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http://www.poynter.org/uncategorized/8351/chris-hedges-on-war-and-the-press/
Chris Hedges on War and the Press
by Robin Sloan Published Mar. 17, 2003 9:31 am Updated Mar. 2, 2011 12:50 pm
By Robin Sloan
Online Reporter
Chris Hedges is a former war correspondent with fifteen years of experience in places such as El Salvador, Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf. He's worked at the Christian Science Monitor, the Dallas Morning News, and most recently The New York Times, where he shared in a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of global terrorism.
Now he's written a book called "War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning." It's a slim but stirring volume, a meditation on the culture of war and war reporting.
Chris Hedges recently spoke with Poynter Online by phone; here's an edited transcript.
Poynter Online: In your book, you write about war reporting as an addiction, and about the clique of war correspondents who go from conflict to conflict, trying to reclaim the high of danger and risk.
But most of the reporters in and around Iraq today aren't war reporters, and for many this is their first war assignment. These aren't adrenaline junkies; they're people who are simultaneously nervous and excited and quite new to this. How do they fit into your vision of war and war reporting?
Chris Hedges: Well, in short, they don't. People like that are very pliable, which is why the military likes them. Usually in any war zone only ten percent of the journalists want to go out and actually cover a war. Most of them are hotel room warriors and that's why there's a great deal of enmity between those of us who spend all of our time in the field and the majority of the press that doesn't.
As far as I can tell, most of the press coverage of this war is going to be carried out by embedded journalists. They will be completely dependent upon the military for logistics, including transportation. Most probably don't want to get very near fighting, and I think the military will be only too willing to oblige.
We will end up with a situation that will be similar to the first Persian Gulf war. The problem is that when media organizations send reporters to cover a conflict they have no experience at all, they have no language skills, they've probably not been in the military. And this really hurts the coverage because they just don't have either the skills or the self-confidence to strike out on their own.
And that's what the military really fears. It fears the independent reporters who break free from the pack, who have their own transportation. We saw this in Afghanistan, we saw it in the first Persian Gulf war, and I am sure that we will see it once again.
In an interview with Bill Moyers, you said: "In wartime, the press is always part of the problem." Is that what you're talking about here?
Partly. If you go back and look at the role of the press since the Crimean War, when the modern war correspondent was invented, the press has almost always seen itself as an important part of the effort to sustain morale and promote and support the war, whatever war effort it is.
The press gives war a kind of mythic narrative that war, in fact, doesn't have. We saw it in Bosnia. Most of the wars I reported did not involve U.S. soldiers — they were conflicts in which the United States wasn't involved, so that if I went into a town in
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http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article13629.htm
Is Iraq different? Yes, there are many differences, but for journalists there are haunting similarities of both Vietnam and Central America. The "noble cause" of "bringing democracy to the Middle East", the promotion of a civil war and the killing of tens of thousands of invisible people. On August 24 last year, a New York Times editorial declared: "If we had known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them. The result is a human disaster of epic proportions, for which journalists in the so-called mainstream bear much of the responsibility; and that includes responsibility for the lives lost and destroyed.
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Chris Hedges idolizing "the elite"by dripmeister295 views
Article:
the BBC...has blood on its corporate hands. There are two interesting studies of the BBC's reporting. One of them, in the build-up to the invasion, shows that the BBC gave just two per cent of its coverage of Iraq to anti-war dissent. That was less than the anti-war coverage of all the American networks. A second study by...University College in Cardiff shows that 90 per cent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them
VexZeed 2 months ago
Article:
a New York Times editorial declared: “If we had known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and Blair, instead of challenging and exposing them. The result is a human disaster of epic proportions, for which journalists in the so-called mainstream bear much of the responsibility
VexZeed 2 months ago
From Article:
And then you have the Secretary of State yesterday calling on reporters and inspectors and people from aid groups to leave Baghdad. So I think — when you look at the real disdain people like Rumsfeld have expressed in the past towards the press, Cheney as well — I don’t think they’re going to have any tolerance for real reporting.
VexZeed 2 months ago