Media independence
Falluja has been a test of the media's independence and honesty. With sad predictability, most outlets have dismally failed.
A situation like Falluja poses choices. A newspaper or broadcaster can put its hands up, admit it knows next to nothing about what is happening in the city, and do its best to discern the facts about the conflict's effects on the most vulnerable victims. Or, alternatively, it can fill its columns and bulletins with statements from the attacking forces and a few blinkered embeds, call in the maps and military experts and pose as an authoritative source of information.
Given the importance of that pose for the media's inflated self-image, it's hardly surprising that the second option is more popular than the first, in Ireland as elsewhere.
The result, even for journalists who mean to be "balanced", is essentially propaganda. On Tuesday, for example, the New York Times web homepage featured a romantic photo of a decisive marine posing with his weapon in a sepia-toned building interior, and an unattributed assertion in the caption: "Protecting the Islamic cultural center in Falluja was one of the US objectives today." Indeed.
It's true that by midweek lots of journalists were choking on their earlier "decisive battle" hype, noting that the surprisingly numerate insurgents calculated the odds in Falluja and strategically retreated, as they have done elsewhere. But there was little sign of hacks waking up more broadly to the peculiar features of this war, and to the devastation US tactics have brought to the Iraqi people.
At this stage, most Western journalists still fail to choke on US and Iraqi-puppet quotes that call the Iraq insurgents "anti-Iraqi elements". They continue to describe the tiny Iraqi-government units, already hit by desertions, as though they were near-equal partners in the Falluja assault.
And most ludicrously of all, they are prepared to pretend that the timing and nature of the assault was determined by Iraqi officials – who just happened to wait until after 2 November to make a decisive move.
The invaluable medialens.org website documents how the allegedly anti-war BBC is among the worst offenders in this respect. On Monday's lunchtime news, Claire Marshall reported from Baghdad: "[Allawi] said that he has given his authority to the multinational and to the Iraqi forces. This does seem to be the authority which they were waiting for in order to carry out their full-scale assault, possibly into the centre of Falluja."
Yep, I'll bet the marines were holding their breath waiting for that one.
It's a small country, media-wise, and Meejit gives its moguls the benefit of the doubt. We're sure the man we unIndependent types recall as "Tony O'Reilly" never, no-way, no-how interferes in his papers editorially.
Still, there was "Sir Anthony", beaming big from the top of the Sunday Independent, beside an inscrutably bland quote saying Bush is where he is, and so is Blair, so he is. And there he was bigger on the editorial page, still inscrutably bland, with 2,000 words described aptly (and bravely) by Susan McKay on the Sunday Show as a "vacuous and platitudinousÖ after-dinner speech".
The about-the-author blurb at the end disdained to mention Sir Dr AJF's Indo connection, in favour of his history at Heinz. This reminder that John Kerry is a sort of corporate in-law helped us locate the between-the-lines wistfulness in the article's references to the Democrat loser.