Collateral damage: American TV

The Doordarshan anchor put her finger on the pulse. The problem is not embedded journalists performing their patriotic duty on behalf of the...

The Doordarshan anchor put her finger on the pulse. The problem is not embedded journalists performing their patriotic duty on behalf of their respective countries, in this case Britain and the US. If we were fighting a war, our journalists would be every bit as patriotic, fudging figures of casualties, playing up the skill of our pilots, and so on.

The problem is the projection of American patriotism in the context of globalisation, the capacity of CNN to penetrate my drawing room with a view of the war from inside an American tank, beamed out in the voice of Walter Rogers, a fine journalist otherwise but, in that moment of patriotic fervor, spewing patriotism at a hysterical pitch. The uninitiated viewer, not having access to alternative footage, becomes the passive recipient of images controlled by London or Atlanta Georgia, ultimately the Pentagon.

Meeting Peter Arnett in Baghdad was a revelation. From the roof of Al Rasheed hotel in 1991, he had described operation Desert Storm and all its gory spectacle for the CNN, ushering in an era of live coverage of wars. I was surprised to find that Arnett was now working for NBC and Discovery because he had been fired by the CNN under mysterious circumstances. The CNN had done an investigation in 1998 on the American army having used nerve gas against deserters in Vietnam and that quantities of such agents were part of the American arsenal. Arnett had anchored this sensational report. The Pentagon did not respond for ten days. But soon Ted Turner, who owned CNN, was pressurised to fire the entire investigating team, including Arnett.

He had barely told me the story when once again he fell victim to notions of patriotism which American journalists are being increasingly invited to uphold. Iraqi TV, identifying him as a veteran of Operation Desert Storm, asked him how the present conflict, then in its second week was proceeding. He said what every journalist was writing at that stage: things were not going according to the American plan. He was instantly fired by the NBC because saying such things on Iraqi TV was 8216;8216;unpatriotic8217;8217;.

Management of the media by the Pentagon on such jingoistic lines would have succeeded had there not been so many well equipped Arab TV units and a lively Doordarshan presence, operating outside the 8216;8216;embedded8217;8217; regime. While the Anglo-American electronic media brought to bear on the proceedings the CENTCOM8217;s perceptions by and large, Al Jazeera, Abu Dhabi, Al Arabia brought out graphic images of Iraq8217;s agony. The balance was provided by Doordarshan8217;s Satish Jacob and Noh Nizami, living through the air strikes over Baghdad, V.K. Shashikumar, driving unescorted from Kuwait to Om Qasr, Basrah, Nassiriya, Najaf, Karbala, Baghdad. Ahmad Kazmi took one8217;s breath away with his mobility 8212; from Tehran to Arbil, Kirkuk, Mosul, Tikrit, Karbala, Najaf, Baghdad 8212; all without any support structure to back him, either at CENTCOM or among the Iraqis.

The global media particularly TV will never be the same again after the Iraq war. The body blow that American TV has taken in sheer loss of credibility is the surest guarantee that the propagandist path will be discarded in comparable situations in the future. The strength of American democracy will ensure that manipulation of the media on such a gigantic scale must not be tolerated in the future.

Dick Cheney and Rummy Rumsfeld may smirk but it is a crying shame that half of America has been manipulated into total darkness on the aims of the war and its consequences. The trigger happy troops in Falluja are victims of the same brain washing which informs middle America: that Saddam Hussein, Iraqis and Al Qaeda are all guilty of having brought down the twin towers!

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Driving across rural Uttar Pradesh during an election some years ago, we stopped at a village outside Mahmudabad. A wizened villager got up from his charpoy and waved us away with his hand. 8216;8216;I shall tell you nothing8217;8217; he said firmly 8216;8216;unless I have heard the BBC Hindi service8217;8217;. He said he had heard the views of the two candidates, the local Hindi newspapers and now he was looking forward to an 8216;8216;independent outside view8217;8217;.

There are two lessons in this anecdote. First, compare the robust common sense of a poor villager in a developing country with the population of the world8217;s richest democracy subjected to persistent dumbing down by its media. Secondly, how the BBC is wasting its currency of goodwill and trust I have seen it enjoy in such places as war torn Afghanistan or Sierra Leone. After the way the BBC has covered recent conflicts, I bet there is room for All India Radio, or something resembling it in an enterprising part of the world, to expand the base of their respective world services on the basis of one, non-negotiable word: credibility.

That precisely is the word towards which American TV, under the influence of its much more laudable print journalism, will gravitate even as the hold of Cheney and Rumsfeld weakens as it must in a democracy.