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Neither Julius Caesar nor Attila the Hun had to worry about the news media, but George W. Bush apparently does. In the memory banks of his officials, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his fellow unilateralists and world conquerors, are remembrances of Vietnam past, among them the conviction that the United States lost the war in 1975 because of the six o’clock news and the early morning edition.

In this view, one of the most critical factors for the “loss” of Vietnam were the reports and images on the war and its attendant horrors filed by the news media. By bringing the war home, the media thus led Americans to oppose it. Some of those images are still remembered today: a photograph of the Saigon police chief shooting a bound Viet Cong prisoner in the head; a girl whose clothes had been burned off by US napalm fleeing the explosions behind her; babies and old women lying bloodied in a ditch in My Lai village, victims of a massacre by US troops.

That the media helped make the United States lose the war is a view shared by Pentagon war planners. In 1991 they kept journalists out of the Gulf War for fear that the support of the US public would sour, as it did in Vietnam, once the images of charred Iraqi bodies, starving children, destroyed water-treatment facilities and their own dead reached American living rooms.

What the news media convey do matter in modern warfare, which since World War II has been waged not only with bombs and bullets but also with images, statements and press releases. In the current age of multimedia, satellite communications and instant replay, the images, statements and press releases have assumed multiple purposes: to demoralize the enemy, to boost your own forces’ morale—and in the case of the US military as it advances toward Baghdad, to convince the folks back home that their sons aren’t coming home in body bags, and everything’s going as planned.

This time the Pentagon has changed its approach, however. Months before the attack on Iraq began, Rumsfeld announced that journalists were welcome, and that the US military would “embed” them in its various infantry units.

Some reporters were skeptical. But since March 19, when the first Cruise missiles rained on Baghdad, that skepticism has diminished. There is information, and the US military is providing it. What’s even more important, and despite a 50-point set of guidelines that among others ban the release of sensitive information, the US military has so far not stopped reporters from hooking up their computers and satellite dishes.

It’s all to the good, chorus Fox News and CNN. The military for once is not trying to conceal information. Instead it is providing the media with it. Which is exactly what may be wrong, say some US journalists. Among others, they argue that journalists’ being “embedded” means they get to present only one view of the war, the US view. What this amounts to is that the media are being used—and “in more ways than one,” says one observer.

Writing for the International Herald Tribune, Lucian Truscott argues that the Pentagon policy of embedding “has turned the media into a weapon of war.” The reports and the images that have appeared in the US media—of Baghdad being bombed, of Saddam Hussein’s palaces ablaze, and of columns of US armor and infantry advancing toward Baghdad—contain a message addressed to the Iraqi government: “Surrender your forces. Opposition is hopeless. If you don’t believe us, just turn on your TV.”

In the era of globalized media, Saddam Hussein himself, as he told US broadcaster Dan Rather, also gets his news from CNN—and the message of what CNN has been showing could not but be depressing to Iraqis and the Iraqi government.

“The Bush administration,” says Truscott, “has beaten the press at its own game…by using the information it provides to harass and intimidate the Iraqi military leadership.”

In short, the Bush government’s policy of “embedding” journalists in US military units has paid off, primarily because the US invasion has appeared to be unstoppable, which it might very well seem from the standpoint of journalists “practically in lockstep with the military”.

But this media strategy will continue to pay off only for so long as journalists perceive the war as going well for the United States. Assuming that the majority of US journalists are professional enough to discharge the fundamental media responsibility of truth-telling, the minute that ceases to be the impression the reports could end up doing the opposite.

Instead of being demoralized, the Iraqi forces could instead be encouraged, even as, back home, concern over their sons and daughters develops among ordinary Americans into opposition to the war.

The Iraqis too have been trying to manipulate the media toward influencing ordinary Arabs—the “Arab street”—into supporting Iraq and hardening their opposition to the US invasion. They are also trying to counter the impact on mass and troop morale of the images of bombs falling on Baghdad and of US forces rolling toward the capital.

In this effort, Iraqi statements and the images they provide—such as the claim that the US forces have not taken any Iraqi city, and the video of the US prisoners of war in Iraqi hands—have naturally been reported by the US media, though with a stronger dose of skepticism than that they reserve for US government officials.

The Iraqis, however, also use Iraqi national television and the Qatar-based Arab network al- Jazeera to refute US claims, rally the support of the population and boost troop morale. It’s an effort that’s at least as legitimate and expected in war as that of the US policy to “beat the press at its own game.”

But does this “weaponization of the media” make the media legitimate military targets?

Claiming that Iraqi television was part of the “command and control” apparatus of the Saddam Hussein regime, the United States bombed the Iraqi national TV building in Baghdad in the night of March 25-26, knocking it off the air for 45 minutes.

The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Paris-based press freedom group Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF—Reporters Without Borders) condemned the attack. IFJ said the strike was “not a strike on a legitimate military target,” and that US claims that the station was among key regime command-and-control assets are untenable.

RSF’s condemnation was more strongly worded. It declared that “military bombing must be limited to strictly military targets,” and pointed out that “the Americans cite the Geneva Conventions when it comes to pictures of US prisoners of war in Iraq, but immediately forgets them [the Conventions] when they bomb a TV building which is civil property and therefore protected under those Conventions.”

“In 2001,” continued RSF, “the US Army bombed the offices of al-Jazeera in Kabul [Afghanistan]. It should be careful not to give the impression of routinely targeting the media that oppose it.”

“Propaganda is part of all warfare and is aimed at maintaining the morale of the population,” said the RSF statement. “Neither this morale nor the civilian population can be considered a military target.”

Both RSF and the IFJ warned that such attacks only expose all media practitioners to graver risks, among them the possibility that they will henceforth be considered legitimate targets because of their views or that of their organizations.

After all, as has been pointed out by US media observers themselves, Fox News and CNN, though private enterprises, have been acting like official US government news agencies for months when it comes to Iraq.

But these global networks should take heart. Only the United States and Israel have so far bombed media offices and TV stations in recent years. (Taking a cue from its US patrons, Israel blew up the offices of Voice of Palestine Radio and TV in the city of Ramallah on January 19, 2001.) For the civilized world, that the news media are critical factors in modern warfare doesn’t justify bombing them. But that’s only for the civilized world.

(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, March 29, 2003)

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