People Like Us (26 page)

And then came Osama Bin Laden. How many Western viewers knew that, for years, people like him had been trained and armed by the CIA? This could be explained in a few words, too: In 1979, the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan to help the collapsing communist regime. In response, the CIA, together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, set up the
mujahideen
(the jihad warriors). They fought a guerrilla war against the Russians, which the
mujahideen
—amongst whose members was Osama Bin Laden—won, after which some went to fight against the Egyptian regime, while others got involved in the Algerian civil war. When Saddam invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden offered to chase him out with his warriors, but the Gulf States preferred to call in America’s assistance. Bin Laden saw this as definitive proof that the regimes were only out for self-preservation, even if it meant calling in the Western powers that had caused the problems in the Islamic world in the first place. Bin Laden shifted his goals, which led to the 9/11 attacks, which formed the justification for the invasion of Iraq ... and the circle was complete.

 

 

Y
ou might think that this kind of background material would be part of the equation for Western viewers. There was air time enough, and if thousands of dollars a day could be spent on sending a reporter in Baghdad to summarize the reports from the news agencies, there had to be a budget for documentaries or other short features which explained the role that Western governments had played in the Middle East in recent decades. Why was this so rarely
mentioned on Western stations as the bombs rained down on Baghdad?

There was more than this left untold on mainstream Western news bulletins. While Arabic stations showed the human consequences of the bombardment every hour, the Western ones did something else. Every evening, the graphics departments conjured up a sort of Risk board of the region, complete with maps, aircraft, boats, tanks, little figures, arrows, and yellow and red stars. In the repeated clips or CNN promos, you’d see fighter jets landing on aircraft carriers, the pilot giving the thumbs up: Yep, got rid of the bombs. Computer animations showed how the stealth bomber could dodge the radar. Look how clever we are, the films said. We can make a rocket that can seek out a toilet seat after a six-hundred-kilometers flight, left down the stairs, and boom.

There were no computer animations showing what happened after the boom—how a cluster bomb threw out 140 mines, each strong enough to destroy a tank. A few never go off, and so you get unexploded mines left around in places where children play. Nor was there any computer mapping of what happens to a human body when a new-generation bomb vacuum-implodes the surroundings.

Your correspondent sat in a hotel room shaking his fist at the television. After a couple of evenings like this, he wrote the following piece:

I heard later that this happens quite often to correspondents: A turbulent period brings up memories of other similarly intense periods, and you suddenly need to
give way to the feelings you’d repressed at the time. There was no other article in my career that got so many reactions—an illustration that you can often only place your best work outside the stock journalistic genres.

That would be the sort of material that could bring out the reality of war. Have a veteran sniper describe what it’s like to pick out Iraqis as if they were ducks: American weapons have such a long range that the Iraqis would never realize that anyone was around, until the bullet hit. Or let an Israeli explain street fighting. You’re walking down an alleyway, and suddenly a door opens. You shoot before looking, because if you do it the other way round, and it’s a guy with a gun, you’re a goner. Only it’s a surprised-looking eight-year-old girl in her nightdress who crumples to the floor.

That’s war, but the reporting on CNN more often resembled the advertisements that armies use to recruit soldiers: “The marines enlarge your world.” “Above all—the air force.” Arabic stations did show unimaginably atrocious images of distraught grandmothers and blown-up children’s heads, hour after hour, though in a way that was more likely to arouse anger and defiance in the viewer than sadness and compassion. Another image I couldn’t get out of my head was of some Iraqi soldiers shot dead in a foxhole, the white flag still grasped in their hands.

 

 

A
t such moments, the gulf between East and West seemed to widen, not because we are different from each other, but because we are shown radically different images of the world. Day after day, Arabs watched distraught Iraqis whose families had just been blown to bits, limbs all over the place, everything lost. And then they heard the American president
triumphantly bragging about the victory with one eye on the next election, and dismissing a question about “collateral damage” as incidental casualties.

If the Western mass media had done their job during the war, viewers would have sat in front of their television sets crying and vomiting. Did this not happen because hardly anyone with war experience ever works on the editorial teams? Was it because some editors found the military toys with cool names like Apache, Tomahawk, and Daisy Cutter exciting? I worry it was something much worse. Before the war was over, the
International Herald Tribune
revealed the advice that the major American broadcasters had received from their communications consultancies. These marketing experts help the stations find out what their public like to watch. American broadcasters are commercial outfits, after all. The recommendations were clear: The more nationalistic the reporting, the higher the viewing figures would be. There should be no anti-war demonstrations, no pitiful stories about the victims, and a lot of anthem-playing, fatherland imagery, and fluttering stars and stripes—in the studio, in the logo, in the filler clips. One consultant summed it up in five words: “There’s money in the flag.” And so it turned out. Forty of the fifty most watched programs in America during the war were from Fox News, who described Saddam Hussein as “the big, bad boy from Baghdad,” who adopted the full terminology, approach, and subject matter fed to them by CentCom in Qatar, and who described the anti-war protests in Europe as “organized by communists.”

 

 

T
hat was one more essential filter in the news: The customers. In Europe, too, the ratings showed that people
would rather be told things by their familiar anchorman than by a boring-looking expert. They’d rather watch short films on Us against Them than complex analyzes on conflicting interests, let alone historical background pieces that made their own country look bad. In Europe, as in America, the editors-in-chief were primarily judged on their circulation and viewing figures.

It made you sadder, if not wiser, and the months and years that followed the invasion gave no reason for optimism. American soldiers in Iraq were not welcomed with rice and flowers, but with bombs and grenades. Although there was never proof of an Iraqi collaboration with Al-Qaida, five years after 9/11 almost the half of the American public still believed that Saddam Hussein had been responsible for the attacks and that most of the hijackers had been Iraqis. The idea that the Iraqis would welcome American troops turned out to have been introduced by the Iraqi opposition in exile, who had used the communications consultancy The Rendon Group—the same company that had provided the flags after the American liberation of Kuwait. And the scene on Paradise Square where Iraqis had toppled the giant statue of Saddam Hussein to loud jubilation—“Baghdad celebrates liberation?” It turned out not to have been a massive national festival after all, but something put together by perhaps two hundred Iraqis and a sharp American army officer. Back to you, Jim.

Events in this book cover the period between 1998 and 2003, and some things have changed a lot since then. The Muslim Brotherhood now blogs. A number of Arab-language TV news stations have begun operating. Footage of Egyptian police brutality appears on YouTube. Young people use their telephones to secretly film sexual harrassment on the street and put it on Facebook. Ariel Sharon and Yasser Arafat have left the stage, a new American administration is in, wars were fought in Gaza and South Lebanon. In Egypt an apparently truly independent newspaper,
Almasri Alyowm (The Egyptian Today)
seems set to wipe out the state-run competition, fundamentally altering at least the print media landscape in that country.

At the same time, a lot has remained essentially the same since 2003. Mainstream news coverage of the Middle East is still structured the way it was a few years ago, and there still has been no fundamental debate about the pros and cons of Western support for Arab dictators, and how such decades-long support is to be reconciled with the professed ideals of “freedom-loving” Western governments. Little effort has been made to explain the motives, dilemmas, and self-image of groups such as Al-Qaida, making it harder to defeat them. And the NATO and Israeli PR machines still go largely uncovered, and continue to have the upper hand in imposing their vocabulary and frames of reference. I am not aware of a single mainstream medium anywhere in the world that explains its choice of topics, angles, terminology, and its criteria for hearing some parties to a conflict, but not others.

When this book appeared in the Netherlands in the summer of 2006, I decided not to include an afterword with suggestions for change. It seemed to me that the problems are so big and diverse that they require a fundamental rethink of the news industry’s basic assumptions. Since there were no obvious instant solutions, I hoped there would be a debate about the problems themselves.

This was a mistake, as I should have known from the book itself. If you don’t frame a message yourself, others will do that for you—and you may not recognize what you see. In this case, the book was said by reviewers, colleagues, and columnists to claim that “journalism is useless.” Some of my Dutch colleagues even put together a whole book in order to refute this claim and demonstrate how useful they are. It was delightfully absurd: You write a book with the message that every message gets distorted when covered in the media, and what happens? This message gets distorted, too.

Perhaps colleagues were not stupid, but jealous, because in the Netherlands alone this book has now sold an incomprehensible quarter of a million copies. It is also out now in Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Germany, and in some of these countries I’ve had funny encounters and confrontations with colleagues, too. They would say, okay, tell me in one sentence what your book’s about, and I would answer: The book is about the impossibility of saying in one sentence what a situation is about. Colleagues would laugh more or less obligingly, and then press again: Look, we only have twelve seconds for this quote.