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| Kelly Hacker is a freshman journalism major and writes 'HackAttack' for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper. |
The U.S. military is making efforts to protect journalists by "embedding" them with military units in order to uphold a new media-friendly policy.
This is done instead of feeding them "carefully selected footage by General Norman Schwarzkopf in Saudi Arabia and General Colin Powell in Washington, D.C.," as Patrick J. Sloyan, a Newsday Gulf War correspondent in 1991, said in "Media Spin can separate war from death" published on www.fair.org.
This would appear to be an effort by the military to make it appear that they have nothing to hide from the public.
They're welcoming journalists to the front lines with open arms and allowing them to take photos of pretty much anything they see, within reason, and while guarded under the wing of the United States military.
But as Canadian Journalists for Free Expression reports, after only three weeks, Gulf War II has already claimed as many journalists (seven) as Gulf War I did in the six weeks it lasted.
One journalist was British, another Australian, a third was an Iranian working for the BBC and a fourth was a British reporter who fell off of the roof of his hotel in an accident unrelated to conflict activity. The only American journalists to die thus far were killed in a road accident or of a pulmonary embolism.
While several of these are the unpleasant results of modern warfare, there are reports that some foreign journalists broadcasting unpleasant images of the war in Iraq were actually targeted by our military.
In "Media Advisory: Is Killing Part of Pentagon Press Policy?" www.fair.org reports that on April 8, a U.S. tank fired a shell at the Palestine hotel in Baghdad, where most non-embedded international reporters are based.
Two journalists, one from Reuters and another from the Spanish network Telecino, were killed, and three others wounded. Journalists who witnessed the attack reject the Pentagon's claims that the tank had been fired on from the hotel, and stated that the tank, while parked nearby, had appeared to be carefully selecting its target.
The article goes on to report incidents where U.S. troops also fired on the Baghdad offices of Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, two Arabic-language news networks that have been broadcasting graphic footage of the human cost of the war. Claims that U.S. forces had been fired upon first by the press offices have also been refuted by witnesses.
In another semi-related incident, the London Times reported on March 31 of an incident in which a low-flying American A10 opened fire on two British tanks, killing one and wounding three. Union Jacks approximately 18 inches by 12 inches were displayed on the backs of the engineer's vehicles. This blunder received no attention from the New York Times or CNN.
Whether the attacks on independent journalists were deliberate or just the result of carelessness, these violations of the protections guaranteed to journalists by the Geneva Convention are disturbing. More care is needed.
And as is evidenced by the A10's blunder, our own reporters are not telling us everything. Maybe we should be paying more attention to what other news sources are dying to tell us.
Write to Kelly at knhacker@bsu.edu
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