When Saddam’s Statue Fell

There is an excellent piece of journalism in the current New Yorker that does what the best of what journalism is supposed to do.  It goes back, and with the perspective of time, additional research and nuanced writing, takes a misreported historical event, and provides the context that was missing at the time.

[THE TOPPLING: How the media inflated a minor moment in a long war — New Yorker, Jan. 10, 2011]

Former New York Times Magazine reporter Peter Maass, with support from ProPublica, deconstructs the myths that surround the toppling of the statue of Saddam in 2003, with an emphasis on explaining (rather than blaming) why it was portrayed the way it was.

He does, however, fault the media for getting swept up in an appealing narrative, while failing to exercise the normal caution against assessing the historical impact of events, without the benefit of historical perspective.   The narrative of the statue of Saddam being toppled by jubilant Iraqis overjoyed to be liberated was just too intoxicating a story line, especially to editors and bosses watching on TV far from the action.

If you’re interested in what really happened on April 9, 2003 in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and how it happened, I highly recommend Maass’s 8859 word opus.   It’s for anyone who wants to understand how the media can help create and perpetuate myths — sometimes small and innocuous, other times large and destructive — with profound consequences.

Here is his main conclusion:

“The toppling of Saddam’s statue turned out to be emblematic of primarily one thing: the fact that American troops had taken the center of Baghdad. That was significant, but everything else the toppling was said to represent during repeated replays on television—victory for America, the end of the war,  joy throughout Iraq—was a disservice to the truth. Yet the skeptics were wrong in some ways, too, because the event was not planned in advance by the military…  The subsequent years of civil war, which have killed and injured hundreds of thousands of people, have revealed the events at Firdos to be an illusional intermission between invasion and insurgency.”

The article illustrates a number of axioms about contemporary journalism:

1.  The farther away editors and producers are from the story, the more they think they know about it.  Concerns expressed by reporters on the front lines are too often dismissed as coming from reporters who are “too close to their story” and “can’t see the big picture.”  That said, sometimes reporters in the thick of a battle can’t see the big picture, but they usually know when that’s the case.

2.  It is hard to buck an appealing narrative.  Too much context and perspective takes the edge off a story, whether it’s positive or negative.  TV news show producers and newspaper editors are predisposed to favor the simplest, most compelling version of events, especially when some other news organization is already portraying it that way.   Editors know a good story when they see it, someplace else.  Reporters who spend too much time trying to disabuse their bosses of appealing, but inaccurate, narratives risk eventual unemployment.  The old cynical adage about this is: “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story,” and its corollary, “Another good story ruined by too much reporting.”

3.  Television coverage changes and can sometimes distort an event.  Significant events that occur away from cameras, or have no compelling visual component, don’t get the attention of stories with good pictures.  (The extreme example of this is the random car chase, which has virtually no news value but for a while was a staple of all-news television, until the lack of journalistic merit became so embarrassingly obvious to everyone, including the viewers.)  When cameras are pointed at a crowd, the crowd reacts.  Good video can result in over-coverage.

4.  Historical perspective often cannot be accurately assessed without the benefit of time, additional information, and reflection.  Some things are obvious: the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of communist East Germany; September 11th would change U.S. foreign policy in profound ways.   But the significance of smaller events is not always knowable at the moment they are happening.  Journalists need to remind themselves to be ever vigilant and remember journalism is really just a first rough draft of history.

5.  Revisionism can go too far.   The idea that everyone thought the war was over in Iraq when the Saddam statue fell is oversimplistic.  I went back and reviewed my own reporting from the Pentagon at the time, and it was replete with many references to hard battles still to be fought.  No one there thought the war was over, but they thought it would be in a matter of months.  But they thought that the day before the invasion. What is clear, is the Pentagon completely failed to anticipate the insurgency, and stubbornly insisted it wasn’t happening, when it began to develop.   But that dynamic was not changed significantly from what everyone knew was a symbolic tumbling of the statue of Saddam.

6.  Symbolism can be newsworthy whether it’s planned or spontaneous.  The hanging of the flag over the side of the Pentagon was not a random spur-of-the-moment decision, but it was symbolically important.  The plant of the flag on Mount Suribachi by Marines in World War II assumed a significance far beyond the simple act, that no doubt had been repeated after many hard fought battles.  Symbolic acts are newsworthy, but myths can grow around them, even when all the facts are known.

7.  Mythbusting is a thankless job.  It takes a lot of time and effort, and in the end few people want to let go of their myths.  And to understand the nuance takes more time and effort than the average editor, much less reader, has.  The news media doesn’t do nuance  well, like say, explaining, “death panels”…

Tags: Media Myths, New Yorker, Peter Maass, Saddam Statue