Meditations on Covering Conflict: Media and the Middle East

S. Abdallah Schleifer
The American University in Cairo

It is amazing how one’s personal past comes back to slam you in the face just when you are convinced the door to the past is sealed by historic circumstance.

 For years I have apologized to graduates students in a course on TV field reporting that so many of my improvised examples of problems faced and solved in script writing and camera work  had to do with war or other forms of violent conflict or at the very least generalized catastrophes. It was simply that was what I had done from the time I was recruited in the field by NBC News to become first a radio reporter and then a TV producer-reporter covering the Arab portion of the Middle East from 1970 until 1983.

 And that fixation on conflict predated NBC News – it had already ended my first significant job (as an expat) in journalism, as the managing editor of Jordan’s English-language daily published in Arab Jerusalem and which duly collapsed on June 5, 1967.  But if war ended my first solid job in journalism it launched me on a new career as basically a war correspondent in the Middle East  for the next two decades  – covering the rise of the Palestinian fedayeen movement  and the war of attrition first for Jeune Afrique and The New York Times from the occupied territories and then from Amman,  from Beirut, where I stopped working as a stringer for the New York Times and devoted an increasing amount of time and energy to NBCV News covering cycles of combat between Palestinians and Royal Jordanians, between the Palestinians - Lebanese Muslim alliance and their Lebanese Army and Christian militia opponents, and  between Palestinians and Israelis both across the River Jordan and then along the Lebanese –Israeli border, and along the Golan Heights ceasefire line  that was ultimately but briefly overshadowed by the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.

 Even all the energy that went into covering Sadat ‘s peace initiative was the exception that proved the rule and it had followed upon more then a year of the Palestinian-Muslim Left alliance’s all out civil war with their “rightwing” Lebanese Christian opponents ending in the massacre of Tel Zatar, which would provided us all with a foretaste of the Chatilla massacres six years later when the Israelis on the edge of Beirut  played the same role of passive allies of the rampaging Phalange  that the Syrian army had played in the late summer of 1976. Meanwhile there were coup d’etats to cover – perhaps the last great wave – Syria, Iraq, Libya and Sudan around 1968, Saddam’s palace coup a few years later along with a failed coup in Sudan and an aborted one in Saudi Arabia (  obscure eyebrows are probably being raised at this moment, but I had the cover story in Jeune Afrique for that one.)

 Almost as a distraction to all of this Fertile Crescent carnage were tours of duty to cover the 2nd Indo-Pakistani War, and after I formally abandoned journalism for teaching, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the massive Allied buildup in Saudi Arabia that immediately followed ( all timed perfectly for my summer holiday from AUC)  and the allied counter offensive that began in January 1991( again perfectly timed for still another one month between-semester holiday assignment to a war zone.)

 I had missed out on both the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan Resistance to the Russians due to our more immediate regional preoccupations, and then suddenly it seemed it was nearly all over, and there I was talking and teaching script writing to students who must have found my continuous reference to war coverage as obsessive.

 Reality and other casualties of contemporary war

 One of the deepest impressions I walked away with after the 1991 Iraqi War was how sheltered the international press had become from the grim, nasty realities of war that one could not help acquiring in the lower fire power level of civil war, guerrilla campaigns and attempted coups – basically my training field that reaffirmed some of the most basic survival skills I had absorbed in my six months tour in Advanced Infantry training with the US Army when I was just out of college.

 War was a basically a bloodless briefing room in Daharan Saudi Arabia in January-February 1991 and many of the journalists at the briefings –and this was 1991 - were already  novices who knew no better. War was foggy black and white  aerial video tapes of so called smart bombs smashing into targets in Baghdad screened  for the journalists at the daily briefings – all very abstract and aside from some very limited footage coming from CNN’s singular perch in Baghdad under bombardment that was it. Even when the US Army swept into southern Iraq after racing across Kuwait the intimations of death were slight – the highway out of Kuwait City littered with burnt out tanks and trucks and lots of dead Iraqi soldiers lying about – but all after the fact.

 In southern Iraq the small group of pool correspondents accompanying the allied forces were generally prevented from going beyond the ceasefire line to even see much less film and report on the Republican Guard retaking Najaf, Kerbala  and Basra and the massacres that ensued following the American betrayal of the Uprising. – the Intifada that would haunt me every bit as much as the Palestinian Intifada, perhaps even more so, because it was so ignored by most of the usual Arab and American critics of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

  The one exception to this curious coverage that was deflected by Pentagon fiat from the sort of close-up to conflict coverage that had characterized WW2, Korea and to a lesser degree Vietnam --where it was amazing how rarely so much of the press could manage to tear themselves away from the fleshpots of Saigon and chopper out to cover combat.(The secret history of that war according to some of my colleagues who covered it, was that the war dragged on long after it had turned sour from a military-political point of view because it was just too much fun for those press and military types who never or rarely left the safety of  Saigon.)

 So between 1991 –when war coverage was already becoming abstract, bloodless and rarely “ up close and personal” as Robert Redford, playing a TV  war correspondent put it --  and the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada Two,  followed shortly by Afghanistan and Iraqi War II,  armed conflict in the world  but particularly the Arab world had seemed to have faded away – aside from those  isolated sharp, in and over fast and tangential to the Middle East events like the early al Qaeda bombings in Africa , Saudi Arabia , Yemen or New York(the first Trade Center bombing), a barely covered war between North and South Yemen or the again abstract war from the air over Kosovo and the obscure barely reported  bloodshed (in Arab media, that is) in the southern Sudan. Even this latest Iraqi War, which began with embedded correspondents and seemingly ended with collapse of Iraqi Resistance after little more than a week of skirmishing in the south lent again, as far as fighting men and women went, an almost bloodless episode divorced from what older war correspondents knew to be war.

  What is so remarkable in all of this is how simila r( despite the different political platitudes that might be invoked) in inexperience was the response to the nastiness of war from both American and Arab reporting. A single incident – the ambush of an US Army supply unit convoy resulting in some American deaths and American prisoners (both duly photographed by Iraqi TV and released to the world via an Iraqi handover to Al Jazeera ) dominated the airways for days. Both CNN and Al Jazeera anchors were torridly reporting on” heavy casualties” – be it CNN’s concern for a few hundred dead American soldiers at the end of a two week campaign  -- the equivalent of a an hour of fighting on the Normandy beaches in World War Two or a bad day in near the 38^th parallel during the Korean War ) or Al Jazeera (echoed to similar or lesser degree by all Arab media, satellite or terrestrial, private or state owned, TV or print) about terrible loss of Arab civilian life, when even the figures provided up to the fall of Baghdad by Iraqi officials and medical personnel for loss of civilian life to allied bombing and shelling was a few thousand dead – which would have added up to two bad nights during the aerial bombardments in the Battle for Britain not to mention the horrendous toll of dead in the calculated massive “strategic bombing” of Coventry by the Germans and Dresden by the British, much less the again consciously targeted Japanese civilian death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki – in contrast to this war when the amount of total bomb power unleashed on amazingly select military –political targets was mind-boggling vast, and the collateral damage of civilian dead  in comparison to all of that unleashed potentially deadly ordinance (far greater than the ordinance that wiped out Dresden) was incredibly, so historically slight.

  So nearly everybody got it wrong, except those old enough to remember War Before Satellite TV. (Nearly all of the journalists covering this war weren’t even born at the time of the biggest, if relatively one-sided  bloodletting in the region – the 1967 Arab Israeli War, many not even born, or certainly far too young for even a good memory for the 1973 War – again massive movements, relatively vast casualties – this time around somewhat more evenly distributed.)

 Then after a series of the unimaginable  incompetent blunders that turned what should have been --  however tarnished by arrogance --  a liberation into an occupation, an insurgency  arose that was almost willed into being by a US civilian political leadership that would dissolve and impoverish (save for its access to vast unguarded weaponry) the Iraqi Army and Security forces that became the broad cadres for insurgency along with foreign fighters and suicide bombers who have seeped through unguarded borders again by the grace of a civilian, political leadership.

  Now war is real – terribly dangerous and most of the best coverage has come from those Arab satellite channels with crews who braved their way into Falluja under siege. As for the Western press they rarely leave Baghdad these days because everything is just too dangerous. Thus the pro-forma reports from Coalition spokesmen or occasional after-the fact photo opportunities are the site of a bombing or roadside ambush but fewer and fewer reports from the field accompanying the Marines in the Central districts who are taking heavy fire every night in major population centers like Ramadi, and fewer and fewer reports of civic action units that have organized local elections in countless villages and towns –whose elected officials are now increasingly cowered by the threat of assassination -- or have rebuilt hospitals, schools, universities and social centers only to see them looted, re-built and re-looted over and over again in the absence of a massive and tough Iraqi internal Security Force that could have been cleansed and re-crafted from the trained .Iraqi Army and police ranks in the earliest days of occupation.

 These are the stories that don’t get reported on out of American misgivings – our TV news operations have become so intrinsically entertainment oriented that the idea of risking life and limb to news gather at the front is unappealing save for a handful of basically print journalists. They don’t get reported on Arab satellite TV either because of a misguided heartfelt sense of a higher duty  than the duty to Truth or in Arabic, the Real – and that is the heartfelt sense of a duty to the Virtual Arab Nation. Virtual because it exists in that interaction between so many Arab broadcasters and print journalists with the individual reader or viewer who conceivably in his day -to day- life knows better and the impassioned mass mentality that now shares this rebirth –Virtual that it is – of the Arab Nation and/or the Islamic Umma as some sort of vital abstraction.. (In Western Europe where there is indeed far more actual creation of a Formative European Nation ( with English as its lingua franca) as far as free travel, free trade, and unified currency are concerned,  there is ironically no impassioned mass mentality, perhaps precisely because it is boringly  real and not rooted in fantasy and wish fulfillment.)  More on this later.

 But even before, even in the first days during and following the fall of Baghdad casualty figures among the press seemed exceptionally high – certainly far higher than those we, in the active foreign press corps in Beirut ever experienced during all the years of intermittent civil war which we covered first hand, and up close. There are probably a number of reasons for this. First – minimal preparation except for embedded journalists who least needed it. I remember my platoon Sergeant in the infantry on the first day of training telling us he would teach us skills in a day or two – like one dares to run only three seconds without hitting the ground when moving through a field of sniper fire that would improve our survival skills in combat by 90 percent; the remaining ten percent would take the following four months of  training.

 There were far fewer journalists roving around in 1967, 1973 or even the smaller bashes in Lebanon in 1975-76 and 1981 and aside from local Lebanese reporters there were almost no Arab journalists on the ground. In the absence of Arab satellite newspapers like Al Hayat and Shawq al Awsat or Arab satellite TV news units, the Arab press(with the rarest exceptions) at that time saw itself as an information and  official opinion transmitting operation – which required no expensive or life threatening trips into combat zones --  as in the case of  real news gathering operations. By 1991  it seemed like just about every major market TV channel in America were sending their own reporters and crews in to a potential combat zone supplement the three networks and CNN. By 2002 Arab television crews were in place in Iraq before the invasion began as well as embedded to a lesser extend along with Western journalists with the advancing coalition forces.

 Of course the major difference was that as Americans, or Brits or French or Italian journalists we were by definition bystanders to the battles. Whatever covert stuff went on, it was clearly Arab against Arab in the civil wars and coups that we covered from the sixties thru the eighties; or Arab versus Iranians, or most dominant of all as a long term regional obsession, of Arab versus Israeli. We were bystanders; at worst locked up out of danger or the perceived possibilities of making mischief (the standard official Arab reaction when full-scale war flared in ’67 and to a lesser degree in ’73) or cultivated in the hope of sympathy and positive images by the Palestinian fedayeen, the various Lebanese militias be they left or right, Muslim or Christian and by the Iraqis holding the line against the Iranians at Basra, not to mention the Israelis.

 That has all changed at least on the ground in Iraq and wherever Al Qaeda and its sort operates as Daniel Pearl would discover or as several British and American journalists discovered when Hizbullah – in its now disowned role as Premature Islamist Terrorists swept up, beat up and held hostage foreign journalists. (Again one could argue that direct American military intervention in the then never ending Lebanese civil war had changed the context – our country was a party in the civil war but that didn’t just mean that our Marines became targets, it also meant open season on American civilians including journalists.

 But most of the deaths of journalists and in particular Arab journalists occurred either in the final hours of the fall of Baghdad or afterwards and usually involved TV crews being fired at by American forces manning checkpoints or on patrol. Major question marks still surround the circumstances of US fighter plane attacks on the offices of Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV as well as the Palestine Hotel resulting in the loss of life. Conceivably these attacks could be attributed to the fog of war – a TV camera from the distance and in the split second of battle decision making can look like a machine gun or shoulder-held missile launcher, particularly when the crews are wearing  helmets and combat vests to protect against shrapnel and bullets as was the case of Al Jazeera.  In the June 1967 War Israeli artillery took out an NBC news team filming the Israeli advance on Arab Jerusalem which was by no means off limits for coverage. So this case in no way resembled the fate at about the same time of the US Liberty. The NBC correspondent was killed but given the political circumstances – broad American public support for the Israelis – no one imaged or suggested the attack was anything but a terrible mistake.

 But there is also a tremendous difference in the danger between a car full of European and American journalists who as Westerners are obviously not party or potentially party in the conflict as they approaching the  innumerable road blocks maintained by one of a dozen militias in the 1975-76 civil war. Those militiamen were at their relative ease in their own country (unlike occupation roadblocks, there were no suicide bombers in the region at that time and the roadblocks were manned  in territory at least nominally sympathetic to the militias manning them.

  How different and far less lethal a situation than Iraq were roadblocks and patrols have been manned by a quite reasonably stressed foreign army of occupation that does not understand the local language unlike many of the IDF roadblocks in existentially(to differentiate from political) somewhat  similar circumstances, and where many of the soldiers are frequently Arabic-speaking Israeli Druze. In the circumstances of Iraq every Arab looking driver or passenger approaching a roadblock – even journalists, can be mistaken for Iraqi insurgents or worse and too tragically if not criminally often, have been

 Contextual Objectivity and Middle East coverage

 The above sub- heading comes from an interesting essay by El-Nawawy and Iskander (TBS 9) Their essay appeared shortly after publication of their quite important full-length study of Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World a d Changed the Middle East (Westview Press).  Indeed these changes were well underway before the invasion of Iraq – a response to Al Jazeera’s unique asset in Kabul up to and during that war, its singular coverage of the late nineties bombing runs against Iraq and above all its in the thick-of-things coverage of Intifada 2, coupled with largely introducing (and as a field producer-reporter I tend to underestimate its  importance )  no-holds-barred, nothing-too-sacred, shouting match  public affairs talk shows in a world desperate for public discourse going beyond the official platitudes of the day. 

 The need to conceptualize contextual objectivity came from the recognition that somehow the Al Jazeera product while at its best was the result of a professionalism founded on BBC inspired virtues of detachment and objectivity at the same time was a different product that did not seem all that detached and objective in the viewing and hearing,  by  critics. – including Arab critics.

 Let me sympathetically simplify this approach before I criticize it. Obviously culture is context. I remember when Orbit funded the launch of the first but very short-lived BBC Arabic World TV service it suffered precisely from lack of a cultural context. News reports  -- particularly when voiced over by the Arabic-speaking anchor or news reader, and less often when recorded  from the field  (a relative rarity) often had an indeterminate quality of news from nowhere – the news was read in Arabic but the cultural context was indeterminate as if these stories were translations from BBC English as in fact many were, since the channel in its start up infancy (which it never really got much beyond) relied heavily upon the BBC World service for material and even entire feature magazine shows were translated and recast.

 Secondly one could say that this concept – contextual objectivity - is a successfully extravagant way (which often is what academic success is all about ) of restating the obvious or at best classic formulations. I.E. – the glass that is filled or emptied to the half-way mark. I use this example every year in the introductory phase of my reporting class, as I am sure countless other journalism teachers have for the past century or two, as an example of how elusive, how difficult objectivity is. In other words whether the glass is half full (optimist) or half empty (pessimist) is in either case true, but startlingly different in implication and implied values. It is the context of the viewer, or the reporter who passes on what he has viewed – his political or social or religious cultural formation so –to-speak that defines the answer that in either case is objective. Hence contextual objectivity.

 I sympathize too much with this insight to simply dismiss it, thus my own ambivalence combining sympathy for the seriousness and professionalism of Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya and a critical take on much of their product – or rather for what is missing in their product. But criticize it I will.

 Let’s take the latter, “half filled, half empty” metaphor first.  This is a perfect metaphor to demonstrate a classroom point. It rarely surfaces in real situations, except in the sort of thoughtfulness and self-insight of an introspective man like Lt. (now Captain) Josh Rushing, one of the main characters in Control Room who notes the limits of empathy; who comments on- camera how much more he was effected by the Iraqi YV images of American soldiers dead, wounded or harassed than by the far more gruesome pictures of Arab civilian casualties being treated during the war in Iraqi hospitals and how that insight into how differently an Arab producer would react to thses two different sets of distressful images, gave him an opening into an Arab take on this war against an obviously barbaric regime, that he would not have otherwise fathomed.

 Recently I put aside what at first might have made a perfect example played out in the press of the half-full, half-empty paradox.  In front of me are the front pages of the March 12 editions of The Egyptian Gazette and The Daily Star (Beirut.) Both feature photographs of President Husni Mubarak receiving Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom – the first visit to Egypt by an Israeli foreign minister in nearly two years. This is the lead story for both papers.

 In the Gazette front page photo  Silvan is sitting some distance from Mubarak, gensturing slightly as he explains himself and Mubarak impassively sits and listens, a serious and cautious expression on his face. Although Shalom appears to the left it is President Mubarak whose name appears first “seen during talks with..” the caption says. The headline: “ Egypt not to send troops to Gaza if Israel Pulls Out – FM “   To the contrary, The Daily Star shows us two smiling figures shaking hands and facing the camera – a classic political stance reflecting at least simulated cordiality and the caption simply and accurately reports in order of visual appearance “Shalom and Mubarak shake hands ahead of their meeting in Cairo.” And the headline: “Egypt agrees to maintain security along Gaza border.” At first glance both reports are true and one  seemingly can legitimately consign  the dramatic difference to contextual objectivity. But in retrospect, after that first fascinating but shallow glance, I would disagree. Because the problem is not the abstract idea of objectivity as if one true fact is as significant as another; the issue is news value – crudely put, what’s new. And in this sense the cultural context of the Egyptian Gazette report is consciously begging the issue and thus corrupt.

 What was new was not that Egypt will not send troops to Gaza if Israel pulls out –President Mubarak had said that often enough – what was new was the agreement to maintain security along the Gaza border (both newspapers ran almost identical leads mentioning both these points.)  Both pictures were real or true but the Daily Star picture reflected the apparent efforts of both governments -- however embarrassing in face of so-called Arab Street sympathy with Palestinian extremist rejectionism --  to overcome their obvious mutual antipathy for the sake of preventing Gaza reverting to utter chaos and intransigence, inviting Israeli reprisals, after an Israeli withdrawal. As for intentions and motivations such is the stuff of speculation and neither photo, nor the shared news story could share that.

 So that is the problem with contextual objectivity – if the cultural context is corrupt the objectivity is an illusion, a slight of hand. That is the basis for my discontent with much of Arab journalism and as a TV journalist, for my discontent which some of the product of Al Jazeera. This problem of corrupt context is not unique to the Arab media but the particular corruption – in this case sentimental-ideological blinders or heartstrings to be plucked by the choice of what gets reported differs from much of the serious Western press where the corruption, I would argue is pandering almost instinctively to the entertainment values of increasingly commercialized news media. Of course Fox on the right and a lot of the anti-war reporting in journals on the left as exceptions – here like Al Jazeera , the corruption is ideological in source.

 One last example.  Late last May a car carrying Sheikh Khalid al Suleiman – a conservative sheikh considered to be the most respected Sunni Imam in Rumadi, along with three younger Sunni ulema who were his associates, was ambushed by insurgents on the highway as they were returning form a meeting of the Provincial Council for the province of Al Anbar -- which incorporates most of the Sunni triangle in central Iraq. The car was forced off the road; the three young imams were killed with close up shots to the head; Sheikh Khalid was similarly shot , critically wounded and left for dead. Miraculously he survived and is recovering although partially paralyzed.

 What is significant is that the most prestigious and quite conservative Sunni sheikh (no Ahmed Chalabi secular Shiite long - exiled tycoon here) served as the deputy director of the Provincial Council, playing an active role in the attempt by the transitional Iraqi authorities restore order and self-government.(Largely because of criminality --  the lack of order--  and thus the lack of electricity or other fuels, some 50 children in the province were dying every night from the cold last winter. )

 This assassination was barely reported by any press. For the American civilian political leadership in Baghdad this doesn’t figure as a major story – it lacks the human interest of dying Marines or the death of important civic leaders in the  Transitional government and the Arab press was silent if even aware.  

 Yet what story that day or for that matter that week could be more important as a corrective for both for an increasingly Islamophobic American public opinion  where the American political right justifies itself in increasingly Islamophobic terms, and for an Arab public opinion that doesn’t seem to take the death of anyone who isn’t Sunni Arab terribly serious. (Look at the scandalous lack of reporting of the Darfur atrocities until just a few weeks ago;  even now the reporting in most Arab media pales besides the reports coming  from international human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch  who have been no less concerned about Palestinian suffering. In Darfur the African villagers who are being, murdered, raped and ethnically cleansed  (there villages burnt to the ground) are Sunni, but they are not Arab and the drama of regional press indifference and flawed news sense and moral sense is a replay to the general Arab indifference to Kurdish suffering in the  massive ethnic cleansing of some twenty years ago. Again, this suggests a context, a cultural context in which the Arab Nation or the Islamist Nation is in fact a utopian banner to obscure a rather nasty case of Arab Sunni ethnocentrism if not ethnic supremacy. The context is corrupt.

 Decades ago, when police- state government was far more vindictive and all pervasive in the Arab world than today and when the most basic professional perspectives as well as skills was absent (particularly in Arab television journalism which in a sense was non-existent) the issues were professionalism and increasing the margins of free expression. Today those margins have been increased significantly and the perspectives and skills of professionalism are more and more apparent in the practice of Arab journalism by its youngest and least provincial reporters and producers. . It is the context – to rescue Arab Islamic cultural context from the corruption of expediency and ethnocentrism  that emerges as the grave challenge. 

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