No more heroes
By Phillip Knightley Posted Sat, Jan 1 2000
The age of war correspondents as heroes is clearly over. Whether they wish to continue as propagandists and mythmakers, subservient to those who wage the wars, is a decision they will have to make themselves.
The media and the military have fought a long and bitter 30-year war, and the military has won. After the Persian Gulf, Kosovo and now Chechnya, it is painfully clear that future wars will be reported on terms laid down by the military and government spin doctors, and a 150-year tradition of independent war reporting has ended.
The main reason for this is that in wartime the media has remained as divided and competitive as in peacetime. In the Gulf War, correspondents competed so much for good pool slots and spent so much time fighting with each other that they were unable to mount an effective opposition to the pool system.
Next, the media has little or no memory. War correspondents have short tours of duty, and there is no tradition or means for passing on their experiences. The military, on the other hand, is an institution that goes on forever. After Vietnam, where the military claimed that media coverage contributed to defeat, the military studied wars, learned lessons and devised, tested and polished systems for managing the media. “You have to plan your media strategy with as much attention as you plan your military strategy,” says Col. P. J. Crowley, spokesman for the U.S. National Security Council.
The Pentagon and the British Ministry of Defense have manuals that are updated after every war and serve to guide the way they will handle their relationship with the media in wartime.
All the military manuals follow basic principles: appear open, transparent and eager to help; never go in for summary repression or direct control; nullify rather than conceal undesirable news; control emphasis rather than facts; balance bad news with good; and lie directly only when certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of the war.
It is instructive to examine how this strategy worked out during the recent NATO conflict with Serbia over ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. At NATO’s headquarters in Brussels, there was a daily briefing conducted by the NATO spokesperson, a Briton, Jamie Shea. In London, the British Ministry of Defense held a series of briefings for journalists throughout the day. The prime minister’s press officer, Alastair Campbell, ran NATO’s presentation of the reasons for the war and set up the alliance’s media operations center. In Washington, White House press spokesperson Joe Lockhart liaised with London to coordinate the alliance stance, and there were media briefings at the Pentagon from spokesman Kenneth Bacon.
Everything was in place for saturation coverage of a war that was, by the standards of other wars of the 20th century, a fairly small affair. There were more war correspondents than ever before. Eventually, an astonishing 2,700 media people accompanied NATO forces when they entered Kosovo at the end of the bombing campaign. At Vietnam’s peak there were about 500 war correspondents.
The revolution in communications technology, including the satellite phone, instant television links from the front to the studio and between correspondents in the field, electronic transmission of still photographs, and the latest arrival at the front, the Internet, all should have provided the public with an unprecedented overview of the war. The ordinary, literate citizen would know more about the causes of the war, the aims of the participants and how it was being fought than any other war in history. Instead, the public drowned in wave after wave of words and images that added up to nothing.
“Kosovo … turned out to be the most secret campaign in living memory,” wrote British war historian Alistair Horne when it was over. “We were given lots of material but no information,” said Sky News correspondent Jake Lynch. British journalist Peter Dunn said it was “the first international conflict fought by press officers.” The New York Times complained that NATO briefings provided polemics and rumor but few facts. Gen. Michael Rose, former commander of the U.N. force in Bosnia, said that at NATO “rhetoric has taken over from reality.” The media itself must shoulder a large share of the blame for the poor way the war was covered. Many war correspondents realized this, as witnessed an article in The Observer of London, “For the media, the war goes on,” by columnist Henry Porter. Porter wrote, “The war … has ended with the media feeling far from satisfied with its own behavior. A rancorous dispute has broken out between those journalists who feel that the media rolled over to become NATO’s gullible plaything and those who allege that some of the reporters based in Belgrade were dangerously compromised in their relations with the Serbs.”
There were other divisions. To appreciate them, we have to accept that this was a surreal war. NATO’s aim was not to defeat Serbia but only to degrade its armed forces to make it stop the ethnic cleansing of the inhabitants of Kosovo. It was fought entirely from the air by means of a high-altitude bombing campaign, so no one except the victims really knew what was happening on the ground. NATO refused to allow correspondents to fly with the bombers, and Serbia would not allow war correspondents free access to Kosovo.
Since they could not go to the fighting, correspondents either gathered at NATO headquarters in Brussels or clustered along the borders of those countries surrounding Kosovo and tried to peer over. There they were interviewed on television by fellow journalists in studios in Europe and the United States, who often had to brief them about the latest news before the interview started because reporters on the spot often knew nothing.
According to veteran correspondent Robert Fisk, the war was reported by largely two types of journalists: the “frothers” who had “convinced themselves of the justice of the war and the wickedness of the other side,” and whose reporting was therefore biased and predictable; and the “sheep” who blindly followed NATO’s word on everything. But could NATO’s word be trusted? Throughout the conflict, NATO insisted that any civilian casualties caused by the bombing were accidents that occurred when bombs missed their targets, despite the fact that NATO claimed to have taken every precaution to avoid this. After being forced to admit that it had mistakenly bombed a refugee convoy at Djacovica and killed several civilians, NATO brought Brig. Gen. Dan Leaf to Brussels to explain to journalists what had happened. He said that NATO had sent two A-10 aircraft to overfly the scene after the attack to get a comprehensive picture of the situation on the ground. Crucially, he explained that these aircraft flew more slowly than the F-16 strike planes and were equipped with satellite-guided binoculars. They were thus able to give a clearer picture of a prospective target than that available to an F-16 pilot who was under pressure to make split-second decisions on whether to attack or not.
This was the only official reference to the limitations imposed by NATO’s combat strategy on the chances of minimizing the risk to civilians.
The truth, concealed from all but the most persistent journalist, was that NATO not only bombed civilian targets accidentally, but that it also bombed them deliberately. In April, Kenneth Bacon, revealing the NATO bombing of “a new class of targets,” electricity transformers in Belgrade, agreed that the aim was to force the Serbs “to put pressure on their leadership to end this.” In May, Lt. Gen. Michael Short, who was in charge of targeting policy, told the International Herald Tribune, “I think no power to your refrigerator, no gas to your stove, you can’t get to work because the bridge is down, the bridge on which you hold your rock concerts and on which you all stood with targets on your heads. That needs to disappear at three in the morning.”
In June, NATO’s commander, Gen. Wesley Clark, admitted to the BBC’s Mark Urban that NATO planes were targeting “phase 3” civilian targets without the approval of NATO’s decision-making body, the North Atlantic Council of Ambassadors in Brussels. But hardly any journalist put all this together, though Sky at least made an effort. So successful was the military’s management of the media that most news outlets accepted without question NATO’s line that civilian casualties were mistakes and that everything possible was being done to minimize them.
NATO was less than honest when it suited it to be so. After the Djacovica bombing, it showed correspondents a videotape on which a pilot explained the trouble he had taken in order to make sure that the target he was about to bomb was not a civilian one. NATO allowed the correspondents to assume that this was the pilot who had actually bombed the convoy. By the next day, they knew it was not: NATO had fooled them.
In January of this year, the Frankfurter Rundschau, one of Germany’s largest national newspapers, reported that a videotape released by NATO headquarters in a briefing justifying the bombing of a civilian train as it crossed a railroad bridge near Grdelicka, 150 miles southeast of Belgrade, on April 12 last year had actually been speeded up to show the train going almost three times faster than it was actually traveling. Thus, said Gen. Clark at the briefing, the pilot had no time to divert the guided missile, and 14 civilians died mistakenly. NATO claimed it discovered the technical error in the videotape only last October and that the tape certainly had not been speeded up deliberately for the briefing.
The Russians watched and learned. When Moscow began its campaign against Chechnya, it used a system of news management based on NATO’s. An information center in Moscow offered NATO-style briefings, which had to be accepted at face value, while at the front everything possible was done to hinder war correspondents and exclude them from battle zones. They were denied accreditation, detained, searched, intimidated. Their audiocassettes, film, notebooks and telephones were confiscated. “How can you cover a war you can’t get to?” one foreign journalist told the Moscow Times.
The lies, manipulation, propaganda, spin, distortion, omission, slant and gullibility of the coverage of Kosovo and Chechnya, so soon after the media debacle in the Gulf, has brought war correspondents to crisis point in their short history. Their role has never been more insecure. What are war correspondents for? What is expected of them? Who still believes them? The U.S. sent a congressional fact-finding mission to Yugoslavia in April because some congressmen felt they could not trust the media or the administration to tell them what was really happening. The sad truth is that today government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skillfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide.
Studies carried out after the Gulf War by David E. Morrison of the University of Leeds showed that although most people did not think that war correspondents should suspend impartiality in wartime, a substantial minority thought that the reporting should always emphasize the British side.
In the Gulf War, where reporting was dominated by television as in no other war, most British, and presumably American, viewers were quite content with the reporting and considered it to be accurate and fair. If viewers had any complaint at all, it was that TV stations devoted too much time to the war and that this disrupted their favorite programs.
Armed with information like this, the likelihood is that governments, their spin doctors, propagandists and military commanders will find further justification for managing the media in wartime and that the Gulf, Kosovo and Chechnya conflicts will become the pattern for all future wars. The media will accept this because in wartime it considers its interests to lie in supporting the government of the day.