Reporting War

Journalism in Wartime

Stuart Allan, Barbie Zelizer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134298655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed.

Each of this book's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today.

Special attention is devoted to recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war, and issues discussed, amongst many, include:

• the influence of censorship and propaganda
• 'us' and 'them' news narratives
• access to sources
• '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect'
• military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage')
• 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters
• tensions between objectivity and patriotism.

The book raises important questions about the very future of journalism during wartime, questions which demand public dialogue and debate, and is essential reading for students taking courses in news and news journalism, as well as for researchers, teachers and practitioners in the field.

Part 1

WAR IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

1

UNDERSTANDING

The second casualty

Oliver Boyd-Barrett

War reporting as genre

War reporting as a distinct category of journalism, a genre, is a generally taken-for-granted feature of our information environment. This chapter explores the implications of the genre for our (mis)understanding of wars and of the periods of “peace” that allegedly separate them. In particular, I argue that the genre obfuscates the reasons why the media focus on some wars rather than others, often fail to capture both the deep-level and proximate causes of wars or explain their actual durations and aftermaths, and hide the extent of media manipulation by official monopolization of information flows. The genre is not well suited to covert and “designer” wars (such as the war on drugs). More importantly, I argue that the genre plays into the hands of power, and this is nowhere more apparent than the media’s failure to identify the metanarratives or grand strategies that explain the links between different wars over extended periods of time. In effect, therefore, the genre of war reporting serves a propaganda purpose. Its generic character has been exploited by state and other propagandists in ways that cripple the capacity of media consumers to make useful sense of the world. A celebrated model of media complicity with propagandists in supposedly democratic societies, the “propaganda model” of Herman and Chomsky (1988), only weakly explains the absoluteness of complicity in times of war, and I extend this model to include the element of penetration of media by intelligence services in conjunction with the wars discussed here.

Knightley’s study, The First Casualty (1975, reprinted 2002) offers a set of classic examples of war-reporting-as-genre. He traversed the Crimea, US Civil War, Boer War, World War I, Russian Revolution, Abyssinia, Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Algeria, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and Yugoslavia, offering a series of massive, violent conflicts that nearly all involved organized, “regular” armed forces of distinguishable enemies, often nation-states, or of warring regions, ethnicities or social classes within nation-states whose legitimacy was contested.

Reporting war, especially combat, has always been typically dangerous, demanding great resourcefulness in gathering and transmitting information. Journalists may unthinkingly subscribe to or knowingly comply with the objectives, ideologies, and perspectives of one or another side to a conflict. Alternately, they must struggle to make sense of the “big picture” in resistance to information monopolies imposed by state and military. Such challenges and difficulties are the essence of war reporting, and these attributes figure into the genre of war reporting that results.

Problems of genre contour or boundary as the nature of conflict undergoes change are to be expected. Genres routinely exhibit transformations and yield hybrid forms in response to changing circumstances, artists’ search for new expression, or changes in audience preferences and decoding skills. Genre is not only about text but is also a feature of the “routinization” of production that shapes audience reception and perception as much as it is shaped by them. Traditional conflicts between antagonists who are identifiable in terms of geography, ideology, character, and interest serve important production as well as textual functions. Classic warfare is the epitome of a “good story,” high in tension and drama, with complex main plots and sub-plots played out within traditional binary oppositions of aggressor and victim, winner and loser. While expensive to cover, warfare is commercially rewarding for the media, since its threat and unfolding ignite insatiable audience appetite for news. Advertisers may initially fear the risk of juxtaposing products with unsavory and unsettling issues, but they soon benefit from higher audience numbers and from the potential for linking merchandise with the semiotics of patriotism. War provides a reason and a focus for news editors in their decision-making about deployment of resources, identification of sources and commentators, and news agendas. War provides a ritualistic challenge, testing, and evaluation, that call upon extraordinary resources and resourcefulness from media institutions, journalists, technicians, and other support workers. Their collective experiences feed the stuff of professional legend, confirming and renewing the narrative of what it means to be a “journalist.” The genre draws from and feeds into other forms of media production, including motion pictures and television series, and all these in turn shape audience perceptions of and expectations about warfare and how the media should cover war.

Casualties of war reporting

Choice of war

The media are highly selective in their focus on wars and conflict. A war that does not attract media attention is not therefore unimportant, of low intensity or scale; nor is it necessarily of scant strategic importance to Western interests. While the United States prepared to invade Iraq in 2003 and the media, especially television news, beat the drums for war, there was equally if not potentially more serious tension brewing between the United States and North Korea. The evidence of actual or imminent, hostile, nuclear capability in the case of North Korea was more compelling than in the case of Iraq. Yet North Korea reporting was completely overshadowed by Iraq. War with Iraq suited the US administration’s game-plan of reshaping the Middle East—a highly influential, controversial, “neoconservative” policy that had mixed pro-Israel, anti-Arab overtones at the service of control over world energy reserves, specifically, and US global hegemony, in general. Before the dangers of post-war destabilization of Iraq became apparent, the war promised to boost the likelihood of electoral success for the Republicans in 2004, and it offered stunning profits for the military-industrial complex from the sales of military equipment and reconstruction contracts.

Military and civilian casualties experienced by the US, Afghanistan and Iraq between 2001 and 2003 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 (Kiley 2003). Western interests in the Congo were considerable, but they had little motivation for publicity. Several gigantic European enterprises (notably Belgian and French) have large holdings in the Congo, and most of the country’s external trade is with European states. The DRC is of especial interest to the US and Japan for its resources of coltan, used in computer chips and other electrical products. Vast oil reserves are believed to lie near Lake Albert in the province of Ituri, center of some of the most vicious bloodletting. US reporter Wayne Madsen provided congressional testimony in May 2001 that the US was using private military contractors in the DRC, and that American companies, including one linked to former President George Bush senior “were stoking up the conflict for military gain” (Lokongo 2002). Fighting continued until a tenuous truce in April 2003 and the formation of transitional government. In July 2003, the UN Security Council voted to impose an arms embargo on the DRC, but Britain and the US stood in the way of extending the embargo to include Rwanda and Uganda, which backed the militias that were slaughtering in eastern provinces (Kiley 2003). Wars, however grave, in which Western interests promote their goals through proxy participants, many of whom have only a partial understanding, at best, of the powers that support them (with or without the presence of covert Western forces or mercenaries), are less likely to command mainstream media attention than wars that directly engage the formal armed services of Western powers and that require manifest accountability to their respective governments.

Causes of war

Causes of warfare are typically problematic. I draw a distinction between proximate and deep-level strategic causes. At another level are broader, longer-term, non-strategic causes unlikely to be decipherable in their entirety by the actors involved, but which will be pried to the surface by historians. Proximate causes have curious relationships to deep-level causes. The “aggression” of one party, for example, may have been provoked by an apparent “victim,” representing pre-emptive retaliation against the “victim’s” maneuver toward its own, unspoken, deep-level ambitions. Proximate causes are generally those cited by the participants, often formulaic and often bogus. The opening gambits of warfare occur when journalists are most vulnerable to manipulation by official sources. In contemporary warfare officialdom seeks to monopolize communication flows by limiting journalistic access to sanitized information from official sources, by rationing transportation and communications facilities, excluding non-approved journalists from military protection and facilities, keeping journalists out altogether—as in Grenada (1983) and Panama (1989), corralling select numbers into press “pools”—as in the Falklands (1982), Grenada (1983), Panama (1989), Afghanistan (2001), and Gulf War I (1991–2) (Thrall 2000), or “embedding” them within military units—as in Gulf War II (2003).

Official controls are also most likely to work effectively in the opening stages of conflict. Issues of legality and morality may be under-articulated or unclear. Critiquing the US administration while troops initiate combat attracts accusations of lack of patriotism, even treason (especially if reporters attend diligently to information from the opponents’ side), and endanger journalists’ already restricted access to official sources and to the battlefield. This very moment when proximate and deep-level causes of war should be open to rigorous analysis is also the time when such analysis is most difficult and least popular. Dissection and disputation of causes can be a heady, intellectual, wordy, controversial exercise, at a time when the media are most of all preoccupied with covering the action, at the behest, they would say, of audience interest. Wars can and often do start with greatly insufficient attention to the possible multiplicity of real causes; if, when war formally begins, journalists have sacrificed context, the chances that they will recover it in time, before the issues become history, are not encouraging. The problems are compounded when journalists and audiences are ignorant as to the locations of battle, their cultures and societies, as was the case in Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq, in both 1990–1 and 2003.

Confusion over the causes and preludes to war is a common failing in war reporting, which makes impossible an assessment by citizens about the meaning-fulness of the very combat that is its focus. This was as true of the second Gulf War in 2003 as of the first in 1990. The intelligentsia was better informed the second time: they had studied the lies of the first war; were aware of the controversial impact of UN sanctions on the civilian population (especially children) and of the “no fly zones” imposed by the US and Britain, and many doubted the claims from Washington and London that Iraq posed an immediate threat to the US or was in possession of significant stockpiles of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Such doubts fuelled unprecedented worldwide anti-war mass demonstrations. A second difference was the speed with which the rationale for war collapsed after initial combat, during the first weeks of occupation. Increasingly, it appeared that the case had been built on exaggerations and outright deceptions. This was no surprise to anyone who had followed many of the “alternative” news websites that provided day-to-day critical analysis drawn from a much wider diversity of sources than available through the mainstream US media, and from long before the war started as well as during and after the war. Among main-stream US media, however, the networks (terrestrial and cable news channels in the US) uniformly banged the drums for war long before the onset of invasion. During the war, television networks’ news frames complied fully with US administration policy: they represented war as a necessary response to an immediate threat by Iraq, justifiable even without UN sanction, whose resulting consequences of death and destruction, both military and civilian, were inevitable sacrifices. Within that frame there was scope for mild disagreement among the Pentagon-vetted ex-military network commentators as to whether sufficient numbers of troops had been deployed and whether initial combat strategies were appropriate. But no network acknowledged the appropriateness of an entirely alternative frame—namely that Iraq did not pose a significant threat to the US, that the invasion did not have UN sanction but constituted an aggressive breach of Iraqi sovereign territory which the Iraqis were fully justified in defending, and that the consequences of war in terms of death and destruction amounted to war crimes attributable to the US and its allies (Boyd-Barrett 2003b). Unlike television news, the mainstream press captured a broader range of perspectives in the period leading up to the war and occasionally achieved significant exposures (including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s apparent acquiescence to Iraqi use of chemical weapons in its war with Iran in the 1980s), but there was a customary lack of outrage in face of growing evidence of subterfuge in the US administration’s diplomacy and its case for war. Both before and during the war, the press was slow to acknowledge the extent to which it had been routinely duped by misinformation and fabrication (including the highly staged toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein, and the Hollywood-style make-believe attention to the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch). Neither television nor the press seemed capable of assessing and listening carefully to non-government expert sources, including that of former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who had argued that the UN had indeed detected and supervised the destruction of most weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and that any left in early 2003 would be inoperative.

Press controls and manipulation

War reporting is generally one sided. The media typically cover war from the point of view of the country in which they and their major owners and readers are based, reflecting the point of view of that country’s government and its foreign policy elites. In part this reflects the difficulty that the media face in gaining protected access to other parties, and when correspondents dare to try to achieve such access they provoke charges of treason. Recent improvements in communications technologies have removed some of the physical impediments to multilateral coverage, but there is little evidence so far of these being seriously put to use by mainstream media for the purposes of achieving greater balance and a broader perspective. Western reporting of the wars in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) were stories told by Western correspondents reporting from Western positions speaking to (mainly approved) Western political and military sources, mainly about Western military personnel, strategies, successes, and, less often, failures, and backed with comments from (often vetted) Western military “experts.” This myopia might be attributed to media reluctance to be seen as relying on “unreliable,” “censored,” or “unverifiable” reports, a hypocritical position that is blind to media dependence on government or military sources of their own side for their most regular, professionally scripted or staged, and above all safe information, disinformation or lies.

When Gulf War I broke in 1990–1, the White House, putting into practice the lessons it had learned from the Falklands War and from the US invasions of Grenada and Panama during the 1980s, knew how to implement its strategy of “control by press pool.” Several pools were organized, although few saw combat. Those journalists not selected for pool...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1 War in the Twenty-First Century
• part 2 Bearing Witness
• Part 3 Reporting the Iraq War
• Index