Stop the Next War Now (22 page)

Peace activists also need to be media activists, to hold our media accountable and to push media outlets to uphold basic standards of fairness and accuracy. Media activism can work. It stopped the conservative company Sinclair Broadcasting from airing an anti–John Kerry propaganda film on its sixty-two television stations in the weeks before the presidential election. It blocked the FCC’s plan to allow greater media monopolization and homogenization. Through vigorous watchdogging of the mainstream media and the robust creation of alternative news sources, media activists can be a major force in preventing the next war before it starts.

MEDIA ACTIVIST RESOURCES

Center for Digital Democracy, www.democraticmedia.org

Common Cause, www.commoncause.org

FAIR, www.fair.org

The Free Press, www.freepress.org

Media Access Project, www.mediaaccess.org

Media Alliance, www.media-alliance.org

MediaChannel, www.mediachannel.org

Media Tank, www.mediatank.org

Prometheus Radio Project, www.prometheusradio.org

Reclaim the Media, www.reclaimthemedia.org

“The cororate grip on opinion in the United States is one

of the wonders of the western world. No first world country

has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media

all objectivity—much less dissent.”

—Gore Vidal

HOPE

VERSUS CYNICISM

NINA ROTHSCHILD UTNE

Nina Utne, the chair and CEO of
Utne
magazine, is a writer, political activist, mother, and community builder. Utne is a founding member of both UnReasonable Women for the Earth and CODEPINK. She is married to
Utne
founder Eric Utne and is the mother of three sons and the stepmother of one.

At a conference recently, a woman came up and grabbed me. Several years ago, she said, she had become so demoralized by what was going on in our country that she became an expatriate. But some months ago in Fiji, she came across the issue of
Utne
magazine with the Statue of Liberty on the cover, the one that proclaimed “codepink: The Birth of a Movement.” She lay in a hammock reading for five hours, and when she got up, she knew she had to come home and become an activist. Now she and her two daughters are involved with codepink and she wanted to thank me.

It awes me to be part of that kind of power—the power to transform lives by the quality of a story. And that, for good and for evil, is the power of the media. The media amplify stories that instill terror or inspire hope. The stories that dominate our individual and collective awareness, and the feelings they stir up, form the raw material of our imagination. What we as a society take in and how we interpret it determine our vision of the future, our sense of possibility.

Yes, we need to know the atrocities that are being perpetuated in our name. We need media that ask hard questions persistently enough to get answers. But once we know the facts, we need to find the will, the courage, and the stamina to confront them. Those are to be found in the inspiring examples of maverick creativity, joyful service, and courageous resistance that exist all around us. At
Utne
magazine, the editors look for those kinds of stories, populated by people who provide examples of how to best live their own lives. Those who know gratitude and perceive grace in the midst of chaos and crisis have much to teach the rest of us—and they can do just that with the help of journalists who think with their hearts as well as their heads, whose hope is stronger than their cynicism. For all of us, learning to cultivate creativity and courage, gratitude and grace, is what will sustain us in what Chinese lore called the “curse of living in interesting times.”

Whether we have fled to Fiji or into the morass of our own hopelessness, we must heed the call to come home to our own strength and convictions, to devote ourselves to what we care about. It is the job of the media to issue that call. And it is our job as citizens to settle for nothing less.

“Of course it matters if our government lies to us.Why do you think

people were so angry at Lyndon Johnson over the Gulf of Tonkin?

At Richard Nixon over the “secret war” in Cambodia? Even Bill Clinton

over the less cosmic matter of sex with ‘that woman’?

If it makes no difference whether the government lies,

why does journalism exist at all?”

—Molly Ivins

KILLING THE MESSENGER

WITH KINDNESS

TAD BARTIMUS

When Tad Bartimus isn’t writing her nationally syndicated weekly column, creating a book, or teaching a workshop, she’s interviewing visitors at her Hana, Maui, fruit stand. In an earlier life, she spent twenty-five years reporting for the Associated Press on four continents.

When I was a young Associated Press war correspondent in Vietnam I hitchhiked to the war. Throughout Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 1973–74, I reported as many stories as my journalistic instincts, fear, and dumb luck permitted. I thumbed or bought access via CIA and American military aircraft, generous or corrupt Vietnamese chopper pilots, and all manner of hired private conveyances, from one-passenger cyclos pedaled by barefoot peasants to Mercedes limousines driven by white-gloved chauffeurs. To get to enemy territory I once even chartered a Mekong riverboat that made the
African Queen
look seaworthy.

My professional colleagues also relied on their wits and experience to ferret out their firsthand versions of the truth. The occasional organized “fact-finding” junket was a great way to hear the official story, but the best reporting came from independent roaming among troops and civilians, on the battlefield and behind the scenes.

It was this journalistic autonomy that led most of the press corps to the same conclusion: America could not win the war in Indochina no matter how much smoke or how many mirrors the military and White House threw at the biggest war story of my generation.

When Richard Nixon’s administration finally negotiated a cease-fire and pull-out in 1973, after ten years and fifty-eight thousand U.S. casualties, the hawks blamed the press and vowed never again to allow journalists unrestricted, uncensored access during armed conflicts.

Some of the Vietnam-era captains and majors who believed the media was the reason America lost the war now run the U.S. military and the White House. Out of their antipress mind-set has emerged a new kind of battlefield journalist: “the embed.”

To be embedded is to eat, sleep, hit the dirt, and travel with a single military unit, to be an unarmed appendage who reports only on “their” soldiers’ narrow view of the big picture.

When I hear
embed
, I think “in bed.” Three decades of reporting around the globe has taught me what the cub reporter covering city hall may not yet have learned: to live with sources is to be co-opted by them. It may not be intentional or overt, but an attachment inevitably forms between people thrown together in extreme danger under constant stress.

Becoming an integral part of any story is dangerous for a journalist. No matter how innocent the bonding between witness and source, there is a natural instinct for the witness to become a gatekeeper, particularly if the source is helping to keep the reporter alive.

When journalists hold back, however slightly, for fear their reporting could negatively reflect on the soldiers risking their lives beside them, the first draft of history is incomplete because they aren’t fully doing their job.

That’s what happened in Iraq. The Pentagon’s “embed” strategy fostered the journalists’ emotional and physical codependence on the troops, and the result, in too many dispatches, was information skewed by a docile, manipulated, and woefully inexperienced media.

Months before the March 2003 invasion, the administration correctly guessed that up-close-and-personal journalism focused on brave young soldiers, delivered by scared embeds high on adrenaline, would sway hearts and minds in favor of president George W. Bush’s preemptive strike.

Breathless television reports, minute-by-minute feature stories, and dramatic photographs and video provided by embeds captured the urgency and danger facing U.S. and allied forces advancing against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

We saw gun battles in real time, heard orders as they were given, read of heroic deeds almost as they occurred. Media coverage was almost all about the fighting, delivered by embeds who experienced it firsthand.

Some of the reporting and writing was in the finest journalistic tradition of Ernie Pyle in World War II, Marguerite Higgins in Korea, and Neil Sheehan in Vietnam. The
New York Times
’ Dexter Filkins, embedded with Bravo Company of the First Battalion, Eighth Marines, took the reader into hand-to-hand combat during the November 2004 battle for Fallujah:

“The sounds, sights and feel of the battle were as old as war itself, and as new as the Pentagon’s latest weapons system,” Filkins wrote in a November 21 story in the
Times
.

The glow of the insurgents’ flares, throwing daylight over a landscape to help them spot their targets: us.

The nervous shove of a marine scrambling for space along a brick wall as tracer rounds ricocheted above.

The silence between the ping of the shell leaving its mortar tube and the explosion when it strikes.

The screams of the marines when one of their comrades . . . lost part of his jaw to a hand grenade.

“No, no, no!” the marines shouted as they dragged [him] from the darkened house where the bomb went off . . . “No, no, no!”

Nothing in the combat I saw even remotely resembled the scenes regularly flashed across movie screens; even so, they seemed no more real.

What news consumers didn’t see or read much about was the collateral damage; the administration’s postinvasion plans to turn Iraq over to its people; solidly researched estimates of the cost of the war, reconstruction, and peacekeeping efforts; and informed analysis of what Iraqis thought of it all.

The best of these more complex stories were often written by a small band of unembedded reporters known as “unilaterals.” Their coverage was uncensored and filed without obligation to allied forces.

Unilaterals didn’t travel in armored vehicles, aboard helicopters assaulting rebel strongholds, or in the middle of camouflaged ground forces fighting house to house. Because they were not embedded they operated on the increasingly dangerous fringes of a war where insurgent forces don’t hesitate to behead and kidnap perceived enemies.

Of the fifty-four journalists killed in the line of work in 2004, the Committee to Protect Journalists said, twenty-three of them died reporting the Iraq war. CNN executive vice president and chief news executive Eason Jordan told a group of news executives in Portugal in November 2004 that unilaterals in Iraq faced arrest and even torture by the U.S. military.

“Actions speak louder than words,” Jordan was quoted by the
Guardian
newspaper as saying. “The reality is that at least 10 journalists have been killed by the U.S. military . . . and the fact that no one has been reprimanded would indicate that no one is taking responsibility.”

His allegation was denied by Bryan Whitman, a spokesman for defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted American military commanders were “very enlightened with respect to the freedom of the press.”

But being unembedded continued to prove more dangerous than being “in bedded.” Paul Workman, who filed stories for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as a unilateral, claimed news consumers were more likely to see what he called a “glorified view of American power and morality, in a war much of the world considers unnecessary, unjustified, or plain wrong” because the embedded press corps was “sleeping with the winner.”

As the Iraq war drags on, it gets harder for all journalists to report on its multiple fronts. When I covered Vietnam, and afterward the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland and the guerrilla movements in Latin America in the last half of the 1970s, I believed all journalists had a modicum of protection because most of us tried hard to be objective and fair and our efforts to stay neutral were frequently recognized by news sources.

The veil was ripped off personal partisanship when American TV anchors began wearing American flag lapel pins following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Now it’s commonplace for cable TV anchors as well as pundits to ignore the once-sacrosanct line separating fact from opinion.

It’s hard for me, in these most dangerous and politically polarized times, to encourage young journalists to go to war anywhere. In 2004, journalists all over the world were attacked for doing their job. In Moscow, the editor of the Russian edition of
Forbes
magazine was shot dead as he left his office. A crusading broadcaster, Roger Mariano, was en route home in the Philippines when he was shot more than a dozen times and left for dead along a country road. Reporters in China, Turkmenistan, and Iran were arrested, interrogated, and held incommunicado for days before being released.

In Providence, Rhode Island, television reporter Jim Taricani was found guilty of contempt by a U.S. district judge and sentenced to six months’ house arrest for refusing to reveal a news source. Other U.S. journalists face possible prosecution in 2005 for the same reason.

If we journalists are no longer free to gather news and information for the public good in our own country, why bother to go abroad to defend the people’s right to know? Why not stay and fight for our constitutionally guaranteed rights here?

If I were in their combat boots, I’d have to answer three questions in the affirmative before I booked my plane ticket to be a war correspondent:

• Will my being there make a difference in discovering the truth?

• Will disseminating the truth as I find it alleviate suffering, save lives, and positively influence humanitarian policies?