The Making of WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception

By Danny Schechter

Danny Schechter dissecting TV war coverage. PHOTO: GLOBALVISION.ORG

Journalism is more than a job. It is a calling — sometimes demanding a call to action. I have been a media maven all my life, starting as an investigative reporter for Ramparts, the muckraking magazine of the 1960’s, and later becoming an on-air newscaster and “news dissector” for Boston’s pioneering WBCN rock station. From there it was on to TV, first in local news and programming and then the start-up at CNN, and eight years at ABC News 20/20. However, I grew dissatisfied with the “infotainment” values that took hold as TV news was increasingly dumbed down and lightened up.

I had initially joined the media with a desire to showcase the problems of the world and eventually came to see that the media was one of those problems.

I defected from mainstream media in 1988, co-founding Globalvision, an independent media company where I created TV series like South Africa Now and made more than 15 documentaries. Today, I write a daily “dissection” on the news and views of the day at Mediachannel.org, which I helped to form in 2000 — and which has since become the world’s largest online media issues network. I have also written six books since 1997 including The More You Watch The Less You Know and News Dissector. My latest is Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq.

In writing that last book, I “embedded” myself in front of my living room TV, comparing and contrasting coverage of the war in Iraq across the spectrum of print and television, here and abroad. Despite TV’s many channels and choices, I found few original voices. Instead, I encountered a pervasive patriotic correctness on the nation’s airwaves, and a uniformity in viewpoint that did a lot more selling than telling about the war. I heard only a few criticisms of the war’s coverage — mostly about flaws on reporting by elite newspapers. Even as larger numbers of Americans and people around the world dissented, their views were rarely seen and heard.

From its onset there were two wars going on in Iraq — one was fought with armies of soldiers, bombs and a fearsome military force, the other was fought alongside it with cameras, satellites, armies of journalists and propaganda techniques. One war was rationalized as an effort to find and disarm WMDs — Weapons of Mass Destruction; the other is carried out, in my view, by even more powerful WMDs — Weapons of Mass Deception.

Military Briefers at the Doha Media Center discussing Jessica Lynch.

The TV networks in America consider their non-stop coverage of the war their finest hour, pointing to the use of embedded journalists and new technologies that permitted viewers to see a war up close for the first time. But different countries saw different wars. Why?

For those of us watching the coverage, the war was more of a spectacle, an around-the-clock global-media marathon, pitting media outlets against each other in ways that often distorted truth, raising questions about the methods of TV news in covering and, in some cases, promoting, armed insurrection.

As my anger with the coverage mounted, I felt someone in the TV world had to stand up. I told myself that if I was really going to be true to my outrage, it was time to fight fire with fire: to use images to fight images, to deploy media against a media war.

But making a film on the media itself is not exactly a popular subject with media outlets — especially about the coverage of a war that many considered their finest hour of great courage and technological wizardry — and, as I began to develop the project, I wondered what channel would show such a film, even if I managed to make it? Where would the money come from? Would my fellow media mavens, especially high-profile journalists, go on camera to discuss their real experiences or make footage available? Is there a media market for work that takes big media to task even through the lens of a news veteran who’s been there and done that?

Only independent film offered the promise of a platform that could document and challenge the betrayal of journalism I was detailing. I called it WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception. The film is my response to what I perceive as a media crisis and a crisis for democracy.

But how do you get the story behind this story? Especially months after the war began? News executives won’t talk candidly. (I tried questioning Fox’s John Moody at one event. He walked the other way when he saw me coming.) Journalists who are privy to behind-the-scenes chatter button their lips, too.

Animated Graphic by Mark Fiore satirizing war coverage.

I also didn’t have and couldn’t afford a real staff. I had to put up my own money to get started. A dedicated young woman with a marketing background who came to our company as an intern worked with me. She had never made films before. After lots of hard work, she became a producer.

We began going to conferences where journalists spoke about the war with each other. One was at the New School in New York; another was the Arab Media Summit in Dubai. There, I was the only American asked to speak. Many of those in attendance had never heard an American rip into his country’s media before. I also sprinkled in some concerns about their media ‹ especially the tendency to assume all Americans backed Bush in the same way our media thought of all Iraq as “Saddamland.”

We soon began collecting footage from groups monitoring media and reached out to independents like Robert Young Pelton and Gwendolen Cates who were brave enough to share footage and commentary from the frontlines. We also reached out to international broadcasters who, after some coaxing, agreed to supply some footage. The BBC, CBC, ARD TV in Germany, France 3, Al-Jazeera and South African Broadcasting shared some of their material to let me show the different ways they approached the challenge of covering the war. Independent filmmakers such as Stephen Marshall of the Guerrilla News Network and independent Patrick Dillen, who had lived in Baghdad, supplied excerpts of their work. Some U.S. network people — including Tom Brokaw’s staff — provided footage.

I then read about and interviewed retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner and other war critics. I shot demonstrations and did interviews in disparate locations. Before long we had over 350 tapes and hundreds of hours of material to log, transcribe and make sense of. It took a year of work to come up with a cut we were happy with.

I also put myself in the film — not to “out Michael Moore Michael Moore,” as Vanity Fair put it, but to offer a personal witness from someone in the media trenches on the need for us to debate the media failure as earnestly as the intelligence failure that led us into a bloody and still unresolved war.

I see myself as a journalist more than a show man but also realize that to be effective, you can't be boring. Yet I was uncomfortable being compared with Michael Moore. I respect his achievement and work but also know that he was successful in reaching audiences the way he did because he had already been certified as a celebrity — a “name” in a celebrity-obsessed society. He had won an Academy Award and had become a fixture in the big Media limelight. He knew he could trade on that fame to promote his new film, aided and abetted by a brilliant marketing maneuver built around picking a public fight with Disney (which had earlier expressed its lack of interest in distributing the film) that made a big enough stink to push the story to page one.

The success of Fahrenheit 9/11, however, did make it possible for me to convince investors that WMD had a chance at being successful given the millions of people worldwide who opposed the war and the media's treatment of it.

The completed film, WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception, is both a 98-minute nonfiction film and 58-minute TV program. Cinema Libre Studio is distributing the former; the UK’s Mercury Media the latter. After playing at film festivals worldwide, we go into selected theaters in December.

Cinema Libre also distributed Robert Greenwald’s Outfoxed, which used the kind of grass-roots marketing effort that we are also attempting with support already from scores of organizations that are urging their members to see it, Our film will be sold on DVD next year, and we have created many tools to promote it like a flash animation, banner ads and even a teacher’s guide for using the film in classrooms.

We have already sold the TV version to a few stations overseas. We also did a thirty-minute program on the “Making and Mission of WMD,” Academy-award winner Tim Robbins narrated a trailer for the film. We never expected the timid — “on the one hand, on the other hand” — programmers of conventional docs at PBS to run the film but do hope to find a movie channel in the U.S. brave enough to take it after its visibility rises.

My hope is that WMD will spark debate about the proper role of the media in wartime. I hope it will encourage more journalists and media consumers to speak up and act out against the media system that went from being a “fourth estate” to the “fourth front” in CENTCOM Commander Tommy Franks’s “top secret” war plan (top secret for us but not to those favored journalists to whom it was leaked).

As the war in Iraq continues, some news organizations have finally acknowledged problems in their coverage — in mid November 2004, the presidents of News at ABC, CBS and ABC admitted, like the New York Times and Washington Post before them, that their coverage of the war was flawed — but by and large the media continues to treat the war like a sports event with more focus on dead soldiers than a failed policy. WMD has, in my mind anyway, never been more timely nor needed.

Yet it is also important for another reason: Filmmaking can be about influencing the national conversation, exposing other voices and becoming a platform for critical ideas and other visions about society.

There are lessons for other media makers here too, I hope:

Don’t be intimidated about critiquing other media.

Believe in your vision and find allies to support it.

Reach out for grass-roots support before the film airs.

Consult with and tap into activist campaigns.

Collaborate with other filmmakers — don’t just buy archival footage from networks.

Use the Web to let people know about your work

Advocate for more access to the airwaves and resources for independent film.

See your work in the context of the fight for a more diverse media and a more democratic media order.

Support independent media in every way you can.

There’s an old saying that should have resonance for any filmmaker who get caught up in the challenges of their own projects and sometimes don't connect to the broader battle for a transformation of the media: “It’s not the ship that makes the waves. It’s the motion on the ocean.”

Get engaged with that motion. Be part of that ocean — but be careful not to drown.

News Dissector Danny Schechter edits Mediachannel.org and makes films. His WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception is being shown worldwide. E-mail: Dissector@mediachannel.org