Facts, some fiction and the reporting of war
Reports of uprisings, break-outs and breakthroughs from thick of the action prove premature
Stuart Millar and Michael White
Saturday March 29, 2003
The Guardian
The Pentagon had long predicted that the confrontation with Iraq would be unlike any other war in history. That claim has been proved correct, although not for the reasons the US top brass may have been thinking of.
For the first time, the public back home has had access to round-the-clock reports of every cough and spit of the military campaign, much of it supplied by the 750-strong army of correspondents embedded with US and British military units in the thick of the action.
From live television pictures of battles through up-to-the-minute internet headlines to acres of newspaper coverage, this has become the fastest, most extensively scrutinsed war ever.
But in such a rapidly changing environment, the sheer volume of information has at times made it almost impossible to establish what is true and, just as importantly, how that affects the big picture. The problems of sorting out fact from fiction and claim from counterclaim have been compounded by the unpredictable nature of the war.
With just nine days of the conflict passed, there have already been a series of apparently critical developments, all of them beamed instantly onto television screens and reported as fact in a blaze of newspaper headlines, that have subsequently turned out to be inaccurate.
1 Republican Guard convoys head south from Baghdad
The Daily Telegraph front page headline on Thursday could not have been more dramatic. "Saddam sends out his tanks," it thundered. According to the paper, two Iraqi columns, each containing 1,000 Republican Guard vehicles, were heading south to attack coalition forces in what would be the pivotal battles of the war. The tank columns, however, failed to materialise.
It seems to have been a case of a journalist embedded with the military being fed spurious information by forces on the ground. In this instance, the reporter was from CNN, embedded with the US 7th Cavalry, part of the main coalition advance force.
The correspondent, Walter Rodgers, said Iraqi units were streaming out of Baghdad under cover of a sandstorm to engage US marines around Najaf. The claim was downplayed almost immediately by the Pentagon. General Richard Myers, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, told reporters that a few "light vehicles" were understood to be heading in the general direction of the US forces.
But that was not enough to calm the headline writers. The following day, the Mirror described the Iraqi move as a "pincer attack on US force", and both the Mail and the Independent carried similar stories. "One of the problems we have got is that journalists embedded with our forces are talking to people all the time. So 'military sources' could just be a conversation with a squaddie who's shining his boots," said one Whitehall official. |
