Below is an email received from a reader to RTE journalist Ray Donaghue, and an official response to 'Tipping the balance west' from RTE.ie’s News Editor Joe Zefran.

Dear Ray

Hope you're well. I've been following your exchange of emails with MediaBite. By the way, I applaud your willingness to engage with them in this way. You wrote:

"...it is RTÉ policy not to base news stories on the accounts of ‘angry residents’, unnamed officials or those speaking ‘on conditions of anonymity’".

And yet MediaBite quote RTE as follows:

"An unnamed US official is reported to have said that more than 600 insurgents have been killed in the battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah." [10]

"A US army helicopter carrying 15 people has been reported missing near Fort Drum, New York, a military official has said. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there are few details on the circumstances surrounding the UH-60 helicopter. 'It is missing,' the official said. 'There were 15 people on board."

"A defence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the pictures matched those gathered by the US military two years ago as part of its investigation into the Abu Ghraib prison scandal."

Can you explain this contradiction? Are we to understand that there is a qualitative difference between an anonymous Iraqi source and an anonymous US source? Is one more reliable than the other?

Best wishes

David Edwards

Response to 'Tipping the balance west'

Response from RTE.ie’s News Editor Joe Zefran:

Dear David,

Thank you for writing such an in-depth analysis of our Iraq War coverage. I just wanted to correct one aspect. I am actually the RTÉ.ie News Editor, not Bree Treacy (she is now RTÉ.ie’s Entertainment Editor).However, I was on holiday when you sent your original emails which is why they were sent to Bree and Ray.

I need to research this issue further before I formulate an official response, but in the meantime can you please correct the section at the end of your post for reflect the correct titles.

Regards,

Joe Zefran, News Editor

Dear David,

My apologies for not getting back to you until now. As you will read below, this is a complex and serious issue and I wanted to respond appropriately.

In regards to RTÉ.ie’s war coverage, I believe it is time to re-evaluate how we attribute facts, information and quotes. The US and UK governments have proven themselves to be unreliable when it comes to some statements and facts, particularly in regards to the Iraq War. As such, we should take better care to differentiate information sourced from ‘US officials’ or ‘anonymous people on the ground in Iraq’ from objective elements in a story or event.

However, we also want to avoid falling into the ‘he said, she said’ trap. With powerful PR machines on both sides of the war, we could run the risk of becoming noise cancellation headphones, thus making our coverage innocuous.

In an ideal world, we would be able to send our journalists to Iraq (and Iran etc) to get the objective story, but even if we had a staff the size of the BBC and a resolve focused on facts despite what government officials might say, the dangerous reality on the ground in Iraq would prevent us from getting the full story.

Indeed, the PR machines for most major governments know this and have been designed to exploit news organisations that are limited by the financial realities of modern journalism. How we balance those forces is becoming a larger part of what we do as journalists.

I am scheduling a meeting with my staff of journalists to discuss how we can improve our war coverage. I do believe we (and all media outlets) need to show more care about how statements about Iran are handled, in particular.

Moreover, I think it is time for an open, public dialogue about how we, as journalists, digest and publish (or broadcast, in the case of my TV and radio colleagues) information from official government sources. It is also time to discuss the emergence of citizen journalism, especially via the internet. How will traditional media sources, whether commercial or public service, define themselves and their information going forward?

Furthermore, how does the public regard our role going forward? I believe these two issues are at the core of how we cover big issues like the war in Iraq – and beyond.

Therefore, I hope that MediaBite will organise a public forum outside of cyberspace. I would be happy to participate in such a debate.

Please let me know when your organisation would like to proceed.

Regards,

Joe Zefran, News Editor

Dear Joe,

Thanks for taking the time to respond. Your comments on the need to re-evaluate how 'official' statements are reported are long overdue in the mainstream media, and should be constantly considered and reconsidered by all news editors.

We also appreciate the constraints that impinge on news reporting and the relative disadvantages that RTE may be at in comparison to bigger and better funded broadcasters. However, our main point is that even allowing for those things the mainstream media has a tendency to emphasise one perspective over another even when facts and sources of information are readily available.

For example, we were struck by the response from RTE (though it is a reaction we have come across before), that eyewitnesses at the scene of a bombing, Iraqi people, were subjectively regarded as 'angry residents' and therefore unreliable sources of information. Yet eyewitnesses would ordinarily be regarded as crucial sources - they have now for several weeks been an indispensable source of information from Burma. Similarly, on 9/11 it did not occur to any journalist that people at the scene would be unreliable witnesses. The fact Iraqi witnesses and opinions are considered unreliable or un-newsworthy evidences much about the context within which Western reporting operates.

There is also evidence to suggest that mainstream reporting is unlikely to diverge from the 'official' position - even where the facts support such a divergence. For instance, our MediaShot 'A crime within a crime within a crime' addressed RTE's failure to report the findings of a second study into Iraqi mortality published in the Lancet medical journal - findings that estimated far more deaths than Western officials would acknowledge, RTE preferring instead to quote figures from IBC, whose database captures only a fraction of the actual death toll.

Notwithstanding the truth of what you say about the difficulties in combating the influence of PR machines, what we know without doubt is that there is a wealth of objective information available that is frequently overlooked or ignored. For the most part it is not the lack of this information that results in misleading reporting, but the context in which it is presented.

Your suggestion of a debate outside of cyberspace is a great idea and we intend to look into the logistics of organising this. If you have any views on this, we would of course be very glad to hear them.

Would you object to our publishing this correspondence on our website?

Kind regards,

David Manning & Miriam Cotton

David,

You are welcome to publish our correspondence on your website.

Depending on the location of the forum, we would be able to do a live webcast of it on our site. Let me know what you guys come up with.

Cheers,

Joe Zefran

Dear Joe,

Thank you for your positive reply.

We're aiming to orgnanise a debate of the sort you suggested sometime in the early part of next year and will be in touch again as soon as we can with ideas for how best to make this happen.

Very best wishes,

Miriam Cotton (& David Manning)