Questions of war coverage
by Peter Preston Posted Tue, Apr 1 2003
No war I can remember has packed so many perplexing press issues into a few short weeks. To embed or not to embed? To put correspondent safety first or second? To tell all or merely some of the truth? To show guns blazing and people dying on prime time television? To repeat what the generals tell you or probe deeper? These are some of the questions that will keep us in seminars for years to come.
I went to the first of these seminars, a world freedom day event co-sponsored by IPI in London a few weeks back, and you could already see the conventional wisdom fracturing. “Why do you keep talking about the ‘Arab world?’ ” asked one Egyptian journalist. “Don’t you realize that the ‘Arab world’ is just as split over all this as your ‘Western world?’ ” The trouble, he said, was our glib search for “fairness and balance.” Because broadcasters such as the BBC needed to even out their coverage, they picked militant Arab groups demonstrating against the coalition and forgot about the millions who make up the Middle East’s silent majority. Phony conflict management.
It was a good point, and so was the follow-up punch from another Arab reporter. Don’t get too euphoric about the wonders of embedding, he said. “Let me ask you this: Would you have volunteered to embed yourself with the Iraqi Army?”
Nobody said yes. Journalists who had been embedded and returned to tell a relatively positive tale were disarmingly frank. Go into war with the Iraqis? No way.
So you see the complexities creeping in. What’s the press’s duty in wartime? To cheerlead patriotically if troops from your country are involved? Or to stick to hard facts and cool analysis, telling the whole story and letting the reader decide? Most of us would vote automatically for the second course. That’s what we mean by “free journalism.” But, on closer examination, nothing is as simple as it sounds.
Why, for example, did the Pentagon and Britain’s Ministry of Defense sanction the embedding of a thousand journalists in the first place? Were these embeds supposed to file rounded stories or the more vivid tales Donald Rumsfeld called salami slices? Answer: Of course they were salami peddlers. Stuck with one particular brigade in one particular tank, given no scope for independent action, they could be nothing else.
But the Pentagon knew that when it sanctioned embedding in the first place. Remember, news companies may have wanted a better sight of the action than they got in the first Gulf War over a decade ago. But wanting something doesn’t guarantee the military will dish it up on demand. No, there had to be something else for the troops and the politicians here. There was. The ride in triumph toward Baghdad may have taken just a little longer than expected — and caused a few more headaches — but it was still a wonderful (political) way of involving ordinary television viewers in a war being fought in their name. You could see; you could feel; you could identify; you could win. So, at least in America and Britain, much of the earlier protest died away.
Embedding, in that sense, was terrific PR, a masterpiece of spin that sets the terms for wars to come. We’ll expect to be atop the next tank heading wherever the coalition goes. We’ll only know something has gone wrong when the request is denied.
That sharp question about going along with the Iraqi army makes an essential point. Our appetite for balanced reporting had its limits. We made compromises every step of the war. Some papers and broadcasters pulled their reporters out of Baghdad (on the grounds of reasonable safety). Thus, they had no one on the other side of the line to tell what happened when the bombs landed. Their audiences only saw half of the story. And even those reporters who stayed were constrained witnesses. Their minders kept tabs on what they said and where they went; they weren't allowed to roam.
Was Al-Jazeera somehow an alien voice and eye? No, it was a crucial way of seeing the conflict, a witness to set alongside channels such as Fox News. Did CNN fatally compromise itself by not telling the whole of the earlier truth about Saddam in order to make sure its correspondents could stay in Baghdad? No. The compromise, as we see it, was one among many and was necessary to maintain, at least to keep one window of truth open.
CNN’s essential dilemma wasn’t theirs alone. Without the pictures and words from the embeds, we’d have known much less. We needed the snapshots they sent. Without the brave reporters who stayed in Baghdad, we’d have had no idea of the ordinary men and women, as well as the officials’ braggarts, on the other side. Without the Arab TV crews, we’d have been blind to consequences we needed to be informed about. Yet all of those elements were, in part, the result of compromises: All of them brought only fragments of truth.
Patriotic cheering or honest reporting? There really isn’t a choice when the rest of the world is tuning in. If you want to win hearts, you have to clear minds. And after the cheers die away, the mood gets reflective. Our stock in trade, whoever we are, wherever we work, is credibility: that most precious and fragile commodity through the sandstorms of war.
Peter Preston
Global Journalist columnist Peter Preston is editorial director of the Guardian Media Group and was the chairman of IPI from 1995 to 1997.