THE TOPPLING -How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war.

[kpete]

The Toppling
How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war.
by Peter Maass January 10, 2011


.............................
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, “The scenes of free Iraqis celebrating in the streets, riding American tanks, tearing down the statues of Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad are breathtaking. Watching them, one cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain.”

..........................

Lambert radioed his commander, Captain Lewis, whose tank was carrying the Danish photographer.

“Hey, get a look at that statue,” Lambert said. “Why don’t we take it down?”

.............

“If a sledgehammer and rope fell off the 88, would you mind?” Lambert asked.

“I wouldn’t mind,” Lewis replied. “But don’t use the 88.”

................

Hummer, in a phone interview recently, explained what happened: “I get this call from Bryan and he says, ‘Hey, we’ve got these Iraqis over here with a bunch of ropes trying to pull down this very large statue of Saddam Hussein.’ And he said, ‘They’re asking us to pull it down.’ So I said, ‘O.K., go ahead.’ And I didn’t think much of it after that.”

Before signing off, Hummer instructed McCoy to make sure no one got killed by falling debris.

McCoy then issued a brief order to Lewis: “Do it.” He also told Lewis not to get anyone killed in the process.

The M-88, with its crane, was the perfect tool. Lambert, who had started everything by handing out the sledgehammer and the rope, was told to finish the job.

.....................

“It’s one thing if you don’t want a photographer in the picture and there’s one photographer in a crowd of a thousand,” Gary Knight, who now directs the Program for Narrative and Documentary Studies, at Tufts University, told me. “But when you’ve got three hundred journalists sitting on vehicles, sitting on tanks, it’s really important contextually to include that information. Most of the imagery that was published didn’t have that context, and so it was misleading.”

At the square, I found the reality, whatever it was, hard to grasp. Some Iraqis were cheering, I later learned, not for America but for a slain cleric, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, whose son Moqtada would soon lead a Shia revolt against American occupation. I met an apparently delighted Iraqi who spoke English, and he told me that his name was Samir and that he felt “free at last.” About an hour later, after the statue came down, Samir was cornered by a group of men who accused him of being a spy for Saddam and were shouting, “Kill him!” A marine had to intervene to save his life.

..........

Among the handful of studies of Firdos Square, the most incisive was George Washington University’s, led by Sean Aday, an associate professor of media and public affairs. It concluded that the coverage had “profound implications for both international policy and the domestic political landscape in America.” According to the study, the saturation coverage of Firdos Square fuelled the perception that the war had been won, and diverted attention from Iraq at precisely the moment that more attention was needed, not less. “Whereas battle stories imply a war is going on, statues falling—especially when placed in the context of truly climactic images from recent history—imply the war is over,” the study noted.

The study examined CNN, Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC from March 20th to April 20th, cataloguing the footage used each day, what the footage showed, and what was said by anchors and reporters. The study focussed particular attention on Fox and CNN, because they broadcast non-stop news. It found that, in the week after the statue was toppled, war stories from Iraq decreased by seventy per cent on Fox, sixty-six per cent on ABC, fifty-eight per cent on NBC, thirty-nine per cent on CBS, and twenty-six per cent on CNN, even though, in that same week, thirteen U.S. soldiers were killed and looting was rampant.

.......................


The Rest:
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/10/110110fa_fact_maass#ixzz1A57WFKWo

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Smirk." - Corporate Media (R)