George Orwell’s many warnings about the power of language to distort has become a truism. Groups on both the Right and Left monitor the news media in an effort to document accuracy and fairness yet one wonders if the media itself pays any attention.
On the night of Friday, Nov. 12, WGN’s 9 p.m. news introduced its coverage of the Battle of Fallujah by identifying those forces shooting at American troops as Islamic rebels. The following morning, National Public Radio, covering the same story, invoked the reference of Iraqi insurgents. Am I splitting hairs or is this a significant difference which reveals much about American media coverage of recent events?
Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, was a secular state based in the Baathist Party. The Baathist movement was and remains in Syria a secular movement which grew out of the pan-Arab movements in the second half of the 20th century. Although Baathists may have been of the Muslim faith the movement was explicitly secular.
As the U.S. military meets resistance in Iraq our intelligence services as well as our media must confront the question of how much of this insurgency is grounded in Baathist loyalty to Hussein, non-specific nationalist antagonism towards an invading army, fundamentalist or Islamist religious forces, or some admixture of all the above. For our military, any analysis which is less complete than that may lead to fatal results. For our media, a failure to reveal the complexities of the situation in Iraq results in a poorly educated public and the dangers therein.
Iraq is, indeed, an Islamic country. It has both a Sunni and Shiite population as well as an ethnic population of Kurds (most of whom are Sunni but not all). Though all Muslim, there is no unity, and they have a recent tradition of fighting against one another.
(For the historians in the audience: This is a kind of deja-vu of the Cold War when all communists and fellow travelers were irrevocably linked at the hip despite the war between the Russians and the Chinese or the nationalist aspects of the Vietnam War against the United States. Communists were communists and they were the enemy).
For the record, we do not refer to American troops as Christian or Jewish. They are American soldiers. Nor are the Polish or British troops identified by their religious affiliation. When Spain withdrew its troops, we did not see this as a removal of Christian troops from the alliance. So why did WGN refer to Iraqi resistance fighters as Islamic rebels? I can see how, in the case of Sunni-Shiite conflict reporters would have an obligation to describe the religious affiliation of the antagonists. After all, this might be the very basis of the antagonism. But this is not the case in Fallujah.
As we continue our battle again terrorism as well as our adventure in Iraq we should be vigilant that our coverage is accurate. Let us not collapse all opposition to America as being, simply put, Islamic. Good citizenship requires knowledge, not prejudice; information, not false assumptions. WGN did its viewers a disservice by offering up a crude representation of current events; literally true but substantially simplified. In this age of international conflagration, we cannot afford such Orwellian distortions.
Jeff Rice is a lecturer in history and a Weinberg College Adviser. He can be reached at [email protected].
