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Patriotism and the media by Roy Greenslade 
Apr. 1, 2004. 06:45 AM Atkinson Speech ROY GREENSLADE Patriotism and the media: Why journalists cannot work to the slogan, 'My country right or wrong' The title is nothing if not specific, so my overall viewpoint's hardly going to be a surprise, but I sincerely hope that, in the course of the next hour, I can convince those of you who are predisposed to disagree with me to think again while, simultaneously, coaxing those who think they're in agreement with me to question whether it's ever possible to obtain a truth-telling, objective journalism based on a public interest remit. I believe that war is probably the greatest test any journalist - including editors, of course - must face, because it raises crucial ethical problems. What is journalism for? What are journalists for? Why does the press - indeed, the media - exist? What is the proper relationship between the state and the media organizations which are based within it? Does the truth hurt and, if so, should we ever contemplate concealing it? Then comes the over-arching question which has haunted Western journalist during so many modern wars: if we so sincerely believe in the moral rightness of one side's political, economic and religious credo - by which of course, I mean our side - and, just as passionately, we believe the other side's systems to be immoral, then isn't it not only natural that we would support our side but also entirely practical? These are tough dilemmas and I'll just add one more macro question to that lot: who do journalists really represent - their specific audiences back home or humankind as a whole? Along the way I hope to tackle some of these questions. Back in the early 1970s, two New York Times journalists - Drew Middleton and Herbert Matthews - set out part of the practical argument which faces war reporters. Middleton contended that the correspondent's duty is "to get the facts and write them with his interpretation of what they mean to the war, without allowing personal feelings about the war to enter into the story. No one," he added, " can be completely objective but objectivity is the goal." Matthews, however, argued instead for "honest, open bias" proclaiming that "a newspaperman should work with his heart as well as his mind." There, in a nutshell, is the dilemma every journalist - whether a reporter on assignment or an editor running a paper - must face in wartime. Heart or mind. Patriotism or professional detachment. Propaganda or objective reportage. Now, I'm going to take you through a good slice of history because I find the structure an excellent way of ensuring that the dilemmas I'll be exploring are grounded in reality. Considering what happened in the past provides both detail and context for the contentions I'll take up as I proceed. So let's scare you just a little by starting way back in 55 BC, when Julius Caesar's legions invaded Britain. There were no newspapers around then, no cameras, no rolling news channels, not a scribe - not a war correspondents - in sight. But Julius knew the value of telling the Roman people about the bravery of his army, about his battle victories and, naturally, about his own heroic part in leading the conquest of another country. So he played war correspondent to tell the story of his own war, bequeathing us the only report of what happened at a crucial moment in European history. He had several advantages, of course, not the least being the fact that he didn't file his copy until years afterwards, well after British territory was indisputably Roman, thus allowing himself the luxury of telling of some of the reverses suffered by his troops. We can't be certain that he told the truth in his 'Commentaries on the Gallic Wars' [De Bello Gallico] - because there were no fact-checkers, what joy! - but it's generally accepted that he didn't embroider his story because he didn't need to. What isn't in dispute is that his account amounted to propaganda: Caesar's military exploits in Gaul and Britain added to the greater glory of Rome and, undoubtedly, to the greater glory of General Julius. He wasn't the first soldier to talk up his triumphs - various Greeks did it hundreds of years before - and he certainly wasn't the last. Indeed, for many hundreds of years soldiers were virtually the only sources for wars and improbably were usually considered to be authoritative. British newspapers up to the mid-1800s relied on letters from junior officers and treated them as true accounts of what had happened. William Howard Russell, the man who deserves to be known as the father of war reporting - well, the great, great, great grand-papa, if you like. His reporting of the Crimean war in 1854 is remarkable in all sorts of ways since, in almost every aspect, it prefigures the subsequent clashes between the government and its military on one side, and journalists and their editors on the other. The conflict between the two sides, put quite simply, was about whether Russell's attempts to tell the truth were unpatriotic. Russell was sent to the Crimea by the London Times, which had been a cheerleader for the war against Russia. But Russell's Gallipoli dispatches revealed that British soldiers were living in substandard conditions and highlighted the administrative inadequacies of the army. The military hadn't wanted Russell there in the first place, having prevented him from sailing on a troop ship. Once they realized what Russell was writing, they did their best to frustrate him, denying him the right to sleep within army lines and looking the other way when his tent was torn down. But Russell stuck to his task, won over many of the junior officers who agreed with him and also sent back descriptive articles - of the battle of Balaclava and the charge of the light brigade - which rank as classic pieces of reportage. He later told of the horrific deprivations suffered by soldiers during the winter months, concentrating especially on the lack of proper medical facilities. Back in London, Russell's editor - John Delane - stayed local to his correspondents by fearlessly publishing his controversial reports. He did so in the face of considerable heat from a host of establishment critics, who included powerful figures in both the main political parties, not to mention the monarch, Queen Victoria, who called The Times an "execrable publication." One senior politician remarked: "If England is ever to be England again, this vile tyranny of The Times must be cut off." The British government reacted as war-making governments in a corner inevitably do, accusing Russell of exaggeration and sensationalism, while desperately trying to discredit The Times. But people flocked to donate money to a fund set up by The Times to send out medical supplies - and Florence Nightingale. Several politicians made formal complaints about the paper breaching security and made vain attempts to censor it. Many of the attacks on The Times referred to it misusing its supposed "power." But it was The Times which came out on top: the government was forced to resign and The Times' status grew immeasurably afterwards. Now, let's be fair here: Russell's writing style was florid, emotive and, yes, often sensational and it later became clear that he was far from 100 per cent accurate on occasion, getting many details wrong. But, in essence, he got the substantive story right: largely through incompetence, the politicians and the military high command had allowed more than a third of their army to perish through sickness. He had done a good journalistic job. So, 150 years ago, at the very dawn of professional war reporting, we can see the schisms opening up: the reporter at the front was doing his job while the generals at the front were attempting to do theirs. The editor back in London was fulfilling his proper role while the government was fulfilling its. Please note that each side believed it was acting on behalf of the public interest. The government and its military leaders believed the war was justified - and would benefit the long-term interests of the British people - so anything which thwarted the war effort, by undermining morale, was unpatriotic. The journalists believed the British public should know what was being done - badly done - in their name, especially the squalor suffered by their soldiery, regardless of the wider political consequences. The people had a right to know the truth. Well, a sort of truth. That's an important caveat because, in everything I saw, please understand that I'm not saying there is one truth, not THE truth, perhaps not even A truth. Really, it's about truth-seeking, an honest attempt to get at SOME kind of truth. Newspapers provide daily snapshots of events in relatively short articles. Truth inevitably includes endless amounts of context, and even then two sincere truth-tellers might see things differently. You'll be relieved to know that this isn't the precursor to a philosophical discourse on truth. I just want you to know that I'm aware of the journalistic dilemma about truth-telling, just as I'm aware of the impossibility of attaining objectivity, not to mention neutrality. We all know that old adage about truth being the first casualty of war. But in accepting that truth is a moving target in peacetime then it's fairly obvious that war moves that target at warp speed. Anyway, I want to continue with a little more history (for which I'm indebted to a former colleague of mine, Phillip Knightley, whose book The First Casualty is a must read). I plan to run rapidly through a couple of wars that provide excellent examples of the difficulties journalists have faced and to which they often succumbed. In the Boer war [1889-1902], the British government overcame hostility from a substantial proportion of the population - which included a couple of leading newspapers - by playing the patriotic card, well, to be more honest, the imperialist card. It unashamedly stoked up racism and jingoism by encouraging the spread of fake atrocity stories. Other, REAL atrocities were covered up. Only later, after the war, did all sorts of facts emerge, such as the disgrace of British internment camps in which many people died and the scandalous military hospital conditions. Why the failure? Because the journalists sent to cover the war were either incompetent or, suffused with a misguided patriotism that led to self-censorship. The Boer was, it transpired, a rehearsal in more senses than one for the First World War twelve years later. When Britain went to war with Germany in 1914 it was far from an overwhelmingly popular decision and several papers preached against it, notably the Manchester Guardian and the Daily News. But the government set up what amounted to a propaganda department - the Parliamentary War Aims Committee - which provided material enthusiastically taken up by the pro-war press proprietors. It was the owner of The Times and the Daily Mail, Lord Northcliffe, who wrote to the head of the army suggesting a propaganda campaign specifically to weaken the German spirit. When that campaign was launched, it duly demonized the Germans as Huns - barbarians - and, particularly, Kaiser Wilhelm. In just one report [Sept. 22, 1914] Northcliffe's Mail called the Kaiser a lunatic, madman, monster, modern Judas, a criminal monarch. German atrocity stories became common, with tales of torture, rape and pillage. The French and English papers were full of such stuff and they headlined very specific instances: 20 Belgian girls were raped in public; a two-year-old child was bayoneted; and most popular of all, a claim that German factories were boiling down the corpses of their soldiers in order to distil glycerine for munitions. Some four years after the war a Belgian commission couldn't corroborate a single atrocity story and the boiling of soldiers' corpses was also discovered to be an invention. In other words, newspapers had accepted what they were told by the government propagandists, one of whom included a gentleman from New Brunswick, Max Aitken [Lord Beaverbrook], one of Britain's foremost newspaper owners. But what of the war itself? The three main protagonists - Germany, France and Britain - all imposed censorship. Britain's war minister, Kitchener, initially banned correspondents from going to the front and had those who disobeyed, arrested. Germany, eager to win over the neutral Untied States, treated American correspondents quite well and it was U.S. papers which forced the British government's hand so that a year into the war, correspondents were sanctioned under strict censorship conditions. The reporters willingly hid all sorts of facts from their readers, covering up British blunders, ignoring German victories and disgracefully overlooking the bloodiest defeat in British history at the Somme in 1916. Philip Gibbs - a Daily Chronicle reporter knighted for his services to the war later had the gall to write that "the truth" was reported ... "apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses, and criticism of the facts." Only after the war did horrific truths emerge - raw recruits without rifles sent to the trenches, cynical and incompetent officers divided by class from their men, France's use of black men plucked from its colonies to fight in order to save white troops from slaughter, and - overall - the worthless sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives. It's as well to remember that 10 million were killed and 21 million wounded in that war. It's impossible to know what the outcome might have been had newspapers in Britain, France and the United States had not accepted the propaganda in the first place and had later reported the senseless carnage which resulted form a military stalemate. However trivial it may be to play history's favourite fantasy game - what if? - it is surely fair to speculate that if newspapers had done their job then people would have pressured the governments to negotiate a compromise settlement. Millions may have lived; Germany may not have been saddled with crushing reparations; Hitler's Nazis may never have risen to power. By reporters adopting the slogan, "my country right or wrong," they may well have done a gross disservice to their country men and women, not to mention the rest of humanity. It may seem as if I'm placing on the shoulders of those journalists a terrible responsibility, but it's hard to imagine that if they had done their job, exercised their freedom, tried to tell the truth [it's hard to imagine] that their readers would not have been appalled enough to call for an end to the war. Let's face it: if facts are suppressed or stories are concocted, then what's the point of war correspondents? They may as well sit back in the safety of their offices and accept handouts from the propagandists. But there is a point to them, of course. For governments prosecuting wars, having reporters on the spot who turn a blind eye and cock a deaf ear by accepting censorship is a hugely valuable coup. So-called independent journalists proclaiming that they're neutral observers lend credibility to the propaganda: they provide an integrity and an authenticity to propaganda that would otherwise be missing and might therefore not be believed as readily by the public. British press coverage of the Second World War was fascinating because, despite occasional squabbles in which editors complained about heavy-handed military censorship, there was a complete unanimity of purpose between newspapers and government. After the pre-war appeasement and once hostilities had begun, there was an overwhelming desire by the British people to defeat Hitler's Germany. That's hardly surprising, given that Britain was threatened with invasion, people were being bombed and living in austere conditions. The journalists sent to the front wore army uniforms, agreed wholeheartedly with the war aims and identified totally with the soldiers they accompanied. I'm sure the vast majority of Britain's war correspondents agreed with their colleague, Macdonald Hasting, when he said: "When one's nations is at war, reporting becomes an extension of the war effort." This attitude meant that when reverses occurred, little if anything the reporters observed was revealed at the time. Negative news, which would have been censored anyways, went unreported. One famous reverse that couldn't be ignored - the Dunkirk evacuation - was presented as a victory. Editors across Fleet Street, in league with the government, believed that telling the truth would shatter morale, so they presented it as a triumph instead, a triumph of the underdog seadogs in small boats saving the British army. The Daily Mirror headline, "Bloody marvellous," was typical. So a media-inspired myth caught hold of the imagination and still persists among Britons, part of which is a gross insult to the French whose magnificent role in holding up the German advance has been consistently overlooked. All sorts of facts during the 1939-45 war were concealed, none more glaring than the bombing of Dresden. But I'm going to dwell for a moment on one incident which I'm sure many of you here know a great deal about. In 1942, there was a raid on Dieppe by 6,000 troops, 5,000 of whom were Canadian. It was a disaster - a massacre - in which 907 Canadians were killed and more than 1,800 were taken prisoner, many of them badly wounded. Nine correspondents accompanied those troops, including three from Canada and none of them told of the appalling casualties. To be fair, their reports were censored twice over and, for the reader between the lines, it may just have been possible to detect what happened. But listen now to what Ross Munro, of the Canadian Press news agency, said years afterwards [to Knightley, p.348] to explain why his report concealed the massacre by concentrating, truthfully, on the bravery of his fellow Canadians: "I was committed to the war completely and utterly ... Maybe it was just jingoism, chauvinism and stupidity, but we felt the Germans were going to wreck this world of ours." He added: "But it won't happen again. The war we were involved in was very clear cut. It really was a crusade." Munro believed that - with the exception of the Dieppe raid - "I never really felt ... that I was cheating the public at home." In those circumstances, I'm sure many of you would agree that it's difficult to imagine what else he would have done. What would he - a journalist and a patriot - have achieved by revealing that the troops had been sent to their deaths on a foolish adventure? Here was an occasion when it is difficult to see what would have been achieved by a truth-telling reporter. Even so, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of bereaved Canadians who would like to have known AT THE TIME more about the mistakes which sent their loved ones to their deaths in what was, by every reasonable assessment, a senseless sacrifice. To make the point, I want to contrast that decision with one made a couple of years later by Marguerite Higgins of the New York Herald Tribune during the Korean War. At the outbreak of the conflict, General MacArthur was upset by the critical reporting and accused the correspondents of giving aid and comfort to the enemy. He extolled them to play a patriotic role by adopting "psychological warfare" against the Communists. Most fell into line. But Higgins was one that didn't, explaining: "It is necessary to tell the hard bruising truth ... to tell graphically the moments of desperation and horror endured by an unprepared army, so that American public opinion will demand that it does not happen again." Even though sympathetic to Ross Munro's plight at Dieppe, I'm much taken with the Higgins viewpoint because - although deciding to do the opposite of Munro - her explanation for her decision is still rooted in patriotism. She is looking far beyond the narrow, contemporaneous theatre of war itself by arguing that attempting to tell the truth about it, no matter how seemingly unpatriotic it may seem to the military or the government in the short term, telling the truth will have beneficial long-term effects. In so doing she therefore believes she is acting in the wider public interested because the coming generations will reap the benefits. That's patriotism, is it not? I think this is an appropriate moment to take a stop on my history tour so that I can explore the related concepts of patriotism and public interest (of, if you prefer, public benefit). This goes to the heart of my thesis. When a person refers to him or herself as a patriot, what do they mean? I would guess that, in most cases, they are speaking of their "country" - hence, my country right or wrong. But what is a country? Is it the government? Is it the military leadership? Is it the people? Is it the men and women of the armed services? When correspondents identify with their government's prosecution of a war it should be simple enough (as it appeared to Macdonald Hastings, whom I just quoted). But even that is fraught: if one observes the soldiers of one's own country being killed - especially if they have been used as cannon fodder - does one remain loyal to the government's military leadership? Does one now owe it to the families of those dead people to tell the truth? Do the people not have a right to know what is being done to their countrymen and women in their name? In times of peace, journalists justify all of the serious material published in their own newspapers and broadcast on TV and radio as being in the public interest. This is most definitely not taken to mean "in the government's interest." Indeed, much of the time it is just the opposite: informing people about what the state is doing to them or for them, often in secret. During a war, as hindsight inevitably reveals, governments and their military authorities do all sorts of things in secret which literally have life-or-death implications. These range from major strategic policy decisions taken by politicians back home to spontaneous, tactical decisions taken by military officers in the field. If these decisions - or the resulting calamities emanating from these decisions - become known to journalists, then it is surely in the public interest for them to be revealed. When my country is wrong, then my country's people have a right to know. And I would maintain that WHATEVER the consequences might be. There's a further twist, of course, if one sees patriotism as less about identifying with a country and more about a cause: belief in a religious creed, for instance, or about support for the working class, whether of one's own country, or of every country ... the international working class. These correspondents would not describe themselves as patriots, of course, but their motivation for reporting sympathetically on people of a certain social class or religion is no less valid than those doing the same for their country. Then, of course, there are those reporters - more numerous nowadays than ever before - who see themselves as acting on behalf of what routine are called "the innocent victims." Indeed, famously, James Cameron, indisputably one of Britain's finest reporters of the last century, was a pacifist who believed war could never be justified. His reports tended, therefore, to reveal the horrors and inhumanities of war. During the Korean war, he sent back a despatch to his London-based magazine, Picture Post, about the brutal treatment handed out to political prisoners by the South Korean authorities. It was entitled: "An appeal to the United Nations" and argued that if there was a just cause for making war in Korea then it was of overriding importance to ensure that the cause was not corrupted by siding with totalitarian oppression and cruelty. The magazine's owner refused to let the editor publish the article, citing as his reason that it would give "aid and comfort to the enemy." Cameron resigned and the editor, Tom Hopkinson, was dismissed. Cameron and Hopkinson were stoutly defended by other journalists, one of whom referred to the editor having been "interrupted in a public duty" by being fired. This is a wonderful phrase - public duty - because it conjures up the rightful image of journalism's real place in society, not as part of a commercial enterprise, not as part of the entertainment industry, not as an extension of a government propaganda machine, but as a serious activity which can justify its existence by the public requirement to be informed. If we see journalism as a duty, in which journalists and editors are seen to have a responsibility to society as a whole, then there is an obligation for them to try to tell the truth, regardless of the narrow, vested interests which wish to curb them. When MacArthur sought to prevent journalists from entering Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the 1945 atomic bombings, he was trying to prevent an important truth from emerging. Fortunately, Wilfred Burchett of the London Daily Express disobeyed. so too did John Hersey of The New Yorker magazine. Those reporters not only exposed the lies of the American authorities who claimed that stories of people dropping dead months after the bombings were Japanese propaganda, they also brought home to the people of Britain, America - indeed the rest of the word - the deadly truth about radiation sickness. I cannot bring myself to think they acted unpatriotically: the fact that no one has ever dared to use those weapons of mass destruction since is partly due to what we know about the suffering of the Japanese. Now I'm going to skip several years and several wars - tiny wars, such as Suez; anti-colonial wars, such as Algeria; one very odd war, the Argentinian-British struggle for the Falklands; and even one long war, Vietnam. But I must touch on these last two very briefly. In journalistic terms, Knightley views Vietnam as an aberration because correspondents were given the freedom to go anywhere, see everything, write what they liked, and concluded that such freedoms would never be granted again [Knightley, p.482] With TV also transmitting pictures on a nightly basis, there are many who have argued that the media helped create the conditions which led to American withdrawal. Maybe that was true. Maybe not. It is such a complex question given that almost all American correspondents reported very sympathetically on their own side's actions and were wholly committed to the anti-Communist struggle. More importantly, though, if we accept that the media did help to bring about the war's end, we should ask whether it was wrong to do so. There are few Vietnam vets about who believe the war was worth prosecuting in the first place and precious few politicians who would now argue that case. If the media did play a key role in ending that war, then they must have served the greater public interest - for the people of the United States and the people of Vietnam - by so doing. But Knightley is right to stress that the authorities learned a great deal from what happened in Vietnam, and none more so than the British when they set off to retake the Falkland Islands/Malvinas from the Argentine invaders in 1982. The media was given no freedom whatsoever because the British and Argentinian governments ruthlessly controlled all access. Only 29 correspondent were allowed to sail with the British task force - none of them from neutral countries - and there was total censorship of both TV and newspaper reports. Indeed, the journalists who went were issued with a booklet which stated that they were expected to "help in leading and steadying public opinion in times of national crisis." The journalist who emerged famous from that war, Max Hastings - son of the MacDonald I mentioned earlier - adopted his father's patriotic philosophy: "I felt my function was simply to identify totally with the interests and feelings of the task force ... when one was writing one's copy one thought ... what can one say that is likely to be most helpful in winning this war." Yet the situation as very different from the Second World War. As with every war fought by Britain since the end of the Korean war, there was anything but full-hearted approval for it by the British people. I fully understand that Hasting would identify with the troops he was following into battle, but to imply that he wouldn't be critical of the overall conduct of the war was to reject any responsibility for trying to report objectively. It meant that he was denying the chance for the millions who opposed the war to obtain information which supported their opposition. The split of the Falklands action in Britain led to a vicious war of words, with pro-war newspapers attacking anti-war papers as treacherous and claims by the government that the BBC was infected by an anti-war bias. The my-country-right-or-wrong argument was interesting. According to pro-war ideologists, it was all very well for the war's opponents to air their grievances before the war began, but once war started it was their duty to support the troops. Anything less made them traitors. I'll return to this debate at the end when I conclude with recent events in Iraq, but first I want to spend a moment or two on a war the British fought much closer to home, in Ireland, because this illustrates why journalists acting as patriots can get matters horribly wrong. Now, I don't think I've been in the least bit controversial in anything I've said so far, but I'm giving you a health warning here on what follows. Among many British journalists, my views about their inadequate coverage of the Northern Ireland conflict are somewhat unpopular, to say the least. For all that, I believe my thesis to be realistic and, like most critiques of war-reporting, I'm sure it will be vindicated in future. My argument isn't made easier by using a broad brush, but time presses and if anyone wants me to go into more detail I'm happy to do so later. I said earlier that no British war since Korea has won the total support of the British population, but the conflict between the British government and its army on one side and Irish republicans on the other has certainly come closest of all to uniting Britain. Certainly, the press and the broadcasters have been more in agreement with the government than in other wars. There have been several identifiable phases in the 36 years since the so-called troubles erupted between the nationalist and unionist populations in the north of Ireland. I'm just going to deal with three very broad phases: the very short first phase was remarkable for what I regard as truth-telling journalism; the long second phase was marked by media acceptance of government propaganda and a failure of reporters to try to report objectively; and the third phase, which is continuing today, is identifiable by its revisionist reassessment of journalistic oversights in the second phase. Phase one began in 1966 when the nationalist/Catholic population protested at a visit by the Queen. Until that year, Northern Ireland had been virtually ignored by the London-based British press during the 44 years following Irish partition. Suddenly, papers decided to see what the fuss was all about. The London Sunday Times carried a good analysis of the situation entitled "John Bull's Political Slum" which revealed that Catholics were living in bad housing conditions, suffering job discrimination and unable to put things right by the vote because of gerrymandering. The following year, the London Times sent a team of reporters to Belfast and Derry and compiled a hard-hitting report headlined "Ulster's second class citizens." But it wasn't until October 1968, when a civil rights march in Derry was attacked by baton-charging police, that the media as a whole - including the world's media - woke up to a story they knew little about. The reporters who arrived in Belfast and Derry had few preconceptions and were not ideologically conditioned to support one community or another. They therefore tended to report what they saw. The results were interesting. The London Observer published a series of explosive articles, one of which - headlined "John Bull's White Ghettos" - was not only a penetrating analysis of the reasons for the civil rights demonstrations but a powerful assault on the legitimacy of Stormont rule. In the following months, there was an undeniable wave of journalistic sympathy for the underdog Catholic minority as serious papers tried to make up for lost time. There was a great deal of support for the civil rights marchers, despite complaints from Protestant/Unionist politicians that trouble was being fomented by troublemakers belonging to a shadowy organization called the IRA. So the London Times sent a news team to Derry to witness a civil rights demonstration specifically to test who might be telling the truth about the violence and its perpetrators. This exercise in self-imposed, self-conscious impartiality resulted in a report which highlighted intimidation of the marchers, and the journalists, by groups of unionists. This pro-civil rights and therefore, pro-Catholic/nationalist viewpoint was echoed in almost every paper. It even implied support for militant resistance to police brutality by the Catholic population. When a young Catholic woman, Bernadette Devlin, was elected to Parliament in April 1969, the newspaper reaction was overwhelmingly favourable, with headlines about her being "a Celtic Joan of Arc." Her maiden speech in the House of Commons was accorded the same kind of reception. But Bernadette's press honeymoon was to be short-lived. Thee were daily riots in Belfast and Derry and, with a police force so obviously acting in concert with unionist gangs, law and order broke down. In August 1969, the British government sent troops on to the streets and quite suddenly, the tone and content of newspaper coverage changed. Bernadette, pictured breaking a stone behind the barricades in Derry, became a pariah. Militant nationalists lost virtually all newspaper sympathy. The IRA, hardly mentioned in the previous 18 months, emerged as the bogeyman enemy. From now on, we entered phase two, during which Britain's press supported both its troops on the ground and the political policies of various governments to maintain the union. The plight of the Catholics, and the important factor of long unionist oppression which the British government had bolstered rather than confronted, was ignored. Reporters were soon beginning to rely on the army for both information and interpretation. This affected every paper's coverage, whether or not journalists willingly accepted what they were told. For most papers, supporting the troops was not only a matter of patriotism, but commercial logic. Every soldier had a family in Britain and it might have threatened sales to have shown sympathy for the enemy. Over the following years, with the IRA moving from defence into attack and carrying its war from Ireland into Britain and elsewhere in Europe, the press not only developed a strong anti-IRA line but an anti-nationalist agenda. One story, and one story only, counted: the war against the IRA. Admittedly, the IRA's bombers and gunmen didn't set out to endear themselves to the British people. But were they always the villains they were made out to be? Running in parallel with the military action was a long-run propaganda war to demonize the IRA which grew more sophisticated as the years passed. Journalists accepted at face value all sorts of uncheckable stories passed on by the secret services in what became known as "the dirty war." Claims by the IRA and its supporters that the British security forces were indulging in a shoot-to-kill policy were scorned by reporters who accepted the word of their security forces and police sources. Similar claims that bombings attributed to the IRA were not their work were also accepted, as were persistent claims that bomb warnings were not passed on, thus leading to innocent people being slaughtered. Later, claims that the security forces - in the dirtiest of all phases of the war - were colluding with a unionist mafia, known as loyalist paramilitaries, were also accepted. Few journalists bothered to investigate. Here was a real test for Britain's media which it largely failed. The unique feature of the Irish war was, of course, the threat the IRA offered, both to the British people - through bombing - and to the British state. The patriotic press lost any semblance of impartiality or objectivity though I hasten to add that I don't think this amounted in any way to a conspiracy. Nor do I think they set out to lie or to distort, but their normal scepticism was, for want of a better word, suspended. Even though they were probably unconscious of the fact, they nevertheless succumbed to the propaganda and diverted journalists from their mission to seek the truth. There is some clear proof of this in recent events in what I call phase three, which began once the IRA instituted a ceasefire and set out on the peace process. Now, some of the most experienced reporters in Northern Ireland are working hard at exposing the extraordinary examples of collusion between Britain's secret services and the loyalist gangs - the very claims which they previously ignored. Britain's most prestigious current affairs TV programme suddenly "discovered" evidence of collusion. Last year, several papers named an IRA mole after a security forces whistleblower revealed his identity, providing an insight to the way in which a shadowy army unit conspired in several murders, including that of a lawyer. As with every case cited above, it's hard to know what would have happened if the media had been doing its job properly all those years. Would peace have come sooner? Would lives have been saved? It's another great what-if. But it's a further example of the way in which, if journalists choose to wake the my-country-right-or-wrong flag they do a grave disservice to the public. Finally, then (I hear the sighs of relief), let me touch briefly on what happened in Iraq. I've always tended to agree with von Clausewitz's description of war as "the continuation of politics by other means." I think that's certainly true of modern warfare and there's an important implication in that maxim for journalists: war correspondents are really political reporters with helmets. This calls on them to be both observers, reporting what they see and hear on the frontline, but also trying to assess what it all means in a wider context. Analysis and interpretation are surely more important than breathless, adrenaline-pumping reportage from a gun battle. Even when reporters are engaged in what we still call, for want of a better term, "human interest" stories, they have to be able to contextualise it. Of course, when wars are fought on several fronts with a variety of participants - as happened in the Iraq invasion last year - that task is beyond any single individual, however good they may be. It means that real power lies with the military authorities who can provide the big picture and - from the other perspective - the choice of coverage resides in the hands of editors back in their media headquarters. That was certainly true a year ago in Iraq. Let's leave aside whether the war was justified or not, which is a whole different ball game. What the long-run global debate over whether to invade certainly ensured was that the war would receive huge coverage, as indeed it did: something like 1,000 media representatives working to enormous budgets were able to cover the war 24 hours a day, utilizing satellite technology to feed world-wide rolling TV news channels. But let's admit that the people of Britain were split more openly than ever before about committing their soldiers to war. Editors were aware of this and none more so than those at the BBC - the public service broadcaster, its controversial war coverage was influenced by its need to serve. It was also a war which was covered from every possible angle - with correspondents "embedded" with units, so-called unilaterals roving around free from censors, reporters with the Kurds in the North, correspondents in Baghdad, undergoing censorship, and - of course - that famous briefing centre in Dohar. Those media briefings were a joke: questions were never answered properly, supplementary questions went begging and the chance of holding the coalition to account for what was happening in the field was nullified. It was New York magazine writer, Michael Wolff, who exposed it as a farce when he asked General Vince Brooks: "Why are we here? Why should we stay? Where's the value of what we're learning at this million-dollar press centre?" Wolff then alienated TV network reporters by accusing them of "kissing ass." But Wolff also attacked "the whole embed principle" as being "intrinsically dangerous," calling it a public relations operation. Plenty of British commentators made a similar point, including Knightley. While I originally shared their pessimism, I've listened to the experiences of several British embeds, and I'm not convinced. The censorship was minimal and, in every war, whether accredited or not, there have been embeds, reporters who joined units at the front. Anyway, there were unilaterals who were able to provide a coherent picture of what was happening because they could talk to the Iraqi people. There was a jigsaw and it was up to editors to put it together, to make sense of it for readers and viewers. Anyway, what emerged in the post-war debriefings of both embeds and unilaterals was that they were all shrouded in the fog of war which turns everyone - soldier, reporter, desk editor and, of course, viewer and reader - into the victim of misinformation. Fake rumours turned quickly into fact: Basra fell - in fact, it fell 17 days later; Um Quasa fell on a daily basis - once with a bogus amphibious landing; Saddam Hussein was killed; Tariq Aziz defected; an uprising occurred in Basra - it didn't; there was a "pause" in the invasion - there wasn't; a convoy of 120 vehicles was leaving Basra for Iran - it didn't. It's possible to see these as understandable "mistakes" but, taken together - and seen in the light of the Dohar briefing centre's staff refusal to quash them - there must be a suspicion that they were part of a propaganda initiative designed to keep the Iraqi defenders confused and to bolster possible opposition to Hussein's forces among the Iraqi people. The readiness of journalists to believe the stories and transmit them is a sad reflection on their supposed desire to report as truthfully as possible. They didn't see any of those incidents happen - how could they, since they didn't happen - but they reported them all the same. There are still many unexplained events to uncover - not least, why an American tank shelled Baghdad's Palestine hotel, killing Reuter's staff, and why the Americans also shot at the building where the Arab TV channel, Al-jazeera, was located. Was this punishment for alleged past misdeeds or a warning for the future? Whatever the case, there is an even greater problem facing those journalists who have been striving, one way or another, to tell the truth to people. The media, as an entity, is now seen by many people as an institution as powerful as any government. Indeed, all governments have done their best over the years to portray the media as "a problem," an out-of-control set of organizations owned and run by unelected men and women who are answerable to no one. This has changed the public's perspective to the point that journalists are finding it increasingly hard to win the support of the people they claim to represent. During the 1991 Gulf war, a poll taken in the U.S. revealed that not only did 80 per cent of Americans support the Pentagon restrictions on journalists, a majority even though there should be greater control. That is truly frightening. As I said earlier, the only justification journalists have for carrying out their mission to inform is that they're acting in the public interest. If the public aren't interested, denying journalists their raison d'etre, then it bodes ill for the truth-tellers of the future. But it does something else - it forces us to confront the most uncomfortable problem of all. What is the public interest? |