Must truth be the first casualty in war reporting?

The era of manufacturing consent has given way to the era of manufacturing news. Soon media news rooms will drop the pretence and start hiring theatre directors instead of journalists. – ARUNDHATI ROY


Introduction

The society in general would like to believe that it is the responsibility of media organizations to report the truth, especially in times of conflict. But the past shows that the rapport between the media and the military and that between the media and the government has been rather edgy when it comes to war reporting.

War coverage comprises of certain distinctive features that distinguishes it from the other routine forms of reporting. It is undoubtedly the toughest and also the most exciting time for the media. Toughest because of the obstacles & dangers journalists face reporting the conflict and exciting because, apart from the sense of worth it gives journalists, war coverage attracts large audiences. According to a report by usatoday.com (http://www.usatoday.com/life/world/iraq/2003-04-08-cable-news-main_x.html - 04.09.03) “In the first 19 days of the war, Fox averaged 3.3 million viewers, a 236% increase from the weeks preceding the war.” This clearly substantiates the fact that war is a very profitable time for media organizations.

However, coverage of war gives rise to several significant questions about truth. The key questions that come to mind are
· Whether it at all possible for journalists, media heads and governments to be completely objective and truthful at a vulnerable period such as war.
· Is absolute truth desirable at a time when a country is going through a major upheaval?
· Whether the media’s news agenda more representative of the patriot in them, when it comes to war reportage.
· Are ethnic minorities, third world inhabitants and economically backward nations ‘media’s unpeople’ during war?
· Do commercial demands, government pressure, technological advancement and military constraints change the real picture of war?

This essay hopes to uncover the moral fiber of journalists & media organizations during wartimes, understand the characteristic features of war reportage and its impact on the lives of civilians and finally seeks to find out whether truth is being mollified at the cost of political, economic and personal vested interests and if so, is it justified?

Journalists at war

According to Philip Seib (2002 p.94) “Journalists must wade through a flood of propaganda from various parties, some of it crafted and disseminated with considerable skill.” He further adds that reporters also have to face many ‘logistical obstacles’ like safety, access to certain areas, military pressure and government and organization demands, which limit the reporters’ chances of developing the story completely and accurately. This is why it is often speculated that the role of the reporter as the gatherer of truth undergoes a major transformation during wartimes, and that truth is in danger of becoming the first casualty of war reporting.

History shows that war reporting has frequently been exaggerative and misleading. During the civil war in America war correspondents were given legendary status but “the legend conveniently overlooks the fact that the majority of the northern correspondents were ignorant, dishonest and unethical; that the dispatches they wrote were frequently inaccurate, often invented, partisan and inflammatory.”(Knightly, 2000 p.21) Robert C. Miller a correspondent covering the Korean War states that certain facts and figures from Korea were purely fabricated by editors, and despite knowing this they had to be written by correspondents like him as they were official releases from military headquarters. (Knightly, 2000 p.1)

In Iraq these days, the U.S. military is reportedly spending millions of dollars planting stories and paying local journalists to write friendly coverage in Arabic newspapers. (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/1204-21.html : 4th December 2005)

It can be seen from the above examples that truth is constantly being blemished. One more stereotype of bogus reporting can be observed when it comes to casualty figures. Seib (2002 p.96) mentions in his book that in 1999 for example NATO reported 10,000 Albanians killed in the Kosovo war while a report from the International criminal tribunal a year later confirmed that it was only 3000. These outright fabrications have far reaching implications.

Implications of misinformation

“If people really new the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow” – David Lloyd George during the First World War. .”(Knightly, 1975 p.87)
The above given statement as I interpret it, is that common man doesn’t really want to wage war but it is the government policy which does and tags him along, in some cases brainwashing and feeding fears of attack and danger and thus arousing panic and fear.
Governments are known to use massive PR operations in convincing people about the inevitability of war. According to a report the US government paid $397,000 to the PR firm Rendon group ‘to help Pentagon look good while bombing Afghanistan.’ (http://www.fair.org/media-beat/011025.html: 25th October 2001) During war each side wants to believe about the hostility of the other side, but the fact remains that neither knows what the truth is. Public brainwashing and propaganda are the powerful tools used by government and media in order to garner support for an impending victory from which no one really benefits.
What are the implications of this? If we were to take the recent example of September 11 and the Iraq war - Almost 200,000 Iraqis and thousands of Afghans are dead for crimes not committed by them, half a million Iraqi children have lost their lives, 2/3rds of Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the September 11 attacks, President George Bush was voted back to power by a thumping majority, 53% British suffer from Islamophobia according to a yougov poll conducted in 2006 and clearly in the past 5 years we’ve seen a massive flourish in terrorism. All these examples depict public minds mired in false indoctrination.

This particular anecdote exemplifies the tremendous power the government guards over the media and the effect it can have on twisting the minds of the community.

“Iraqi soldiers were reviled for dumping Kuwaiti babies out of incubators, cruelly leaving them to die on cold hospital floors. This was the height of savagery, demanding a response. Nayirah, a Kuwaiti teenager, testifying before the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus Committee in October, 1990, told of how as a volunteer at the Al-Idar Hospital, she witnessed the horrific scene of Iraqi soldiers brutally tossing newborns from their incubators. Such was Iraqi disrespect for life. This was how Iraq treated the defenseless. But long after the story inflamed the world's indignation, reporters discovered it was pure fiction, carefully crafted with the help of the PR firm Hill and Knowlton. And far from being an impartial witness, Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US.” (http://www.mediamonitors.net/gowans13.html: 19th June 2001) What was the result of this? Well, public support had been effectively congregated on totally false grounds and “Americans were firmly onside their government’s decision to bomb Baghdad back to middle ages.”
There are however counter opinions which pronounce that truth about war is better kept under wraps. Katherine Graham (owner of Washington Post) in her speech at CIA’s Langley Virginia headquarters in 1988 says “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know about and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.” (http://www.wanttoknow.info/secrecygraham: 2nd May 2004)

The captors of truth

“In [many cases], the U.S. and other western news media depend on the military for information.... And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the casualty list.” – (William M. Arkin, Media principles: Killed by friendly fire in US info war, Index on Censorship, 13 November 2002)
Journalists, editors, governments and military – all are evenly responsible captors of truth. Each although has different reasons for keeping it under the veil. “War reporting is generally one sided. The media typically cover war from the point of view of the country in which they are their major owners and readers are based, reflecting the point of view of that country’s government and its foreign policy elites.” (Allan and Zelizer, 2004 p. 29) Is it then possible, for the truth to come out?

For the government and the military, the media is ideally its mouthpiece to persistently defend itself for going to war and present a favorable picture to their citizens. From their perspective maintaining positive public opinion is of utmost importance. “Governments often expect unquestioning compliance from the media during periods of tension, behaving during pre war hostilities in much the same way as during war itself” (Carruthers, 2000 p.52) Absolute loyalty and patriotism is demanded from the media but as Carruthers further adds, during war the gap between loyalty towards ones country and support for government policy is gradually blurred. There are however examples of the media not having succumbed to government pressures – the BBC for example during the Iraq war maintained an evenhanded approach despite persistent pressures from the British government.

Military control of information during war is a major factor leading to deceptive facts and propaganda. “The military often manipulates the mainstream media, by restricting or managing what information is presented and hence what the public are told. For them it is paramount to control the media. This can involve all manner of activities, from organizing media sessions and daily press briefings, or through providing managed access to war zones, to even planting stories. This happened throughout the twentieth century” (Anup Shah - http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Media/M ilitary.asp – 31.03.05) A Fine example of this would be the media censorship during the Falklands war when “media pools were at the mercy of military minders.” (McLaughlin, 2002 p.79)

It is not only the government & military pressures although that stops journalists from reporting the truth. Demanding editors and work pressures, the hunger for the big story, the prerequisite of military support and the issue of patriotism brings about a dilemma in journalists which has seriously affected objective war coverage and has often made them forgo their ethics and resort to taking sides.

Tom Cook of the New York Herald wrote in a letter to his editor during the American civil war in which he said “I think the navy department could be induced to procure of us an outside vessel which we might call our own were (we) to promise that the navy department would be exempt from attacks in the columns of the Herald” (Knightly, 2000 p.24). Knightly also shares an anecdote of a journalist in the American civil war being bought off for cigars and whiskey. When such is the situation, reporting the truth becomes extremely difficult and it becomes almost mandatory to act as propaganda machines on behalf of ‘our boys’.

It is interesting to study in this context, what is labeled by BBC correspondent turned MP Martin Bell as the journalism of attachment.

Journalism redefined during war

War reporting has gone through a series of changes due to a number of historical and technological reasons. New concepts of ‘journalism’ such as the journalism of attachment and more famously embedded journalism have sprung up, giving war reporting a whole new makeup. But whether these offshoots are conducive to the practice of truth or not is an important question.

The journalism of attachment in Bell’s own words ‘cares as well as knows’. According to Mick Hume (1997 P.4) “The journalism of attachment says that reporters cannot remain detached from modern evils like genocide in Bosnia or Rwanda, but must side with victims and demand that something must be done.” This he says gives rise to a tendency among journalists to be moral judges and take sides. He says that having investigated and researched, they are entitled to their own opinion but more often than not they tend to get “evidence mixed up with their emotions, so that they risk what they want to see rather than reporting all that is there.” What Hume is trying to stress here is that the concept of ‘bystander journalism’ where the reporter is merely a spectator is dying out and journalists are getting more and more involved in a fight against the evil and to prove their point they often tend to go overboard. However according to Bell “objective, dispassionate journalism has its place but not in the midst of some brutal war or human calamity.”(McLaughlin, 2002 p.154)

A more blatant step further would be the concept of embedded journalism. As a means to granting a higher level of access, the military offered the media to join them in the combat zone as embeds. This is basically how embedded journalism came up – where in the journalist is not merely a spectator but a participant in the war. This obviously meant fuller coverage and more comprehensive detailing in reporting but according to critics it would give rise to sympathetic and one sided reports that were soft on the military.

According to Oliver Boyd Barrett (Allan & Zelizer 2004, p.30) the objective of embedded journalism during the 2nd gulf war in 2003 was “to stifle dissent, garner unquestioning support and rally around a common symbol.” He shares instances of how the US administration would give an agenda for the messages of the day to the reporters and how they were made to sign 50 contractual conditions wherein they were given a list of things they were not supposed to report on.

A few examples…

This tendency of the media to give biased or partial information can be evidently seen in the manner in which they represent the views of war parties in a conflict. According to Philo and Berry (2004, p.259) in the Israel – Palestine conflict the media has often misrepresented the Palestinians either by simply giving excess coverage the Israelis or by failing to provide the Palestinian rationale. According to their study “words such as ‘mass murder’, ‘savage cold-blooded killing’ and ‘lynching’ were used by journalists to describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs.’ This according to them is directly liked to pressure, lobbying and international relations between countries.

America’s ‘war on terror’ in Afghanistan garnered implausible television coverage not only by the American home media but also from the media around the world, and most interestingly from Al Jazeera, the Arab channel. The coverage by both, the American media (Fox, CNN, and CBS) and Al Jazeera has been widely criticized for being partisan, biased and misleading to certain beliefs and organizations. Al Jazeera was criticized for developing into a mouthpiece for Bin Laden by airing his tapes which urged people to join the “holy war” thus flaring the Arab society’s anger towards the US. On November 12th 2001 the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul was bombed America, which they claimed was by mistake. According to Naomi Sakr this was because “Al Jazeera’s exclusivity negated the American and British efforts to control the flow of information and to restrain the footage transmitted from Afghanistan” (Zayani 2005, p. 161-62)

Fox, CNN and other American channels and press on the other hand were criticized for being predisposed to the government and being unabashedly pro-American in its war stance. “Patriotic journalism was particularly pronounced in the weeks after the attacks. Fox News channel anchors and local television reporters wore red, white and blue ribbons on their lapels. Led by CNN, the networks displayed logos covered in the US flag. Local and regional newspapers featured star and stripes colors and ribbons in their covers. In David Letterman’s show, CBS news anchor Dan Rather declared himself to be ready to receive orders from President Bush. Journalism made gestures that show cultural membership of the national community.” - Silovio Waisbord (Zelizer and Allan, 2002 p.206) Thus it can be seen here that it has been extremely difficult to get an unmarred picture of any of these modern conflicts and truth is inexorably lost somewhere in the middle as different propaganda is thrown from different sides.

Conclusion

“The dust-storms of propaganda which are created by those seeking to defend their ‘own side’, will in the end do nothing more than to prolong the conflict” (Philo and Berry 2004, p.259)

I feel war itself is a consequence of different interpretations of the truth. And unfortunately war makes news where as peace doesn't and this is exactly the quirk of fate that pins down journalists. It is easier said than done, to draw a distinction between the integrity of one’s profession and a sense of partisanship towards one’s nation, beliefs, people, military, government and organization and this is precisely the constraint that reporters face during war. In such a situation it is very difficult to accomplish the complete truth. But if a logical balance is to be struck then it is very important for journalists and media organizations to objectively look at the other side. It is important to probe deep into the causes of conflict, accurately follow up its development, understand restrained contexts, dig up historical circumstances and then probably determine the nature of their judgment. By not doing so, not only are they doing a disservice to their profession, but also changing the course of history on the basis of which much of today’s public opinion and many future decisions, reactions, prejudices and verdicts rest.

It is also immensely crucial for the media to alter their ‘principle of selectivity’ when it comes to war reportage. Unseeing certain conflict because it doesn’t stimulate publicity or signify geo-political interests is as much an offense as not reporting truth is. Kiley (2003) notes about the media’s un-coverage of third world conflicts “Military and civilian casualties experienced by the US and Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2004 were grave, but tiny in comparison with those in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) (formerly Zaire), where four million lives were lost between 1997 and 2003, more than any since world war II” (Cited in Allan and Zelizer, 2004 p.27)

The media must remember that they bear a particular responsibility to their readers and watchers and that they influence their psyche to a large extent. And this is rightly why truth must espouse over all other considerations.