Category Archives: Journalism

Women’s rights in Iraq

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Free­lance jour­nal­ist Thierry Robin has entered Iraq to cover the plight of women in post-war Iraqi soci­ety. She He wrote to me the fol­low­ing:

I’m a free­lance reporter and a mem­ber of the ABIR (Asso­ci­a­tion for the Ben­e­fit of the Iraqi Women and their Rel­a­tives) asso­ci­a­tion. I will go on a trip to Iraq from 8th to 22nd of Octo­ber and I will blog from Bagh­dad about women’s rights (in French and in Eng­lish). I thought you could be inter­ested in this ini­tia­tive and that’s why I’m con­tact­ing you.
With other mem­bers of ABIR, we will bring mate­r­ial to a dis­pen­sary and an orphan­age. We will also meet Hanaa Edward from the local NGO “Al Amal” and other per­sons involved in the pro­mo­tion of women’s rights in Iraq. It will be an oppor­tu­nity for me to make sev­eral reports with the aim of catch­ing people’s atten­tion about the appalling fate of Iraqi women and girls: Sex­ual vio­lences, abduc­tions and mur­ders are wide­spread, pre­vent­ing the women from tak­ing part in the post­war society.

Her His blog is up, and the Eng­lish ver­sion is at the bot­tom of the post­ings. Her His report­ing on the needs of the sick and the dying in the woe­fully under-equipped Bagh­dad hos­pi­tals are heart­break­ing. And — big sur­prise — the vio­lence that the Bush admin­is­tra­tion says is get­ting too much atten­tion is omnipresent.
*UPDATE* Thank to my non-existent French skills, and the sharp eyes of two of my read­ers, David Frazer and Amy N., I found out that Thierry is a man, not a woman. My apolo­gies for the screw-up. Thanks for the cor­rec­tion, guys!

Press outrage

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This will likely come as no sur­prise to my Iraqi read­ers, but I came across this tid­bit in a Guardian arti­cle about the ves­tiges of Saddam’s grip on Iraq:

Almost all of the bureau­crats at [Saddam’s] infor­ma­tion min­istry have done very nicely for them­selves since the war. The gov­ern­ment min­ders who spent their days report­ing to the intel­li­gence ser­vices on for­eign reporters or doing their best to obstruct their work have gone on to well-paid jobs — for the same for­eign news organ­i­sa­tions they once hounded.
The second-in-command at the infor­ma­tion min­istry, who spent his days read­ing the reports the min­ders wrote about vis­it­ing for­eign jour­nal­ists, has been employed by Fox News.

I just shake my head at this one… As Josh over at Talk­ing­PointsMemo notes, if CNN had done this, this might raise more than a few eye­brows.
The rest of the arti­cle is an inter­est­ing read, too.

Blogging and Journalism

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Har­vard University’s Nie­man Foun­da­tion, which admin­is­ters the pres­ti­gious Nie­man Fel­low­ship, has pub­lished the Sep­tem­ber issue of the Nie­man Reports, look­ing at the inter­sec­tion between blog­ging and jour­nal­ism. The entire issue is avail­able as a .pdf file for down­load.
My con­tri­bu­tion starts on page 84, but the entire pack­age is excel­lent, with strong offer­ings by J.D. Lasica, Eric Alter­man and Dan Gill­mor.
The com­plete list is:

  • Weblogs and Jour­nal­ism: Do They Con­nect? by Rebecca Blood
  • Is Blog­ging Jour­nal­ism? by Paul Andrews
  • Weblogs: A Road Back to Basics by Bill Mitchell
  • Weblogs Threaten and Inform Tra­di­tional Jour­nal­ism by Tom Regan
  • Blogs and Jour­nal­ism Need Each Other by J.D. Lasica
  • Weblogs Bring Jour­nal­ists Into a Larger Com­mu­nity by Paul Grabow­icz
  • Blog­ging Jour­nal­ists Invite Out­siders’ Report­ing In by Sheila Lennon
  • Mov­ing Toward Par­tic­i­pa­tory Jour­nal­ism by Dan Gill­mor
  • Weblogs and Jour­nal­ism: Back to the Future? by Glenn Har­lan Reynolds
  • Blog­ging From Iraq by me
  • Deter­min­ing the Value of Blogs by Eric Alter­man
  • The Infec­tious Desire to Be Linked in the Blo­gos­phere by Mark Glaser
  • Read­ers Glimpse an Edi­to­r­ial Board’s Think­ing by Keven Ann Willey
  • A Reporter Is Fired for Writ­ing a Weblog by Steve Olaf­son
  • An Edi­tor Acts to Limit a Staffer’s Weblog by Brian Toolan (Edi­tor, Hart­ford Courant, no blog)
  • Blog­ging Con­nects a Colum­nist to New Story Ideas by Mike Wend­land
  • Blog­gers and Their First Amend­ment Pro­tec­tion by Jane E. Kirtley
  • A Weblog Sharp­ens Jour­nal­ism Stu­dents’ Skills by Larry Pryor

I plan to use a lot of this in my course that I’m teach­ing at NYU, so any of my stu­dents read­ing this blog should just down­load it now.

Army admits to using Journos in Iraq

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Fol­low­ing on the curi­ous story of Paul Moran, the U.S. Army is admit­ting it used the media for its own ends. In one inci­dent, a tank com­man­der rounded up jour­nal­ists for what the arti­cle calls a “thun­der run” through Bagh­dad to show Iraqi troops, whose resis­tance had stiff­ened thanks to Iraqi media manip­u­la­tion, that the U.S. was in charge.

“I just wanted them to report what hap­pened. If hav­ing the media report accu­rately is using them, then they were used,” said Col. David Perkins, who as com­man­der of the 3rd Infantry Division’s 2nd Brigade had orga­nized the tank foray into Bagh­dad specif­i­cally to gar­ner pub­lic­ity for the U.S. advance.

Also inter­est­ing is the grous­ing by Marine Col. Glenn Starnes, who derides the cur­rent bad news out of Iraq as sen­sa­tional and says its “because we’ve lost the embeds.” The prob­lem, accord­ing to Col. Starnes, is that the mil­i­tary lost con­trol of the story, not the sit­u­a­tion.
Now, I can’t say for sure what is going on. I’m not there. _And that’s the problem._ If the mil­i­tary is admit­ting to gin­ning up pro­pa­ganda stunts that get trans­mit­ted both back home and to the enemy, then how can the civil­ians on the home front trust what’s being reported? Is the sit­u­a­tion in Iraq really as bad as it’s being reported? Or is it sen­sa­tion­al­ized as Col. Starnes charges? Granted, reporters do flock, vulture-like, to bad news, but I don’t think any think­ing per­son would deny the mil­i­tary — and its com­man­der in chief — has a vested inter­est in shap­ing the story, calm­ing the home front down, bol­ster­ing a flag­ging sup­port. And now they’ve admit­ted they’ve staged events to give cer­tain impres­sions. (But we already knew that, thanks to the whole Jes­sica Lynch embar­rass­ment.)
Maybe things in Bagh­dad really are OK, as SecDef Don­ald Rums­feld said the other day, but how can we know for sure? It’s pretty obvi­ous the mil­i­tary can’t be relied on to tell the straight truth — not that I totally blame them; for all my crit­i­cisms, I under­stand the need for media manip­u­la­tion in today’s glob­al­ized and net­worked world. How­ever, I don’t have to like it, approve of it, or par­tic­i­pate. Hence, my solo trek to the war.
Back­ing up the inde­pen­dent spirit, Orville Schell wrote in an essay in Sunday’s _New York Times Magazine_ that for­eign cor­re­spon­dents must becomes a “state­less peo­ple” in order to remain inde­pen­dent. By far the most telling exam­ple of this are the sen­ti­ments expressed by Mazen Dana, the Pales­tin­ian cam­era­man who was killed by U.S. sol­diers last month when they fired on him with tank shells. (The offi­cial rea­son was that the tank com­man­der thought his cam­era was an RPG.)

Dana rep­re­sented those reporters whose alle­giances are not pri­mar­ily to nation, patri­o­tism or ide­ol­ogy but to this new inde­pen­dent tribe of cryp­tic witness-bearing, the antithe­sis of embed­ded, pro­ducer reliant, flag-waving Ger­al­dos. ”Free­dom means to me to work free, no one bother you,” he told his C.P.J. inter­viewer in his game Eng­lish. ”We film, and we show the world what’s going on. … My motive is to con­tinue my work, even if it costed for me a lot of prob­lems and a lot of injury … even if it cost me my life.”

It did, trag­i­cally, just as it cost 16 other jour­nal­ists their lives. But that may be the nature of what’s required in future wars, in which the land­scape has changed and national alle­giances are lia­bil­i­ties — both for life and limb, and for the sake of truth.

What is evolv­ing is a form of con­flict not char­ac­ter­ized by armies of ”good guys” and ”bad guys” or ”lib­er­a­tors” and ”oppres­sors,” one cov­ered by jour­nal­ists who come from or iden­tify with one side or another. We have instead a new, almost grav­ity­less, world of con­flict in which the Amer­i­can mil­i­tary can kill jour­nal­ists with­out caus­ing great alarm and ”the enemy” can blow up U.N. aid mis­sions and other ”soft” civil­ian tar­gets with­out remorse. All that jour­nal­ists have to steady them in this bad dream is grit and a stub­born refusal to serve any of the con­tend­ing mas­ters. What gives their work mean­ing is a defi­ant com­mit­ment to inde­pen­dence, accu­rate report­ing and an almost exis­ten­tial belief that no mat­ter how debased the world and pol­i­tics become, the ”real story” some­how still matters.

Yet more on Paul Moran

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I may very well regret this, but in the inter­est of fair­ness and/or throw­ing gaso­line on a dying fire, I’m reprint­ing Shel­don Rampton’s email to me — with his full per­mis­sion — in which he responds to Eric Camp­bell, the Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Corp. reporter who defended Paul Moran’s work in Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. (And whose crit­i­cism led me to apol­o­gize.) Ramp­ton is the co-author of “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” which was the orig­i­nal prod to this whole Paul Moran imbroglio.

1585422762.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpgAs the co-author with John Stauber of “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” I read with inter­est your recent apol­ogy about Paul Moran, the Aus­tralian TV cam­era­man who was killed in Iraq and who also worked for the Ren­don Group. How­ever, I think you have apol­o­gized exces­sively and pre­ma­turely.
In “Weapons of Mass Decep­tion,” John and I describe Moran’s work for Ren­don very briefly, but there is more to the story than we tell there. We decided not go go into fur­ther detail, partly because a more exten­sive telling didn’t seem to fit within the flow of that chap­ter. How­ever, the facts in total are actu­ally MORE dis­turb­ing than you would imag­ine from the brief men­tion that appears in our book. More­over, I would chal­lenge some of the state­ments that Eric Camp­bell made in his com­ments to you.
To begin with, Camp­bell refers to an “unend­ing rep­e­ti­tion of false claims” about Moran. How­ever, Colin James, the reporter who first wrote about Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the Ren­don Group, con­tin­ues to stand by his story. James works for the “Ade­laide Adver­tiser,” and he learned about Moran’s work for Ren­don when he attended his funeral. Accord­ing to “The Bul­letin,” an Aus­tralian news mag­a­zine, James sat down with “two close friends and two of Moran’s broth­ers” the day after the funeral:

They drank cof­fee and rem­i­nisced about their friend the altar boy, the sea scout, the livewire. The jour­nal­ist was inquir­ing of the cameraman’s work in north­ern Iraq when one of the friends men­tioned that Moran worked for a “shad­owy” com­pany. Shad­owy com­pany, won­dered the jour­nal­ist. What­ever could you mean?
The friend men­tioned a name: the Ren­don Group. He talked of Moran’s involve­ment in help­ing an Iraqi defec­tor escape and Moran’s work with the INC. Moran, he said, had helped mobilise a pop­u­lar upris­ing against Sad­dam Hussein’s regime and trained dis­si­dents in the use of hid­den cam­eras. There were the renowned “Paul Moran chan­nels” � he seemed able to con­tact impor­tant peo­ple with lit­tle bother � and the “James Bond lifestyle”. In short, Moran had spent a decade, on and off, try­ing to desta­bilise Sad­dam Hussein’s regime for a com­pany hired by both the CIA and Pen­ta­gon.
Per­haps Moran’s death wasn’t so ran­dom, after all. Per­haps this nice guy had a secret. Well, that’s how the jour­nal­ist reported it, any­way. Colin James, an Ade­laide Adver­tiser reporter with a 1994 Walk­ley Award, stands by his story. No one demurred while one friend spun tales about Moran, he says. James’ main fear dur­ing the inter­view was that his eyes might turn into saucers. He rushed back to the office and punched “Ren­don Group” into an inter­net search engine. And his eyes grew wider.

The URL for the above story is as fol­lows: http://​bul​letin​.ninemsn​.com​.au/​b​u​l​l​e​t​i​n​/​E​d​D​e​s​k​.​n​s​f​/0/
B1B47ED7DABBEDBCCA256D480013C030?OpenDocument
It should be noted that Colin James did not intend his story to be any sort of attack or crit­i­cism of Moran’s work. To the con­trary, it was head­lined “Moran’s secret cru­sade against the tyranny of Sad­dam,” and it is full of lauda­tory com­ments about Moran by his griev­ing friends. You can read James’ story at the fol­low­ing URL:
http://​www​.thead​ver​tiser​.news​.com​.au/​p​r​i​n​t​p​a​ge/ 0,5942,6239116,00.html
Clearly, James’ account dif­fers from Eric Campbell’s claim that Moran merely “did occa­sional audio visual pro­duc­tion work [for] Ren­don and other PR com­pa­nies.” More­over, James’ account is cor­rob­o­rated and ampli­fied in a TV seg­ment for the Aus­tralian news pro­gram Date­line. You can read a tran­script of the pro­gram and view the video at the fol­low­ing URL:
http://​www​.sbs​.com​.au/​d​a​t​e​l​i​ne/
trans.php3?dte=2003 – 07-23&title= Paul+Moran+Story
The Date­line pro­gram inter­viewed Zaab Sethna, a long­time spokesman for the Iraqi National Con­gress. Accord­ing to Sethna, he and Moran began work­ing together more than a decade ago, prior to Oper­a­tion Desert Storm:

When I first met Paul we were work­ing for the gov­ern­ment of Kuwait. That ended after Kuwait was lib­er­ated by the Amer­i­cans and then the Ren­don group came back us to.
We weren’t employ­ees we were on con­tract. The Ren­don group came back to us and said, “We now have a con­tract to bureau­cracy, to kind of do anti-Saddam pro­pa­ganda on behalf of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion.“
So, there was some radio, some tele­vi­sion, there was like a trav­el­ling human rights exhi­bi­tion around the world to show Saddam’s human rights vio­la­tions. There was send­ing out press releases, kind of stan­dard pub­lic rela­tions. What we did�nt know, what the Ren­don group didn’t tell us, was in fact it was the CIA that had hired them to do this work so we hired on…

More­over, Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the INC and the Ren­don Group led to one of the high-profile inter­na­tional news sto­ries that pur­ported to doc­u­ment a covert Iraqi pro­gram to develop weapons of mass destruc­tion. As Sethna explains in the Date­line piece, Moran was cho­sen by the INC as one of only two reporters (the other was Judith Miller of the New York Times) invited to inter­view Adnan Ihsan Saeed al Haideri, an Iraqi defec­tor who claimed that he had been used by Sad­dam to build spe­cialised bunkers and other facil­i­ties for chem­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and nuclear weapons research. After Miller and Moran did their sep­a­rate sto­ries on al Haideri, he dis­ap­peared into a U.S. wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gram. You can see some of the sto­ries about Iraq that were based on al Haideri’s alle­ga­tions at the fol­low­ing URLs:
http://​www​.cbsnews​.com/​s​t​o​r​i​e​s​/​2​0​0​2​/​0​1​/​1​8​/​e​v​e​n​i​n​g​n​e​ws/ main324937.shtml
http://​usinfo​.state​.gov/​t​o​p​i​c​a​l​/​p​o​l​/​t​e​r​r​o​r​/​0​1​1​2​2​1​0​7​.​htm
http://​observer​.guardian​.co​.uk/​w​o​r​l​d​v​i​e​w​/​s​t​o​ry/ 0,11581,669024,00.html
As this exam­ple illus­trates, it is inac­cu­rate for Camp­bell to char­ac­ter­ize Paul Moran as merely a cam­era­man. The Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion also treated him as a reporter and allowed him to break a story that was of major impor­tance in mak­ing the case for war with Iraq. To have this story reported by some­one who has worked closely with both the Ren­don Group and the Iraqi National Con­gress is a clear case of con­flict of inter­est. Eric Camp­bell is merely blow­ing smoke when he tries to use the dis­tinc­tion between a “con­tract worker” and an “employee” as his basis for claim­ing that no such con­flict existed. It is also strik­ing that no one has been able to sub­stan­ti­ate al Haideri’s detailed descrip­tions (includ­ing loca­tions) of an exten­sive weapons pro­gram that included under­ground stor­age facil­i­ties. As Scott Rit­ter has pointed out, it would have been impos­si­ble for Sad­dam Hus­sein to destroy such facil­i­ties quickly with­out leav­ing a trace in the days pre­ced­ing the war. There is a good chance that al Haideri’s claims about weapons facil­i­ties were the basis for Don­ald Rumsfeld’s claim on March 30 that “We know where they are.” But if we knew where they are, why haven’t we found them by now?
I think that it is also rather disin­ge­nous for Camp­bell to com­plain that it is now “too late to repair the dam­age” of allegedly “false claims” about Moran that have cir­cu­lated on the Inter­net. Fol­low­ing the pub­li­ca­tion of Colin James’s story in the Ade­laide Adver­tiser, Moran’s fam­ily and friends were asked repeat­edly to clar­ify the facts about his life and work, and they repeat­edly declined to do so, usu­ally cit­ing their grief as the rea­son for remain­ing silent. The Aus­tralian Broad­cast­ing Cor­po­ra­tion has also been very “eco­nom­i­cal with the truth” in its com­ments on the mat­ter. For exam­ple, here is the URL to a tran­script from ABC’s “Media Watch,” which com­ments on the Ade­laide Adver­tiser:
http://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​m​e​d​i​a​w​a​t​c​h​/​t​r​a​n​s​c​r​i​p​t​s​/​s​8​3​2​0​3​2​.​htm
The ABC response con­sists of call­ing Colin James’s story “a super­fi­cial piece” and then declin­ing to com­ment fur­ther on grounds that it wasn’t “a story most of the Aus­tralian media followed” — a clas­sic “non-denial denial” that fails to iden­tify a sin­gle error of fact in James’s story while insin­u­at­ing that some­thing was wrong with it. And how can Moran’s peo­ple have it both ways? If the Colin James story wasn’t fol­lowed by most of the media, how can it have caused the intense grief and suf­fer­ing of which they com­plain? And if they can’t be both­ered to pub­licly cor­rect any errors in the story, why should we take them at face value now when they com­plain that errors have gone uncor­rected? And what errors specif­i­cally are they talk­ing about? The only error that Camp­bell men­tions in his com­plaint to you is that Moran worked on con­tract for Ren­don rather than being an “employee.” That’s arguably an error on your part (not ours), but it’s a pretty nit-picky com­plaint, given the extent of Moran’s rela­tion­ship with the Ren­don Group.
As for the com­plaint that Moran is being vil­lainized, John and I never char­ac­ter­ized him as a vil­lain, and nei­ther did you. I think Camp­bell brought up that claim for the pur­pose of emo­tional intim­i­da­tion. I have no doubt that Camp­bell liked Paul Moran and resents read­ing crit­i­cism of his work. I also have no rea­son to doubt that Moran believed in the cause of the Kurds, and he prob­a­bly also believed in the work he did for the INC. Peo­ple who work on pub­lic rela­tions cam­paigns often inter­nal­ize the beliefs of their clients. “Sin­cer­ity of belief,” how­ever, is not a valid defense against the spe­cific charge of con­flict of inter­est, and by any rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion, Moran crossed that line. To say that this is the case does not mean that Moran was a vil­lain, and it is not intended to con­vey any dis­re­spect for the dead. Out of respect for the LIVING, how­ever, I think the pub­lic is enti­tled to know the full story of how we were sold the war on Iraq.

Shel­don Ramp­ton
Edi­tor, PR Watch (www​.prwatch​.org)
Author of books includ­ing:
Friends In Deed: The Story of US-Nicaragua Sis­ter Cities
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You
Mad Cow USA
Trust Us, We’re Experts
Weapons of Mass Deception

There is obvi­ously more to this story than a first — or sec­ond or third — glance shows. I’ll be work­ing on this one over the next few days.