Should The Media Broadcast Iraq Hostage Videos?

by Samuele Gabbio

(IPS) -- Kidnappers' tape tactics in broadcasting footage of victims have won them international attention. But are the media right to broadcast the tapes? Or are they serving up deadly propaganda?

These questions are inevitably directed at the Arabic language news network, al-Jazeera.

"I think everybody tries to use the media. Governments, business groups, individuals, they all try to use the media," al-Jazeera spokesman Jihad Ballout told IPS in a telephone interview from Qatar.

"Where do you draw the line? You decide what to view and what to block out considering the news perspective, the news value of the material," he says. "What we normally do is to take information and subject it to what we call a 'taste and decency test.'"

Would everything we see and read about terrorists pass the test? Many, including some governments, think not.

President George W. Bush's national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in an interview to al-Jazeera in 2001 that she did not like U.S. networks showing Osama bin Laden tapes because "it was not a matter of news, it was a matter of propaganda."

Yet images of abducted westerners begging for their lives have become standard fare on channels such as al-Arabiya and al-Jazeera. On Friday al-Jazeera showed footage of British hostage Margaret Hassan weeping and begging for her life. The BBC decision earlier in September to broadcast a tape provided by a terrorist group of British hostage Ken Bigley pleading for his life had added more fuel to the already heated discussion.

While questions arise about media as a tool for terrorists, they also arise about government suppression of media in the name of the fight against terrorism.

After the suicide bombings in Casablanca in May 2003, the Moroccan parliament passed an anti-terrorism law giving authorities tighter control over media, and new powers to arrest journalists and close down newspapers.

Under those powers, veteran editor Mustafa Alaoui of the al-Ousboua weekly was arrested June 5 after his paper ran an announcement by an Islamist group claiming part responsibility for the Casablanca bombings.

Terrorism served as an excuse for Russian officials and members of Chechnya's pro-Moscow government to threaten closure of Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded station which started transmissions in the local Chechen, Avar and Circassian languages in April 2002.

Officials said that broadcasting in Chechen spread rebel ideology, and offered the possibility of conveying coded messages.

Zimbabwe President Robert G. Mugabe on the other hand cited the U.S.-led "war on terror" to close down every independent media organisation in his country. That won Zimbabwe the third position (after Iraq and Cuba) on the list of the "world's worst places to be a journalist" published by the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) this year.

What do experts think?

"I think airing these videos is necessary to show which are the tools used by terrorists today and to help people understand how barbaric terrorism can be," Enzo Sisti, author of the book 'Caccia a bin Laden' (on the hunt for Osama bin Laden) told IPS. "But in case of shocking images a critical commentary is always necessary."

Sisti said that "in the case of Pari and Torretta (the two Italian women abducted and then released), for example, media coverage has been important and helped in finding an intermediary."

Journalists have an obligation to report information that is important for the public to know regardless of the source, Bill Kovach, founding director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, told IPS in an e-mail interview from Washington.

"But the journalist should make every effort to carefully verify that information," he said. "Terrorists use information for propagandistic purposes and journalists should make that clear."

General secretary of the U.S.-based International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) Adam White says "journalists have to make ethical choices when it comes to their source of information. The key questions are: is the information true and relevant? Is the source giving information that the people have a right to know? Will this information harm others?"

Al-Jazeera became news when it aired the first al-Qaeda tape after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. The Osama tapes and the hostage tapes that followed upset many people in the West.

But White thinks that this "provocative, challenging and news-breaking" network has also "irritated many politicians in the Arab world" while responding to the "yearning for professionalism and independence in Arab journalism."

Al-Jazeera carries great responsibility, Kovach says.

"Because they have access to people, places and information that other journalists do not, it is incumbent upon them to be especially diligent that they do not allow themselves to be used by one side or the other, that they maintain their independence from groups or governments and that they carefully verify claims by one side or the other and not simply transmit what may merely be propaganda," he says.

Ballout from al-Jazeera says "people have to consider the propaganda effect from two perspectives: the professional one and the political one. Most of the criticism you get on this topic is politically and not professionally driven."