Iraq war journalism 'sanitized': British report

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, November 07, 2003

Iraq war journalism 'sanitized': British report

The reporters "embedded" with military units during the US-led war on Iraq gave a "sanitized" picture of events, said a BBC commissioned report on Thursday.

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The reporters "embedded" with military units during the US-led war on Iraq gave a "sanitized" picture of events, said a BBC commissioned report on Thursday.

Closeness to the units did not make reporters less objective, said the study by the Cardiff School of Journalism. Yet British broadcasting culture made it impossible to show the full horror of war.

The study made following concerns that the practice of embedding reporters, adopted for the first time in the Iraq war, could compromise journalistic standards.

"Most of the journalists involved made efforts to protect their objectivity, and on key issues, were demonstrably able to do so," the study by an eight-person research team said.

However, the researchers were concerned that for "entirely laudable" reasons, it was impossible to show particularly violent or graphic images on British television.

Journalists were aware of this and fashioned their coverage accordingly, with the result that people felt they were watching a "made for TV" version of war that was "sanitized" and almost fictional.

"It may be that embedded reporters are, despite often diligent objectivity and undoubted courage, forced by current constraints to produce a kind of coverage which may, for some, make war appear more acceptable," the researchers said.

For many people, what was missing during the conflict was a broader analysis, especially in relation to how Iraqi people saw and experienced the conflict.

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