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news & press The War Report: Filling the Mainstream Media Void
"While there were often sporadic outbursts of violence, the place didn't literally become a full-on warzone until 25 September 1996," Parry recalls. "Benyamin Netanyahu approved the opening of a tourist tunnel that ran alongside the base of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem, an explosive move that his security advisors warned against. One of the earliest resulting demonstrations -- in Ramallah by Birzeit University students -- was needlessly met with live ammunition.... Israeli troops were literally giving each other high fives as they shot people." Palestinian police eventually responded with gunfire of their own, and the resulting 5-day conflict claimed 15 Israeli and 88 Palestinian lives. "5 Palestinians were shot dead and 263 wounded by nightfall that [first] day in Ramallah. The walls and floors of Ramallah's tiny hospital were covered in blood... The media coverage of what had transpired at the demonstration was so skewed that it became a moral imperative to challenge it, and the web was the most accessible publishing medium we had." During the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000, Parry and his colleagues created the Electronic Intifada [El] website. "Israel reinvaded the entire West Bank in an operation it termed 'Defensive Shield," Parry told Cool'eh. "When Ramallah was put under curfew for two weeks, we launched a diaries section on the EI website that literally carried the only voices coming out of the town during the period. Mainstream media coverage of what we were doing followed, and El's website saw 750,000 visitors that month alone." Parry and co.'s latest project, Electronic Iraq [eIraq], was founded in 2003, just before the war began. Cool'eh spoke with Parry about the realities of running a largely DIY wartime publication. What are the ideological ingredients and logistical materials necessary to create a publication that offers reporting from the front lines of a war-torn country? Conflict is dangerous in that it is a charged situation and you're going to be perceived as taking sides by someone. The EI and eIraq websites are not affiliated with any governmental, political or religious groups, and are founded on the principle that the welfare of the Iraqi and Palestinian peoples is paramount. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a key consideration in our editorial policy. While the dynamics of power in any conflict are usually very unbalanced, the truth of a situation is found in the experience of people on the street. The handshakes of leaders, the constitutions ratified by parliaments -- all are meaningless unless it impacts the situation on the street. This is where the true measure of peace is found and it is a defensible place to focus reporting. The projects were begun by a group of friends and colleagues that had been working together, on and off, for several years. Having solid relationships with those you're working with is far more important than organizational structure, Logistically, the web is an extremely accessible and affordable medium, where you can secure professional-grade web hosting for just $200 a year. Beyond that, it's about access to computer equipment and your time. With a news website powered by a content management system, you can have multiple people working on the website from anywhere in the world that there's an Internet connection and web browser. Digital cameras, digital video cameras and laptop computers are vital as you can't drop film off for processing at Wallgreens or Rite Aid when there are tanks rolling down the streets! On the ground, you definitely need people. While on one level this can mean sending people into the warzone, don't forget that there are already people living there, working far non-governmental organizations and universities, who you can solicit to submit content for your site. Some people also regularly visit the region, and once you're established you will find that people start offering to write for you when they visit. Word of mouth is very important. How did you go about establishing sources on the ground in Iraq? eIraq was launched because the EI team was frustrated that the existing site's focus on Palestine did not give us much leeway to report on Iraq. So we rang our colleagues at Voices in the Wilderness [ViTW] who had been working in Iraq since the 1991 war, and who already had peace teams on the ground before the 2003 war, and said, "How would you guys like us to create a site like EI for Iraq, and work with you to get all that information out there?" We knew we could handle general Iraq news reporting from existing news sources such as the United Nations, human rights organizations, and journalists' rights organizations like the Committee to Protect Journalists, and by soliciting articles from experts outside of Iraq. ViTW had its team infrastructure in place already, and therefore covered the one area we could not, reporting from inside the country. EI and eIraq are run on a budget of $50,000 a year, less than the salary of a single foreign correspondent. While the core team is committed, we still all have full time jobs .... The majority of our budget for EI and eIraq comes from donations from individuals in the $25-$100 range. This is important, because it's sustainable .... Finding time to fundraise when you're already stretched to the limit with everything else is a challenge that there is no simple answer to. What are some of the difficulties you face in running a publication about Iraq from the States? Obviously the biggest difficulty is the physical distance, as communications are unreliable and expensive between the US and Iraq. During the war the US shut down telephone and Internet connections. Fortunately we had a satellite data modem that allowed us to independently access the Internet. Unfortunately, this cost around $25,000 in usage fees for the couple of months in which it was needed! The situation during the war was extremely tense, with bombing clearly visible from the hotels where members of the Iraq Peace Teams were based. When even mainstream media journalists were finding themselves in the line of fire, the teams were operating in a high stress environment. In the immediate aftermath of "Shock and Awe," team members began visiting civilian neighborhoods before members of the commercial media. As the first to report civilian casualty stories from Iraqi hospitals and bombed neighborhoods, reporting fell below standards of clarity that the editorial team in the US wanted, but it was hard to resolve this. Telephone communication was so sporadic that you'd have to dial for several hours to reach Iraq. And the team on the ground was dealing with immense pressures. Think about it: You've just lived through seeing a city bombed. You knew from long before the first explosion that this was not a justified war of self-defense. And now you're the first citizen from the aggressor country that stands face to face with the person who just lost their entire extended family when your military bombed a residential apartment building. It's not the best frame of mind for anyone to calmly assess the facts of the matter. Not to say that our reporting was flawed or inaccurate, but some of it was frustratingly incomplete. It's just very hard to get definitive answers to questions in a warzone. When missiles are fired at a neighborhood, it's not as if everyone is standing on their roof with a pen and paper taking notes. So you have to methodically weed through people's assumptions and spend some time trying to find the one person who was on their roof hanging laundry and saw a plane approach and fire before they ran into their basement, so you can eliminate ground-based fire and know that -- as there were no Iraqi planes in the air at that point -- it was a US strike. The teams did a fantastic job in the situation and there's nothing I look back on in the site and wish we hadn't published. eIraq's reporting hit the nail on the head 95 percent of the time. Our main goal was to humanize the people we were at war with. What was your strategy fur publicizing the site and drawing readers to it's content? When you have American peace activists reporting dally from Baghdad during "Shock and Awe," it wasn't hard to sell it. We saw coverage on US cable television and in key newspapers around the world. Months before the Abu Ghraib story broke, we were reporting stories of Iraqis who had been tortured in US detention, which clearly was, and remains, a widespread practice. Unique coverage like this generates respect for the project and journalists and policymakers begin to add you to their bookmarks. Once one journalist starts writing about you, there's a domino effect. With e-mail announcements when new content is added, with other viral marketing tools such as 'E-mail This Page' and 'Print This Page' functions, and with the ability for other webmasters. to automatically syndicate news headlines from your site onto theirs, visitors publicize the site for you. News spreads fast in situations where the majority of reporters were holed up in hotels asking their waiters what was happening. How do you gauge the success of Electronic Iraq? We pulled off something no one else had done before and left behind a body of writing, from a different perspective than that dominating the mainstream media, during a nation-defining period in American and Iraqi history. The first two months of the war we registered over one million visitors -- unheard of for a new alternative media website. After the initial ground war, the Library of Congress and the British Library (the UK's 'Library of Congress') both asked for permission to archive Electronic Iraq for researchers. From before the war began, we were consistent on facts that we all now know to be true -- that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and that the US administration was fabricating its case for war. Perhaps future historians will write tomes about how a multi-billion-dollar media industry utterly failed to even register something that 10 people with a few thousand dollars managed to figure out before a single shot was fired. Do you have any advice for young people who are interested in developing publications that cover the realities of violent conflict? The Internet is driven by content. If your content is unique, high quality, visually interesting, and regularly updated, you are already doing exactly what you should be doing. Keeping it manageable is important.... It's better to do one thing really well than overextend yourself. The world isn't black and white... just as there are a ton of Americans out there who wouldn't want people in other countries to imagine that they are 100 percent supportive of the current US administration, there are a ton of Iraqis and Palestinians who feel exactly the same way when they read international media coverage about them, which portrays them as a homogenous mob. If you can humanize a people in a time when your media is trapped reporting the government's viewpoint as the dominant story -- because they don't want to bite the hand that grants them "access" -- you're well on the way to doing the right thing. Nigel Parry lived in Ramallah, occupied Palestine, from 1994-1998 and is a cofounder of Electronic Iraq and the Electronic Intifada, alternative news websites that won the ADC's Voices of Peace award in 2003. He lives in New York City with his dog, Roo, and works as a freelance web designer through his business, nigelparry.net Related Links 
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