MEDIA-MIDEAST: Arabs Debate ‘Misinformation’ during War on Iraq

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

N Janardhan

DUBAI, Jun 11 2003 (IPS) - Two months after the ouster of Saddam Hussein, the Arab media is coming under scrutiny for ‘misleading’ people in the region into believing that Iraq would provide stiff resistance and even win the war against the U.S.-led forces.

But this, journalists and analysts in the region also say, may be no different from how many in the western media followed the line of the U.S. and British governments, and trumpeted the threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – which have still not been found today.

In the aftermath of the war on Iraq, when the victors of the military conflict are clear, many are asking how many media outfits in the Middle East reported that Iraq’s defences were such that it could throw off the invasion by U.S.-led forces – only to see Baghdad fall with little sign of these.

”The media gave us the impression that Iraq was winning the war,” said Hassan Khairy, an Iraqi expatriate in the United Arab Emirates.

”The Americans had invaded Baghdad, but a commentator on one of the Arabic channels was refuting it, claiming that the U.S.-led forces could never enter Baghdad because the Republican Guard units were at the gates in full force,” he recalled.

If the Iraqi army was as loyal to Saddam as it was made out to be, ”where did the Republican Guard vanish?” asked university student Mohammed Qattan.

Some of the answers to these questions may be difficult, but government officials have also been zeroing in on what they call the faults of Arab media – whose stance experts say was likely to have been affected by their views against the U.S. intervention in the Middle East.

The Arab media’s coverage of the war in Iraq was ”subjective and misleading”, Kuwaiti Minister of Foreign Affairs Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmed told a media conference in Kuwait Sunday.

They concealed the ”truth and manipulated Arab public opinion, which created a rift between intellectuals, journalists, politicians and masses”, he added, saying media should regain its credibility by ”identifying and rectifying their mistakes”.

But Kuwaiti Minister of Information Sheikh Ahmed al-Fahed went further, pointing out another ‘fault’. He cited the way the Arab media ”sneered” at the Kuwaiti stance on the war on Iraq and portrayed the country – which Iraq had invaded in 1990 – in a negative light for supporting the U.S. invasion.

But national interests aside, journalists in the region say that Arab media may not have fared as badly as people are now saying. Some say the regional media were certainly not much different from the way many western media outfits handled the coverage of this war.

For the Arab media, especially the electronic media, the events of the last months in Iraq were their first real experience of war reporting.

While the U.S.-led military attacks in Afghanistan in late 2001 was only broadcast by the Qatar-based al Jazeera television station, the 2003 crisis in the Middle East was covered by the UAE-based Abu Dhabi TV and Al Arabiya too, apart from several other small networks in the region.

Given that limited experience, Faisal Al Qassem of the al Jazeera television network said that a comparison between the regional and Western media would reveal that the media in the Middle East did not do as badly as perceived by sceptics now.

After all, the Western media ”parroted the official line of their governments”, Qassem told a media conference in the UAE last week.

”They poked fun at Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed al-Sahhaf as ‘minister of misinformation’. What about the embedded journalists? They were worse. The only thing they did was cheer and clap for the Anglo-American troops,” he pointed out.

Questioning the so-called objectivity of the Western media, UAE-based analyst Enad Khairallah said: ”For all those who mocked Sahhaf’s briefings and asked where the Republican Guards were, there is a counter-question: where are the weapons of mass destruction that Iraq is alleged to have harboured and which Washington and London used as justification for war?”

The media are supposed to report facts, the analyst concedes, but they are also supposed to reflect the dominant public sentiment. ”Since the main concern in the West was fear of terror attacks following the September 11 attacks, the Western media played up the threat of weapons of mass destruction without independently verifying if Iraq actually possessed them,” he explained.

Similarly, Khairallah added: ”The Arab media exploited the prevalent anti-U.S. sentiments in the region by giving an optimistic picture of Iraq’s chances in the war. Like the Western media, which relied on their governments for all the information, the Arab media too depended on the Iraqi government for details pertaining to the war strategy.”

The reality was that ”even Saddam didn’t know what was happening on the ground,” he remarked.

He also asked: ”While the Arab media has reported speculative theories about American intelligence bribing Republican Guard commanders into betraying Saddam and surrendering, why hasn’t the Western media delved into how the war ended as suddenly as it did?”

Fadi Ismail of the Al Arabiya channel finds the debate about the Arab media ‘s performance an overreaction.

Following the sudden and shocking fall of Baghdad, ”they are venting their frustration, expecting us to conjure miracles and change the situation in the Middle East. Our job is to report facts, and we did just that from whatever resources were available to us,” he said.

At the same time, Ismail admitted that the opinions of the military experts who appeared on television channels and were quoted in newspapers were inaccurate. ”They lacked information about what was taking place on the battlefield.”

Looking back, Ismail says the media should reflect the truth even if it has a negative impact on the public. ”The priority should be professionalism. The media must not deceive the people by feeding positive news about a negative development,” he added.

The onus is on the media, agrees Khairallah. Citing an old Arabic adage, he said: ”With so many avenues to ascertain news, ‘your friend is the one who tells you the truth’.”