Words: 3,276
Introduction
Truth for the majority of mankind is a fact which has been verified or as per the Concise Dictionary of English “a concept or system of concepts, regarded as accurately representing some aspects of the world, the universe”. Journalists and reporters very often don’t check their sources properly as Nick Davies writes page after page in Flat Earth News. The maxim “In war, truth is the first casualty” does not come from Senator Hiram Johnson (it doesn’t appear in any of his speeches) as Arthur Ponsonby states in his Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War (1928). The quote is attributed (but not sourced!) to the fifth century BC Greek dramatist, Aeschylus, author of Armageddon. As that play shows us, truth is at the centre of any human conflict. For different purposes in times of war and conflict, truth is hidden, distorted and very few times spoken. How (the hell?) can media represent the truth in times of conflict and war? Is/was Max Hastings right when claiming that reporting was an “extension part of the war effort”? We will look at the challenges facing the media and specifically war/conflict reporters and journalists : factors influencing objectivity, the context and the object of reporting.
To give a framework, we will look at times of pre and post conflicts and the live reporting during such hostilities. We will look at a few examples in the total wars (Word War I), localised conflicts like the Gulf War I (20 years ago – without celebrations from today’s press), one-on-one wars such as the Falklands/Malvinas conflict and internal wars. Avoiding the “war on terror” which is not one – as terrorism in its essence is based on elusiveness and hence such acts are not stricto sensu a war but a feud, we will reflect on how journalists can be tricked into ignoring the truth or facts and the reasons for such “attitudes”. We will ask the question if lessons can be learned (finally) on war and conflict reporting and how neutrality and impartiality need to be part of the media in an increasingly internet-based and warfare world.
PART I: Pre-conflicts and Propaganda
During Aeschylus’ time, battles and conflicts were reported by the military apparatus and over history by writers, citizens, spies, diplomats, the religious, journalists, reporters, and nowadays internet users. Very often, the reporting of conflicts is a very challenged matter for the would–be neutral and impartial observer.
As in the case of many human oppositions, there is always a three-period phase in a war: pre-conflict, hostilities and post-hostilities. Such a structure will allow us to analyse some tangent trends in the propaganda of different parties in hostilities during such times and the difficulties of reporting. But what is the role of the media during such periods? Are the reporters and their team representing the military view, the politicians from the home side or the victims of such conflicts? The analysis of some elements in the different parties propaganda prior to a state of war reveals some interesting findings.
In the pre-war or conflict times, Susan Carruthers in her book, The Media at War (2000), exposes the intrinsically antithetic paradox of the media: either following the war machine apparatus propaganda and presenting a nationalistic view to the readers or viewers or being independent, neutral, impartial and investigative at the risk of being labelled a traitor and losing contacts. For the governments across the world, the media is the support to tell the Nation of the necessity of war, the narrowing of, and the possibility of starting hostilities imminently. Tony Blair’s statement to the British Parliament of the 45-minute strike of Britain by Iraq weapons of mass destruction and the following media frenzy, reflects such a stance. At that time, the BBC instead of accepting such a fact as the truth sent Andrew Gilligan to enquiry about such a claim. This is how media should react to all sorts of pre-war propaganda whatever the “boomerang effect” (the controversial Hutton Report in this case). Such an example of falsehood relating to non-existent facts and WMD shows the extend of prefabricated stories prior to a conflict.
In the Frontline, In Search Of Truth In Wartime film documentary, John Pilger interviews a former CIA Intelligence Officer, Ralph McGehee, describing the incessant campaigns of disinformation targeting the press with white (or governmental statements), grey, and black propaganda (where you speak in the voice of your enemy). According to McGehee, in early 1965 in order to find a reason to get involved in the Vietnam conflict, the CIA sent 80 tons of weapons in a jonque to fake an invasion from North Vietnam to produce evidence to the US International Press Commission and the American public. Pictures and footage were sent to the TV networks showing the “evidence” that North Vietnam planned to invade the South imminently. Soon after that, a first battalion of US Marines started operation in the former French colony, and a week later, the US government launched operation Rolling Thunder, the start of the US-Vietnam War.
As it is not human nature to kill freely, in order to overcome such feelings, the production of the “necessity of illusions, fantasies and myths” is needed to overcome this natural human disinclination. As Adam Curtis analyses in The Power of Nightmares: “The way you do it is with propaganda”. In that framework, news is regarded by the army forces as a commodity to be manipulated, distorted or hidden for the final objective, victory. Either “noble lies” for Plato, “a big lie” for Hitler, a deception, untruth, or lie is needed to launch any war. This is a reason why semantically the first victim of war is the truth.
These different kinds of propaganda (white, grey and black) should always be kept in mind by the credible media, at any level, in order to keep the focus on objectivity. As time and conflicts show, this is rarely the case.
2 Media and Propaganda’s apparatus
The most efficient PR apparatus was developed by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister who infamously wrote: “News policy is a weapon of war” in his personal diary. According to Susan Carruthers, Goebbels took the British propaganda strategy of the First World War and applied it to the Nazi regime. Before WW1, the press in France and the UK was forced to publish material which, it was later found, had no foundation and were actually falsehoods.
From the British PM’s 45-minute claim to NATO statement that 100.000 Kosovo people died at the hands of the Serbian army – Milosovic was indicted for 498 killings by the International Court of Justice, slightly lower than the “collateral damages” (510 dead) suffered by civilians in the ex-Yugoslavia by NATO bombing– the times of pre-conflict are full of such stories which the press in its entirety report without double checking the facts. Obviously, the difficulty is “access” but more often the same old stories resurfaced.
The “Bayonet Baby Effect” atrocity is possibly the best paradigm of the disinformation campaigns or the manufacture of news. Always repeated, and always believed by reporters and journalists.
The Bayonet Baby Effect
At the beginning of the WW1 (1914), the British press were reporting that Germans were tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them with their bayonets like the Norman Lindsay described in his picture, The Bulletin (see Pictography reference).
Arthur Ponsonby (op cit.) reveals that same story and a similar one of babies having their hands cut off by Germans shortly after invading Belgium: “On September 2, 1914, The Times correspondent quotes French refugees declaring: "They cut the hands off the little boys so that there shall be no more soldiers for France."
However, Francesco Nitti, Italian Prime Minister during WW 1, stated in his memoirs: “We heard the story of poor little Belgian children whose hands were cut off by the Huns. (...) Mr. Lloyd George [then British PM] and myself carried out on extensive investigations as to the truth of these horrible accusations, some of which, at least, were told specifically as to names and places. Every case investigated proved to be a myth."
Philip Knightley in his monumental book, The First Casualty (p.486), describes the alleged atrocities when the Iraqi troops arrived in Kuwait City and tossed babies out of incubators to send those machines back to their country. A campaign was orchestrated by the Citizens of Free Kuwait with stories appearing in the Daily Telegraph, Reuters, L.A Times, and others, with the nexus being a young Kuwaiti woman in front of a US Congressional Causus on Human Rights describing how she lost her baby with the robbery of the incubators. Some sources said that due to the outrage of the American public, George Bush Sr. did a U-turn and started speaking more belligerently speech about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The young woman, Nayirah, was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador in the US and such a story, as it later emerged, was just part of the Kuwaiti in exile Government propaganda.
Such stories and similar ones (eg. the “rape camps” in Kosovo or the “death camps” in Bosnia[2]) constantly appear in the press before small or major conflicts. It is very often referred to the hitlerisation or demonisation of the enemy, the “other” (see. Stuart Allan in News Culture under “Us and Them : racism in the news” p.157 for further development on this specific issue). The role of each serious newspaper and channel is to check the veracity of such facts one way or another, whatever the atrocities. Failure to do so ends with the media’s worst enemy, loss of credibility.
Finally, such “psychological” imagery was used during the 1989 Romanian revolution and is still visible nowadays in the “Killing Fields” of Cambodia on large billboards showing a super-human Khmer Rouge soldier (on his own and at the same time) tossing and bayonetting a baby.
Conflicts in South East Asia have changed media conflict reporting and military propaganda. As we will see, freedom of reporting during war itself can bring disparate and complex situations on both sides.
Part II - War and conflict reporting in action
Freedom of reporting: Vietnam
The Vietnam War gave the press, the military forces and the world a glimpse of modern 20th century conflicts. Some called it the last “Freedom” war as journalists were free to roam around at their own risks, getting any stories which they could find and given a free ride or flight to file their story. It was the first TV war as images reached the audiences worldwide within hours of being shot. Technology was already a major part of reporting at large: the typewriter and telephone calls to the editors of the Korean War had given space to satellite slots, super 8 cameras and daily commercial flights between Saigon, the US and Europe. Images of bombings, executions, children suffering and the evacuation of US and European citizens from the US Embassy in Saigon and Phnom Penh still remain in adult minds worldwide.
It was also a war “lost” by the media as generals and politicians criticized numerous on occasions the lack of objectivity and patriotism on the part of American and Western reporters. John Pilger, a former reporter in Vietnam, put it simply as a failure due to “incompetence in a racist war”. Some in the French intelligentsia -as they like to be called- claim that the Vietnam War was the last colonial war. Generally, as time, academic studies and empirical evidences show, condemning the media as the culprits of such a defeat was a myth. As T. Allan in The Media of Conflict Chapter War Reporting (p.198) summed it up: ”the points of disagreement between members of the US political and military elite became more publicly salient, [as] more critical forms of reporting began to emerge to test the limits of the slowly fragmenting elite consensus”.
In Vietnam, hacks, young or old, only did their job by reporting what they were seeing in situ and following their own judgement. To the US army, it appeared that the freedom of press blindly granted to the media to report a war against “evil” didn’t pay any dividend in winning the conflict and the hearts at home. Added to this, the belief of un-patriotism on the part of foreign editors made an US general declare that in the future, “the press would have to be compelled to toe the line”. In other terms, the birth of what is generally referred to “embedded journalism”.
Total “Blackout” conflicts
When the Task Force was launched by Margaret Thatcher in April 1982 to regain control of South Georgia island and the Falklands, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) had already in place a mass-communication PR strategy. One of the main points was to have a total blackout of independent news reaching Britain and for this, the MOD had elaborated a plan to “contain” the press. One of the directives was to take “selected” journalists with “minders” on board the vessels (an action referred as “pooling”) and “giving them training and military suits” as if they were part of the British army. By the time the journalists reached the war zone, a sense of combined jingoism, patriotism and self-censorship and the reluctance of the British Navy to send the reporters’ messages to their editors in the UK, made the stories on the home ground pure propaganda. The British media was divided either supporting “their” boys (like the Murdoch press, The Economist and others) or offering the public a more neutral, objective and impartial view. Whatever the dilemmas at home, the MOD “won” the media war by applying a new press management in wartime and the war zone. In that strategic plans, they may have had Winston Churchill in mind:
“a warship in action has no space for a journalist”.
However, it was not only the British press, the Argentinians had the same approach by releasing only “good” and censored news like the success of the invasion and later the sinking of the Sheffield[3] but never mentioning the Argentinian forces surrendering (without resistance) in South Georgia.
As we have seen earlier, the pooling and “embracing” of British-only reporters in Her Majesty’s Navy produced stories through the press that were in line with what the MOD was seeking: reporters were the lawyers of the public interest. As Hallin and Gitlin put it: “Media in wartime aspire to reflect their public, by celebrating consensual values and emphasising their own responsiveness to the popular mood.” For some journalists, the “enrolment” was like being “totally prisoners of the MOD” (John Shirleys, Sunday Times). For others on the navy side, it was a perfect “controlled war” and “censors delight” (Morley Safer, CBS News). When Margaret Thatcher broke the news saying:
"Just rejoice at that news!” for once, it was the army and the government having the scoop! The same techniques of press containment were developed further in subsequent conflicts. The military forces from each country had learnt the lessons from Vietnam, the British MOD way of media management during the Falklands conflict, and its consequent mock exams by the US forces in Grenada (1983) and Panama (operation Just Cause in 1989). In this respect, more recently and being economical with the truth, the total blackout of the Sri Lanka war against the Tamils Tiger fighters (LLTE) follows that strategy to avoid “cameras on the battlefields” at all costs.
However, the Falklands War should have given the media a sense of the dangers in controlled reporting. Not at all.
3.3 Controlled and open Journalism
The first Iraq War (IW1) which started 20 years ago with the first air strike on Baghdad (17th Jan 1991) was reported live on CNN. It provided with hindsight a new trend that is still followed by most of the war reporters nowadays: “embedded journalism”. This pseudo-journalism is the attachment of reporters to the military forces. James Rodgers, former BBC war correspondent in Chechnya, rather speaks of the difference between “controlled” and “open” reporters which seems more accurate.
During the IW1 (1991) -and IW2 (2003)-, the propaganda machine of the Western allies was in perfect motion. Most of the reporters were in pools called Media Reporting Teams (MRT) with forbidden areas of reporting (eg. spontaneous interviews with servicemen, filming of injured soldiers, civilian casualties, etc.): anything which could have upset the viewers at home. As this was the first 24-hour TV war with a global broadcast, a concept emerged soon after the launch of operations: the “CNN effect“ where the military had to answer almost live on planned or spontaneous events to serve multiple different cultural audiences around the world.
Generals Schwartzkopf and Colin Powell became real celebrities giving their “blessings” urbi et orbi to the start of the operation Sand Storm and the bombardment of the Iraq “infrastructure”. As it soon appeared from the CNN images, civilians suffered heavy losses and new semantics emerged. Orwellian vocabulary like “collateral damage”, “surgical strikes”, “smart bombs”, were across the headlines in the reports from the front line. Hearing such terms for the first time, you thought you heard an unusual slip of tongue from Michael Buerk. Those terms reflect the “sanitising” of war “on grounds of tone and taste” (Knightley op cit.) from the first person who brought death and famine to the British viewers for their evening meal...
Such euphemisms were further developed during the IW2. But it is to the credit of some press organs (The Independent) that they withdrew their staff from the MRTs, and to some journalists such as John Simpson for the BBC or Brent Sadler from ITN, that they reported freely (according to their own words) from Baghdad. It is also to the credit and credibility of the BBC and CNN, at that time, that they broadcasted live from Iraq’s capital despite the critics and that they were nicknamed the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation and the “the voice of Saddam” for CNN.
John Simpson who was accused of being a puppet in the hands of Saddam Hussein declared that “the British public need to be better educated to war reporting”.
The IW1 (or Gulf War or even Persian war as it was/is still wrongly called) underlined the strategic approach of the military to control the reporters and the media in general and serve the global public with a new orwellian prose. Truth from the armed force side became a glossary of technological terms.
IW1 is still remembered as the first “Nintendo War” (in reference to the first console game) showing not the suffering and blood but graphic and night images. It was also the end of the Western unilateral view of the world with the emergence of new satellite channels like Al Jazeera.
These new concepts were renewed in other conflicts (Kosovo, Afghanistan) and in the second Iraq War which became the first Internet conflict reported live and the stuttering of citizen journalism.
Conclusion and further reflection
Very often truth and war are antinomic values. Philip Knightley (p.525) concludes regarding the conflict in Kosovo that: “The sad truth is that in the new millenium, government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skilfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide.” Indeed war correspondents are an endangered species, and not for the right reasons! The role of journalists in a new world media order is becoming increasingly more challenging. The Internet and its “citizen reporting” are still not prevailing and is very often a source of controversial facts and sometimes misinformation. The military forces and their propaganda support play with the medias in order to bias the public to whatever cause.
However, the new technological tools allow reporters to be independent, autonomous and in quasi-permanent contact with their office despite tighter budgets. But, unlike The Economist’s guideline for the IW1 (“The truth must await the end of the fighting”) and controlled or “pooled” journalists, the independent, objective, impartial and neutral reporter will become the voice of credibility and truth in any conflict zone. For this, he or she should learn from the “bayonet baby” effect, avoid honey traps and freebies from any side and put into context any military, political and commercial bias conflicts can bring. Finally, armed conflict reporters need to ignore the Douglas Hurd’s ostrich policy on Bosnia: “People reject and resent what is going on [massacres, ethnic cleansing] because they know it more vividly than before”, and follow Martin Bell “as if the world would be a better place if the killing continued and yet we knew nothing about it” (In Harm Way p.155) .
In a world where values are connected more with celebrities than philosophers, conflicts correspondents have an opportunity to provide impartial reporting and, infinitely but possibly: peace. As Aristotle wrote: “ΠΑΝΤΕΣ ΑΝΘΡΩΠΟΙ ΤΟΥ ΕΙΔΕΝΑΙ ΟΡΕΓΟΝΤΑΙ ΦΥΣΕΙ.” (“All humans by nature desire to know.” Metaphysics, Book 1) and with knowledge and truth, war and its horrors can remain memories of the past.
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Websites
France2 http://www.france2.fr/
France24 http://www.france24.com/fr/
The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/ (Accessed: 03 January 2011)
Rodgers, J. blog http://rodgersjamesm.livejournal.com/ Mining disasters, journalism, and justice (Accessed: 03 January 2011)
Filmography
Pilger, J (2001), Frontline, In Search Of Truth In Wartime, ITV
Pilger, J (2010), The War You Don't See, ITV
Coppola, F. (1979) Apocalypse Now, CMNI Zoetrope Production
Curtis, A. (2004), The Power of Nightmares (2004), BBC
Pictography
Lindsay, Norman (1916) The Bulletin
Teleography
BBC, BBC1 Ten O’Clock News
BBC, BBC2 Newsnight
BskyB, Sky News
CNN
France24 (Audiovisuel Exterieur de la France – AEF)
ITN, ITV News at Ten
