Who are the true heroes?” “

The war in Iraq has generated a huge mountain of ‘news’ thanks not only to the presence of hundreds of journalists, but also to the efforts of the combatants themselves who are fighting each other not only on the battle front but also through rival press conferences, dispatches, claims and counter-claims. And while the number of journalists who have lost their lives in the conflict has risen to twelve, we excerpt from the long interview granted to us by Bruno Frappat , editor in chief of the French Catholic daily “La Croix”, those passages that refer to the profession of journalism and that analyse the relation between “information and war”. How should we treat the huge mass of information from the front? “We have our own team of correspondents in Iraq: one in Baghdad, one in the south (in the region of Basra) and one in the north (in Kurdistan). They send us dispatches every day. We believe what they tell us on the basis of what they have been able to see with their own eyes. However, they aren’t able to form an overall view of what’s going on. No one has an overall view, except for the Pentagon, and it doesn’t tell us everything it knows… We need to believe direct eye witnesses, practice “source criticism”, be prudent in our interpretations. We need to avoid drawing precipitate conclusions in response to faint rumours or “urgent” communiqués of the press agencies. We sometimes need to wait before drawing conclusions. We need to pay a good deal of attention to the inherent contradictions of successive official statements. There’s so much “communication” and so little real information”. We’re also witnessing a media war conducted by the combatants (Bush, Blair, Saddam) with information used as a weapon… “During the 1914-1918 war, we invented an expression, in France, to describe the way in which the High Command was packaging the fighting: “brain stuffing”. Nothing seems to have changed. When the Iraqi Minister of Information, on the eve of the siege of Baghdad, announced that the Anglo-American troops were going to be routed, it’s easy to grasp that his message and his mendacity were aimed more at boosting the morale of the Iraqi forces than convincing us media men of the “rearguard”. When the American military chiefs dismissed the term “pause” when a pause in the fighting was evident to all, as happened at the end of the second week of the war, it’s easy to grasp, in that case too, that the message was addressed to their troops and not to our readers”. Are there aspects that information ignores or doesn’t want to touch? “We don’t know anything about what the Anglo-Americans have discovered, or failed to discover, about the “weapons of mass destruction” whose presumed holding by Saddam was – officially – the cause for this war. Up till the siege of Baghdad, at any rate, Saddam Hussein, it seems, made no use of them. Does this mean that he doesn’t have them, or that he has them but prefers to reserve their use for a later stage? Another taboo: the effective state of mind of the populations under the control of Saddam Hussein and of those that have been “liberated”. In both cases, it’s almost impossible to conduct frank and confidential interviews with them, without the presence of their “protectors” or “minders”. What’s the line adopted by “La Croix” in reporting this war? “On a professional level, “La Croix” has refused to be sensationalist, in particular as regards what photos it publishes (no images of victims, not even of prisoners of war, whether they be Iraqis, or Americans or British). I have asked my editorial staff to give proof, in their articles, of the greatest possible impartiality, leaving any ‘stance’ to the editorials that represent the paper. We have placed the emphasis on professionalism. We have created some new features linked to this war, such as the one titled “Peacemakers”, an appropriate counterpoint to the rhetoric of the warmongers. We think in fact that, even in the worst periods of history, a flickering torch, that of hope, always remains. Those who hold it with an unsteady hand are the real heroes. The others are victims of a tragedy greater than they”.