You can be for the truth or with the terrorists

You can be for the truth or with the terrorists

May 04, 2005

JOURNALISM may be the first draft of history, but it is often a very rough draft indeed. The perspective offered by history frequently requires a total rewrite. This especially applies to war. And it must be especially remembered in the wake of the terrible news that an Australian, Douglas Wood, has been taken hostage by Iraqi insurgents. Wood has become the latest propaganda tool in their battle with Coalition forces, with the Iraqi people and with Iraq's new democracy. The terrorists want US, Australian and British troops out of Iraq and will rely on a media-fuelled compassion campaign to achieve that goal. And driven by daily deadlines, ratings and its instinctive objection to the Iraq war, the media will no doubt comply.

That is a pity. While Wood deserves all our help and our sympathy, Iraq, and indeed kidnap victims such as Wood, would benefit if more journalists reported not just the daily horrors of war, but also stories that provide for a longer view. Much of our media has not done that to date. Most of the media took up a common position on Iraq very early on. Intervention was a dreadful mistake. "Quagmire" was the word du jour for months on end. "Quagmire" harked back to Vietnam, the first war beamed home to the baby boomer generation on their televisions. Back then, the media played a pivotal role in turning public opinion against continued military intervention in Vietnam. Back then, most contemporary journalists thought Vietnam would be better off if US troops pulled out. History is not so sure.

Fast forward 30 years and it is as if the same generation, now all grown up and making television programs and writing newspaper reports about a different war, has hit the replay button. Certainly, Jane Fonda has not draped herself over one of Saddam Hussein's tanks, but a steady line of Hollywood types has been bashing George W. Bush for going into Iraq. And the media has hardly budged from their bad-news angle.

Admittedly, there was a brief moment in early March when even the most anti-war newspapers seemed to be revising their positions on Iraq. Like a breath of fresh air, London's Independent newspaper dared to ask "Was Bush right after all?" as it tracked developments across the Middle East, from Lebanon to Palestine, from Egypt to Saudi Arabia and, yes, in Iraq. Ditto Germany's Der Spiegel and France's Le Monde.

But, alas, the bad-news angle is too seductive. Even when the Iraqi parliament approved a new cabinet last week, much of the media's tone was bleak. For The Sydney Morning Herald's Paul McGeough, it was a case

of the "war-weary Iraqis" heaving a "sigh of relief" over the endorsement of a "government of sorts".

Delete the gratuitous descriptions and here's the news. Iraqis now have their first democratically elected government in 50 years. While some cabinet jobs are yet to be settled, the new 27-member cabinet includes Shia, Sunnis, Kurds and even a Christian. Six are women. The jockeying for position in this "government of sorts" looks pretty much like the usual haggle-fest that goes on in democracies when positions of power are up for grabs.

Good news is not hard to come by. But when something positive does happen, it either gets filtered through the anti-war eyes of the media or is all but ignored. And that is what the terrorists are counting on. They must detest The Wall Street Journal. Each fortnight the paper's website (www.wsj.com) includes a round-up of good news from Iraq. It makes for refreshing reading, if only to even up the Iraq ledger.

Last week came the latest instalment, all 27 pages of it. It included reports that Baghdad real estate prices are on the rise, that the Baghdad Stock Exchange is back trading at expanded volumes. That production of oil in the south is reaching 1.1million barrels a day, close to pre-war levels. That USAID projects are helping to set up proper legal and regulatory authorities. That USAID work on Baghdad Airport is nearly complete, giving it "100 per cent electrical self-sufficiency" freeing up power for the national grid.

One sobering reminder of life under the former Iraqi dictator also failed to make the cut at most Australian newspapers. Late last week it was revealed that 113 Kurds - all but five of them women and children - were found in mass graves near the southern city of Samawah. There is a skeleton of a teenage girl clutching a bag of possessions. Many women were wearing their best clothes, like the shiny gold and purple dress found in one of the 18 trenches. Ten were babies. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, more than 290 mass graves have been found, filled with at least 300,000 people believed to have been executed by the Baathist regime.

The Australian and The Daily Telegraph reported the story yesterday. But where was the rest of our press on this important story? Ignoring it, perhaps, because they are loath to remind us that the Iraqi people are free from such tyranny.

The media is a player in modern warfare. The more they inform us about hostages, the more hostages are taken. This is the deadly, inevitable, side to the information age. But if the media would more often lift their head above the ruck and look to the longer view as well as today's disaster, the distinction between journalism and history may not be quite so stark as it is now.