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UN troops in South Sudan. The world’s newest country turned into Mad Max territory. (UN)
The Western media tend to report on big wars involving their own troops. Smaller wars, and even genocides, get less air time. And peacekeeping secures very little attention indeed. The title of a book by veteran journalist Mort Rosenblum asks Who Stole the News? – is it the fault of media manipulation by Western governments, or are the media themselves to blame? Once the media – with the much-vaunted CNN Effect – were considered all-powerful, but the twenty-first century, so far, has witnessed an apparent reduction in the influence of the Fourth Estate.
An inescapable characteristic of what was once conveniently called peacekeeping is that it rarely makes the news headlines, except perhaps when things go wrong. From the plethora of stories, evidence indicates that the media are extremely interested in warfare, although admittedly news organisations do not cover every rising conflict that takes place on the planet at any given time. As a consequence, wars appear to burst from nowhere into breaking news and, once finished, the countries in which they took place return to relative media obscurity.
The 1990s was a decade replete with examples of this, from Somalia to Kosovo, Bosnia to East Timor, and Rwanda to Haiti. Waging peace, in other words, is far less likely to attract journalistic attention than waging war. This phenomenon could be explained as the result of media interest only in bad news – because peacemaking is usually a success story over time it thus lacks the characteristics of a ‘good story’. The media appear to be most interested in the deployment of armed forces to dangerous environments, especially when their home nations are involved. ‘Our’ wars attract intense media coverage; ‘their’ wars far less so – unless they too become our wars through international military intervention. But when the war is over ‘our’ media find that the cost of retaining a presence, with teams of reporters staying in upmarket hotels and using up expensive satellite time, is disproportionate to the returns gained in good copy or pictures and so they move on. This ‘parachute journalism’ is extremely frustrating for peacekeepers and means that wars are treated as short paragraphs in the first draft of world history. Peace is treated as if it were merely a punctuation mark.
UN troops in South Sudan. The world’s newest country turned into Mad Max territory. (UN)
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China had the power, big army and oil interests to help out in South Sudan, 2014.
Parachute work tends to be derivative, ethnocentric, superficial and susceptible to propaganda. Yet so-called peacekeeping can also be a dangerous business, as the aftermath of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM illustrated. The Anglo-American war in Afghanistan after 9/11 virtually disappeared for a couple of years from the media spotlight once Kabul was secured from the Taliban; the remaining serious crises reappeared only sporadically when soldiers were killed or after an assassination attempt on the new leadership. When the International Security Assistance Force became a NATO operation it did attract more media attention in Europe and especially in Britain, which took command of the renewed war in 2006 against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. The relative media inattention from 2002 to 2006 could be crudely explained away by the media being more interested in events than in issues and this would also belie the claims of some officials about the power of media coverage in prompting military interventions in the first place. ‘The media got us in, and the media got us out’ [of Somalia], claimed one, while another described the lack of media interest in Sudan as ‘Somalia without CNN’.1
To a great extent the recent debate about media coverage of foreign interventions has its origins in the Vietnam War when what had been a historically co-operative military–media relationship broke down. Especially after 1968 the American public could watch the horrors of this ‘uncensored war’ on their colour television sets. Instead of analysing the lessons learned from military inadequacies or political failures of will, the media were targeted as a scapegoat as the United States suffered its first public defeat in its military history. But this was a modern equivalent of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ theory. Few who believe that the United States lost the war in the living rooms of Middle America seem to question how a democracy could wage war for another five years – longer than US involvement in the Second World War – with such allegedly hostile media coverage. Nonetheless, the myth of ‘the Vietnam syndrome’ has informed debates about the relationship between war and the media ever since.
A good deal has now been written about these developments. The literature on peacekeeping and the media, however, is still quite small. Diplomacy is a complex business, often conducted quietly away from the prying gaze of the media, and in any case hardly makes for exciting television. Hence dramatic foreign news stories, such as Libya’s renunciation of weapons of mass destruction in December 2003, seemed to intensify and ignite quickly, when in fact they were the result of months if not years of quiet negotiations. Images of soldiers patrolling foreign streets garner limited attention, especially if no one is firing at them. How much media attention is today afforded to the UN’s longest peacekeeping operation, in Cyprus? What happened to Sierra Leone in the British media? Where did Panama and Grenada go from American media coverage?
These questions are not without significance in the relationship between government, media and public opinion. As one scholar has written:
As conflicts in distant countries have little bearing on the everyday lives of citizens, whether or not they are aware of the magnitude of a crisis, and whether or not they are concerned, is entirely dependent on the level of media coverage. Where the public is at a level of awareness sufficient to incite widespread concern, approval ratings of the government will be affected as the public focuses on their government’s response to the conflict, raising the price of inaction from the point of view of the government. Likewise, where there is a media blackout of a major humanitarian crisis, the price of inaction will be insignificant, and approval ratings unaffected. In this way, the media has the power to control the price of inaction by governments in humanitarian crises, regardless of the actual humanitarian price of inaction.2
The inability of the media to sustain their interest in peacemaking became even more profound with the end of the Cold War in 1991, although more deployments of peacekeeping forces followed that period. The sheer variety and complexity of international crises since then, from collapsing states unhooked from superpower patronage to civil wars and their resultant humanitarian emergencies, have not been well served by television, a medium incapable of compressing such complexity into three-minute news reports. The emotive nature of images from such crises, however, prompted Kofi Annan, when he was UN under-secretary for peacekeeping operations, to suggest that, from Ethiopia onward, the role of the media took an entirely new tack. The target of reporting shifted from objectivity to sympathy, from sustaining intellectual commitment to engaging emotional involvement. It sometimes seemed that the media were no longer reporting on the agenda, but setting it.
It is certainly true that the media tended to report on complex emergencies through the front window of human interest stories. Virgil Hawkins noted:
Attracting viewers and readers means grabbing and keeping their interest, and this requires keeping stories simple, sensational, and easy to understand. This has resulted in the emergence of the coverage of conflict as an oversimplified ‘morality play’, in which one side in a conflict is portrayed as evil, and the other as a victim, with a formula that puts pressure on the international community to intervene and rescue the victim.3
Traumatic images of lines of fleeing refugees (Kosovo, and now throughout southern Europe), starving children (Ethiopia, Somalia) and victims of genocide (Rwanda, Bosnia) can appeal to human compassion, but they do not in themselves prompt international interventions. Indeed the Rwanda Steering Committee report even claimed that ‘inadequate and inaccurate reporting by international media on the genocide itself contributed to international indifference and inaction’. The decision to intervene may or may not be prompted by dramatic images, as many politicians have testified, but the decision itself is still a political one.
The transition over the last two decades from traditional peacekeeping operations to what may now be called humanitarian interventions, or perhaps nation-building, has taken place against significant shifts in the way global news organisations report world events. In that period international journalism developed the technological capacity to bring news instantaneously from almost anywhere, while, paradoxically, media organisations tended to reduce their commitment to foreign news reporting. This was particularly pronounced in the United States prior to 9/11. In 1998, for example, only 2 per cent of total American newspaper coverage was devoted to international news, compared to 10 per cent in 1983. Network television coverage similarly dropped from 45 per cent of total broadcast output in the 1970s to 13.5 per cent in 1995. No Time magazine cover in 1997 featured a foreign affairs story (as compared with eleven in 1987), while the magazine’s international news coverage followed Newsweek in a reduction to almost 10 per cent.4 Specialised foreign and defence correspondents have all but disappeared in many newspapers in Britain and the United States and those who survived found it increasingly difficult to secure a place for their stories. Moreover, owing to the end of national military service in the UK and of the draft in the United States, current frontline war reporters, like the politicians, have had little or no experience of soldiering.
Such reality is hard to reconcile with the widespread popular belief in the so-called CNN Effect – that real-time television services drive the foreign policy decision-making process. CNN’s domestic service followed the pattern of the other networks, although greater coverage of foreign events was more evident on CNN International, as befitted its global audience. In normal times, however, even on such rival networks as BBC World and Sky News, it is not so much a question of 24-hour rolling news but the same or similar news bulletins being repeated on the hour, twenty-four times a day. Where these news organisations come into their own is during an event like the attack on the World Trade Center or the opening of the Iraq War. But it is hard not to conclude that live television follows events rather than drives them, and research has demonstrated that when a government’s policy is firm, television images can be and are resisted; it is only when the policy is weak or embryonic that an impact is possible.5 It was, for example, an American policy of non-intervention in Rwanda – and even in Bosnia up until 1995 – that made the Clinton administration actively resist the most traumatic reports of genocide in those countries. And the dramatic images from Somalia several years earlier in fact followed rather than preceded the decision to intervene. As one researcher pointed out: ‘In all of 1991, Somalia got three minutes of attention on the three evening network news shows. From January to June 1992, Somalia got eleven minutes.’6 The CNN Effect is, in short, largely a myth. And yet it could be argued that in less sophisticated, non-democratic states in the Middle East, the ‘Al-Jazeera Effect’ might have some political leverage.
It would, however, be difficult to deny that the very process of observation can change the nature or the course of an event. People behave differently when a camera is pointed at them, and if they are doing something wrong they rarely welcome observers. And when the observers come under fire, then they become part of the story, especially when journalists are killed – nobody is more interested in the media than the media themselves. When Radio Television Serbia was briefly knocked off the air by a NATO air strike during the 1999 Kosovo conflict a worldwide media outrage ensued. Interestingly, no corresponding concern rose when Anglo-American targeting of Iraqi radio and television occurred in 2003, although when an American tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, killing two journalists among the press corps housed there, speculation arose that the media were viewed by the military as having become part of the problem rather than the solution.
The military has often experienced frustration at the lack of media interest in peacekeeping operations. For example, around 800 journalists were embedded with Anglo-American forces during Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. Once the warfighting phase was declared over on 1 May 2003, however, most news organisations demobilised their reporters, and the military found great difficulty in filling available embedding slots in the months that followed. And this was despite the fact that more soldiers lost their lives in that period than during the invasion itself. The embedded system had provided viewers with probably the most spectacular combat footage ever seen from the front line of a war. But the urban warfare that followed in the ‘consolidation of victory’ did not fit easily into traditional definitions of warfighting or peacekeeping. So frustrated did some American officials become at the constant flow of ‘bad news’ stories about Iraqi resistance attacks on coalition ‘invaders’ that they felt compelled to launch a public relations campaign to counter the media impression that post-war Iraqi reconstruction was a complete disaster.7 Not until the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 did this situation begin to reverse, at least temporarily.
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The UN failed to stop the genocide in Cambodia. (Author)
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African Union peacekeeper in Darfur, 2004. (Author.)
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South African cameraman J.J. Swart with a Fijian major during peacekeeping operations in Tyre, southern Lebanon, 1991. (Author)
Peacekeepers had traditionally been portrayed in the media as the ‘good guys’ versus the ‘bad guys’, peace being good and war being bad. This image was dealt a blow with the fall of the UN-protected ‘safe area’ of Srebrenica on 11 July 1995. The complexity of the Balkans conflicts of the 1990s was not well served by Western news media coverage, which was confusing and biased against the Serbs when in fact atrocities were committed by all parties. The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was portrayed as noble in its missions to create demilitarised zones and support humanitarian relief, but was ineffective in deterring military action in the safe areas, until the fall of the safe havens sealed its fate. NATO had been unable to secure any UN mandate for its Kosovo campaign. In fact Article 2.7 of the UN Charter expressly forbade intervention in the internal affairs of sovereign states. But endless television news footage of suffering civilians – especially ‘innocent’ women and children – appeared to place the morality of intervention above international law. The Labour government’s policy of non-intervention in the Balkans between 1991 and 1995 effectively made the Kosovo conflict of 1999 the West’s war of contrition, caused by its earlier hesitance to intercede.
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UN Fijian peacekeeper in southern Lebanon, conducting his own hearts and minds campaign, 1991. (Author)
The BBC’s documentary series The Death of Yugoslavia in 1996 explained the full context to the public while another documentary in the same year, No Place to Hide, was the first real attempt to rescue peacekeeping’s tarnished image. A BBC drama series released in 1999, the ironically named Warriors, portrayed the British peacekeeping role in Bosnia through the eyes of a group of young soldiers from the Cheshire Regiment. The four main characters begin the tour with little to complain about except the cold, but when they see women and children being murdered as their houses are destroyed, while the Western soldiers are powerless to do anything but watch, they become confused and frustrated. Upon their return to Britain, six months later, they faced a difficult re-adjustment to normal life and their trauma spills over into their relationships with each other and with their loved ones. Warriors was broadcast several months after the NATO ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo. Many Britons took away the message that none of their military personnel should be sent into such situations only to be restricted by obstacles such as a UN mandate.
This implicit motivation was explored more explicitly in such movies as Savior (1998), based on a real-life story from Bosnia in 1993. Directed by a former prisoner of war, the Serb director Predrag Antonijević, and starring American Dennis Quaid, the film tracks the redemption of a man (Quaid) who has lost his wife and child to an Islamic terrorist attack, which motivates him to become a mercenary for the Serbs. The film depicts the brutal atrocities committed by Serb forces and Quaid’s salvation and conversion back to the cause of peace through his protection of an innocent woman, who had been raped by a Muslim, and her child.
Welcome to Sarajevo was another exercise in redemption from guilt. The central theme is whether reporters should risk death to get a story in an environment in which objective reporting is extremely difficult. This situation boils over when the British journalist realises that a local orphanage is under steady bombardment from Bosnian Serb artillery. Determined to turn the crisis around, he reports from the orphanage as often as possible, hoping this will spark outrage – and action – in the world community. When this fails to materialise, he abandons any last semblance of objectivity and decides to take action himself by smuggling a small girl from the orphanage out of the country and back to Britain. The use of original television news coverage of the conflict adds to the film’s authenticity but the film stands out because of the theme of whether reporters should use their medium as an agent for provoking international intervention in other people’s wars.
Another British reporter, the BBC’s Martin Bell, also addressed this issue. As discussed earlier, Bell was so disturbed by the international community’s failure to intervene in Bosnia, a mere three-hour flight from London, that he called for a ‘journalism of attachment’. Objective reporting, he argued, was largely a myth and he increasingly reported on stories about the victims of war rather than the mechanics of waging a war. Because he saw television news reports as a propagandistic medium, capable of provoking international intervention and the peacekeeping required subsequently to maintain the peace, he played a role in events from the decision to bomb the Serbs to the negotiations that resulted in the Dayton Peace Agreement. When Bell became disillusioned with journalism’s change in the late 1990s to ‘infotainment’, he could only watch as Britain imported the American obsession with ratings driven by commercial imperatives and the fall of hard news.
Similar ideas have prompted some scholars to call for ‘information intervention’ in order to prevent crises from developing into bloodbaths. The phrase was first coined by Jamie F. Metzl, an American authority on humanitarian intervention, out of frustration at the failure of the international community to intervene in time to prevent the Rwandan genocide. At the core of the idea was the belief that a country gives up an element of its sovereignty when it severely violates the human rights of its citizens. In that situation the international community is justified in being more aggressive, including by using information tactics, than would otherwise be the case. Information intervention, then, is the use of information in an aggressive manner when it is justified on strong human rights grounds.8 This fitted in with trends in international law. Even in the African Union, the so-called R2P – the responsibility to protect – could override the old concepts of national sovereignty. This was the theory but most of the evil tyrants did not appear to be losing sleep over R2P.
Effectively an argument for media interference to prevent the development of ethnic hatred, Metzl’s idea ran contrary to long-held views about both propaganda and international law, seeing propaganda as a positive force and international law as outdated. Metzl was a strong supporter of what he termed ‘counter-information’:
We need to explore what can be done between the impossible everything and the unacceptable nothing. The political cost of doing everything is usually prohibitive. The moral cost of doing nothing is astronomical.
Although Western democracies had developed mechanisms for dealing with ‘hate speech’ domestically, no international equivalent existed for dealing with the kind of incitements to genocide perpetuated by Radio Mille Collines in Rwanda. Just as the Bush Doctrine supported pre-emptive war against ‘rogue’ states that supported terrorists, or which might one day provide them with weapons of mass destruction, information intervention was an argument for preemptive propaganda to prevent collapsing states from degenerating into internal chaos and violence.
Until the international community accepts or develops the kind of mechanisms needed to activate what might be called pre-emptive peacekeeping, it remains the case that when the pressure to ‘do something’ reaches the point at which something has to be done, it invariably takes the form of military action. The United States in particular had demonstrated its military capacity to enforce what the Bush Doctrine called ‘regime change’. Even under Barrack Obama, in Libya, for example, anarchy not order followed (half-hearted US) intervention. What followed the combat phase is more of an indicator for deciding whether the military intervention was justified in the long term (as distinct from whether it was ‘just’ under international law, outdated or otherwise). Indigenous media reconstruction is regarded as part of the process of nation building following armed interventions. In societies such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq, where no tradition of a free media existed because they were part of the state propaganda machine, introducing democratic and independent media systems was deemed essential to the eventual exit strategy of military combatants. A striking disparity prevails here between democratic governments’ suspicion of the power of the media in forcing interventions in the first place and the enormous efforts expended subsequently on introducing new indigenous media systems that might foster democratic values.
In some military circles, the conviction has emerged that victory is no longer determined on the ground, but in media reporting. This is even more true in peace-support operations where the goal is not to conquer territory or defeat an enemy but to persuade rival parties (as well as local populations) to stop fighting and talk and trade instead. This was the real significance of Operations JOINT ENDEAVOUR and JOINT GUARD, implemented by the NATO-led multinational force designed to put into effect the Dayton Agreement. The 1995–99 experience of SFOR and IFOR in Bosnia of ‘shaping the information space’ in support of the mission was to have considerable impact on developing ‘information warfare’ concepts emerging out of the Gulf War experience and the doctrine of ‘information operations’ that was to supersede it in the second half of the 1990s.
Indigenous media reform was one strand of the process meant to create a climate of peace and reconciliation in Bosnia, although journalists felt this to be the responsibility of non-military and non-governmental organisations. But, as long as a NATO presence persisted, SFOR needed to communicate not only with local media (however hostile they remained) but also directly with the local populations as well as with the international media present in the region. Centred on Sarajevo, the Coalition Information and Press Centre operated in accordance with by now well-established NATO Public Information principles, namely a pro-active campaign designed to tell reporters as much of the truth as could be told (within constraints of operational security and force protection), as accurately and in as timely a manner as possible. Daily press conferences, regular press releases and the arrangement of interviews with commanders became its routine work, while the overriding message in the early days was that SFOR was not an invading force but that it was well led, well equipped and ready to respond through the use of force if necessary.
By 1998 an independent media commission was established in Bosnia and Herzegovina as an interim system for the post-conflict environment. This model was later borrowed by the UN mission in Kosovo with the creation of a temporary media commission pending a return to domestic rule. Traditionally, international peacekeeping forces had been invited into a country to help keep warring factions apart, usually with a UN mandate. While the semblance of neutrality was maintained, this made hearts-and-minds activities a little easier within both the country itself and the international community. But the Bush Doctrine, which had as one of its key components the policy of regime change coupled with pre-emptive war and the promotion of democratic values in the succession stage, made this look more like ‘nation building’ or even ‘democracy building’, or, worse still, neo-imperialism. With Saddam deposed, scores of new newspapers appeared in Iraq, although some of them, lacking a democratic journalistic tradition, failed to even attempt objective reporting. Those that were regarded as inciting attacks against the occupying forces were closed down. This made military sense, but hamfisted planting of stories in the Iraq media usually did not – it damaged the cause of building a ‘beacon of democracy’ in Iraq and exposed the United States to charges of censorship and hypocrisy. While Washington was, in theory, promoting freedom of speech for the post-Saddam media as part of the cultivation of Iraqi democracy, some critics highlighted the simultaneous decline of press freedom at home because of the American media’s uncritical support of the war.
The transformation of some of the Western media from their traditional watchdog role to one in which they appeared to be mere lapdogs of government justifications must contradict the notion of the free media being an essential ingredient of exporting democracy or maintaining it at home. Instead of dissent, the drive to ‘go live’ creates an illusion of audiences participating in history as it happens, while this kind of participatory viewing appears to rewrite the media’s traditional role as mediator between events and the public. Soon the voting style of popular celebrity shows may seep into political decisions. ‘Press your red button to vote for war.’
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UN peacekeepers in the Golan, 2013 (UN)
Despite popular myths and ingrained military suspicion of journalists, veteran correspondents and fighting soldiers in Western armies usually get on very well in war zones. After all they share a passion for different branches of the same profession: understanding warfare. Martin Bell aptly summarised the relationship with British forces in Bosnia: ‘The army and media are partners in the same enterprise.’ Often they are similar in temperament, though rarely in physical fitness. When setting up the embeds in 2003 the UK Ministry of Defence allowed units to specify numbers of correspondents and any special operational requirements. The Parachute Regiment and the Royal Marines chose not to include female correspondents, on the grounds that these units operate rapidly on foot. ‘That was something of a broad assumption given the fitness levels of journalists, regardless of gender’, according to one academic report on the war.9 Even if veteran journalists have not had formal military training, which many have or at least used to have, then their long years under fire often make them more combat-savvy than many young professional soldiers. It has to be said, however, that the demise of the specialist defence correspondent from all but the largest media outlets has had an impact on the military; now, when a big event takes place, the military is presented with media from a wide background. One experienced officer, for example, had to contend with a children’s TV journalist in the 2003 war. And as the military gets more technical, not least with its increasingly sophisticated equipment, fewer and fewer journalists can understand not just the kit but the overall campaign. Nevertheless, freed of the alphabet soup of military jargon and acronyms, veteran correspondents nearly always make a good fist of explaining what war really is about. The further removed from military headquarters and the closer to the front line, the better the military–media relationship tends to be. Tactically, nearly always, and operationally, frequently, the interface between correspondent and warrior works; at a strategic level it becomes more of a political issue, often a matter of spin rather than hard facts.
The British military refer to relations with correspondents, particularly in the field, as ‘media operations’. It has always been a part of military doctrine that media ops should be distinct from propaganda operations, including psychological operations (PSYOPS), public information operations (P Info) and Information Warfare (IW). Propaganda has always been an element in warfare – to influence the home front, allies, enemies and neutrals. Propaganda has been defined by some scholars as biased or misleading information used to promote a political cause. P Info, however, is primarily about keeping a public informed, thereby gaining their understanding and support. PSYOPS and P Info can overlap – what is information to one person is propaganda to another – and the spectrum of so-called black, grey and white operations runs all the way from unvarnished truth to downright lies. Traditionally, the British Army has been wary of PSYOPS, which some see as a ‘black art’. It has been suspicious of media ops too, but it has become an integral part of media training in the Army: ‘Don’t lie to journalists. Don’t tell them everything or even much, but just don’t lie.’ That at least was the simple bedrock message of modern British media operations. Above all, keep media ops (the supposedly straightforward, honest truth) separate from psychological operations, which are usually directed at enemy target audiences. An adjunct to this was ‘keep the press informed and busy, otherwise they’ll go looking for perhaps unfavourable news elsewhere’. The Army shorthand used to be ‘feed the reptiles’.
Since the Crimean War the British military has been exercised by issues of press restrictions. The main bone of contention was always the catch-all of ‘operational security’ – not giving away useful information to the enemy, particularly if it threatened soldiers’ lives – since this was often used as an excuse to exclude the media. The nature and quality of ‘minders’ (‘escorts’ in the US military) were also longstanding bugbears for correspondents. Security review was a pivotal issue in the Falklands: journalists’ copy was checked by minders with the fleet and bureaucrats back in Whitehall. The restriction of communication technology in the Falklands was another irritant for hacks. The pool system has caused endless friction between military and the media – John Pilger famously called it ‘ruling by pooling’ – while privileged access and briefing to some war correspondents (usually the most experienced, influential or politically favoured) inevitably niggled the pack mentality of many. After decades of wrangling about these issues with the military, most journalists missed the big story: that in 2003 the Pentagon was planning a coup to capture their own hearts and minds.
Despite many debates and much arcane military jargon in doctrine manuals, the various ‘tools of influence’ became merged in both the United States and United Kingdom, especially after 9/11. The American concept of ‘full-spectrum dominance’ implied control not just in space, on land, at sea and in the air, but in the realms of information too. Information dominance became a vital element of combat power.10 New military thinking, under the rubric of network-centric warfare, aimed to combine the interoperability of all military systems, from the computers in headquarters in the United States, to individuals in tanks and fighter aircraft. The technical advances that permitted such integration were applied to the softer sciences of information dominance. Now military and foreign policy would include media management, PSYOPS and overt relations with the press. Mix it all in with liberal doses of smart PR and advertising techniques and – presto! – you achieve information dominance. Such, at least, was the theory.
The next step was to try to match up this American system with allies, especially Britain. Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s main media adviser, had already shaken up the turgid bureaucracy of NATO’s media machine during the Kosovo war. He was instrumental in establishing the Coalition Information Centres (CICs) in London, Washington and Islamabad during the 2001 war in Afghanistan. These centres helped to bridge the gap between the different time zones in the 24-hour news cycle. In Washington the CIC morphed into the Office of Global Communications, or OGC. This was supposed to explain the USA’s strategic goals in the war on terrorism.
The Pentagon also created the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), set up by Donald Rumsfeld which, in March 2002, was forced to close down overnight because of intense press criticism and concerns among White House media advisers and senior military public affairs specialists. ‘Strategic influence’ was soon dubbed ‘strategic lying’ by media critics. The OGC included not just senior diplomats and military personnel but also public relations experts, notably Victoria Clarke. Before ‘Tori’ Clarke had joined the Pentagon she had run the Washington office of a big PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, notorious for the ‘babies-torn-from-incubators’ scam in the lead-up to the 1991 war against Saddam. Some evidence indicates that news of the existence of the OSI was actually leaked to the press from Clarke’s office, revealing the considerable tensions even within the Pentagon itself about fusing psychological warfare and deception techniques into media operations under the umbrella of what was now being called information operations.
The OGC coordinated with Campbell’s group in Downing Street (though the formal location was the Foreign Office Information Directorate, geographically just around the corner from the prime minister’s residence). From this matrix sprang the dodgy dossiers and false intelligence on WMD that provided the British ‘justification’ for the 2003 war, even though we learned subsequently that the American president had not insisted upon Britain’s participation. Indeed Bush had been so worried about the prime minister’s domestic political situation that he even suggested Britain not become involved. Tony Blair disregarded this option, seemingly in the belief that joining with the Americans would provide Britain with greater influence in Washington’s decision making. In this he was to be proved wrong.
The wartime Washington and London command-and-control propaganda groups were linked to US Central Command (CENTCOM) in Qatar, the Forward Press Information Center in Kuwait, and then, at the bottom of the food chain, the minders on the ground – the US public affairs officers and British media ops personnel. The system was much more complicated than this, of course. Even the process within the British Ministry of Defence would require a large handbook to explain the various internal groups, let alone how the various bits of other ministries fitted into the jigsaw. Through a Cross-Government Implementation Group as an integration mechanism, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for Trade and Industry and the Department for International Development all had an input, as well as the Ministry of Defence. The News Release Group was another pan-government body that produced themes and strategic messages, which were then distributed to the various ministries.
All the media manipulators attempted to avoid conflicting news releases and announcements. A mild-mannered but able Welsh civil servant, David Howard, headed the Ministry of Defence’s Communications Planning Unit (CPU), which was tasked with smoothing internal frictions and co-ordinating the MoD’s themes and messages before working with other departments. This unit helped to produce a supposedly ‘joined-up’ information campaign that guided the daily ‘prayer meetings’ of ad hoc media experts in the Ministry of Defence. The members would meet at around 8.45 to 9.00 am in Whitehall’s MoD HQ after speedreading the thick pile of overnight news clippings. Already, the overnight planning team (the Iraqi theatre of operations was three hours ahead of London) would have produced a planning grid for the briefing of the ‘O Group’ – the Chief of the Defence Staff and other top brass. The prime minister would be briefed at about the same time as the Ministry of Defence prayer meeting was in session. The usually brisk and efficient meetings would typically last an hour or so and there would be an open discussion, with rapid decisions being made on what would be that day’s ‘lines to take’, the key messages. Facts were supposed to be the currency, not spin. If the British system was complex, the connections with Washington and HQs elsewhere made it even more so. Even the Defence Select Committee of the House of Commons later struggled to work it all out.
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Nepalese troops peacekeeping in southern Lebanon, 2012. (UN)
If no spin was tolerated at the operational level, at least in the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), nor was there to be any fodder for conspiracy theorists. The research conducted by Cardiff University’s School for Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies is a rare example of academics outside the loop identifying an important element in MoD operational thinking, which in this case was that ‘there is no institutional memory’.11 Military officers had a turnover of a maximum of three years, while senior civil servants in the Directorate of Corporate Communications (renamed the Directorate General of Media and Communications in 2004) could be there for much shorter periods. The civilian directors of this section usually stayed for far less than three years, with two moving on to promotion in the Defence Intelligence Staff. Middleranking civil servants had a much longer track record, but though they knew the ropes they were too junior to influence any strategic level of institutional memory. Moreover, policy was never ‘militarised’ and civilians were rarely intimidated by even the most robust of senior officers. This was part of the style of the MoD and, indeed, British civil service. Meanwhile, in the field, Intelligence Corps officers frequently complained of poor handover of information when previous officers left the theatre; hence the passion in the Ministry of Defence for ‘lessons learned’ exercises. It was a case of constantly re-inventing the wheel because of poor methods of recording institutional memory and previous experiences, all part of the traditional British military ethos of the talented amateur.
Nowhere did this apply more than to media operations. Public relations officers once held ‘the equivalent status of mess wines member or children’s party organiser’. Officers used to describe PR and media ops as ‘career stoppers’ and as outside ‘the magic G3 [Plans and Operations] circle’.12 Army officers are trained to risk their lives, not their careers. This amateurishness was exposed by the press reactions to the Falklands War.
The Ministry of Defence struggled to improve its performance by using talented reservists. The Navy’s media ops reserve team had previously been staffed by former regulars, while the Army brought in civilian journalists with a taste for occasional military service. A few were regional BBC reporters, which might suggest an obvious conflict of interest though at the same time an acceptance that the Army needed professional input. Some of these Army reservists did excellent jobs. A good example was Lieutenant Colonel Robert Partridge, who was the deputy director of the Press Information Centre in Kuwait during the 2003 war. ‘My speciality,’ he said, ‘is making guns go bang in the film industry.’13 Ironically this small army of journalists in uniform rarely wrote about their own experiences; one of the reasons was the Ministry of Defence’s strict rules of media disclosure, reinforced by the stringent Official Secrets Act. An informative exception was Steve Tatham’s Losing Arab Hearts and Minds. Lieutenant Commander Tatham, however, was a serving regular officer who was the Royal Navy’s spokesman in theatre during the 2003 war.
The secrecy rules, though, were sometimes breached. Witness, for example, the several generals’ memoirs, bestseller Bravo Two Zero by ex-SAS trooper ‘Andy McNab’, the special exception given to Victoria Cross winner Johnson Beharry, and in April 2007 the eccentric MoD decision to allow some, but not all, of the fifteen service personnel held hostage by the Iranians to sell – not freely give – their stories to the media. This decision caused a moral furore in the British media (even, hypocritically, from the newspapers who were bidding for the story), forcing Defence Secretary Des Browne to stop all further interviews of the former captives. A return to normality followed with the reintroduction of the rule that no serving soldiers should sell their stories to the media.
The 1991 Gulf conflict and the Balkan wars had impelled the Ministry of Defence to upgrade its media ops policy. As the BBC’s Nik Gowing noted in 1997: ‘No longer is there an under-funded, second rate information strategy staffed by under-experienced reservists. Instead, high calibre, fast stream officers have been given responsibility for running a well-resourced, proactive operation.’14 British correspondents had played a part in this transformation, not least by helping in joint exercises and lecturing at military colleges. At one such event, held at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, in 1995, one of the correspondents most popular with the Army, the BBC’s Kate Adie, said:
The armed forces need their personalities ... . If the fears of timorous civil servants about a ‘cult of personality’ had been allowed to prevail, not one of the heroes of British military history would ever have emerged ... . The military are nothing if not plain spoken; they should be allowed to speak up a little more.
The Balkans made media stars out of a handful of British colonels. No longer was media work a career-stopper. The 2003 war also made US and UK military spokespeople household names. In the Gulf a senior Ministry of Defence civil servant, Simon Wren, enforced a toughminded, well-organised strategy; unlike the more reclusive and formal American media advisers he was exceptionally accessible to correspondents, especially with his regular ‘background briefings’. In Whitehall he had the backing of regular officers such as Lieutenant Colonel Paul Brook and Squadron Leader Tom Rounds who had the unenviable task of allocating embeds to military units.
After the 2003 war the Ministry of Defence again re-organised its media apparatus. The media and communications directorate had been renamed and restructured – angered by some alleged leaks and perceived over-friendliness with selected correspondents, the secretary of state had ordered a fusion of the separate media units for the three services. Though it was true that correspondents had sometimes played one unit off against the other in oldfashioned, inter-service rivalry, the main intention of the new reforms was to reinforce political control. The media directors of the three services could no longer speak fully to journalists, either on or off the record, and this undermined their relationship. An outsider, journalist James Clark, was made director of news. In the Ministry of Defence main building the usual mix of military and civilian press officers staffed a round-the-clock office, alongside an array of civilian planners. The new factor was the Defence Media Operations Centre (DMOC). This was a tri-service organisation ‘capable of delivering a rapidly deployable media operations capability and cutting-edge training’ as the inhouse Defence Focus magazine puffed it. Though the Ministry of Defence had used its own mobile film and photographic combat crews before it had been fairly ad hoc. The new organisation included two Joint Media Operations Teams (JMOTs), self-sufficient units with all the latest hi-tech equipment. In ten years the British military had moved from the cult of the amateur to an emulation of the American professional model. And yet it had not taken the much debated final step of setting up a distinct media corps as the Americans and Australians had done long before.
While at the strategic level US and UK media management (or manipulation) had tended to coalesce, important differences remained. In the 2003 war, for example, the Pentagon saw the embedding programme as part of an overall ‘perception management’ strategy while the Ministry of Defence tried hard to keep media operations quite separate from psychological operations and propaganda. Officials were less focused on the wider strategic influence of media coverage. But strategy in the United States was also flawed since the Pentagon was concerned more with the domestic audience. Despite the fact that they allowed an al-Jazeera reporter to embed with US forces, the Pentagon assumed that the mostly American embedded journalists would be broadly sympathetic to their mission while the Ministry of Defence was accustomed to and ready for much more difficulty from its ‘own’ British reporters. The Ministry of Defence’s media bible, the Green Book, last revised in 1992, was not specifically updated for the Iraq War, while the US Public Affairs Guidance document was created especially for the information war in Iraq. The Pentagon’s focus on PR aspects of warfare was reflected in the name it gave its 2003 war operation: Operation IRAQI FREEDOM; while the Ministry of Defence deployed a random computer technique to provide the anodyne title of Operation TELIC.
Besides the traditional British military disdain of PR, another reason for the different style was political. The Pentagon had long been planning for war. Britain had to pretend that it was going through the motions of negotiating a peaceful solution. No inevitable conflict could be assumed, especially in dealing with a media that would influence a House of Commons deeply divided on fighting Saddam. Blair’s deception led not only to numerous last-minute ad hoc problems with media ops, it also caused serious and fatal shortcomings in British procurement and deployment to the Gulf.
The longer-term determination of US strategy made planning for the information war much bolder. And the style was more Hill & Knowlton than Clausewitz. A survey by media specialists at Cardiff University noted:
The distinctions in the military between information operations, psychological operations, public diplomacy and public affairs may indeed be blurring, but the evidence is that the development of the embeds policy and its American implementation was largely driven by a public relations agenda.
The invasion of Iraq was a perfect PR news story. It was short and broadcasters could devote massive resources to it. The Pentagon and the MoD provided correspondents with front-row seats. The media could hardly resist. What would be televised was the actual progress of the war, not why it was being fought in the first place. Dramatic twenty-four-hour coverage was bound to swing Anglo-American public opinion over to supporting their troops, glossing over why they were there and what would be the consequences for Iraq. Saddam had been demonised by the PR machine; the killing of Iraqi civilians rarely appeared on Western screens. In their eagerness for unprecedented access the media generally lost the substance of what they were doing. They inadvertently became part of the PR strategy. They had been captured by their sources.
It took several years of an increasingly bloody Iraqi insurrection for the American media to start asking really awkward questions of the Bush administration. This would suggest before then a considerable PR success story – at least on the home front where it was considered unpatriotic to question the government’s motives over Iraq. Abroad, it was quite a different matter. Anti-American sentiment had never been so vociferous, even among traditional NATO allies such as France and Germany. In the Islamic world it was a catastrophe. This prompted a re-invigorated debate about the merits of public diplomacy – planned governmental ‘informational’ activities, including broadcasting, to win overseas hearts and minds. The loss of credibility over such events as the toppling of the Saddam statue in Baghdad, or even the spin surrounding Private Jessica Lynch’s rescue from Iraqi captivity, would be hard to regain. In the aftermath of the combat phase of the Iraqi conflict in 2003 two American writers had warned:
In the wake of this conflict, we should ask ourselves whether we have made the mistake of believing our own propaganda, and whether we have been fighting the war on terror against the wrong enemies, in the wrong places, with the wrong weapons.15
By 2006 the message had finally been received and attempts were under way to revamp the official US propaganda machine under the umbrella term ‘Strategic Communications’. For it was at this strategic level that the real information war against al-Qaeda needed to be addressed. Sun Tzu advocated that you should not only know your enemy, but you should also know yourself.
Co-ordinating government departments, intelligence agencies, and the military in a commitment to effective strategic communications made sense, provided the strategy didn’t undermine its goals by being caught out in a web of deceit and lies. In 2008 Nick Davies’s controversial book Flat Earth News launched a devastating attack on how US strategic communications had corrupted the truth telling which is the essence of effective journalism. He listed numerous examples of experienced journalists swallowing propaganda. Davies summarised his argument thus:
The pattern is clear. From Zarqawi to Saddam, from Afghanistan to Iraq, from Washington DC to Tashkent: there is a steady flow of fabrication. The storyline about Zarqawi is part of a larger storyline about Al-Qaeda which is part of a larger storyline about terrorism which, in turn, is part of a global storyline about US foreign policy and its opponents. The notorious misinformation about the weapons of mass destruction is simply one element in this pattern.
Under US law the CIA is not allowed to plant false stories in the domestic media, but Davies cited numerous examples of how foreign stories blew back into the USA. In Britain the common practice of the intelligence agencies feeding favoured correspondents is not illegal. Though the military and the State Department and the UK FCO generally inject their material into the media more or less overtly, through their PR arms, Davies said that the intelligence agencies, with huge budgets, were working by subterfuge. It bears repeating: co-ordinating a counter-strategy to Islamic extremism has been vital to Western success but subversion of the media in the democracies smacked of short-term and counterproductive thinking. From the perspective of good journalism practice, the strategic communications behemoth had been hobbled by its numerous internal disputes. NATO, Washington, and London even had trouble with the very nomenclature of the system. And turf wars proliferated: the CIA had harboured a decades-long suspicion of Department of Defense covert action, for example. The State Department and the DoD had been frequently at loggerheads; this was replicated in Whitehall. And the French, of course, displayed highly individualistic tendencies, often opposed to Anglo-American policies.
Davies, an award-winning journalist himself, quoted author and former MI6 officer John Le Carré who said that MI6 had ‘controlled large parts of the press’ in the UK. That may have been partly true during the Cold War, though Flat Earth News does provide chilling examples of government influence rather than control in the post 9/11 era. Davies noted that the PR industry, which created pseudo events masquerading as domestic news and the new machinery of international propaganda, was far more influential than the traditional bêtes noires, domineering proprietors and ad-spend. But Davies also praised the Washington Post’s military correspondent Tom Ricks who painstakingly revealed that much of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s reputation as an alleged al-Qaeda mastermind in Iraq was the work of US strategic communications. Though many hard-bitten foreign correspondents had been duped by American and British propaganda, Ricks was a shining example of hard work and scepticism of official sources.
A tiny percentage of journalists become foreign correspondents and even fewer become regular commuters to what their nineteenth-century forebears called the ‘seat of war’. Davies’s critique may be true of many domestic reporters, who are too overworked, lazy, or browbeaten to disdain the avalanche of PR stories. It is far less true of the special breed of war hacks. So what is it that makes them different?
This branch of the trade is seen as glamorous but also very dangerous. Andrew Marr, one of Britain’s highest profile political reporters, described foreign correspondents – a broader category that embraces the war hacks – as the ‘aristocracy’ of the media. ‘Travel, excitement – and meaning as well; a certain sense of moral superiority, along with expense accounts.’ He continued:
Robert Fisk emphasises the loneliness of being a good foreign correspondent and the consequent need to construct an imagined community of fellow tradesmen. More than any other group of journalists, foreign correspondents have a family tree of heroes and heroines, and a sense that they are a tribe, albeit a scattered and dysfunctional one. They are rarely admirers of head office.16
Marr was not a war correspondent. Anthony Lloyd, of the Times and a former Army officer, was. So Lloyd had free licence to describe his fellow war reporters as:
an affable clan of damaged children, a concentration of black sheep taking their chances in the casino of war ... . they could fight and fuck one another with the abandon of delinquents in care, but they also looked after one another, linked by altruistic camaraderie common to any pariah group. I fitted in just fine.17
Lloyd was eccentric, daring and, inter alia, a self-confessed heroin addict. He literally came under the category of ‘war junky’, addicted to the dangers of the trade. After returning from the Balkans, he observed, ‘I was delighted with most of what the war offered me: chicks, kicks, cash and chaos; teenage punk dreams turned real and wreathed in gun smoke.’
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Antony Loyd, a former army officer who became a well-known correspondent for The Times, confessed to drinking too much, womanising too much and taking drugs.
It was never just a male addiction. Emma Daly, of the Independent, recalled her time in Sarajevo: ‘You grow accustomed to distant gunfire, a lullaby soothing you for another night. Sometimes you thrill to the thunder of artillery, adding an edge to sex, arousing in the way of a violent storm raging against the windows back home.’
She added: ‘War brings out the best and worst – as some sink to the lowest depths of depravity and cruelty, so others rise to display a generosity of spirit, a courage that is overwhelming, and that, for me at least, outweighs the evil.’18
Journalists are rated below second-hand car salesmen in public esteem, but war correspondents tend to be an exception, especially if they secure a lot of ‘face-time’ on TV. Some high-profile stars, however, have entered ‘the land of the inauthentic’, according to Martin Bell (who has described himself as a ‘war zone thug’):
It is possible these days to enjoy a successful career as a virtual foreign correspondent, without actually travelling very far or doing very much or taking any risks. All that is required of you is to look sincere, apply your make-up, throw no tantrums, take your turn to be dish monkey, write fast and stay close to your communications.19
Moreover, some well-known journalists, especially in the United States, became too expensive to risk in real combat zones; some foreign correspondents now completely avoid ‘bang bang’.
This book, however, has been about journalists, both staffers and freelances, who have spent much if not most of their time in harm’s way. What makes a good war correspondent? It was Nicholas Tomalin of the Sunday Times, killed in the Golan Heights in 1973, who famously remarked that all it takes is a certain way with words, a plausible manner, and rat-like cunning. If only it were that easy. Nevertheless, young journalists nearly all say they want to do the job. They have a choice. They can laboriously climb up the ladder of their news organisations or they can learn a language or two and go out to headline combat zones and hope to become a ‘stringer’ for those big news organisations that are short of volunteers from their regular fulltime staff. A handful will make it via these routes and half of those who do could die, go mad – or go sane and come home. Newcomers face many obstacles, as Emma Daly noted:
It is expensive to watch a war – you need cameras and/or computers, access to satellite phones and flak jackets, insurance and someone to pay for the $50,000 medical evacuation plane (just in case), black market food and fuel, translators or language lessons. Then you need to persuade someone to show you the ropes, tell you the safe routes in and out, the tricks of survival.
Given such difficulties, why do war correspondents do it? It is a mixture of adrenalin, curiosity, professional pride, maybe the lure of a Pulitzer or perhaps a belief that they can have some effect in a disordered world. They probably don’t do it for the money: no danger money is paid by the British media. The risk of death or wounding is too high for mere financial inducement, even for the top TV staffers. Freelance war correspondents often risk all for very little money indeed. The correspondents themselves usually don’t know what motivates them, though they will reluctantly offer one-liners in their memoirs or to fellow journalists. Rory Peck, an utterly fearless freelance cameraman, who was killed in action during the 1991 coup in Russia, was asked shortly before his death why he did what he did: ‘You get paid to travel to the most interesting places at the most interesting times. What do you lose? Each time you lose a little bit of your heart.’20
The risk of death is high. Iraq took more Western war journalists’ lives than the Second World War (68), Vietnam (66), the Balkans (36) and Korea (17). Different organisations use different criteria to classify reporters, but one Parisbased organisation estimated that sixty-four journalists were killed in Iraq in a single year, in 2006, although this figure included drivers, translators, and technicians, 90 per cent of whom were Iraqis. Other organisations include only fulltime journalists and cameramen in their rolls of honour. The Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists said that 2006 was ‘a year of tragedy’ with at least 155 murders, assassinations, and unexplained deaths. Reporters without Borders said that at least eighty-one journalists were killed on duty in twenty-one countries, the highest total since 1994.
Of course, not all the worldwide media killings were of war correspondents. That does not negate the point that Iraq had proved continuously fatal for the war reporter’s craft. The formal BBC guidance is that ‘no story is worth a life’ but the BBC and the other media still sent its (increasingly reluctant) journalists to the country, while it led the news. Was it worth the risk? During the height of the occupation Iraq was the biggest story in the world and journalists had to try – despite the numerous limitations – to provide an impartial account. The US and British military were acting in the name of their citizens. Someone had to monitor their behaviour. The contrary argument was that it was reckless to send correspondents who did not have a military background. They were holed up in the Green Zone or severely restricted even when they lived outside. More persuasive was the argument that, by giving an impression they were reporting freely, the journalists had been co-opted by the occupying forces who wanted to demonstrate that things were improving or would improve, one fine day.
Yet still they went: perhaps out of duty, or to protect or promote their careers, or because they felt the suffering of the Iraqi people should be told, especially in the West. Some journalists become deeply attached to the cultures and countries they cover. The veteran of veterans, Peter Jouvenal, developed a deep affection for Afghanistan, including marrying an Afghan woman. War correspondents such as Jouvenal became specialists, harking back to the days of in-depth reporters who learned the language and culture. Modern ‘parachutists’, however, are generalists, experienced in crises, not countries. And the multi-skilling required of today’s reporters can mean that next week’s war correspondent was last week’s food reporter.
Some self-deception is usually involved in constantly returning to wars. As one Balkan veteran noted, ‘No journalist or photographer believes that he will be the next casualty. Death or injury is something that happens to the other chap. In the firing line we all believe we are immortal.’ The last point, however, may well apply only to younger correspondents. Peter Jouvenal drew on statistics about Spitfire pilots in the Second World War when he noted, ‘Although their life expectancy was short, the longer they flew the safer they became.’ Many who defy death as often as Jouvenal become deeply superstitious, carry a talisman, or perform little rituals. Others busy themselves with the mundane. ‘You spend about 90 per cent of your time involved with logistics; food, shelter and safety,’ said Kate Adie. ‘You spend your time that way to avoid being shot or blown up or blown away.’
Black humour is frequently the only way to sustain sanity in war zones, especially jokes at other correspondents’ expense. In Afghanistan in the 1980s, as an inexperienced correspondent I moaned to the cameraman, Chris Everson, a tough ex-soldier, about being pinned down in a trench by attacking Russian gunships. He replied brusquely, ‘If you don’t have a sense of humour, you shouldn’t be in Afghanistan .... Besides, if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.’ Thomas E. Ricks provided another example. Jackie Spinner, a Washington Post reporter was working near the Abu Ghraib prison when two men tried to shove the small, reserved Spinner into a car. Confusing her beginner’s Arabic phrases, she tried to yell that she was a journalist, but instead shouted, ‘I’m a vegetarian’ – which happened to be true, but irrelevant. Luckily, she was rescued by two passing Marines.
All war correspondents have to face death occasionally and fear much of the time. They learn to deal with it in different ways. BBC’s Jeremy Bowen explained:
In all the wars I have ever seen I have had moments of abject terror. But they were just moments, or a few minutes at least. You cannot be frightened the whole time, even if the place you are in is dangerous all the time, because, if you were, you would not be able to function. Human beings are adaptable. You can learn to absorb and ignore a lot of what is going on around you.
Jeremy Bowen knew when to call it a day, though he still carried on reporting. Like him, the birth of their own children persuades some correspondents to quit or reduce frontline combat reporting. Others burn out and stop, sometimes quoting the old adage, ‘The monkeys all were starting to look alike. Only the cages were different.’
But what of war correspondents who are psychologically damaged but still continue? War can be a potent narcotic. Like any narcotic it is highly addictive; it can and does kill. Journalists will write about post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in soldiers but will rarely admit that they are suffering from it themselves. They will confess sometimes, particularly the war junkies, that they enjoy the adrenalin rush which soldiers call a ‘combat high’. To survive war correspondents have to indulge in some self-deception to blank out the conditions they work in. Just as journalists often believe that they are peculiarly immune from subjectivity, so too they believe they can confront war with impunity. This may be a precondition of being able to survive in war zones, but that does not lessen the psychological damage, especially when they return home to their spouses (if they still have one). Editors, in the comfort of their offices, often play along with the self-deception of their people in the field. This immunity is part of the myth of the war correspondent as hero, someone who can record endless suffering without suffering himself or, increasingly, herself. There are no glass ceilings in trenches.
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Photographer Robert Capa allegedly suffered from PTSD and mistreated his girlfriend, Ingrid Bergman.
Some do suffer serious psychological symptoms, though this is not new. After a decade of war photography, Robert Capa started to exhibit many of the symptoms of PTSD: restlessness, heavy drinking, irritability, depression, survivor’s guilt, lack of direction and barely concealed nihilism. He said his dreams were haunted by death, which he admitted to his then girlfriend, the actress Ingrid Bergman. Recent research has suggested that a substantial minority of today’s war correspondents also develop psychological problems such as PTSD.21 The more remarkable observation, perhaps, is that most emerge relatively unscathed. Through a complex interplay of factors that determine motivation, a self-selection process is at work ensuring that most journalists who choose conflict as their area enjoy what they do, are very good at it and keep the life-threatening hazards from undermining their psychological health.
But those who did develop psychological symptoms rarely received treatment in the past. This was perhaps because of the wider macho culture that enveloped the profession. Many news organisations tended to join in this conspiracy of silence – even though the BBC and CNN in more recent years pioneered counselling for their correspondents. But the journalists themselves tended to shun any form of therapy, perhaps because of embarrassment, ignorance and, above all, that their future careers would suffer if news of their treatment reached the ears of their bosses. But Iraq, the Syrian beheadings and, for example, the murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl forced some veterans to think again. Many hacks had been killed accidentally by stray bullets or artillery, or deliberately because they were mistaken for combatants, or because a warlord wanted to suppress some nasty atrocity or two. Pearl was a cautious man who looked out for his safety and acted like any other experienced journalist would. He was decapitated because of his Jewish religion, as well as his nationality. In the post-9/11 world seething with religious and ethnic hatred, nationality had merged with religion as the new risk factor for journalists.
It has been suggested that reportage is the natural successor to religion, at least in the Western world. A few decades ago most of the planet’s population would exhibit no day-to-day knowledge or curiosity about how most of the other inhabitants of the globe were faring. Today an ordinary person’s mental space may be filled (and may have to be refilled daily or hourly if an important breaking story is erupting) with accurate reports about the activities of complete strangers. This constitutes a revolution in mental activity. In previous ages in the West religion was a permanent backdrop, as it still is in the Muslim world. Now the ‘news’ provides modern humans with a release from their humdrum routines, and the daily illusion of communication – perhaps even communion – with a reality greater than themselves as individuals. Like religion modern reporting is obsessed with death. War reporters gravitate naturally to massacres and military mayhem. Religion had been mankind’s answer to death; the Christian belief in personal immortality is an obvious example.
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Daniel Pearl in his proof-of-life picture. The American journalist was murdered by Islamists as much for his nationality as his Jewish faith.
Modern reporting endlessly feeds the audience with accounts of the deaths of other people, and so potentially puts the viewer continually in a position of being a survivor. ‘In this way reportage, like religion, gives the individual a comforting sense of his own immortality.’22
This argument may seem rather farfetched, though a columnist in the Guardian, Linda Grant, made a parallel point during the Balkan wars: ‘Today’s foreign correspondents are really impotent priests, the sounders of moral clarions to the world, bringing home despatches from horror spots for which, they cry, something must be done.’
As with the military, war correspondents probably comprise a similar number of saints and sinners, with a minor sprinkling of barking eccentrics and the very occasional psychopath. War correspondents may be as brave as the soldiers they write about, though the military would say correspondents were less disciplined, while correspondents would perhaps prefer the term more independent. Historically, most soldiers used to be convinced that the sole and single purpose of every journalist was to destroy their careers. But the military soon learned how to use the media for their own ends. In the Balkans Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart described the media’s role in peacekeeping operations as a ‘very useful adjunct of our armoury – and there are no Rules of Engagement we have to comply with before using them’. After the military dominance in the 2003 campaign against Iraq, war correspondents felt they were on the back foot. Nevertheless, still they followed the sound of gunfire. They went, in the words of Life magazine’s famous combat photographer, Larry Burrows, ‘to show the interested people and to shock the uninterested’. Burrows was killed when the helicopter he was travelling in with three other photojournalists was shot down by the Viet Cong over Laos in 1971.