[casi] Bremer Bunch Will Broadcast

["as-ilas" <as-ilas@DELETETHISgmx.de>]

http://observer.com/pages/nytv.asp

It's Bagh-SPAN: Bremer Bunch Will Broadcast
by Joe Hagan



Live from Baghdad, fair, balanced and direct, it's Bush TV.

The Coalition Provisional Authority running Iraq, created by the Bush
administration, dissatisfied with the American television news decisions on
covering the conflict, is about to create its own broadcast operation, with
the capacity to bypass the networks, live from Iraq, 24 hours a day.

"We've had to rely on events covered by the networks and their
interpretation, and their feed back to the United States," said Dorrance
Smith, the former ABC News producer and an advisor to President Bush and his
father, now senior media adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

"That's about to change," said Mr. Smith, "because we're about to have total
24-hour connectivity."

Asked if he would call the new operation an American Al-Jazeera, a broadcast
operation institution untethered by commercial considerations, Mr. Smith
said it was more like a "C-SPAN Baghdad."

When the Bush White House bypassed the television networks in September 2003
by taking the President's story on Iraq directly to local news affiliates,
it sent a blunt message to the television networks: they didn't want the New
York anchors-Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather-determining their
headlines.

That plan seemed to work. But in the past few weeks, particularly with the
significant growth in casualties in Iraq and the decrease of public support
for Bush administration's war policy, the White House, aware that the fate
of the Bush administration is tied to the progress of the war, took charge
of molding public perception. The White House understood the story belonged
to whoever owned the cameras, microphones and satellite. So it has made the
decision to create its own de facto news operation, without the middlemen of
ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and even Fox.

Mr. Smith was straightforward about the issue of control being important to
the C.P.A.

"It's real time to the United States," he said, referring to the capacity to
broadcast immediately, at will, "as opposed to being covered by a network
and having them decide whether they want to carry it live. And that's a
critical distinction in a wartime situation. And it's not just external in
terms of a mass audience."

He compared it to the Centcom broadcasts during the military operations last
spring. "They were watched in every government agency as they were
happening, and that's because they have the connectivity. That will soon be
true in Baghdad, but it hasn't been true until this point.

"It's C-Span Baghdad. The satellite coordinates will be for one and all and
won't be dependent on somebody deciding whether they're going to put it on
live."

Mr. Smith said the C.P.A. would create a broadcast link from Baghdad, giving
it the ability to broadcast news conferences out of the Republican Palace in
Baghdad without the need for network intermediaries, so it could be
transmitted without getting "chopped up in New York."

That way, said Mr. Smith, Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III, the C.P.A.
administrator, and his press officers can take their stories directly to
local television affiliates and news operations and the Washington press
corps or directly to a private conference transmission of their choosing,
control the story themselves and "get our message out without having to
create an event and have it be covered by somebody and be seen through their
filter."

The new project, which Mr. Smith said would roll out in "the next couple of
weeks," has no official name, but it will precede the next C.P.A. media
project in December, a press filing center similar to those in the White
House or the Pentagon, complete with a credential system that would dole out
access.

"It's not different from the capacity that exists in the Pentagon or the
White House or the State Department or anyplace," said Mr. Smith. "It's just
the technology didn't exist for the civilian side in Baghdad. It's really
not that radical, but it's just a capability that's now built into the
civilian authority."

And with that, the Baghdad enclave will become a mini-White House in terms
of capacities and facilities. "We live in an interconnected world," said Mr.
Smith, "and when you watch the evening news, people aren't looking at the
source, they're looking at the information, and we have to be capable of
broadcasting from Baghdad as you would from any other origination point.

"It's a capacity that has not existed in Baghdad," Mr. Smith said.
"Basically it's taking the capacity that existed at CentCom, that for
whatever reason, did not translate to the civilian authority in Baghdad."

Mr. Smith, onetime producer of ABC News' This Week with David Brinkley and
Nightline, is a childhood friend of the Bush family, who left ABC in 1989 to
become media advisor to President George H. W. Bush, then returned for a
second stint with ABC News from 1995 to 1999. He said he sympathized with
the press' wartime reporting mission, but thought the C.P.A. TV operation
could do it better.

"I recognize what their obligations and responsibilities are, and they're
going to cover the military side and the war side," he said, "but as it
recedes, do they focus on the peace side or do they not focus on anything at
all? We'll be in a better situation to do it ourselves and help paint a
different picture than the one being portrayed."

The toughest chess game on earth-between the beleaguered, bullet-riddled
press offices of the C.P.A., and the frustrated, battle-weary media corps
who drill the administrator's office for details of the conflict-just got
tougher. After the administration's complaints in September that the press
was painting a disastrous picture of Iraq during the nation-building
efforts, reporters came under increasing pressure from the White House to
find the so-called "good news" in Iraq, or lose access.

The pressure came not only from the White House and the C.P.A., but also,
according to some TV executives, from network executives, who were beginning
to feel the pressure to themselves-or at least trying to anticipate the
administration.

If anyone could be given credit for seeing the writing on the wall-that the
C.P.A. would soon subvert the networks by setting up their own operation,
protecting its cameras and broadcasts with tightly controlled access-it
would be Dorrance Smith's former employer, ABC News.

Last October, ABC News president David Westin announced an ambitious,
expensive project called "Iraq: Where Things Stand," a joint effort with
Time magazine to get outside of Baghdad and survey the country's progress
since the invasion. In a memo to ABC News executives, leaked to USA Today on
Oct. 15, Mr. Westin appeared to agree with the administration on at least
one count. He was unhappy with the media's coverage of Iraq. "We often seem
to be captive to the individual dramatic incident," he wrote, just one week
before the Bush administration made its own criticisms known.

"ABC News is now going to address this conspicuous lacking in the reporting
to date," Mr. Westin wrote. He then announced the network would roll out a
series of reports on the state of Iraq, an audit of the hearts, minds,
well-being of regular Iraqis.

The propinquity of the Bush complaint and the ABC News response seemed close
to some observers. But Mr. Westin said he came up with the idea a month
before, in August, after the terrorist attack on the U.N. headquarters in
Baghdad. But ABC News-and its anchor, Mr. Jennings, in particular-have been
widely attacked by conservative media critics as a bastion of anti-Bush
bias. Was ABC News righting the ship, or just finally getting the real
picture? And how exactly was Mr. Westin's criticism of media coverage in
Iraq different from the administration's?

"I don't see them as related at all," Mr. Westin told The Observer. "My
concern is not the validity or even the value of the reporting, but that it
didn't go far enough. It was valid, but it was not complete. There was
another part of this story that also needed to be told."

In order to balance the news, fairly?

"It's not even balanced in the sense that one doesn't know whether it's good
news or bad news," he said. "It just needed to be complete. And it might
point in exactly the same direction as the bombs going off."

As it happens, that's exactly the direction it turned, by terrible
circumstance. When the ABC News-Time magazine series aired-on World News
Tonight, Nightline, Good Morning America and This Week, starting on Nov. 2
and ending on Nov. 7-it provided a perfect illustration of the challenge
that the government faces, and, incidentally, that Mr. Westin faces, too. A
number of "individual dramatic" incidents-the downing of the Chinook
helicopter on Nov. 2, and the subsequent loss of another helicopter with six
soldiers five days later-managed to make irrelevant the story the Bush
administration wanted told, of progress in Iraq.

Mr. Westin's conclusion about the "Iraq: Where Things Stand" series was that
the Iraq story was "complicated." Did the ABC report corroborate the White
House's view of Iraq's improvement?

"They've been right that the schools are better, absolutely," Mr. Westin
said. "And they've said that repeatedly. I think if you look back at their
statements, they have not been comprehensive at looking at all the various
elements that we've gone through."

Back in New York, where, as former ABC News producer Dorrance Smith said,
the news was "chopped up," ABC News editors engaged the complicated issues
of balance at close range:

David Wright, an ABC News correspondent, contested the idea that he had been
seeking good news in Iraq, described turning in footage of an Iraqi he
called "the happiest man in Iraq." The Iraqi, he said, felt his life had
improved considerably since the U.S. invasion. "I had to fight to get him in
because they said he's the exception," he recalled. "If anything, it was,
'Don't spend so much time on this one guy because life's going so well for
him.'"

Bob Woodruff, another ABC News correspondent who worked on the project, was
also adamant that he was given no explicit instructions by Mr. Westin to
seek out positive stories. But he conceded that the initiative might have a
deflecting effect.

"The White House is not going to bitch about us not taking the initiative to
do the story anymore," he said, "but we're still going to do it, which tells
you the motivation."

Mr. Westin said that the series would continue in February and March.

"We haven't seen any of it," said one White House official. "That's what
they should be doing. It's tough to praise someone for what they're supposed
to be doing," the official said. "It's just amusing that journalists have to
resort to making a commitment from the top of a news organization to
quote-unquote 'tell the real story.' It's almost dripping with irony, and so
much so a lot of people wouldn't even notice."

Responded Mr. Westin: "I guess what I would say to you is, a: I'm not
surprised, and, b: Fortunately it's not why we did it. I would be
disappointed if it was the reason we did it."

But in the days since, as reporters in Baghdad were implored by Mr. Bremer
to visit a new school or an upgraded fire house, a missile or grenade
assault would make a casualty of the field trip.

And the C.P.A. had-in what is called the Green Zone-created a replica of the
institution that had spawned it, the White House, with institutionalized
press antagonism. "They're living in a Washington bubble," said ABC News'
Mr. Wright of the C.P.A. Inside the high-walled compound, Mr. Wright and
others said, officials employ no Iraqi food-service workers for fear of
poisoning, buy their office supplies and furniture from the United States
and use a cell-phone system based in Westchester County, N.Y.

"Inside the green zone it's a totally artificial world, sheltered from
Iraq," said Mr. Wright. "So the fact that they spend so much of their time
there-and you hear stories that they send their laundry to Kuwait-it's like
you're in a different country.

One producer described a C.P.A. press office as staffed by political true
believers, "neocons and evangelists," the military full of passionate
officials trying to achieve victory, "apoplectic" at the press for
under-reporting the "good news' in Iraq.

"The terrorists have a brilliant strategy by choosing novel media targets,"
said the producer, referring to the Red Cross and U.N. bombings last summer.
"They're fighting the war using U.S. media. Is U.S. media being unpatriotic
and causing the U.S. to back off and withdraw? It's complex and extremely
interesting."

"I know it's a political situation, and I know there's an election coming
up, but it's not our job to do P.R. for them," said Mr. Wright.

As for Dorrance Smith, he said he had success with CNBC's Chris Matthews and
CNN vice president and chief news executive Eason Jordan selling "the real
story of Iraq." Mr. Jordan "came over and met with Ambassador Bremer and was
going to take a second look at the way they're doing the story. It required
a second look," he said. He also said that he had spent most of his time in
Baghdad so far trying to convince networks and cable news outlets to change
their approach toward the coverage.

"The net effect of this self-scrutiny," he said, "is they've changed their
approach to how they're doing the story." Then he added, "I'd like to see
more."

You may reach Joe Hagan via email at: jhagan@observer.com.



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