Collateral Damage

The question they didn’t raise was just as troubling though: in this age of the all-powerful mass media, do journalists endanger their lives, as well as those of their colleagues, through tendentious reporting in the guise of Press freedom?

To be sure, no argument howsoever compelling can justify acts that put mediapersons in harm’s way, even if they happen to be operating behind so-called enemy lines. It is one thing for reporters and photographers to die at the hands of militias and thugs, as have happened in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan.

But it is a different matter altogether if journalists are killed by regular soldiers, that too when the former’s identity is not in doubt thanks to the high level of coordination nowadays between media organisations and armies. In the case of the Al Jazeera team, as also the Abu Dhabi TV office which narrowly escaped destruction, there was very little scope for confusion, although no one can completely rule it out.

That said, however, it would be disingenuous to claim that war correspondents don’t have a dog in the ongoing fight. At a recent Johannesburg gathering of journalists concerned about war coverage, it was suggested that they campaign for the Geneva Convention to recognise the right of journalists to do their job in a war, and to be protected by and from both sides, much as it is done for medical workers.

This would make it a war crime to target journalists. The proposal is good in principle, but it presupposes a moral equivalence between medical workers and journalists that simply doesn’t exist. For all the courage displayed by embedded journalists and roving independents, if the Iraq war coverage has exposed anything, it is the media’s brittle credibility and a pervasive lack of professionalism.

Reams of newsprint have been devoted by the liberal Press to the flag-waving style of Fox Television reporting and the alleged pro-US establishment bias of CNN. Yet, if truth be told, the overwhelming majority of non-American media organisations covering the conflict have made no effort to hide their anti-war bias.

BBC World Service might be guilty, as the New Republic’s Andrew Sullivan says, of soft anti-Americanism, but for Al Jazeera or any of the other Arab satellite TV stations, such an accusation would have been an insulting understatement — at least until the fall of Saddam Hussein.

They saw nothing unethical in being the Iraqi dictator’s loudspeaker — the most powerful weapon in Saddam’s armoury as far as the battle for Arab public opinion was concerned.

Whether out of pan-Arab solidarity, or because of cut-throat competition, or perhaps under orders from pro-Western regimes eager to blunt nationalist criticism, Arab TV channels filled the air waves of the Middle East for weeks with inflammatory commentary instead of unbiased reportage.

In the battle for hearts and minds, their dramatic war footage was no less lethal than the Allied Apache helicopter gunships and arguably mightier than the most powerful American artillery guns. Indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that, given sufficient time, the proverbial Arab Street would have erupted in violence and frustrated the Bush administration’s regime-change goal, to say the least.

In the end, the Baathist regime crumbled under the twin blows of Allied firepower and internal dissent — something that Arab news editors and producers, to their undying regret, could not prevent.

But the fact remains that nothing could convert them from political advocacy to balanced reporting until the giant statue of Saddam was toppled in the heart of Baghdad and the truth could not be concealed any longer.

Tragically, by then, independent journalists had become ‘‘collateral damage’’ of the deadly propaganda war: two foreign reporters died and three others were injured when a US tank attacked Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel.

While Al Jazeera being Al Jazeera has every reason to suspect that the attack on its bureau was ‘‘deliberate and premeditated’’, media organisations with no other agenda than to report the truth had better beware of the hazards of pack reporting before sending their reporters on the next war assignment.

The writer is a senior journalist working in the Gulf