Some people have very strange ideas about the way events in Iraq are reported. Not just people in general, not just people in Downing Street and the White House, but journalists.
"I wouldn't mind going to Baghdad for a bit," a cameraman friend of mine said the other day, "but I don't like the idea of being stuck in the Green Zone with nothing to film."
Well, as far as I know, there are no journalists working in the Green Zone nowadays. Even Fox TV, which sticks pretty close to the US military, is based outside. Every news organization which has a permanent presence in Baghdad -- and there are fewer and fewer of them -- operates in the city itself. So why do people like my cameraman friend think we are stuck permanently inside the Green Zone? Because other journalists, who might be expected to know better, tell them so.
Journalists like Rageh Omaar. I have got a lot of affection for Omaar, and I am looking forward to his forthcoming show on al-Jazeera International. But when he was interviewed in the press recently, he revealed some very strange ideas about the way his former colleagues at the BBC report the most important news story in the world at present.
This is how the he was quoted: "It is time," he said, "for news organizations to `fess up' and make clear that many of the pictures that comprise what are effectively `pooled reports' have been shot by anonymous Iraqi freelancers, whilst the Western journalists have remained inside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. If we as an industry don't grapple with the question of putting up a health warning then we will slowly but surely have some of the legitimacy sapped from us."
In his defence, Omaar has not been to Baghdad much since former president Saddam Hussein's fall, and things there have changed out of all recognition.
I am certain, too, that he did not mean to snipe at his former BBC colleagues.
But those of us who report from Baghdad regularly -- I try to go every six weeks or so -- know there is not a word of truth in any of this. We do not remain inside the Green Zone, there are no pooled reports and there have not been any for three years now, and our pictures are not shot by anonymous freelancers.
The BBC, from its ancient, uncomfortable house in the center of Baghdad, maintains a basic team of about nine people, not counting locally-engaged staff: a full-time correspondent, the redoubtable Andrew North, who took over from the equally brave Caroline Hawley; a second correspondent, who comes in from London or one of the BBC's foreign bureaus for six weeks at a time; a bureau chief, also from London, and also for six weeks; two British, South African or Australian contract cameramen; a satellite engineer; and three security staff, usually ex-SAS or ex-Marines. People like me, the tourists, come for particular news events.
The locally-employed staff include translators, cameramen, an engineer and an editorial team that works for the BBC Arabic service.
And there are the stalwarts who keep our entire operation going: drivers, security men, a cook, some cleaning ladies. In getting to work, they put up with daily dangers that the rest of us can scarcely comprehend. So what is it Omaar wants us to confess to?
"Some of us, I feel, are engaged in some kind of a small fraud on the British public, the readers and viewers," he said.
"I feel very uncomfortable that we are not putting a health warning on reports from Iraq because not to do so lends an enormous legitimacy. We are saying Channel 4 or the BBC or Reuters or ABC can vouch for this, when individual journalists are not so certain," he said.
I am sorry Omaar thinks his former colleagues turn into fraud-sters when they go to Baghdad. I am happy to assure him that they operate in precisely the same way as they do everywhere else; as he did, indeed, when he worked for the BBC in Baghdad three years ago.
We do not cower in the Green Zone, waiting for US or British officials to spin us duff stories or for unknown cameramen to flog us dodgy bits of video that then receive some sort of credibility from our reporting.
The BBC Baghdad bureau works exactly like each of our other bureaus around the world. We do our own reporting, and, like every major TV news organization, we have access to the work of the two big agencies, Reuters and Associated Press Television News.
Their Iraqi cameramen, who are neither anonymous nor freelance, film just about everything that happens in Iraq; and we use their material in Iraq just as we use it everywhere else, because we know it is good and trustworthy. And when it is too dangerous for us and our Iraqi staff to get out, we find out what is happening the old-fashioned way -- by ringing people up and asking them.
Of course, for a team of Westerners to drive around Baghdad or film out in the open can be tricky, and it needs careful planning with our security advisers. But things at present seem to be marginally easier than they have been. In Baghdad last month, I went out filming in the streets almost every day, and felt pretty relaxed about it. North and Kate Peters, the bureau chief who has just left Baghdad after a six-week stint, have been doing the same.
Driving out of Baghdad is too dangerous at present, but the intrepid agency cameramen -- the real heroes, I would say, of the entire war -- give us a remarkably accurate picture of what is going on elsewhere in Iraq.
Speaking of heroes, some foreign journalists in Baghdad have done a remarkable job: Patrick Cockburn of the Independent, for instance, who travels round Iraq in a way no TV crew is able to; and some of the American journalists, who have not had as much praise in Britain as they deserve.
Knight Ridder, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and others have done a first-class job in describing the slow collapse of Iraq, even though many of their advertisers and readers probably do not want to hear this kind of bad news.
And the BBC? Well, I am immeasurably proud of it for staying the course in Baghdad when no other British, and few international, broadcasters are willing to put up the effort and the money. It is a real achievement to have our people there permanently, charting events day by day and telling the world what is going on in spite of the problems and the mounting cost.
I simply do not agree with Omaar that the legitimacy of TV news has been sapped by our reporting from Baghdad.
On the contrary, I think our work there gives us even greater legitimacy. It is, as I say, the world's biggest news story; and just because it is difficult and sometimes dangerous, that does not give us the right to turn our backs on it.
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