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Embedded in the spin
cycle
By Isaac Baker
NEW YORK - An incisive new documentary is
taking aim at the US media's one-sided coverage of
the war in Iraq, arguing that its collective
complicity deceived the populace and made the war
possible.
WMD: Weapons of Mass
Deception, which cost just US$200,000 to
produce, points to a wide array of failures in the
accuracy of the reporting, as well as an
unwillingness to question the Bush
administration's claims and actions.
It
was produced by Danny Schechter, a self-proclaimed
"network refugee" who worked for CNN and as a
producer for a prominent television news show.
"This is the central problem of our
democracy," he told Inter Press Service in an
interview. "This isn't a sidebar issue. You can't
have a democracy when people aren't being
informed."
The film documents the US
media's near-unanimous acceptance of the Bush
administration's claim that Iraqi president Saddam
Hussein possessed nefarious weapons of mass
destruction (WMD), and therefore must be removed
from power by unilateral US military action.The
film also attacks the media's credulity of alleged
links between Saddam and the al-Qaeda terrorist
network - claims that were unsupported by any
actual evidence.
"The fact that they [the
media] allowed the Bush administration to
manipulate the truth so grossly and so nakedly in
the run-up to the war made the war possible," Eric
Alterman, media critic and writer for The Nation
magazine, says in the film.
Schechter told
IPS he was disturbed at the adherence to the
government's line and lack of journalistic
questioning among US news outlets before and
during the Iraq war, a time he calls "a really
shameful period for journalism".
"It hints
at the emergence of a state media system in our
country," he said.
The film references a
study by the media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting (FAIR) of on-camera sources used in
television news in the run-up to the war. Out of
1,167 experts brought on camera during news
broadcasts, the study shows, only 3% opposed the
US-led invasion.
"You had this incredible
imbalance where people who were critical couldn't
be heard," Schechter said.
The film argues
that this marginalization of dissent and the
media's refusal to question the war in Iraq were
in part due to journalists' and networks' fear of
being seen as "unpatriotic".
"In the post
[September 11, 2001] media there was a lot of
patriotic political correctness," Schechter said.
"You have a president who says, 'You're either
with us or with the terrorists,' so if you
criticize him you're with the terrorists. This
created an intimidating environment."
One
aspect of the "media war" the film deals with in
detail is the vast number of "embedded" reporters
in Iraq, a policy that Schechter says led to
jingoistic coverage. An embedded reporter eats,
sleeps and lives every day with a specific group
of US troops. The policy was championed by
Pentagon media chief Victoria Clarke and other
public relations experts in the Defense
Department, who had been planning it before the
war started.
The film argues that since an
embedded reporter's life is in essence in the
hands of the soldiers, and the reporter and the
soldiers spend so much time together under extreme
circumstances, the reporter grows attached to the
troops. The bond that is formed jeopardizes the
reporter's ability to be accurate and objective
and leads to cheerleading instead of critical
journalism, Schechter says. In the film, several
embedded journalists talk about their experiences
on the front.
"We got to know these
soldiers and we wanted them to be successful,"
says Gwendolen Cates, a reporter for People
magazine who was embedded with US troops in Iraq.
"How will I be able to handle it if one of my
soldiers dies?"
Schechter believes that
the problem of media irresponsibility goes deeper
than just a few journalists or networks who
reported the war in a biased manner.
"It's
hard to get people to see this as an institutional
problem," Schechter told IPS. "They focus first on
policy failure, second on intelligence failure.
I'm saying no, it's a media failure."
WMD has already received
international acclaim and is being screened at
cinemas from Scotland to Australia. It won the
Austin Film Festival and Denver Film Festival
awards for best documentary.
However, the
documentary has also seen its share of criticism,
much of it from the very US media corporations and
outlets the film targets. Some critics have argued
that Schechter's film is a poor spin-off of
Michael Moore's 2004 high-grossing documentary
Fahrenheit 9/11. Vanity Fair magazine said
Schechter was merely trying to "out-Michael Moore
Michael Moore".
Schechter, however, was
quick to point out to IPS that he made his first
documentary in 1968, years before Moore's debut.
The film is scheduled to come out on
digital video disc in March to coincide with the
second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
(Inter Press
Service) |
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