- BUDAPEST -- Television reports
produced by "embedded" correspondents in the Iraq conflict gave
a sanitised picture of war, according to an academic study published by
the BBC today.
-
- Researchers found that although reporters who accompanied
the British and US military were able to be objective, they avoided images
that would be too graphic or violent for British television. Some of the
coverage resembled a "war film".
-
- Today, a senior BBC news executive will make a controversial
case for desanitising the presentation of war on British television. In
a speech to a conference of broadcasters in Budapest, Mark Damazer, deputy
director of BBC News, will say the current position is a "disservice
to democracy".
-
- He told the Guardian last night: "For reasons that
are laudable and honourable, we have got to a situation where our coverage
has become sanitised. We are running the risk of double standards, and
it is not a service to democracy."
-
- British television viewers have not seen images of dead
or injured British soldiers since the Falklands war, he said. "The
culture has become more and not less sanitised over the years. We have
a problem, and we need to start a debate about this."
-
- But Mr Damazer, who stressed he was speaking in a personal
capacity, said viewers were not being presented with the full picture.
"I'm not saying we should go fully down the al-Jazeera route and show
everything, but we need to move from where we are."
-
- The BBC-commissioned research will be discussed at NewsXchange
conference in Budapest today. It showed that the corporation, like most
other British broadcasters, tended towards "pro-war assumptions".
The least pro-war broadcaster was Channel 4. The study is the most comprehensive
yet, covering 1,500 individual reports.
-
- Professor Justin Lewis, deputy director of the Cardiff
journalism school, said: "The criticisms that were made at the time,
that the embedded reporters were more likely to give a pro-war spin, do
not hold up.
-
- "But we do have some reservations, particularly
about the narrative that is created by embedded reports, where the only
discussion is about who's winning and who's losing, with little of the
wider picture."
-
- Although British broadcasters were not guilty of the
overt pro-war bias of their US counterparts, they tended to assume the
truth of what they had been told. In nine out of 10 references to weapons
of mass destruction during the war, there was an assumption that Iraq possessed
them.
-
- Broadcasters were twice as likely to show Iraqi enthusiasm
for the coalition forces as suspicion or hostility.
-
- Mr Damazer said the BBC report exposed the poor quality
of official briefings. "The quality was too low for what we should
expect in a pluralist democracy," he said.
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2003
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1078652,00.html
|
