managing media. killing journalists

The first war photographs ever shot were not the ones by the famous Roger Fenton,  of the 1955 Crimean War .

 Calotypes shot by  a  British doctor in  Afghanistan should  take that prize.   Fredrick Scott Archer's 1851 calotypes  of the first  British Afghan war were the one sided  viewpoints of an obviously embedded , participant in  the British Empire's wars..Even though there was no control on what he could and  could not photograph, the limits of  the technology he used and and his official status in the  invading army, defined his images. He did not risk being shot by his own side. 

Things are very different now. Armies and the governments have learnt  their lessons from the Vietnam war. 

Media, today, has to be managed. Perceptions of the wars  have to be be carefully  controlled. The costs of losing the media wars is just too  high .  High enough to make the murdering of media an acceptable media management exercise.  

In the Iraq War, 136 journalists were killed. At least 15 of them -- about 11% of the total -- were killed by US forces, sometimes apparently with deliberate intent. (Consider that if some 500,000 US troops rotated through Iraq over the course of the way and 4000 of them were killed, that meant soldiers had a 1:125 chance of being killed there. With 136 dead journalists, there would have had to be more than 14,000 journalists covering the war for them to have the same odds of getting killed. It seems clear it is much more dangerous being a journalist in a US war than being a soldier!)

Back in 1983, the US, in one of the more ludicrous military actions in its long history of war, invaded the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, on the pretext that it feared Cubans were building a military airbase there (actually Cuba had sent construction workers to the impoverished isle to help the country build a better commercial airport so as to improve its tourism business). During that invasion, which was conducted with a total media blackout despite almost no opposition (the main “enemy” putting up any resistance was a group of Cuban construction workers!), a group of seven journalists, including a reporter from the New York Times, attempted to reach the island on a small boat. They were blocked by a US destroyer, which warned them over a loudspeaker to turn around or be “blown out of the water.” The journalists gave up and retreated.

That little “war,” which was conducted from beginning to end with no reporters allowed in the battle zone, marked the beginning of a new relationship between the Pentagon and the press -- one where the military maintains complete control over access and information, both what is provided to the media, and what the public gets to learn.

Wikileaks released this video of a helicopter crew slaughtering civilians and two Reuters cameramen in Baghdad

When the US launched its invasion of Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1991, it required all journalists covering the attack to be “embedded” with US forces. Prior to that time (with the exception of the Grenada War mentioned above), journalists, for example in Vietnam, were free to go anywhere in the war zone and to report what they saw. They were not tied to, or restricted to, specific military units. They faced risks, but the risks, as evidenced by the deaths of war correspondents, were caused by either land mines they encountered, or by enemy fire, not by fire from US forces.

That all changed with the Iraq War in 2003. At that time, the Pentagon continued with the same methods developed in the Gulf War, requiring journalists to be “embedded” with specific invading, or later, occupying units. Those journalists who chose not to be embedded were warned that they were putting themselves at much greater risk of being targets.

We know, from documents that were obtained and released by Wikileaks, that the Bush-Cheney administration considered, but fortunately eventually decided against, bombing the main studio and office building of Al-Jazeera Television in Qatar in the early days of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were known to be furious at what they considered to be the biased reporting on that war by the Arab-language TV news organization. This aborted plan to blow up the whole station, which would have resulted in huge casualties, casts in a very suspicious light the rocket and machine gun attack on the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad on April 8, 2002, during the US assault on Iraq’s capital city just a few weeks into the invasion. In that attack, Tareq Ayyaub, an Al-Jazeera cameraman, was killed and another journalist was injured. The US claimed it had inadvertently struck the Al-Jazeera building because of “shots fired from nearby,” but an investigation disclosed that Al-Jazeera had given the coordinates of its facility to US forces so it was known to be a press site, not a military target.

Furthermore, there was another attack that same day, this time by a US tank, which fired a 120 mm round at a balcony of the Palestine Hotel, where US forces knew that virtually the entire foreign press corps were holed up during the invasion. Killed on the balcony were Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and the Spaniard Jose Couso of Telecinco TV.

That said, the incidence of journalists being killed by US forces in recent US conflicts has been much, much greater than it ever was in earlier wars, such as the one in Vietnam, or in Korea or World War II, which inevitably begs the question of whether some of the journalist killing has been deliberate, perhaps with the intent of keeping journalists in line.

Certainly the White House discussion about whether to bomb Al-Jazeera’s main offices shows that there is a willingness, all the way up to the top of the US government, to view journalists as the enemy, and even to contemplate killing some of them to affect the coverage of a war. The bombing of the Al-Jazeera bureau in Baghdad in the early days of the US invasion appears to have been a brazen attempt to do just that.

 During this latest Israeli assault and bombardment of the prison-territory of Gaza, the Israeli Defense Force fired several missiles directly at a building housing not only the Gaza Al-Aksa TV station, but a number of offices of foreign journalists. Two Al-Aksa cameramen were killed in the strike. Several other buildings housing foreign journalists have also been struck, and the Foreign Press Association for Israel and Palestinian Territories has stated that it believes the IDF is well aware of the locations of offices of foreign reporters in the territory. Israel has admitted to targeting the two Al-Aksa victims, claiming that working for the Hamas-owned station means they are Hamas “terrorists.” But as to whether the strikes on buildings occupied by foreign reporters is meant to be a message, or to keep them from covering the IDF attack on Gaza, that remains, like the US attacks on and killing of journalists, an open question.

http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1438