By: Barbara Bedway On the day President Bush proclaimed the fighting over in Iraq - from an aircraft carrier positioned to provide the best backdrop for his TV speech - famed war correspondent Chris Hedges reflected on the postwar coverage and the continuing importance of, and obstacles to, getting the story right. "Postwar coverage has actually been better than the jingoistic war coverage, which was abysmal," said Hedges, who has covered a dozen conflicts around the globe, including, as an independent reporter, the first Gulf War. He now writes for the "Metro" section of
The New York Times.
Hedges had previously shared his views with
E&P in February, during the prewar debate, and with E&P Online near the end of the conflict.
"There have been some stories - too few, but some - that have given us a sense of the human cost of this war, both to Iraq and to the soldiers who carried it out," he said last week. "We didn't ever discover how many civilian casualties occurred in the first Gulf War, and I doubt we'll ever know about this one."
Americans also remain largely uninformed about what the country faces in its new role as interim administrator of Iraq, he believes.
"We don't have a sense of what we have waded into here," said Hedges, author of
War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, a winner of the Amnesty International 2002 Global Award for Human Rights Journalism, and a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. "The deep divisions among the varying factions could be extremely hard to bridge, and the historical and cultural roots are probably beyond the American understanding."
The hard work of both reporting and analysis will inevitably be the province of newspapers, he asserted, though only a handful of publications will grapple with it: "Now that the feel-good, flag-waving part of war is over, the real culprits, the commercial-broadcast media, are going to pack up and leave. What they've done is a huge disservice to the nation. They have no sense of responsibility to continue reporting as the story gets more complicated and difficult to report."
The message put out by the Bush administration and the commercial media portraying Americans only as "liberators" ill equips the country to understand why that is not the perception of many Iraqis or much of the rest of the world. Hedges compared the situation to Israel's taking over Gaza in 1967, and operating among a hostile population: "For occupation troops, everyone becomes the enemy."
As he emphasized in his previous interviews with
E&P, the importance of having reporters with an intimate knowledge of the area is crucial for providing illuminating context. "In a perfect world, we'd have reporters who speak Arabic and who understand Iraq's history and culture," he pointed out. "But they need time, knowledge, and space to write, and very few media operations do this kind of analysis. Public TV tries, but they have no budget. It takes a gigantic investment.
Profit-driven media organizations realize these stories take work on the part of the readers, and they just don't see the point." The result, he fears, is that "we'll see Iraq in terms of flare-ups and incidents, without any context or sense of what's happening or why. That makes it difficult for us to have informed judgments." Without providing this sort of context, the print and broadcast media cannot perform their essential role in a democracy: to keep the public informed.
"I didn't become a reporter," he said, "to make money or win fame. It's sad to see such deterioration in the long tradition that has had a lot of integrity, and been a vital part of our democracy, in the 20 years I've been doing it." Though he has faith that papers such as
The New York Times and
The Washington Post will continue to produce the in-depth stories vital to a democracy, he fears the allure of easily digested, image-driven TV news will continue to predominate.
"Newspapers still do journalism," he observed. "We've become a bit like blacksmiths, almost an anachronism now. I find it very frightening. It is similar to the end of the Roman Republic, when the spectacle of the arena replaced real political debate and participation in political life. And when that happens, you end up with a Nero."
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here