BAGHDAD: It was the day after a particularly gruesome car bombing in downtown Baghdad, and Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba was selling optimism. At a news briefing in the fortified Green Zone, the soft-spoken, British-educated Kubba asked Iraqi reporters to cover the country’s progress as aggressively as they do the gore. “What will images of pools of blood or families suffering from the loss of a loved one prove?” he asked.
Many of the reporters weren’t biting. Rosy stories about repainted schools or improved police training often clash with a grimmer reality experienced by many Iraqis, including journalists.
“Where are the good things the government has accomplished?” a newsman Hassan Nasir Dahash demanded later, detailing the lack of electricity at his home.
Such a question from a reporter would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein’s regime. But in the hurly-burly Iraq that has emerged since his fall in 2003, dozens of newspapers, television channels and radio stations have created something approximating a Western-style media environment in which leaders and opinion makers must compete for coverage.
As a result, newly minted politicians tussling over the country’s draft constitution now tirelessly spin journalists. The government, forced to fight for coverage, is struggling to find new ways to control the message that reaches the public.
“We are all trying to figure out what the Iraqi street, what the average Iraqi citizen wants,” said Hiwa Osman, a former BBC reporter who serves as media adviser to Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.
Nowhere has the competition been fiercer than on the second floor of the Baghdad Convention Centre, where US and Iraqi officials hold briefings for journalists from dozens of Iraqi and foreign news organizations.
For the government of interim Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari, the task of making headway in this media maelstrom has fallen largely to Kubba.
The graying, 50-year-old former civil engineer, who left Iraq to study in Britain, returned to Iraq in April and has discussed everything from guerilla attacks to the progress of reconstruction projects during a series of news briefings.
Kubba fields the questions patiently, acknowledging bad news, gently suggesting alternative interpretations or begging understanding from the sometimes combative media.
But the professorial spokesman confesses that he is often outgunned.
Talk of more controls is not winning the government many more fans.
Even Dan Senor, who spent months trying to sell good news to the American public as a spokesman for the US authority that used to govern Iraq, said Kubba’s complaints might be so much crying in the wind.
“You can’t spin Iraqis about whether their lives are getting better,” Senor said. “The first thing to do is to actually make their lives better.”—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service
