Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : Some Taylor publications and media output
Guardian article (2010) on Army Combat Camera Team in which Prof Taylor quoted 
War reporting Meet the army's own media corps. The Combat Camera Team is the army's own embedded media corps, reporting from Afghanistan When David Beckham made a surprise visit to British troops in Afghanistan in May, the press wasted no time in splashing photos of him signing autographs, handling weapons and scoring during a kickabout at Camp Bastion in Helmand. It was far less widely reported when troops at a patrol base in Sangin commemorated the D-day anniversary by reading a poem by a second world war marine, John Henry Beale, at sunset - just hours after being shot at by insurgents who had destroyed part of the wall of the base with an improvised bomb. And there were no media reports of the moment when a small group of Afghan children wandered over to investigate the camera of a soldier working with the Coldstream Guards to set up a vehicle checkpoint. But all these moments were captured by Captain Joanna Timmermann and her Combat Camera Team (CCT) - the British army's own embedded media squad. Timmermann says the CCT, established during the Iraq war in 2003, was the result of the MoD identifying a need for managing the media during conflicts. A fully trained Territorial Army Royal Engineer officer of 12 years, Timmermann is also a PR graduate and describes her job as that of a war correspondent. Does she consider the work of her team to be objective? "We are serving soldiers and members of the MoD and in terms of what we produce, we try and keep an objective eye," she replies. "Obviously, we are not looking to show the people we are with in a bad light - any PR person doesn't want that. But if you put out material that is overly biased it is never going to be used, so that would be counterproductive." The CCT's video, photos and reports are distributed to broadcast and print media, and published on the army's YouTube channel, Flickr and on Facebook. It has produced a profile of the female Apache pilot Jo Gordon, shown tractors being given to farmers in Nad-e-Ali and filmed parts of the recent Tor Shezada operation. The team - Timmermann plus a photographer, Corporal Barry Lloyd, and a videographer, Sergeant Tom Robinson - is on a six-month tour, and the material they produce will be archived at the Imperial War Museum in London. The unit has unparalleled access to the frontline, and troops are often more comfortable talking to the CCT than to the press. Timmermann says the team regularly works alongside embedded journalists, but also acknowledges that the media "aren't sending as many journalists as they have in the past". An MoD spokesman says there are no embedded journalists in Afghanistan now with the exception of a documentary team. For a cash-strapped news industry, equipping and insuring reporters to cover war zones is a challenge, says Phil Taylor, professor of international communications at the University of Leeds. He cautions that the demands of real-time news are impairing war reporting. "There's so much information coming from so many sources. When you're operating within a 24/7 environment there's no time for balance - you're in danger of repeating enemy propaganda, our propaganda. There's a refrain that this is the first draft of history, but increasingly those drafts are rougher and rougher because of the tyranny of real time." The CCT is an updated version of the official photographers that the army has had since 1915, and "the idea of a war correspondent being an independent member of the free media is a relatively recent phenomena," Taylor points out. "The only way to transcend the criticism of embedded journalists is for big news organisations like the BBC to have some journalists embedded and some not," he adds. "You have a big team of people covering all sides and editors back at base who provide the balance." Taylor notes that larger news organisations can be reluctant to take MoD-approved footage. But they do take such footage when it suits them: Sky, the BBC, and the Telegraph, Guardian and Sun have all published MoD material in the past few months, and not just about Beckham's flying visit. It's important to question why the MoD thinks there's a need for the CCT, says Taylor. "There has to be a reason why the MoD employs otherwise three otherwise qualified fighting human beings to take footage. This is the information age, and if you don't get your audio-visual agenda out there, somebody else with a camera on a mobile will." |