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Embedded reporters ‘sanitized’
Iraq war
By Matt Wells
Budapest, Hungary, Nov. 6 — Television reports produced
by “embedded” correspondents in the Iraq conflict gave a sanitized
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
desensitizing 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 honorable, we have got to a situation where our coverage has become
sanitized. 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, sanitized over the years. We have a problem, and
we need to start a debate about this.”
But 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 AlJazeera 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.
Damazer said the BBC report exposed the poor quality of official briefings.
“The quality was too low for what we should expect in a plualist
democracy,” he said.
Source: Guardian (UK)
