Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : WAR & CRISIS REPORTING
Professionalism in War Reporting by Tom Gjelten 
Professionalism in War Reporting: A Correspondent's View Tom Gjelten Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict September 1997 The news media have long been players in the drama of war. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was provoked in pan by jingoistic press in the United States. Seventy years later, the media were involved in another war: The lack of public support for the US effort in Vietnam was blamed in part on correspondents who adopted a skeptical attitude in their assessment of Pentagon war claims. But rarely has the work of war correspondents come under the kind of scrutiny it does today. Journalists these days are not only accused of aggravating conflicts - we are also expected to resolve them. The smaller the war and the wider our reach, the more impact our reporting is believed to have. Advances in information technology have made it possible for journalists to report instantaneously from remote locations. With the downscaling of conflict in the post-Cold War era, meanwhile, there are more wars to choose from. Some get covered and some don't, and the coverage decisions can be critical. In 1984, television pictures shaped the international response to the war and starvation drama in Ethiopia. By 1994, the effect of news coverage in conflict situations was considered so significant as to be factored into military planning. During the Haiti intervention, the US Atlantic Command "Operation Room" was dominated not by maps and charts, but by four television sets. Officers tracking and coordinating military operations wanted to monitor in real time all broadcasts concerning the intervention, so they could react accordingly. The diplomats, military - officers, policymakers, and aid workers who follow the performance of the news media so closely these days are increasingly critical in their assessment. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, then the United Nations Secretary General, argued in a June 1996 speech in Germany that "through the issues, people and places it chooses to highlight - or to ignore - the media today has enormous influence over the international agenda-" This new reality, Boutros-Ghali said, "has drastically transformed the conduct of international relations the age-old practice of diplomacy."1 He left little doubt that it displeased him. As a US journalist reporting the war in Bosnia. I was surprised by the harsh reviews our work there sometimes received. Foreign Policy, the quarterly journal published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, carried an article in its Winter 1993 issue, for example, alleging that in the Yugoslav conflict, "The press itself has been a large part of the bad news. In Bosnia, the writer claimed, the news media deliberately attempted to influence policy, to the point that they "became a movement, co-belligerents no longer disguised as noncombatant and nonpartisan."2 Humanitarian aid agencies, finding their own activities increasingly affected by news coverage, complain that we in the media focus too much on tragedy and misery, that we sensationalize the news, and that we oversimplify complicated stories. Some critics say news organizations should go so far as to change the way they approach their work. A representative from the "Bread for the World" aid agency suggests that journalists dedicate themselves "to reimagining the purposes of the profession," with the aim of becoming more humanitarian in their outlook. People working on programs and strategies to prevent or resolve conflicts suggest that we think more about the impact our reporting may have on a conflict's development. Human rights monitoring organizations insist that we be aggressive in uncovering atrocities and injustice. Advocates of a truly free press are understandably wary of calls for journalists to steer their reporting deliberately toward some broader social good. Journalists cannot always anticipate the consequences a story may have and in general it should not be our concern. Our obligation is to report the news as we see it, not necessarily as diplomats or government leaders or aid workers would prefer to have it reported. Our guiding principle should be to tell the truth, without trying first to identify what news is helpful or harmful. But the changes that heighten the impact of international news reporting do have implications for the way journalists who work abroad should be trained, assigned, and monitored. We need to understand the interaction between all the parties in a conflict or crisis situation, the news media included. While this is not a time for us journalists to "re-imagine" our profession, we do need to be more diligent in our reporting more sophisticated in our description of world events, more thoughtful in our analysis, and more clear about the role we actually play. In short, we need to be more professional. |