News Compass

Friday, May 30, 2003

"Saving Private Jessica Lynch"

The parents of Private Jessica Lynch gave a press conference on Thursday (29th May) regarding their daughter who is recuperating at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

It is still not known when Lynch will be released from the hospital. And Jessica Lynch herself hasn't commented publicly about her time in Iraq.

Greg and Deadra Lynch told the press at their West Virgina home:

"We're really not supposed to talk about that subject. It's still an ongoing investigation and we can't talk about anything like that."

They both also said they couldn't comment on media reports that dispute military information released on their daughter's April 1 rescue from an Iraqi hospital.

U.S. doctors have said Lynch doesn't remember anything about her capture, and probably won't.

But at the press conference Thursday, Greg Lynch disputed the army doctor's view. He said his daughter's memory is as good as ever.

Private Jessica Lynch's story will go down as one of the most " stunning pieces of news management yet conceived" .

The US media are now picking up the story following BBC's broadcast of the Lynch story in UK and in Canada a few days later, following investigations by BBC reporters with Iraqi doctors and medical staff in Nassariyah, Iraq.

Hugh Dellios and E.A. Torriero (Chicago Tribune) report:

Lynch's story is the tale of how a modern war icon is made, and perhaps how easily officials and journalists accepted contradictory, self-serving versions of what happened to her.

Seven weeks after her dramatic rescue marked a turning point in the Iraq war's public relations campaign, questions remain about the telling of her story and about the roles of the Pentagon and the U.S. news media in turning the petite, 19-year-old Army private into the face of good battling evil.

The final story hasn't been told, and no one contests Lynch's bravery.

Iraqi doctors who treated her say they worked hard to save her life, they deny reports that she was slapped by an Iraqi officer and they insist there was no resistance when the U.S. forces raided the building.

Despite her pain and fear, Jessica Lynch sipped juice and ate biscuits under the watchful eye of Iraqi doctors and nurses who shielded her from thugs during her eight days of captivity in an Iraqi hospital in March.

.... Experts in propaganda say the tale fit all too nicely into the neat story line the Bush administration wanted to push and the American public wanted to hear at a time when the war didn't appear to be going very well.

"I recognized the pattern: She was being made into an important symbol," said Robert Ivie, an Indiana University expert in communication, culture and the rhetoric of war. "She stood for the narrative that the Bush administration was telling."

In its handling of the story, the Pentagon was taking its cues from the White House, which had sent a former Bush election campaign official to Central Command's Qatar base to manage the daily briefings to 700 journalists there.

Pentagon officials say any suggestion that the Lynch rescue was concocted is ridiculous. They blame any exaggerations on the media. "Both the Department of Defense and the folks at CENTCOM (Central Command) tried very hard to tamp down a lot of the stories and speculation about (Lynch) and her circumstances," Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. David Lapan said.

The Pentagon insists it didn't embellish the Lynch story when it announced the rescue at its Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar.

But a few targeted whispers to reporters by anonymous U.S. officials -- about Lynch's "to-the-death" gunbattle before she was captured, her supposed gunshot wounds and her mistreatment at the hospital -- set the plate for a feast by TV networks and newspapers that couldn't resist such a made-for-TV story line.