The Other Air Battle

Al-Jazeera rules the waves—whether the Pentagon likes it or not

By Jonathan Alter

NEWSWEEK

April 7, 2004 issue — “A lie,” according to a 19th-century epigram, “will go round the world while the truth is pulling on its boots.” This assumes, of course, that the boots can give chase eventually. But what happens when the lies and truths (and half-lies and half-truths) are bouncing off satellites at warp speed?

        FOR MONTHS THE U.S. government has girded for a huge propaganda war. That’s why the Pentagon allowed reporters—including Arab correspondents—to “embed” with troops, and why top officials like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz wined and dined Al-Jazeera. But so far, it’s losing that war badly. Saddam Hussein is turning out to be a Madison Avenue Machiavelli, the Pentagon’s ingenious embed system is fraying and Washington’s “message discipline” is breaking down. Even as the U.S. military strives to avoid Iraqi civilian casualties, it finds itself depicted as a bunch of baby killers in the only air war most of the world sees—the one that appears on television.
        Al-Jazeera is to the Iraq war what CNN was to the 1991 gulf war—the primary source for news worldwide. From the Middle East to Asia to South America, its video feeds are used by scores of networks that need raw, often graphic footage and don’t much care what Donald Rumsfeld has to say about it. This renders many of the decisions made on what to air in the United States less relevant. At least two of the families of American POWs learned of their loved ones’ fate from satellite dishes that picked up foreign-language broadcasts using Al-Jazeera or one of the four other Arab satellite channels.

        Al-Jazeera’s chief, Mohamed Jasem Al Ali, met personally with Saddam Hussein last year, which greased the skids for eight reporters and a support staff of 20 in Baghdad. “Whether you like him [Saddam] or don’t like him, being a good reporter is about having good contacts,” Ali told NEWSWEEK’s Martha Brant last week from the network’s headquarters in Doha, Qatar.
        Until now the Pentagon has tried to play ball with Al-Jazeera. It offered the network four embedded positions with American forces, though only one—with a Marine unit in southern Iraq—came through because of difficulties with the Kuwaiti government. (Many Arab regimes loathe Al-Jazeera for its aggressive coverage of them.) Last week Colin Powell gave the network an exclusive interview, and CENTCOM officers provide Al-Jazeera and the other Arab reporters with plenty of personal attention, including a special room for prayer. Al-Jazeera, in turn, says it will consult with the United States before airing more pictures of dead Americans.
        But it’s no use. Statements from Iraqi officials are covered on Al-Jazeera as facts; comments from American officials are portrayed as “claims.” The phrase “so-called” always precedes “war on terror,” and the crawl line under the screen keeps a running tally of civilian Iraqi casualties. Rumsfeld’s news conference last week was split-screened by Al-Jazeera with a wounded girl in an Iraqi hospital bed. While the Al-Jazeera reporter covering CENTCOM, Omar al-Issawi, is professional and fair, his network downplays many of his reports. At its best, Al-Jazeera treats the United States roughly the way Fox News Channel treats antiwar protesters—with a half-hearted effort at balance, followed by withering commentary.
        So it’s not surprising that the war is playing poorly for the United States even in countries whose governments support it. “The trauma is unimaginable,” writes the Indian daily Asian Age. “The suffering acute.” The Mirror, a London tabloid, juxtaposed a grinning President Bush next to a distraught Iraqi woman amid the rubble with the headline: HE LOVES IT. Italy is one of the only nations in the world with a consistently pro-American view on TV, and that’s only because billionaire Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi owns 90 percent of the stations.

       To keep the focus on brave American soldiers, the Pentagon is relying on the embed system, which both the military and the news media consider a huge improvement over the 1991 gulf war, when then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney blacked out most coverage. But after a week, a revolution of rising TV expectations is underway. Video from the front that looked fresh worldwide in the early days of the war—of tanks rolling through the desert or soldiers brushing their teeth—is now more ho-hum, even for American viewers.

        This is part of a larger debate within the American news media. “Any time you show dead bodies, it is simply disrespectful in my opinion,” Charles Gibson of ABC News said to Ted Koppel on the air. Koppel, embedded with U.S. forces in southern Iraq, disagreed: “I feel we do have an obligation to remind people in the most graphic way that war is a dreadful thing.”
        The rest of the world agrees with Koppel, and has aired unsparing images of dead American POWs and Iraqi civilians. Coverage of the still-elusive truth behind last week’s marketplace attacks runs the gamut from Iraqi TV, which calls them intentional U.S. war crimes, to Fox, which speculates that the damage may have been caused by Iraqi bombs targeted on Iraqis so as to blame Americans. Everyone else—from Al-Jazeera to the other U.S. networks—is somewhere in the middle.
        The holy grail of coverage—still rarely achieved—is context. That’s why the minute-by-minute live reports during the day are proving more disorienting and less useful than a traditional TV format once seen as a dinosaur—the evening-news programs (both broadcast and cable), which filter, clarify and package developments rather than flinging them at the viewer. Ideally, all the newfangled technology should serve, not master, old-fashioned storytelling. But even the best of that reporting is no match in the global marketplace for the power of pictures, wherever they come from.

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