Introduction

How wars are reported is a long-running and fractious element of modern democracy. This book probes a deep-rooted struggle: the contest between the media and the military in which one side waves the banner of freedom of speech and the other trumpets the security of the state. Is this a result of a clash of cultures, or are the high-profile problems that sometimes occur in military– media relations the result of other pressures? As a much older institution, the military sometimes – often – resents the way the more modern mass media cover military activity. In peacetime the media seem uninterested, unless a barracks murder, a scandal over women at sea or some other ‘bad news’ intrude. While soldiers are training for war, enduring what few other human beings have to undergo physically and psychologically, journalists appear anarchic, antiestablishment, sceptical, disrespectful of authority, competitive to the point of ‘dog eat dog’, and what Kurt Vonnegut described as ‘voyeurs of strangers’ misery’. When war breaks out – a phenomenon that modern societies regard as a last resort and a failure of peacetime politics – the reporters flock to the scene like packs of wolves, revelling in the killing fields. From the military point of view, you now have civilians on the battlefield; to the men and women in uniform, reporters are a bloody nuisance, ignorant of what soldiers have been training for and ill-versed in the art of war.

The military preoccupation with secrecy and ‘OPSEC’ (operational security) clashes with the journalistic necessity for publicity and even sensationalism. The resultant tensions bubble over into post-conflict relations until the next war, when the cycle of resentment and mutual incompatibility begins once again in debates over the need to know versus the media’s claims to a right to know.

Behind the rhetorical flourishes, however, war correspondents and frontline officers, often despite themselves, are frequently similar in temperament and background and sometimes even in patriotic objectives. They share many of the psychological characteristics that come from experiencing the reality of combat. This band of brothers experiences what the rest of humanity usually observes only from a distance, through the ‘prying lenses’ of television. Interestingly, radio correspondents and newspaper reporters tend to attract less opprobrium; we live in a visual society in which the camera is king, the ‘camera never lies’ and ‘seeing is believing’. Of course, in our modern society – characterised by digital technology that disseminates all sorts of information and images instantaneously and globally, 24/7 – we know that in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And journalists are the Cyclopes of a kingdom so saturated with information that ordinary observers can barely make sense of the world in which they live.

In war zones, far from the norms of civilian culture, death is a common denominator. Both soldiers and journalists accept the possibility of death. Indeed, upon it they build their careers. Wars are the ultimate audit of a state, although Western democracies no longer fight each other. For all its faults, so far the European Union has achieved its primary purpose: to outlaw war among member states. Previously, in the two world wars and then in the Cold War that stemmed from them, governments forced citizens to accept censorship in exchange for the promise of national survival. The fall of the Berlin Wall – and UN peace enforcement in particular – introduced the so-called wars of choice, in which citizens have demanded to know precisely what their soldiers were doing in their name. Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ‘global war on terror’ reintroduced ideological warfare between different belief systems, the purported clash of civilisations characterised by constant war abroad and heightened terrorism alerts at home, while draconian anti-terrorism measures prompted increasing evasion and secrecy in Washington and London.

All Western governments pay lip service to the theory that the media can audit their warriors and the politicians who send them off to war, but the publicity surrounding the disclosure of the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, for example, showed that sometimes theory becomes practice. This book examines how military forces, sometimes under government orders, have circumvented democratic accountability. They have done so for a number of reasons, including instinctive military secrecy, reflex aversion in the defence ministries to public disclosure to civilians, and downright political chicanery, as well as the purported rationale of disguising vital information from the ‘enemy’. The evidence comes mainly from wars fought by Western states, particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, although sometimes instructive examples are taken from more authoritarian polities.

In 2012 Pen and Sword published my book about the recent termination of an Asian war (Total Destruction of the Tamil Tigers: The Rare Victory in Sri Lanka’s Long War). In 2009 the government in Colombo completely defeated or physically destroyed the Tamil Tigers. This was one of the few occasions in modern history when a major guerrilla army had been conquered militarily. And cynics in uniform liked to point out that this may not have been unconnected to the fact that journalists, especially foreign ones, were kept away from the war zones. A few Westerners who tried to gain access often got a rough ride. For example, my colleague Marie Colvin, reporting for the Sunday Times, lost an eye to government artillery. Others were jailed and sometimes local Sri Lankan correspondents just disappeared. Those who are interested in this special case should read my book. Here I have concentrated mainly on Western democracies that have been expected to allow the media access to the wars conducted in their name.

Sri Lankan special forces in the last stages of the Civil War before government troops wiped out the remnants of the Tamil Tigers. The government kept journalists away from the final Götterdämmerung. (Sri Lankan Ministry of Defence)

This book covers various elements of the media, including print, radio, television, cinema and still photography. For a generation after the Crimean War, correspondents and war photographers served complementary but different roles. By the 1890s new technology, especially more portable cameras and better printing processes, allowed them to merge into a single profession: the photojournalist. While soldiers took cover, the photojournalists had to keep their heads up and take pictures – the closer, the better. Some of the best, such as Robert Capa, were killed in the process. For most of the twentieth century journalists tended to specialise: snappers (photographers), scribblers (print media) and radio and TV reporters prided themselves on the demarcation between them. But more recently cost cutting and technology (especially ultralight digital cameras linked to laptop computers) as well as social media have again fused the different crafts of the wordsmith and the image maker. Technology, no matter how advanced, was never a substitute for good journalism, however.

Since modern war reporting began in the mid-nineteenth century the central questions have always been: how much should be told? And when? At one extreme is the American censor who reputedly said, ‘I would tell the people nothing until the war is over. Then I would tell them who won’. Conversely, it could be argued that TV viewers should be permitted to see the ‘splatter shots’ – blood and gore, smashed bodies, bayoneted babies, raped women – in order to expose the wrongdoers and excite sufficient moral indignation to prompt the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the United Nations (UN) to deploy forces, as happened in the Balkans during the 1990s. In the final analysis, war correspondents and their editorial bosses at home must forge their own individual compromise between evading censorship and wallowing in total licence. They walk the tightrope between voyeuristic ‘war pornography’ and the dangers of ‘compassion fatigue’, or desensitising audiences to what real war can do to real people.

Striking this balance is crucial for the simple reason that the war correspondent’s job is quite different from domestic reporting, not only because it is so personally dangerous and professionally demanding, nor even because only a small minority of journalists graduate into the profession by being good (or crazy) enough to cover conflicts effectively. Rather, war reporting can have a very real impact on the numbers of lives lost – or saved. Domestic reporting may sometimes topple governments, but it rarely plays God.

In the face of such moral burdens, how should journalists deal with military and political authorities who may try to suppress information that should be disclosed to the electorate? Jeremy Paxman, one of the most hard-nosed of British television journalists, famously re-quoted the remark that a broadcaster’s attitude towards politicians should display the same degree of respect that a dog reserves for the lamp-post. That’s fine for the decorous rancour of a TV studio, but it wouldn’t always be recommended with, say, a Chechen or an African warlord. Flying bullets, the crump of mortars or even a punch on the nose teach rapid lessons in interview etiquette. In war zones, facing mutual dangers and sharing information, journalists and soldiers often learn to compromise. To survive they must strike a deal. Correspondents frequently self-censor their reports to keep their vital military sources ‘on-side’; news is fudged. The individual tactics of war reporting can be as complex as the strategy of national propaganda campaigns. War is often hell, and war correspondents are not angels, despite the former fashion of white suits and the current one of pious rhetoric.

This book attempts to explain how democracies report wars. First, it provides a narrative account of how the media have covered nearly all the major and some minor wars of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Second, it offers a frontline analysis from the perspective of soldiers and of humble ‘hacks’ (as journalists call themselves). The story frequently zooms out from the front line and into the corridors of power to consider the vantage point of generals and government ministers. Third, and more implicitly, it evaluates the debate over the impact of media coverage on foreign and defence policy.

The book also explores some media myths. Ever since the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, the military has tended to display open hostility to journalists (even though war correspondents were by and large ‘on-side’ during that conflict, as indeed in most previous conflicts). More recently, however, journalists have become a crucial element of war planning, not least because of extensive ‘embedding’ and new military doctrines such as information operations. Public affairs, or what the British call ‘media operations’ (media ops), has become a key part of contemporary military doctrinal thinking and war fighting.

This shift is, in fact, a return to historical norms. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, military–media relations were generally co-operative, not conflicting, especially during wars of national survival. Despite their pretence that newspapermen were scum nearly all British prime ministers in the nineteenth century privately courted the influential among them, even writing secretly for newspapers, and also owning papers, especially in Ireland.1 Provocation of public anger and dissent at home was the exception, epitomised by the father of all war correspondents, William Howard Russell, and his critical coverage of the British army’s conduct during the Crimean War. More contemporary exceptions are the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Iraq War of 2003, which deeply divided public opinion, especially in Britain and Europe.

If co-operation is generally the rule, what are the reasons for this, bearing in mind the intrinsic dichotomies of media disclosure and military secrecy? How does the interface between the reporter’s right to know and the military’s almost knee-jerk commitment to ‘operational security’ actually work? Does this create a gap between images of war and the harsh realities of the battlefield? Is modern embedding a Faustian pact for journalists, whereby reporters trade off freedom to say what they like for security and access to dangerous, newsworthy places? And, in the process, do journalists evolve from simple observers to actual participants? Usually, three or four days shared under fire can turn individuals into the best of buddies (and occasionally worst enemies). How has modern technology – especially live satellite broadcasting from the front line and the use of mobile phone cameras – influenced journalism, military conduct and even the public’s perception of what is occurring?

A warning is necessary here. Journalists are more prone to subjectivity than most professionals precisely because they believe they are uniquely immune to its seduction. Of course, total objectivity is clinically impossible, especially after witnessing a massacre or two, but journalists should strive for it and reject the temptations of advocacy journalism. War correspondents may bond (or pretend to bond) with the warriors who share their food or armoured vehicle. Ultimately, however, hacks must refuse to take sides, especially when they are covering wars fought by their own nationals. This is the prime imperative of war reportage.

I need, therefore, to inject a personal note. I worked occasionally as a staffer or full-time ‘stringer’ but usually as a freelance correspondent for print, radio and TV networks in many of the conflicts of the last forty years. I also worked inside the military machine during various separate stints in the UK Ministry of Defence: as an inmate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, later at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College, in defence procurement, then in Whitehall, and also in media operations in the field in the Balkans and the Middle East. Being a poacher turned gamekeeper (or perhaps gatekeeper) was sometimes uncomfortable. Occasionally senior military and politicians were a bit wary of my journalism background; more often my hack friends (wrongly) assumed I was a spook. I hope this extensive first-hand experience brings a fresh perspective to this latest examination of war and the media. And, with all the keyboard courage I can muster, I shall attempt to apply Paxman’s dictum not only to deserving politicians but equally to journalists and military personnel.