- NEW YORK (IPS) - An incisive
new documentary is taking aim at the U.S. media's one-sided coverage of
the war in Iraq, arguing that its collective complicity deceived the populace
and made the war possible.
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- "WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception", which cost
just 200,000 dollars to produce, points to a wide array of failures in
the accuracy of the reporting, as well as an unwillingness to question
the George W. Bush administration's claims and actions.
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- It was produced by Danny Schechter, a self-proclaimed
"network refugee" who worked for CNN and as a producer for a
prominent television news show.
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- "This is the central problem of our democracy,"
he told IPS in an interview. "This isn't a sidebar issue. You can't
have a democracy when people aren't being informed."
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- The film documents the U.S. media's near-unanimous acceptance
of the George W. Bush administration's claim that Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein possessed nefarious weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and therefore
must be removed from power by unilateral U.S. military action.
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- The film also attacks the media's credulity of alleged
links between Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network -- claims that
were unsupported by any actual evidence.
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- "The fact that they [the media] allowed the Bush
administration to manipulate the truth so grossly and so nakedly in the
run-up to the war made the war possible," Eric Alterman, media critic
and writer for the Nation magazine, says in the film.
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- Schechter told IPS he was disturbed at the adherence
to the government's line and lack of journalistic questioning among U.S.
news outlets before and during the Iraq war, a time he calls "a really
shameful period for journalism."
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- "It hints at the emergence of a state media system
in our country," he said.
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- The film references a study by the media watchdog Fairness
and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of on-camera sources used in television
news in the run-up to the war. Out of 1,167 experts brought on camera during
news broadcasts, the study shows, only three percent opposed the U.S.-led
invasion.
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- "You had this incredible imbalance where people
who were critical couldn't be heard," he said.
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- The film argues that this marginalisation of dissent
and the media's refusal to question the war in Iraq was in part due to
journalists and networks fear of being seen as "unpatriotic."
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- "In the post 9/11 media there was a lot of patriotic
political correctness," Schechter said. "You have a president
who says, 'You're either with us or with the terrorists,' so if you criticise
him you're with the terrorists. This created an intimidating environment."
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- One aspect of the "media war" the film deals
with in detail is the vast number of "embedded" reporters in
Iraq, a policy that Schechter says led to jingoistic coverage.
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- An embedded reporter eats, sleeps, and lives every day
with a specific group of U.S. troops. The policy was championed by the
Pentagon media chief Victoria Clarke and other public relations experts
in the Defence Department, who had been planning it before the war started.
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- The film argues that since an embedded reporter's life
is essentially in the hands of the soldiers, and they spend so much time
together under extreme circumstances, the reporter grows attached to the
troops. The bond that is formed jeopardises the reporter's ability to be
accurate and objective and leads to cheerleading instead of critical journalism,
Schechter says.
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- In the film, several embedded journalists talk about
their experiences on the front.
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- "We got to know these soldiers and we wanted them
to be successful," says Gwendolen Cates, a reporter for People magazine
who was embedded with U.S. troops in Iraq. "How will I be able to
handle it if one of my soldiers dies?"
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- Schechter believes that the problem of media irresponsibility
goes deeper than just a few journalists or networks who reported the war
in a biased manner.
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- "It's hard to get people to see this as an institutional
problem," Schechter told IPS. "They focus first on policy failure,
second on intelligence failure. I'm saying no, it's a media failure."
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- "WMD" has already received international acclaim
and is being screened at theatres from Scotland to Australia. It won the
Austin Film Festival and Denver Film Festival Awards for best documentary.
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- However, the documentary has also seen its share of criticism,
much of it from the very U.S. media corporations and outlets the film targets.
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- Some critics have argued that Schechter's film is a poor
spin-off of Michael Moore's 2004 high-grossing documentary "Fahrenheit
9/11." Vanity Fair magazine said Schechter was merely trying to "out
Michael Moore Michael Moore."
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- Schechter, however, was quick to point out to IPS that
he made his first documentary in 1968, years before Moore's debut.
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- The film is scheduled to come out on DVD in March to
coincide with the second anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
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