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The Layalina Review

VOL. V NO. 13, June 05-June 18, 2009

Iraqi Media Struggles with Propaganda

Many Iraqis have come to ridicule a high-priced US media campaign aimed at improving the military's image and promoting democracy, reports UPI. The Arabic-language newspaper Baghdad Now is one of the products dismissed in Iraq as US propaganda, which attempts to show a harmonious portrayal of Iraqis and US soldiers working together.

"The millions spent on this is wasted money," Ziyad Al-Aajeely, director of Iraq's nonprofit Journalistic Freedom Observatory said. "Nobody reads this." During the last six years, the US government has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on billboards, printed material, and television and radio airtime aimed at marginalizing extremists and fostering reconciliation in Iraq.

Baghdad Now is part of America's huge psychological warfare campaign to influence Iraqis' behavior and attitudes, explains the Washington Post.

In a country where security forces have a checkered reputation and sectarian tension remains high, many Iraqis have grown dismissive of the flood of propaganda they know or assume comes from the US government.

Baghdad Now is not labeled as a US military publication, although the military acknowledges it is produced by an Army psychological operations unit and distributed for free by soldiers. Piles of it are left at entrances to the Green Zone for passersby to pick up.

The Washington Post reports, “A front-page ad showed Iraqis marching down a street, apparently protesting. Under the image was the statement: ‘The security forces protect your right to demonstrate peacefully.’"

Another edition included a cartoon showing a maimed insurgent leaving Iraq as a smiling refugee returns. “This is so wrong," Al-Aajeely said with a chuckle. "The people in charge of this are not professional journalists. They do it the same way the prior regime did its newspapers," he added, referring to publications that hewed to the narrative Saddam Hussein wanted to push.

"The Iraqi media landscape is a peculiar one," says Gary Gambill, editor of Mideast Monitor, for Online Opinion. According to him, the fall of Baghdad to US-led forces nearly six years ago opened the doors to a flood of new private media, the likes of which the Arab world has never seen.

Despite the wide variety of publications and radio and television stations that sprung up, “to this day, Iraq has no substantial media licensing restrictions or any official censorship.” Nevertheless, intimidation, violence and death threats are numerous, constantly hampering the work of journalists.

Most major Iraqi media outlets are oriented toward the outlook and interests of a single ethno-sectarian community and sponsored by partisan political or religious forces. They typically avoid overtly sectarian language, adopting more subtle cues for differentiation. Gambill asserts that, “direct calls for violence are rare in aboveground media outlets, but indirect incitement of sectarian animosity is common.”

Coupled with dire economic conditions, where advertising markets are not nearly sufficient to support a profitable media sector, leave a vacuum to be filled by political parties who can fund media outlets in exchange for a profitable image.

Gambill remarks that meanwhile, good faith efforts by the State Department and USAID to bolster the professionalism and ethics of the Iraqi media were quietly undermined by the Pentagon. First revealed by the Los Angeles Times in late 2005, the US military paid editors of Iraqi newspapers to publish over 1,000 heavily-slanted articles written by US officers using Arabic pseudonyms.

Gambill maintains that this is the legacy of the Baathist rule, a time when the media were tightly controlled and when real journalism did not exist. Optimistic observers frequently draw comparisons to Lebanon, where the media are dominated by the leading political factions of each sect and offer a diverse range of viewpoints.

“However, Iraq lacks the deep-rooted tradition of civil liberties, political pluralism and free enterprise that underlies media independence in Lebanon. Lack of state restrictions on the media is not an ingrained trait of Iraqi governance, but instead a reflection of contingent political factors subject to change.”

Others fear that media pluralism serves to reinforce divisions in Iraqi society. Gambill asserts that with all major socio-political forces “having minimally accepted the country’s new constitutional order and committed to resolving differences at the ballot box,” the greatest danger for Iraq is that Shiite, Kurdish and moderate Sunni governing elites will use their control of the state to weaken the media networks of their political rivals.

“This would obstruct the growth of independent alternatives, producing a multipolar parallel to the state-media relationships prevailing in other Arab states,” concludes Gambill.

In related news, The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and the Journalistic Freedoms Observatory (JFO) highlight several issues that harm press freedom in Iraq. Both groups point to a number of assaults and instances of harassment which have occurred in recent months and were committed by government officials against journalists in various parts of the country under the control of Iraq's central government.

Since 2003, the press in Iraq has made significant strides as hundreds of independent, party- or state-run newspapers, radio and television stations have emerged, notes CPJ. However, Iraq is also the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, with 139 journalists and 51 Iraqi media workers dead.

In recent months, many journalists have faced harassment and in some cases assault, by Iraqi security forces. In other cases, high-ranking government officials have used lawsuits as a political tool to obstruct and silence the news media.

The CPJ further describes cases of journalists who have been detained, harassed or persecuted. Such is the example of Jassam, a freelance photographer working for Reuters, who was detained on September 2, 2008 by US and Iraqi forces during a raid at his home in Mahmoodiya, South of Baghdad.

On November 30, the Iraqi Central Criminal Court ruled there was no evidence to hold Jassam and ordered the US military to release him from Camp Cropper near Baghdad, Reuters reported. The US military has not yet complied with this order.

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