Fascinating, revelatory article by Franklin Foer in The New Republic on the Orwellian state control of the Western media who operate in Iraq. Not only does the government insist on prior restraint privilege for all editorial copy (and amazingly, organizations such as CNN and NBC agree to this condition), they also employ 24 hour overt and covert monitoring of all journalists, they actively attempt to compromise male reporters with sexual propositions (makes you wonder who might have been hiding under the bed with CNN’s Peter Arnett, Wolf Blitzer and Bernard Shaw as the bombs started dropping in ‘91), and they regularly threaten and physically intimidate anyone they feel is reporting in a manner inconsistent with the wishes of the beloved dictator, on one occasion actually murdering a reporter from the London Observer.
"Sometimes the officials go beyond angry lectures. According to a network source, on about four separate occasions in 1996 the Iraqis roused [ABC News' Shelia] MacVicar from her hotel room at 2 a.m. and drove her to the Ministry of Information, where officials screamed that she was working for the CIA. The French documentary filmmaker Joel Soler told me how his minder took him to a hospital, ostensibly to examine the effects of sanctions, but then called in a nurse with a long needle. "He said, 'Now we'll do a series of blood tests.'" Soler jumped on the table screaming: "I said, 'I'm calling my ambassador.' If I'd been American, forget about it." There's the horror story of The London Observer's Farzad Bazoft, an Iranian-born British journalist. A few months before the Gulf war, the Iraqis tried Bazoft behind closed doors on charges of espionage. They then hung him. As he turned over Bazoft's remains to the British Embassy in Baghdad, Information Minister Latif Nassif Jassim told journalists, "Mrs. Thatcher wanted him alive. We gave her the body."
The article goes on to show how nearly all journalists are cowed into accepting these rules of reporting and end up mouthing only officially sanctioned propaganda Thus, these reports have no more validity than the rhetoric espoused by the Iraqi Ministry of Information. Remember that next time some useful idiot claims "half a million" Iraqi children have been killed by US-sponsored sanctions since the Gulf War.
However, in the spirit of embracing diversity, I will acknowledge that even brutal, oppressive dictators sometimes have a point about what is reasonable to show on a cable news program. According to Foer:
Even when reporters faithfully follow the regime's instructions, the Ministry of Information still torments them. [CNN's Peter] Arnett describes constant harangues from ministry officials, even about colleagues over whom he had no control. They'd complain, "What the hell is Larry King saying? Can't you shut him up?"
No doubt this was in reaction to a hard hitting interview with Rosie O'Donnell or a King musing like "For my money nothing quenches my thirst like...water" or "If you only see one movie for the rest of your life, let it be...The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood."
