CBC News: DEADLINE IRAQ - Uncensored Stories of the War
Broadcast on Sunday November 23, 2003 at 10PM (10:30NL) on CBC-TV
Repeated on Sunday March 14, 2004 at 10AM (10:30NL) on CBC-TV
Repeated on Saturday March 20, 2004 at 10PM ET/PT on CBC Newsworld
These are the stories that weren’t told by the media during the Iraq war.
CBC NEWS goes straight to the source, to journalists, camera operators and photographers from news organizations around the world, who reveal the lethal risks they faced,
as well as the untold horrors they witnessed.
Read what viewers had to say about Deadline Iraq on our Feedback page.
Introduction - Stories
Photo Gallery - Resources
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Originally Broadcast on Sunday, November 23 2003
INTRODUCTION
There were two wars in Iraq. One featured soldiers. The other featured journalists. News organizations competed with one another, and the resulting risks journalists took to be first on a given story sometimes got them killed. The fact is that journalists and journalism were often front and centre in the stories that came out of the conflict. Embedding versus unilateral. The high mortality rate of journalists. Criticisms surrounding the soundness of the coverage. The unprecedented speed and immediacy of transmitting words and pictures of combat.
Now that the war is "over", journalists and journalism are still making headlines. Christiane Amanpour of CNN has stated that the coverage of the war, particularly in America, was too driven by patriotism. John Burns of the New York Times recently said that the Iraq war highlights how corrupt journalism has become. His colleague at the Times, Judith Miller, has herself been accused by some media observers of being corrupted by Pentagon influences. The controversy around Tony Blair and the BBC's coverage of the war continues to boil.
Given all this, we thought it would be fascinating and informative to zero in on the journalists who were there. Whether there were logistical impediments to getting their stories out, or editorial concerns, or military restrictions, there was much that they couldn't, or wouldn't say, during the war. Now they can. We interviewed nearly 50 journalists from around the world, representing the broadest range of media affiliations. You can read the entire interviews from 12 of them here on our website.
And the composite picture they give us of this war is one that we didn't really see: what went on behind the scenes, the fear, the exhilaration, the tedium, the professional gratification, as well as the toll it took on them emotionally and psychologically. It is their stories, as well as footage and pictures that never saw air time during the war, that lie at the heart of "Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War.”
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