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The land the British press forgot

Though you would never know it from the coverage in the United Kingdom, there is no doubt what the most important foreign story of the year has been — the military success of the “surge” in Iraq.

Civilian casualties, while still far too high, are declining rapidly. The latest Iraqi government figures, which generally report a larger number of deaths than those released by the U.S. military, show 606 fatalities in the conflict in November, the lowest number since the bombing of the Samara Mosque in February 2006 that sparked off a spate of sectarian violence.

The weekly number of attacks has declined by almost two thirds and some of the two million who fled Iraq are beginning to return. Even nightlife is returning to parts of Baghdad.

Yet little of this has been reported or given an airing in the British press. The strongest and best coverage currently coming out of Iraq is from The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time, Newsweek (all of which have been fiercely critical of the Bush administration’s approach) and the various news agencies. Not even the BBC comes close to matching the quality of their output.

This at a time when U.S. journalists have concluded that the British press did a far better job of reporting the run-up to the conflict than they did — so U.S. dominance of this field is not because its reporters are any better than their U.K. counterparts.

Perhaps explaining the failure of the British press to devote more space to Iraq is easy: it has become a good news story. But the situation in (nominally) British-controlled Basra has been bad of late, with many Iraq-watchers considering developments there the greatest long-term threat to Iraq. If the explanation was simple press bias, then surely the bad news from Basra would still be enjoying lots of ink?

There is certainly plenty of bad news going under-reported. In the first six months of the year 18 barbers were murdered in Basra because they had been shaving beards. From the middle of July to the middle of August, there were, on average, more than 90 attacks a week on U.K. forces. Between July and September, 42 women were killed in Basra, largely for various “offences” against Sharia law.

None of these appalling developments received the attention that they deserved; only one U.K. newspaper ran stories on each. The issue here is not the difficulty of getting the story, but the neglect of this information once it enters the public domain. The fact that both good and bad news stories from Iraq have been under-reported suggest that the problem is more systemic. Iraq is the most difficult conflict in any of our lifetimes to report.

British reporters have faced a big challenge in reporting from Iraq. While Baghdad is the national capital and the centre of the story, British troops have been based in Basra, more than a day trip away from Baghdad. When something happened in Basra, reporters were continually forced to choose between covering events in Baghdad or taking the time — and risk — of travelling down to Basra a day later with no guarantee of getting the story.

In these circumstances, the only way that the British press could have covered the whole Iraq story, with a proper emphasis on the British perspective, would have been with a very well-resourced effort with large bureaux in Baghdad and Basra, something that no Western newspaper has.

The New York Times and the Washington Post spend several million dollars a year on their Iraq operations, but they are almost wholly centred on Baghdad. Both papers still regard it as probably the most important story they cover. It is rare for more than a few days to go by without them carrying a front-page Iraqi story.

For U.K. newspapers Iraq has almost disappeared from the front page — it has slipped down the news agenda since Tony Blair left office. The conflict had become so entrenched in the public mind as Mr. Blair’s war that the political resonance of it vastly decreased with his departure. Unlike in America, there is no major split between the two parties about how to handle the issue and so it is unlikely that Iraq will move many votes at the next election.

Proprietors and editors now need to decide if they are prepared to spend the money required to allow their reporters to do this difficult job to the fullest of their abilities. A failure to increase the resources for foreign and conflict coverage will lead to the British press being reduced to chasing and following a U.S.-led news agenda. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

(James Forsyth is online editor for the Business and the Spectator.)

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