American troops shot two al Arabiya journalists in Iraq during a shootout at a central Baghdad checkpoint. The AP adds the detail that "cameraman Ali Abdel-Aziz and correspondent Ali al-Khatib were hit as they covered a nighttime rocket attack on Burj al-Hayat hotel."
I don't think that American troops intentionally targetted the Arab journalists. It's a combat zone, and things like this happen. But that said, a lot of Arabs are going to believe the opposite. Arab journalists dead by American forces play very poorly in the context of the ongoing harsh rhetoric about the the Arab media. American troops and officials do not hide their contempt for the Arab media, or their perception of al Jazeera (especially) as an enemy. When Arab journalists get killed, then, it generates particularly high levels of outrage regardless of whether or not it was intentional. The killing of al Jazeera's star journalist Tareq Ayoub during the war continues to be discussed passionately on al Jazeera. It has become a touchstone for the general feeling of being targeted.
As I said, I don't think the killings were intentional, and accidents will happen in a combat zone. But the likely response on all sides to the deaths points to a deeper, structural problem: it is highly unlikely that Iraqis or Arabs will give such benefit of the doubt, particularly since there will be no media coverage which might convince them that it was an honest if deplorable mistake. This is one of the major side-effects of the American approach to the Arab media, one which seems to be virtually unrecognized. By devoting American efforts to al Hurra and to the Iraqi Media Network in its current form (although the latter, thankfully, appears to be on the way out), the Americans have helped create a dangerously unfriendly media and information environment.
The CPA's efforts to tightly control information in its official media - devoid of either credibility or an audience - leaves an information vaccuum which empowers both the Arab satellite stations and the rumour mill on the street. Since both of these, at least in the American estimation, are hostile to the occupation, it is very much in their own self-interest to create credible and popular media outlets which can openly air these kinds of events. In the absence of such a credible, widely viewed domestic media, Iraqis will continue to disregard what they see as propaganda emerging from the CPA and the Council, and get what they consider to be better information from the Arab satellites and from the street. I actually think that the "hostility" of these satellite stations is greatly exaggerated, but my point here is that American officials do not - hence, by their own lights, the empowering of those stations would have to be seen as a counterproductive policy.
The American occupation authorities in Iraq, as well as the Bush administration, could adopt a less confrontational and hostile tone towards the Arab media. And it could drop its failed efforts to either ignore or to combat the Arab media, and its quixotic efforts to control information in an information-rich environment. Al Hurra is not the answer, for reasons I've gone on about in some length before and won't repeat here.
The CPA can't prevent the Governing Council from lashing out at al Jazeera - Council members hate al Jazeera and the Arab satellites for their own reasons - although nobody believes that the Council could take decisions such as closing the al Jazeera and al Arabiya offices without Bremer's tacit approval. But it can purge its own rhetoric and practice of such counterproductive messages.
UPDATE: as I expected, the killing of the Arabiya journalists is playing badly: " Iraqi journalists walked out of a Baghdad news conference given by Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday in protest at lack of security and the killing of two Iraqi journalists by U.S. troops. "We declare our boycott of the conference because of the martyrs," Najim al-Rubaie of Iraq's Distor newspaper said in a statement read at the start of the news conference as Powell and Iraq's U.S. governor Paul Bremer looked on. "We declare our condemnation of the incident which led to the killing of the two journalists...who were killed at the hands of the American forces."" Ugly, could get uglier. Journalists shape public opinion, and they care about their own, for obvious reasons. Let's just hope that the Americans don't just respond by complaining about the "hostile Arab media." As above, there's more going on here.
More from Reporters Sans Frontiers here, and from Julia posting at the American Street.
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