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MS. GEORGIE ANNE GEYER
Columnist and Author
PLENARY SESSION IV
“American Media and Foriegn News Coverage”
Thank you, David. When I think about the subject of foreign correspondents today and the information we get, I think back to a day in April 1973. I was a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Daily News and covering the Middle East for the first time. I had inexplicably been able to get a visa for Iraq. Now most journalists in the Middle East knew that if you did get a visa you’d stay about three days, you would be followed most of the time, and you wouldn’t get to see anybody except perhaps a few foreign diplomats—and then you would leave in a huff without getting anything. But I got there and, to my amazement that Monday morning, I went to the Ministry of Information and the people there said, “Oh you’ve come!” Being a suspicious sort from the South Side of Chicago, I didn’t think that was a notably positive response, but it turned out that it was. Within a week I had seen a lot of the leaders of the country. I had been to the Kerbala Mosque, which, like Mecca, is forbidden to Westerners. I wore an abaya, the black robe that the women wear, and I was going to see Saddam Hussein. The reason was that they had nationalized oil the week before, so it wasn’t my charm or beauty or modesty or any of those things.
This day I went with the translator to one of the old king’s palaces on the Tigris River with lots of gold on the walls and ceilings, I remember, in the room that we were sitting in. Saddam came in; it was in 1973, so he was in his mid-forties. He was very handsome and looked very much like he does today, with a beautiful silk French suit. There were three of us, the translator, Saddam, and me. We sat there on straight chairs for four hours, working through translation, of course.
He kept saying to me, “Ask me anything you want!” And I did. He was then officially vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. So I said, “Mr. Vice Chairman, your enemies say that you killed your enemies with your own hands. Now why do you do things like that?” I had already found that going into a kind of schoolmarm position with leaders like that usually works because it’s respectful, but it’s also firm. And I think it reminds them of their mothers, although I don’t know that he wanted to be reminded of his mother, from what I have heard about her! (She wanted to abort him, you know.) But he answered. He said, “Sometimes when you are in an underground movement you have to do things that you don’t want to do.”
Most of all he talked about oil. He wanted to open to the West at that point, and that was obviously the reason why I got this interview and a lot of others. But what I remember mostly about him was that four hours is a long time to spend with just one other person. And in those four hours in which we looked at each other, most of the time there was no expression on his face whatsoever. It was totally flat, totally blank. He didn’t smile, he didn’t get angry. There was simply no expression. I suppose psychiatrists would say this was socio-pathological. I am not capable of exactly analyzing that. But I do remember that that was the thing that stayed most in my mind.
I went back to Iraq a number of times after that, and I’ve always found the country very interesting. It is a graveyard of great civilizations. One weekend I went from Baghdad to Nineveh, to Hatra, to Ur—and that leaves you with the feeling that you are sort of walking over all of these great violently destroyed civilizations of the early world. It is an odd country in that sense.
I went on to cover the Middle East a great deal. I remember about six years ago I drove over to Gaza from Jerusalem, which I often did. I always used to drive around the occupied territories, stay in the Hotel Palestine in Nablus. But this day I went over to Gaza. I had arranged to see one of the chiefs of the Islamic Jihad, one of the radical groups. I expected to find a rather traditional sheikh with white robes and a white hat, probably an older gentleman, maybe with a beard, most likely, in his house with eight or nine children.
Well, I didn’t find that at all! I went into a storefront and found a very well- tailored, handsome young man. He had a beard but it was very carefully cut. He had a Western suit on and he was sitting at his computer. He was an engineer, and he was the head of this Islamic Jihad. That was my first clue to what we now know. I believe it was John who said so well that the radicals, the terrorists, whatever we want to call them, and I’m not going to get mired down in language, are not the poor in the world. However, they are inspired by the poor of the world, as well as by their own ambitions. So we have a complex set of situations here.
But I want to speak in the few minutes that we have, ladies and gentlemen, because I know you want to go on to questions, about first the problem of foreign correspondents today. One of the great problems of 9/11, and I could prove this to you beyond the shadow of a doubt, is that we have hardly any foreign correspondents around the world anymore. Everyone has cut back. We are expensive (not me, I’m not expensive, but other people are expensive). You don’t even have TV crews in most of the European cities.
Now we have an avalanche of people in Afghanistan. But the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, during the nineties nobody was paying any attention to Afghanistan. I was, because I’m a foolish, crazy person who believes that there should be a balance of news and that you’ve got to have people on the ground. Nobody went there, and so we didn’t have the root understanding of what was going on.
I wrote several columns on it because you could see with the first blowing up of the World Trade Center and that whole series of events what was going to happen. But you had to have correspondents out there, men and women analyzing the mentality of the people, their genuine grievances, their ingenuine grievances, and that’s what I have spent a lifetime doing. But you can’t make even my editors print it. I remember I talked with Ahmed Rashid, probably the best analyst of Afghanistan, a Pakistani journalist. I had lunch with him here a couple of years ago. We went over all this and I wrote all about the Islamic schools there, the radical training and so on. But I don’t think any of my papers used it.
One, there are no foreign correspondents. The ones that do go in now we call the “parachutists.” They’re not the old correspondents, like my group, who used to live in an area for at least three years, probably six years. These are kids that go in overnight. They’re bright, they’re capable; that’s not the problem. The problem is they can’t possibly know the culture, they can’t possibly know the political intricacies; they can’t possibly know the regional give-and-take. They can’t possibly know the history, much less the languages. For instance, I speak five languages. I’ve worked very hard at this. I do it because it is respectful to the countries and peoples that I cover. So that's one of the great problems, ladies and gentlemen.
Now we are getting terrific coverage of Afghanistan. We are beginning to get some good coverage of Iraq. As you noticed, I don't know him but Nicholas Kristof from the New York Times is in Iraq. I am probably going myself soon. But he’s been doing excellent work in the southern Shiite cities: Basrah, Najaf, Kerbala, where I was in the shrine. But he is writing about the streets and the sukhs of the Shiite cities in the south, and these 70 percent of the population are just ready to explode. Of course they are going to explode! I mean you can’t have 17 percent of the Sunnis running the country, which is one reason why the Baghdad government is so cruel, and not have the other sects ready to explode. You always find that when you have a minority running a country. Yet our government doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea about this because they are talking about just going in and occupying. Everything will fall in line and there will be a decentralized federal project for the country. It’s almost unbelievable.
Ladies and gentlemen, foreign correspondents used to feel protected. Ernie Pyle said once, “We correspondents could go anywhere we pleased, being gifted and chosen characters.” That was very much the spirit. We felt protected by international laws, by our own government, by our embassies. We were privileged observers, like the Red Cross. Then we became the new diplomats. I used to see Arafat in Beirut and then the embassy would call me the next day and say, “Please come over and tell us what he said,” because they weren't permitted to see him. They wanted to but they couldn’t.
Then we had the information revolution and everybody thought, “Oh you don’t need foreign correspondents at all. People will get all this on the web.” Well that’s ridiculous! Only 2 percent of the people of the world have any connection to the web at all. Then they said, “Well, now you can’t cut people off from knowledge, from information, because it’s everywhere.” Ladies and gentlemen, I covered Serbia and the Balkans for eight years. You can cut people off! The Serbs today will not acknowledge what happened when in every household there is someone who took part in that war. You can cut people off when they want to be cut off. We have a lot of the same problems that we had, frankly, in the Middle Ages!
Now I think we are overcovering Afghanistan. We’re overcovering Iraq—this terribly unfortunate idea of going into Iraq. So now let’s think about what we’re not covering. Well, we’re not covering Africa. We’re barely covering Latin America. We’re not even covering China now. Remember a year ago, China was going to be the great threat? Now we hardly get any coverage at all. And I want to say here that one of the editors whom I deeply admire, who does insist upon covering everything, is David Jones. He has wonderful pages, and I don’t say that because I am on them occasionally. The Washington Times still has very intricately balanced coverage. You’ll find something on Cameroon one day, Burma the next, then Niger the next day, as well as good coverage of breaking stories. And I think that is absolutely, crucially important.
In the few minutes I have left, I will differ a little bit with, I think it was John O'Sullivan, who said Americans are well informed. I think, yes, a lot are. But I have another Pew Research Center survey that scares the very living wits out of me, which found that 65 percent of Americans polled did not read foreign news because they “didn‘t know where the countries were.” And 51 percent said, “Nothing ever changes.” 45 percent: “Events don't affect me.” 42 percent: “Too much war and violence in the coverage.” Well, that really scares me, ladies and gentlemen, because what we are seeing is the end result—I think we are seeing this in much of our political leadership as well in all parties—of the abysmal lowering of our educational system.
In closing, ladies and gentlemen, John Zogby asked recently in his polls, “Why are Americans not concerned about Iraq?” He said, “Their children will soon be in the midst of one of the worst wars in history.” He found that a majority of people was for the war, but when he asked them, “Are you for a war in Iraq if there are casualties?” it went down to 30 percent. Well, how can you have a war without casualties? In many ways we're living in an unreal world, and I do put that really on our lack of balanced coverage of the world.
There are other things. There is bias. I am a syndicated columnist. I was a foreign correspondent. I wrote very differently when I was a foreign correspondent or when I was a society reporter in Chicago than I do as a columnist. A columnist is supposed to write opinion, and that’s what I do. I often find more opinion in the news columns in the areas that I am covering than I do on the opinion pages. So we need more balanced coverage. We need fairer coverage. I agree with our friend from Al-Jazeera that coverage of the Middle East over the years has been very, very skewed. I have insisted upon covering all sides. I was the first one to write about the Palestinians in 1969 when I went there. This is a fight that is ongoing, because there are no rewards for an American journalist covering the Palestinians. I mean, there are no rewards at all. All the rewards are from the other side. So these personal things go into it as well.
Ladies and gentlemen, I would just like to leave you with my one strong feeling: we need balanced, total coverage. What are we not covering now? Now we know Afghanistan. We know everything about the Taliban and about Mullah Omar and about Osama bin Laden. We know what their mothers fed them and everything. But what are we not knowing about? What is next? What about the Rwandas? What about the Serbias? What about the Bosnias? What about the East Timors? And where are we going to find the next Bosnias and Somalias and East Timors? What about the thousands of missiles that the Hezbollah guerrillas have in the south of Lebanon? What about the Shiites arising in the south of Iraq? These themes are the ones that are coming. And I don’t want us to make the same mistake that we made with Afghanistan in the nineties. Thank you.
