The keyboard is mightier than the pen

The press and political pressure helped 'lose' the first battle of Fallujah, an Army report says. UPI reports:

A secret intelligence assessment of the first battle of Fallujah shows that the U.S. military thinks that it lost control over information about what was happening in the town, leading to "political pressure" that ended its April 2004 offensive with control being handed to Sunni insurgents. ...

The authors said the press was "crucial to building political pressure to halt military operations," from the Iraqi government and the Coalition Provisional Authority, which resulted in a "unilateral cease-fire" by U.S. forces on April 9, after just five days of combat operations. ...

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Crucial to the failure, the authors said, was the role of the Arabic satellite news channels Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya. An Al Jazeera crew was in Fallujah during the first week of April 2004, when the Marines began their assault on the city of 285,000 people. ...

By contrast, the assessment stated that later in 2004, when U.S.-led forces successfully retook Fallujah, they brought with them 91 embedded reporters representing 60 press outlets, including Arabic ones. "False allegations of non-combatant casualties were made by Arab media in both campaigns, but in the second case embedded Western reporters offered a rebuttal," the authors said.

The key to counteracting disinformation campaigns like that mounted during the First Fallujah, was to break the stranglehold of "access journalism". As the Army report concluded, once there were a multiplicity of reportorial sources on-scene it became difficult to manipulate the message. Fake messages can still be generated, but they must compete with those produced by other observers. After a while the fake messages become outliers because, as tends to be the case, the larger the sampling size the greater the tendency of the statistic to converge to the true value. The open source software maxim that "all bugs are shallow when there are many eyes" also applies to reportage. False testimony cannot survive if there are many witnesses.

Al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgents also drew their conclusions from the belated arrival of the second wave of journalists to the First Fallujah and became determined to prevent its repetition. And the most effective way for insurgencies to recreate the "access journalism" so advantageous to them was to kidnap journalists. This they did to great effect. The process through which they cleared the information battlefield of anything they didn't control is plain from the stats. For example, the nearly all of the journalists kidnapped in 2004 were foreign, many from major news agencies like the New York Times, the Times of London and Radio France. By 2005, the majors had been driven into the Green Zone. The kidnap victims for 2005 tended to be the lower tier: freelancers, reporters from obscure agencies like Romania Libera or Iraqis. By 2006, all but one of the kidnapped journalists was Iraqi. The sole exception that year was Jill Carroll. In 2007, every single one of the journalists kidnapped was Iraqi. Direct access by the Western press had been effectively ended.

These figures demonstrate how the insurgency purposely drove the press from the field to recreate the information monopoly they found so advantageous in the opening days of the First Fallujah, when only journalists from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya were reporting from the scene. The kidnapping campaign compelled news outlets to rely on stringers who could then be controlled by the insurgency and who could be counted on to miraculously stumble on photo opportunities showing insurgents in action, such as the Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of an Iraqi election worker being killed on Haifa Street. The effective riposte again turned out to be finding ways to break the reportorial stranglehold the enemy had established. The information blockade runners turned out to be bloggers and journalists embedded in the military, of whom Michael Yon is perhaps the most famous. The Iraqi bloggers were protected by their anonymity and the embedded journalists were protected by coalition troops. These reporters outflanked the wall of "access journalism" which was gradually restricting the majors and created alternative sources of reportage. Although few in number these blockade runners played a pivotal role in penetrating the "bodyguard of lies" with which al-Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency had surrounded itself.