Reporting Iraq — 2007

I think that the net­works, they are fed up with the massive bombs. They don’t want to see things going bang any­more. What troubles me is that — what troubles me most per­son­ally, is when I see chil­dren hurt — and those are the stor­ies that you really want to get on the air and it really both­ers me that we can’t. Allen Pizzey, CBS News, March 2007

Four years ago I was talk­ing to a tired but exuber­ant David Bloom. He was on the move with the U.S. 3rd Infantry Divi­sion, sit­ting atop a spe­cially adap­ted M88 Medium Recov­ery Vehicle with a gyro-stabilized cam­era that linked back to a mobile satel­lite truck. It was the future of war cov­er­age. “Lean­ing back from the fixed cam­era like a sail­boat skip­per ready­ing for a turn,” the NBC cor­res­pond­ent com­mu­nic­ated ten­sion, exhil­ar­a­tion and bore­dom – the rush and frus­tra­tions of an armoured charge.

Before Bagh­dad had even been taken, Bloom was dead from a blood clot, aged 39, a cas­u­alty of cramped sleep­ing quar­ters. The live ride to lib­er­a­tion was over. The ‘Bloom-mobile’ went on to chase hur­ricanes. Its tech­no­logy turned out not to be the future of Iraq war cov­er­age after all.

The future belonged instead to alto­gether more basic equip­ment, like the Sony FD Mavica cam­era used by Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., a jailer at Abu Ghraib. Graner used it to take 173 of the 279 pho­to­graphs uncovered by the U.S. Army’s Crim­inal Invest­ig­a­tion Com­mand. It got him ten years in a prison of his own.

With a cheap video cam­era, basic edit­ing soft­ware and an Inter­net con­nec­tion, you could put fear and murder online. With global access, even killing a dozen work­ers from a coun­try as poor and remote as Nepal was guar­an­teed to make a head­line some­where. Post­ing video online became the media weapon of choice for any­one seek­ing to attract an audi­ence, from Iraqi gangs to U.S. sol­diers – Ogrish.com offer­ing a ghoul­ish pre-cursor to You­Tube.

It wasn’t until recently that the mobile phone finally took its news­gath­er­ing bow at Sad­dam Hus­sein’s exe­cu­tion.

Short of com­pli­city in tor­ture, murder and exe­cu­tion next to any of this user-generated con­tent, the lim­its of con­ven­tional news cov­er­age are all too obvious.

The most dra­matic reg­u­lar foot­age gen­er­ated in the con­flict looks tame by com­par­ison, but it was prob­ably shot by Kevin Sites. Sites him­self was some­thing of a revolu­tion­ary oddity — a ‘journ­al­ist of the future’ – who had moved his one man blog­ging, shoot­ing and report­ing band from CNN to NBC. On a pool embed with Mar­ines in Fal­lu­jah, Sites recor­ded a sol­dier cas­u­ally dis­patch­ing a wounded Iraqi as he lay on the floor of a mosque. The half-apologetic telling of that tale on the Nightly News did neither him nor NBC much credit.

Bos­nia had Mar­tin Bell. Afgh­anistan made Lara Logan. Although journ­al­ists see wars like bears see honey – worth get­ting stung for – Iraq is too big a tale for one teller. Too big, too expens­ive and too dan­ger­ous. There are journ­al­ists will­ing to go to Iraq to report, but Brit­ish news organ­iz­a­tions are for the most part unable to afford the expense of a reg­u­lar pres­ence, and audi­ences are unable to get excited by the gloomy dis­patches they generate.

The BBC remains fully com­mit­ted to a pres­ence in Iraq. So too do the U.S. media and the agen­cies. And vir­tue is its own reward, but it’s an over­stretched vir­tue. Gen­er­als may shame min­is­ters with stor­ies of short­ages and cuts, but that doesn’t get talked about so much in journalism.

News organ­iz­a­tions don’t seek to pub­licly embar­rass their pay­mas­ters into upping cov­er­age budgets. Michael Grade’s first prom­ise upon return­ing to ITV was not to fund a per­man­ent pres­ence in Iraq. BBC Director-General Mark Thompson did not threaten to pull out of Bagh­dad when the licence fee nego­ti­ations didn’t go his way. Still when Sky and Five go there to report in strength, it’s sig­ni­fic­ant enough to gen­er­ate a press release.

Besides resources and secur­ity, the other chal­lenge to Iraq report­ing comes from ‘the people formerly known as the audi­ence.’ On one level, that mani­fests itself in indif­fer­ence. The Brit­ish public’s interest has shrunk along with the size of the Brit­ish aux­il­i­ary force, a fact not lost on edit­ors or exec­ut­ives. The new, prime­time Pan­or­ama run estab­lished its pop­u­list cre­den­tials by kick­ing off not with an explan­a­tion of the biggest ongo­ing con­flict of our time, but with an under­cover IVF investigation.

So mass indif­fer­ence sits side by side with minor­ity zeal. An Asso­ci­ated Press account of mosque burn­ings led to a cam­paign by right-wing blog­gers ques­tion­ing – wrongly, as it turned out – the exist­ence of an Iraqi source named in the AP report.

Many people read­ing Press Gaz­ette will know journ­al­ists killed cov­er­ing Iraq. I’m no dif­fer­ent. It’s fash­ion­able to say no story is worth a life. But the ques­tion I ask myself is this – what would we know about Iraq without journ­al­ists? It might simply be a face­less cham­ber of video horrors.

Our busy, care-filled lives may not find time for what’s hap­pen­ing in Iraq, a con­flict for which, like it or not, Bri­tons shoulder respons­ib­il­ity with the gov­ern­ment to which we abrog­ated exec­ut­ive power.

But if we want to excuse our indif­fer­ence, then it’s within ourselves and our insti­tu­tions that we should look, and not without – to those who are engaged in report­ing the conflict.

[This is a linked ver­sion of a piece writ­ten for Britain’s Press Gaz­ette]