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Allen Pizzey, a senior Canadian CBS journalist, working the crowd in Kurdistan.
Before 9/11 policymakers sometimes talked despairingly about the new media power and some television news personnel were often eager to agree. British television journalist Nik Gowing noted, however: ‘TV’s unquestioned ability to provide a contemporaneous, piecemeal, video-tickertape service – a tip sheet of raw real-time images virtually instantly – must not be confused, as it usually is, with a power to drive policymaking.’1 Despite former UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s claim that CNN had become a ‘sixteenth member of the Security Council’, television has never driven foreign policy, although occasionally it might have some impact. Television journalists are far less influential than they sometimes think. If any hacks believed in the myth of media power, as presumably some did, they may have been inspired to topple dictators or uncover unjust wars in the name of Pulitzer prizes, pride, professionalism or even personal gain. In reality, while investigative journalism might have greater impact domestically, proving cause and effect of foreign reporting is far more nebulous. And this is even more true as traditional news is being replaced by younger people chasing informal news on social media. TV news channels may go the way of newspapers and musical records and bookshops.
It does not matter if journalists rarely have the political impact some of them think they possess. They can still be witnesses, recording the first draft of history with all its flaws. Even if no political impact resulted at all from their work, Channel Four correspondent Lindsey Hilsum’s words are worth remembering. She told me: ‘It is important that we as journalists tell the truth for its own sake, not because it’s likely to change government policy.’ So also does CBS journalist Allen Pizzey’s comment that ‘If we do our jobs properly, we negate the age-old excuse, “we didn’t know”, as a way to justify inaction or indifference in the face of brutality, suffering and injustice. “You did, because we told you.”’ Both Pizzey’s and Hilsum’s views constitute the highest ideals of the profession. The BBC’s Alan Little was more pessimistic on the role of journalist as moral witness: ‘A lot of us, especially in Bosnia, thought that the effect of our being there and bearing witness would have a beneficial effect, would in fact change things. In fact, it didn’t change anything.’ Little is a very fine journalist, but he is too pessimistic perhaps on this point. Journalists were there to record what happened in some places some of the time. Some of the horrors were recorded. Until the last days of the Second World War no foreign journalist recorded Auschwitz for the outside world. At least the concentration camps in Bosnia were filmed early in the Balkan wars. No one could say, ‘We didn’t know’. That is the prime directive of the craft. Taking a long view, there will always be friction in wartime between the media and the military. It is in every democratic citizen’s interest that this is so. Sadly, in the post-9/11 ‘long war’, increasingly and regrettably portrayed not just as a struggle for the survival of a nation but for a whole civilisation, war correspondents can expect more of what they received in the 2003 Iraqi war. And it got even worse and much more dangerous in reporting the Islamic State.
Allen Pizzey, a senior Canadian CBS journalist, working the crowd in Kurdistan.
Yet this study has shown that correspondents do not need military officers to censor them or bend them to their will. In nearly all wars journalists will tend to take sides, despite their vocation’s mission and their training. In wars of national survival they will instinctively veer toward patriotism. In wars of choice, if they are embedded, often they will subconsciously bond with their hosts. If they are freewheeling in conflicts such as Bosnia or Rwanda or Darfur, they may well consciously indulge in advocacy. War correspondents may swear to be watchdogs rather than lapdogs but they are also human when confronted by massacre, mutilation and the murder of their colleagues. Nevertheless, their individual bravery and intellectual acumen may often be of heroic proportions.
In most wars for most of the time most of the war correspondents were onside – by volition, not compulsion. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of communism spawned a new world disorder, however, with a mosaic of longsuppressed conflicts that did not challenge the very existence of Britain or America. This was a little like revisiting the golden age of the nineteenth century. Correspondents could roam across the Balkans, not free from danger, but at least unleashed from military minders and government censors. By Phillip Knightley’s definition, war correspondents could once again become heroes.
And yet soon Knightley would write the profession’s obituary because of the media’s performance in the 2003 war. The media were again effectively corralled as they had been in the 1991 Gulf War. Then one US Marine officer observed: ‘We didn’t view the news media as a group of people we were supposed to schmooze. We regarded them as an environmental feature of the battlefield, kind of like the rain. If it rains, you get wet.’2 The media are today accepted by the military as a natural part of military strategy. They are sometimes seen as a threat, but there is a modern recognition that they can be ‘managed’ or controlled as part of the wider information war.
The descendants of William Howard Russell and his specials in the nineteenth century and of the war correspondents in the twentieth century will resist the new doctrine of strategic communications. In the looming future wars of the twenty-first century, despite all the hi-tech media management of the military and political spin-doctors, the same ‘luckless tribe’ will try to speak truth to power, despite all the odds stacked against it. Throughout history wars have usually been chronicled in favour of the victors. The Crimean War was a bloody success for the British, though William Howard Russell’s reports helped bring down the government in London. His reputation, however, as the father of modern war reporting was earned not as a result of the political repercussions of his writing but because he pioneered accurate frontline journalism. For the next fifty years journalists moved relatively unimpeded across numerous imperial battlefields. Most of these conflicts were small wars. But the two world wars were struggles for national survival and journalists were sometimes compelled (but usually they eagerly volunteered) to become patriots with pens. Later, the Cold War demanded a general conformity from the press. Images of nuclear mushroom clouds encouraged self-censorship. True, exceptions existed from 1914 to 1989, where individual bravery, determined investigation, or political conviction went against the tide of conformity. Occasionally, major stories such as My Lai were uncovered.
From this sense of intermittent freedom allied to new technology emerged the myth of the ‘CNN Effect’. The mantra was chanted: television can make and unmake American presidents and drive diplomacy, particularly in the democracies. George H. W. Bush commented, ‘I learn more from CNN than I do from the CIA.’ For the last hundred years, after every major media innovation, near-apocalyptic warnings about the perils of communications and media technology abounded. Foreign ministries magnified the potential effects of the invention of the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century. Then came telephones, radio, television, satellites and the Internet. Now we are in the era of the ‘citizen journalist’ when ordinary people equipped with mobile phone cameras can transmit images to global audiences instantaneously. Journalists and diplomats alike have no time for mature reflection given the twenty-four-hour news cycle that prompts hasty reactions and the overdramatization of each ‘crisis’. Each generation tends to become mesmerised by the latest high-tech communication device and swears that it will usurp its predecessor. Yet radio did not replace newspapers, nor did television completely displace radio. The Internet is capable of streaming both – and much more. The younger generation in the West had largely given up on live TV news and relied on social media instead; the Islamic State had used this process as a strategic weapon of war.
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Citizen journalism. The use of mobile-phone cameras helped to make the death of Neda Agha-Soltan in Teheran part of the world-wide audience for the crackdown on media freedoms in Iran, 2009.
So the old CNN debate looked frayed. CNN News soon became one of many real-time news services and was challenged and perhaps superseded by BBC World and the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sky and Fox News. A thoughtful senior BBC World journalist, Nik Gowing, contributed a series of groundbreaking academic papers demolishing the CNN-effect argument. Then, in 1996, the Qatar-based television station al-Jazeera arrived to rival Western domination of news for the Middle East and broadcast information and opinions not found elsewhere. The myth of CNN media power was founded on the false doctrine that television lost the war for the Americans in Vietnam. As this book has indicated, the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong won the war; CBS or ABC did not lose it. Journalists do not lose wars, even though PR-influenced information strategies may be a vital ingredient in winning them. But if governments are losing a war or have lost one, journalists – blinkered as they may be sometimes – will eventually notice. Television did not cause the greatest defeat in American military history, although many US decision-makers, especially in the military, believed it did, and for a very long time. Even today some senior US military officers will display kneejerk symptoms of the Vietnam-era television syndrome. They blame the messenger, as we frequently saw in Western reactions to al-Jazeera in the wars in Iraq. While television provides a lens, however, political leadership should provide the focus – a clear strategic goal. ‘Pictures drive diplomacy ... only when there is a vacuum of political leadership,’ argued Johanna Neuman, the foreign editor of USA Today in her influential book Lights, Camera, War, published in 1996. Neuman was taunted in America because she was a foreign editor with no foreign correspondents. Despite the expansion of media outlets (and office managers), the numbers of foreign correspondents throughout the media were slashed in the 1990s. ‘War tourists’ and parachute journalists increasingly replaced the old hands who had set the standards for their successors to follow but who were now operating within a completely different global news environment.
The British military took on board the Vietnam myth and developed its own antidote but this time about a victory, not a defeat. In the Falklands, the Royal Navy ruled the seas, waived the rules and shaped the story. That war disclosed extensive government intimidation and manipulation of the media and, occasionally, the willing connivance of the press in the patriotic interests of deceiving both the enemy and the British public. The US government tried to apply the Falklands lessons in both Panama and Grenada. But it was in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein in Iraq that the Falklands model was applied most effectively; the coalition secured ground control over the media before it won air superiority over the Iraqis. The allegedly negative power of television had been tamed – despite the Baghdad ‘loophole’ wherein three CNN television journalists were already entrenched in the Al-Rashid Hotel. Peter Arnett, John Holliman and Bernard Shaw reported the action live as the world watched American bombs light up the Baghdad sky. While in Saudi Arabia, never before had so many journalists been forced to cover a war stone-cold sober. At last the Pentagon had avenged its loss of control from the Vietnam era.
The Gulf conflict was billed as the first real-time, live satellite television war. Actually viewers saw little of the war and not much of that was live or informative. But it was fast. While the press conferences on television gave the impression of bored, rude, dumb and unpatriotic questions from scruffy journalists, immaculately dressed military briefers appeared professional, patient, and wise. Paradoxically, despite the chained media in the Gulf, the idea that media drove diplomacy was again trumpeted, yet the US government used the media for its own purposes to spread disinformation about an amphibious landing that would change the course of the war, for example, and to warn Iraqi commanders not to use chemical weapons.
Events are reported faster today – Nik Gowing’s ‘tyranny of real time’ – which can cause errors by hacks as well as diplomats. And so governments have to respond faster. Television can confirm data gathered from other sources but it can also beat traditional sources of information gathering, especially in a rapidly moving international crisis. Diplomats, like all civil servants, prefer to work slowly and systematically. TV images can, therefore, be a nuisance factor. Twitter, however, could ignite political crises in minutes. Jamie Shea, in the spotlight as the NATO spokesman during the Kosovo war, said:
The ability of the media to dramatize events and create a global audience for conflict puts policymakers under pressure to take decisions faster and with less time for reflection than in any other time in previous history. This increases the chances of those decisions being the wrong ones.3
The political effects: the media, especially social media, may sometimes prioritise the political agenda but it does not dictate responses. Graphic pictures – ‘stick action’ or gore – can sometimes influence the process much more than the policy itself. Dramatic coverage of wars may create a political resonance if it happens to hit a critical, usually unpredictable, void in the news cycle. And it would have to coincide with a moment of policy panic, when governments have no clear strategies. Daniel Hallin, in his classic account of the Vietnam media warfare, argued that the impact of the media on policy was proportional to the level of consensus in a society about the aims of the war. So to create any effect on government, the stories should also resonate with the popular will.
In Iraq in 1991 the Shias rose up in the aftermath of Saddam’s defeat, but no Western cameramen were present as witnesses. The rebellion was brutally suppressed by Saddam in an information void. In the north, Western cameras provided heart-wrenching pictures of Kurds fleeing into the snow-covered mountains. British Prime Minister John Major sketched a novel plan, literally on the back of an envelope, to create a safe haven protected by a no-fly zone. Washington and London had been caught unaware by the drama over Kurdish refugees. This was an example of pictures having an effect as a result of a policy vacuum and decision-makers being caught off guard.
The media was unchained completely in the Balkans. Bosnia could claim to be the first true television war – or the nearest any medium could get to ‘real war’. Lightweight cameras proliferated among soldiers, victims, voyeurs and reporters. The general mayhem invited explosive pictures of bombed babies in marketplaces, mass rape, concentration camps, refugees and even UN hostages. It was a constant drumbeat by journalists who wanted Western governments to do something – anything. Martin Bell admitted later that he was a founding member of the ‘Do Something Club’. In the policy and moral vacuum that was Bosnia, the media seemed to be providing not a policy but a slogan: intervention, intervention, intervention. The media, however, were highlighting dilemmas but did not suggest ways of resolving them. Quite simply, American and European governments did not want to send large ground forces into the Balkan quagmire. So some cosmetic concessions were offered to public opinion – ‘pseudo-action’, such as the deployment of peacekeepers who could by definition not enforce peace, and short-term diplomatic solutions, such as safe havens that were not safe.
Bosnia’s bloodstained television coverage could nudge governments a little by raising the emotional temperature, but if presidents and foreign ministers did not want to act, then they would choose to ride out the media storm. This is what happened over the Rwanda genocide, to the eternal shame of the UN. Media can move governments occasionally and grudgingly, usually when decision-makers are caught off guard. The converse holds that if governments are committed to a policy, they will expend time, money and, crucially, political capital in winning over public opinion and the media. This explains the apparent contradictory example of Somalia. Television pictures of starving children were said to have sucked in US troops and TV images (particularly the dead US soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu) forced them out ten months later. President Bill Clinton, however, was not prepared to expend political capital by shoring up a disagreeable policy on Somalia that had been a lastminute humanitarian flourish by his predecessor. Powerful pictures in Somalia there may have been for both presidents, but it was politics, not media coverage, that decided which way the policy would bend. The multiple crises caused by the Syrian civil war, especially mass migration to Europe, had fired up the electorates in the EU and NATO, but the war weariness caused by intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya had deterred the deployment of major Western ground troops. Despite years of horror stories – with hardly any independent pictures from the caliphate – only small groups of special forces had been sent from NATO to aid local fighters, especially the Kurds. No matter what the news and, despite the daily drumbeat of refugees drowning or throwing themselves against Balkan fences, political leaders in Western governments had made the decision that Western ‘boots on the ground’ would not be tolerated by their voters.
War correspondents regularly risk their lives and thus like to believe that their reports do make a difference. They usually do not set out to change governments or their policies, but it is only human nature for journalists to admire the effects of their own work, especially if it includes the aura of humanitarian relief. In Bosnia daily reports over an extended period might have struck a chord with the general public, but they were unlikely to speed a change in policy unless diplomacy was already moving in that direction – in this case the 1995 air strikes against the Serbs. Diplomacy could have prevented the Balkan wars; once they had broken out, the major powers offered alibis for a policy of inaction. As long as the belligerents were determined to fight on, the West could do little militarily on the ground – short of a replay of DESERT STORM – except to wait until the contestants reached what Clausewitz called the culminating point: the imminent collapse of the Bosnian Serbs.
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Mass migration swamped European politics in 2015. Here NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg seeing for himself Western naval contingents in the Aegean Sea. (NATO)
Even the most cynical journalists sometimes feel that they can do some good and effect some change for the better. In reality, a foreign or war correspondent is lucky if he or she makes a big difference more than once in their careers. A classic example is the BBC’s Michael Buerk’s moving film on the Ethiopian famine in 1984. The drama of a truly exceptional report and its timing may prompt extra charity or pieties at the UN. But rarely do political realities improve on the ground, however. Even in the extreme case of Rwanda, daily doses of televised misery may speed messages but not implement change. Moral outrage and international aid are often disguises for diplomatic inaction. And, crucially, it depends on what governments see as their national interest and what can be done cheaply. British intervention in Sierra Leone, a former colony, was considered ‘doable’, but Sudan, also formerly under British rule, was not. Douglas Hurd, a former UK foreign secretary, famously used the term ‘virtuous intervention’, but what he really meant was significant humanitarian results at a small cost, although only if it was entirely in British interests, he told me in a 2002 interview.
Politicians as well as journalists can deceive themselves about media clout. Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos controlled nearly all the media and the guns. The majority of his army, however, refused to use their weapons to reverse electoral defeat. The Chinese Communist Party – despite the initial presence of cameras – took a different course in Tiananmen Square. After allowing cameras to record Mikhail Gorbachev’s high-profile visit, when the crowd turned into ‘pro-democracy’ protesters, the plugs were pulled – literally, as CNN was broadcasting live on air – before the consequent slaughter took place. As such, the media were almost irrelevant in both cases. In crises, state monopoly of military power and the will to use it are often impervious to media challenges, although the collapse of communism in the USSR perhaps obviated this general rule in Eastern Europe – although not in Putin-era Russia, which has largely crushed domestic media opposition and kept independent journalists out of Chechnya. And Burma provided a more recent example in Asia of guns trumping the media until the reforms following 2013. Governments adapt and react, as they did to the telegraph, radio, television and the Internet. Television, even at the height of CNN influence and the alleged CNN Effect in the 1990s, could never replace politics and diplomacy, although it might force it to become more discreet. For example, the Oslo peace talks on the Middle East carefully avoided the media. Skilled politicians and diplomats are very rarely victims of media attention. The successful are usually its masters.
If correspondents could look back on perhaps two golden ages of freewheeling opportunities to report wars – 1856 to 1914 and the Balkans in the 1990s – then 9/11 ushered in a return to wars of perceived national and existential survival in a manner reminiscent of the world wars of the last century. The so-called war on terror has often been considered a convenient replacement for the Cold War. The Anglo-American information strategies in the lead up to, and the conduct of, the invasion of Iraq emasculated the Western media, though not al-Jazeera. Ironically, the neo-conservative agenda had indeed created democracy in the Middle East, but it was highly localised in a Qatar-based news station and it was to work mightily against the Bush administration’s policies. In 2003, so humbled were the Western media, and especially its war correspondents, that the principal chronicler of the profession, Phillip Knightley, declared: ‘The age of war correspondent as hero appears to be over.’ He should have tried saying that to correspondents in Fallujah in Iraq or Helmand Province in Afghanistan during the failed occupations that followed the Iraq War.
A series of popular feature films – Salvador, Under Fire, The Killing Fields and The Year of Living Dangerously – represented the war correspondent as courageous rebels usually committed to truth. And some of the hacks’ memoirs confirm this heroic image. This may be partly self-aggrandisement but it is also the journalists’ instinct to make a livelier narrative out of what can be a life of hard work and bureaucratic tedium punctuated by bouts of terror and dysentery. Nevertheless, most war correspondents, even the bravest, rarely mention what others would call heroics. During small dinner parties with their peers in Washington or London, in conversations almost unfathomable to outsiders, they might air their hopes and fears. In public, if asked about their profession, they would always simply say, ‘I’m a journalist’, never ‘I’m a war correspondent’. Much of the ‘bang bang’ had been done by freelance cameramen, for example, by the pioneering Frontline TV News. Two of the four founders were killed in action. The company closed because even the best action footage rarely paid the rent, let alone a mortgage. Rarely do combat journalists – freelancers or staffers – achieve fame. Most of the best film work, especially from freelancers, is often voiced over in the studio by stay-at-home staff journalists. And the office-bound often get the credit. The John Simpsons and Christiane Amanpours tend to be the exceptions. Many of the other senior war correspondents mentioned in this book are not household names.
The claims about TV power are usually made by politicians or sit-tight journalists, rarely by the war correspondents. Television journalists are far less important than their big salaries and sometimes bigger egos might suggest. Working journalists in the field are more concerned with other issues, not the political impact of their material nor often the lack of context when the programme is aired alongside other ‘packages’ in the newsrooms at home. TV provides action, not process, pictures rather than ideas, and stereotypes rather than complexity. ‘New York wants John Wayne movies, not talking heads,’ said one correspondent during the Vietnam War. Not much has changed in that respect.
This is what TV pundits call ‘dumbing down’ or ‘stupidification’ as Martin Bell dubbed it. A former SAS officer who worked as an ITN correspondent in Bosnia had spent years setting up a report on the resistance movement in Iran. Just as he was about to risk a dangerous trip to film illegally inside Iran, his news editor told him to drop it all for a story on the finances of the Spice Girls pop group. ‘This is what the viewers would rather see,’ the editor told him. This is redolent of Martin Bell’s comment from Bosnia: ‘I have even wondered, occasionally, whether it isn’t easier to deal with the warlords than the editors.’ All correspondents in the field have problems with editors at home, not least because few of them have ever got their boots dirty in foreign wars. They constitute the wellsprings of ‘received wisdom’ or what Bell called ‘departments of preconceived notions’. Few had risked more than a breakdown on the New York subway or London’s Underground. Courtesy is required, however, because correspondents need to have their expenses signed off by these same officebound editors.
Dumbing down is also the fault of the viewers and readers. The couch potatoes, for whom the hacks risk their lives, have increasingly short attention spans. Except for big wars, when ‘our boys’ go into battle, most TV stations prefer domestic celebrity stories. In the summer of 2006 Iraq fell off the UK media agenda while all lights focused on the 24/7 real-time saga to rescue a whale that had swum up the River Thames. Here, I admittedly do need to caution about over-generalisation: the ‘media’ are a truly heterogeneous body about which it is difficult to generalise – just like the military. But many newspapers are even worse than I have depicted. Public radio and television in the United States and the BBC, especially its Radio Four, as well as the UK’s Channel Four News, remain often lonely flag bearers of serious commentary. As media scholar Jean Seaton observed, ‘There is more news in the world, but it is produced by less specialised, more general reporters. They know less, they cost less, but they produce news that is disseminated more powerfully than ever before.’
De-contextualised, dumbed-down war reporting has also been sanitised. The reality of war has been ‘good-tasted’ away. War has been prettified, and perhaps after 9/11 this makes it more acceptable, not least to viewers and voters. Images of the falling victims of the World Trade Center attacks disappeared almost immediately from news reports. It may suit the military and certainly the government not to see too much gore, both of the victims on the other side and the injuries and deaths of Western troops. The media may also fear alienating their customers if the unvarnished truth were told. Slaughter has to be rationalised but it also has to be rationed, as my departed colleague Phil Taylor said so succinctly. On the other hand, despite the high costs of sending teams loaded with equipment halfway around the world, wars can be good business for TV stations. They boost ratings and thereby income from advertisers, provided there is not too much blood on the lens. Jim Burroughs, an independent filmmaker who covered the Afghan wars, had this to say on the role of the ‘bean counters’, the accountants:
Their interest is only in what they call ‘the bottom line’. Perhaps this is not the worst thing in the world of business, but for journalism it is catastrophic. Because journalism, like medicine, is meant to be more than a business, and to be governed by more than the rules of business.
Another concern is the role of spooks. Journalists are increasingly subjected to manipulation by the intelligence agencies although, as this book has outlined, this is not a new problem. Examples abound of correspondents’ recruitment as secret agents. Equally dangerous to the profession is the practice of agents going undercover as hacks. And, since 9/11, the planting of fabricated stories on reporters, as part of a strategic communications programme, has played into black propaganda campaigns to justify wars. Potentially less fatal is the professional concern about the erosion between commentary and news reportage – ‘comm-portage’. This is more of an issue in newspapers, but opinions on air, in the middle of factual reporting, can be disguised by skilful broadcasters with an agenda of their own. So journalists get it wrong, perhaps because they have been duped by intelligence or because of their own failings or personal political agendas. When the media make mistakes, they can run a correction. When the military cock up, people often die. When the intelligence agencies get it wrong, unnecessary wars can result. When they all interact and get it wrong together, you got a long war that went disastrously wrong, as in Iraq. All share a responsibility for turning the base metal of Islamic extremist violence into the golden currency of terror. Religious nationalism dressed up as holy war is not new. Nor is the result: committing human flesh to hard steel and explosives on behalf of an idea. What has changed dramatically in the twenty-first century is the aftershock. As a well-known British columnist, Simon Jenkins, observed in the Guardian:
Terrorism is 10% bang and 90% an echo effect composed of media hysteria, political overkill and kneejerk executive action, usually retribution against some wider group treated as collectively responsible. This response has become 24-hour, seven-day-a-week amplification by the new politico-media complex, especially shrill where the dead are white people.
Correspondents can be both perpetrators and victims. Perhaps what Knightley really meant was that the days of the heroic impact of war reporting were over because of the current military/government strangulation. Knightley’s The First Casualty redounds with epic accounts such as John Reed’s (partisan) portrayal of the Russian revolution or Wilfred Burchett’s description of Hiroshima in 1945. In this regard Knightley’s obituary for the war correspondent may well be partly correct. And yet, despite all the technological change and government spin, journalists today can still be found who would qualify for Knightley’s pantheon – pre-eminently Marie Colvin who was killed in Syria in 2012. This book started with a comment by BBC’s Jeremy Paxman and, since he always liked to have the last word, let me include his words among the last: ‘Essentially journalism is a matter of instinct, the expression of primitive curiosity and an instinctive urge to cause trouble, to be difficult, coupled with an atavistic distrust of anyone in authority.’4 Many of today’s war correspondents possess these qualities in spades.
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Tim Hetherington was a star graduate of the Cardiff University Journalism School. The photojournalist was killed in Libya in April 2011.
A few brave ‘soldiers of the press’ who make up the ‘little army of historians who are writing history from the cannon’s mouth’, to quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, still maintain William Howard Russell’s legacy.5 War reporting is necessary, not just as a witness to history in the killing fields, but ‘to monitor the centres of power’ in authoritarian states and in Western democracies, where government spin and propaganda can dupe apathetic voters and hard-bitten correspondents alike. In the final analysis war reporting is not as glamorous as many Hollywood movies suggest. It is not about victory or defeat, but death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit, and also the total failure of politics to provide alternative solutions. This book suggests that war reporters have far less impact than is often assumed. That is perhaps the real tragedy: showing the reality of conflict could help eventually to outlaw war on our crowded planet. Sadly, even the most well-meaning of politicians will almost certainly keep war correspondents in business.