In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
Reporters and government officials have always squabbled over access; but the news coverage of the messy, ongoing conflict in Iraq has worsened the already tense relationship between the press and the administration. American officials accuse reporters of indulging in a morbid obsession with death and destruction, and ignoring how Iraq has improved since Saddam Hussein was toppled. Reporters grumble that the secretive White House and Pentagon hold back just how grim and chaotic the situation really is.
After a summer of sliding polls and an autumn of tough questions in Congress, the White House is hoping to boost public support by convincing Americans that the cynical national press is getting the story wrong. Last week President George W. Bush himself complained about the national media’s fixation on bad news, and made a show of going around them by granting interviews with local TV reporters. “I’m mindful of the filter through which some news travels,” he told one interviewer, “and sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people.” Of course, Bush isn’t the first president to try sidestepping the national press in favor of local reporters, who tend to be gentler questioners than the reporters who cover him every day. Bill Clinton did it when he thought the White House press corps was treating him harshly. So did the first President Bush.
News management is at the heart of the administration’s shake-up of Iraq policy. The National Security Council recently created four new committees to handle the situation in Iraq. One is devoted entirely to media coordination–stopping the bad news from overwhelming the good. Yet White House officials insist their agenda for Iraq is not driven by the need to generate positive campaign coverage. “If this was all about the election, do you think we would have gone to Congress and said, ‘We need $87 billion to send 8,000 miles away’?” says one senior administration official. “I don’t think so.”
Despite their efforts, administration spinners struggle to make themselves heard over the gunfire and suicide bombs in Baghdad. Take one potentially good news story: the arrival of new Iraqi bank notes last week, freshly minted, and minus Saddam’s haughty portrait. Administration officials crafted the media rollout for weeks. In theory it was a compelling story. The new bills were printed in five countries, including the U.K., Germany and Sri Lanka (the two Iraqi printing plants weren’t up to the job). Piles of old Saddam bank notes were burned, and the new currency was flown into Baghdad onboard 25 jumbo jets. Yet the event was barely covered. USA Today buried a wire story inside, on page 5, while its front page led with hard news: the death of three U.S. soldiers and the hunt for Saddam. “This was an enormous logistical effort that could never have happened in a country in chaos or without the cooperation of the Iraqis,” says one senior U.S. official. “Yet it barely breaks through the media.”
One new tactic in the media war is to send congressional allies and cabinet secretaries to Baghdad to bypass the American reporters. Commerce Secretary Don Evans flew into Iraq last week to tell investors and voters back home to stop believing the news on TV. (Evans’s last high-profile travel was an American road trip to convince voters that the economy was recovering.) “All the TV wants to cover is some sensational, isolated terrorist attack,” Evans told NEWSWEEK on his flight back to Washington. “I went over expecting to find an environment where people were frightened. But I found a country that was alive with hope and optimism.” Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war. But that didn’t stop a group of Republican senators from tearing into American reporters covering Iraq earlier this month. “I was not told by the media… that thousands and thousands of Iraqi schoolchildren went back to school,” said Larry Craig of Idaho, who recently toured Iraq. The senator neglected to mention that he slept both nights of his trip in Kuwait, not Iraq.
