Phil Taylor's papers
|
BACK TO : PROPAGANDA AND THE GLOBAL 'WAR' ON TERROR (GWOT) Years 1 and 2, ie 9/11-2003
The Image of War by ABC Pictures of war now dominate the media. But do they increase our understanding of what's happening? In the age of non-stop, live-to-air coverage has the depiction of conflict become a matter of volume, not quality. This week on The Media Report, one of the world's most respected photo-journalists, Tim Page, whose photos of Vietnam changed public perception of the war, talks about the power of the image in war coverage. The Media Report: 27 March 2003 - The Image of War [This is the print version of story  ]
Mick O'Regan: Hello, and welcome to The Media Report. This week we're going to consider the images of war that fill the pages of our newspapers and magazines. How are they chosen, and what impact do they have on our understanding of the conflict? & Mick O'Regan: However, before we delve into the world of printed images, I want to focus for a moment on the death of the ABC cameraman, Paul Moran, who was killed earlier this week in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Three Kurdish fighters and eight other people were also killed in the attack. Just last night, the Australian government issued a renewed travel advisory on northern Iraq, urging Australians to leave the area, and indicating that media personnel may be specific targets of violence. Just 39, and the father of a new-born daughter, Paul Moran died when a car-bomb, concealed in a taxi, was detonated by a suicide bomber, most probably associated with the group Ansar al Islam. Paul had worked extensively in the Middle East, stretching back to his freelance days for the ABC from Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War in '91. I spoke last night to the Australian journalist, Michael Ware, who's working for 'Time' Magazine in northern Iraq and witnessed the attack. Michael Ware: The place where it occurred is down on a frontline near the small town of Halabja. Halabja is a very sad place and in 1988 was attacked by Saddam's Baghdad regime with chemical weapons and it has a terrible history. They're still suffering down there, thanks to a group of Islamic militants, principally led by an organisation called Ansar al Islam. They're seeking to impose a Taliban-style regime here in the north of Iraq. They currently control a number of villages in the mountains bordering with Iran. So for the past 12 months, these groups have been conducting a military offensive against the secular Kurdish government here in the north, so there are active front lines down there, and the terrorists are heavily dug in to mountain caves and bunkers. So down there, there's a war raging, literally every day. Down there on Saturday I was on the front line with a group that's called the 61st Uprising Battalion in a particularly exposed part of the defences. Whilst we were there, Ansar began shelling us, obviously we all scurried to bunkers, all the Peshmerga. When we could pop our heads back up the Peshmerga started replying with heavy machine-gun fire from a large Soviet weapon called a DShK, which fires 12.7mm rounds. As that was going on, just behind the bunkers that we were in, again across a grassy field, just a few hundred metres away, there was a god-awful explosion. This came as an enormous surprise, this is behind the lines, this was a Kurdish position that had just been secured the day before, directly behind us, so it was under Kurdish control. We looked around and I saw an enormous fireball and thick black smoke belching into the sky. Unfortunately on February 26th I'd seen a suicide bombing in the same area, just a kilometre away. I instantly knew that that site was out of range of the mortars and the rockets, so I figured it was a suicide bombing. So we jumped in our vehicles and dashed down to the checkpoint where the explosion had occurred. When I got there I found great confusion, in fact the Kurds were pulling the men out of the taxi, and were just about to execute him there on the spot, but some other Kurdish soldiers stepped in and an enormous argument broke out, and everyone cocked their weapons and eventually the taxi driver was taken away. Sixty metres further down the road I found out why they were targeting that taxi driver. A group of journalists had been at that checkpoint. As I said, the day before it had been controlled by an Islamic group called Komal, and it had changed hands. There was four vehicles of journalists there interviewing people coming out of the terrorist controlled areas. People started to realise that something was not right, something was amiss, so the journalists started getting in their cars and pulling away. The first few cars were pulling away. As they did, Eric Campbell and Paul Moran were getting into their vehicles. Just as they were ready to drive off, the soldiers started running down the road from behind the checkpoint. Paul Moran quickly turned and started filming this and walked towards them as they were running, so he was sort of following them through his viewfinder. His translator was perhaps ten metres behind him. As Paul had his back turned, looking at these soldiers, a taxi, a local taxi, just with one man, the driver, came out of the terrorist controlled area, approached the checkpoint, drove through the checkpoint while no-one was really paying attention, and drove directly behind Paul so he couldn't see it, and stopped, literally right next to him and that's when the car bomb detonated. Mick O'Regan: Michael, was the attack a specific attack on an individual, or was it a general attack do you think, on journalists? Michael Ware: It's obviously in the confusion of this place, it's very hard to say. But on my assessment and on the assessment of many other people here, it looks like it. I mean, look, 15 hours before this attack the Americans had actually launched what one commander described as 'a cocktail of Tomahawk and Cruise missiles' on to the terrorist bunkers. So during that night they'd been absolutely pounded, and then in that day, they'd decided obviously to send a suicide bomber inside the lines and to hit the sort of civilian underbelly of the Kurdish front. Now it takes a while to rig a car bomb, so that car bomb was coming no matter what. However, when there was a large group of journalists congregating at that checkpoint I think the temptation was far too great. It's been picked up by intelligence that they want to hit journalists. There's great media play when something like that happens, they feel that it's a victory, a strike against the West, or icon of the West. And they saw these journalists there, I think they figured that was a very juicy target, and by the way that the car moved and the way that the car positioned itself before it exploded, it looked for a journalist, and it found Paul Moran. Mick O'Regan: Has the attack changed the way that journalists are working in that part of northern Iraq? Michael Ware: Well it's obviously made people much more wary of the region around Halabjah where the terrorists are most easily able to strike, and so for example, I changed my routine at checkpoints. I refuse to let my driver sit behind or between other vehicles as they are waiting to be searched, these sorts of things. The Kurds have now sealed off the Halabjah front from the media. That I think is a response to this suicide bombing, but also due to the fact that a large number of American special forces troops have arrived in that area, and are leading a ground offensive against the terrorists. Mick O'Regan: Michael, given the danger to which you've now been exposed and a danger that you've witnessed, would you consider opting to be embedded now? I mean do you see the advantage of being an embedded journalist? Michael Ware: Well the 'embeds' face a whole different array of risks as well. Generally they're not allowed at the pointy end of the spear. If they're with a particular battalion and the re-con platoon of that battalion is 500 metres forward in fighting, then they're generally not allowed to be there. Yet they're just as vulnerable to artillery or rocket attack as the soldier standing next to them. So I guess it's six of one and half a dozen of another. The risks here are very different obviously. We're very much freewheeling, we're very much on our own. The only defence that we have here are our wits and the particular team of people that you can gather around you. You've got to have confidence in them and trust in them. These things can strike you anywhere. I mean I was in a six-hour battle with the Ansar terrorists back down in Halabjah some weeks ago, we were under sustained mortar fire for six hours. The man next to me got peppered with shrapnel, he was sitting literally sitting right next to me, right next to me. So there's only so much you can do to some degree, and no matter where you are, you're going to be facing risks. Mick O'Regan: The Australian journalist, Michael Ware, on a satellite phone from northern Iraq where he's reporting for 'Time' Magazine. & Mick O'Regan: The relationship between war and journalism has been fundamentally restructured in this conflict by the integration of reporters with the active military units, the so-called embedded journalists Michael Ware was just talking about. The process marks a departure from both the tight military control of the media that typified the first Gulf War and the free-ranging coverage of the Vietnam conflict. In a moment I'll speak to a couple of senior newspaper people about the selection of photographs we see in the Australian press. But first, a different view. Tim Page was one of the new breed of photojournalists who rose to prominence during the war in Vietnam. Through images in publications such as 'Life' Magazine, Page documented a side of the war largely unseen, and unknown to the general public. Tim Page: We had a freedom to come and go as we wished, we had total freedom. And today, you're electronically strapped to whoever is using you, and you can't exactly just drive back through an advancing column of armour and get out of there whenever you choose. I suppose some of the embedded journalists must have helicopter facilities, but not very many of them. And it's almost going back to Second World War or Korea, you basically cannot really voice or investigate under your own steam, you can't leave that column and go off to the nearest town. The thought of having to be stuck with that American unit and not be able to get out, would be very oppressive, and I don't think we're actually getting a true face of what's going on. Mick O'Regan: Why not? Tim Page: Because the true face of what's going on is the suffering of the people. I think of Vietnam and I think the people who really suffered, everybody involved was a victim, but the people who suffered were the civilians, the ordinary Vietnamese over who life esteem rolled daily or blitzkrieg daily. Are we really getting a peep at Iraqi suffering? I read this morning that the American government is asking their various news channels and networks not to use al Jazeera's pictures of American casualties. We are the messengers, I mean there's a downside to war, people die, people are maimed, people are wiped out. And I'm not saying that the media should be on one side or the other, but I think we're rational and I think we have to express the horror of war. But if you can't see the horror of the war, then we're not doing our job. Mick O'Regan: When you think back about being in Vietnam and the images that you selected, did you have a sense, as you pressed the shutter, that this was an image that was going to change people's attitudes, were you seeing a depiction of injured and dying people, images that would sap the enthusiasm of the general public for war? Tim Page: I was totally unaware. I mean I got tear sheets, I got magazines sent to me. I'd arrived in Vietnam as a 20-year-old kid from Laos, I'd come overland as a hippie. I had no idea what Joe Public was thinking back in America, I'd been to the States. The remit I had was to shoot what I wanted, so in a sense, what came into the viewfinder was happenstance. Often the picture would be a very mundane picture, just exhaustion, somebody slumped by a trail. It could be a very ordinary picture, something which you could have got any day, because most war is about very, very, boring perverted moments, waiting for something to happen, like you're dirty, you're full of crap, I mean you don't eat properly and there's not enough of this, there's not enough of the other. I mean, it's desperate, going to war, being on the receiving end or being on the delivery end, it's miserable. It's exciting, but it's miserable. It's hard to explain the excitement or the misery. Mick O'Regan: Well just on that though, do you think at the moment what we're seeing is a sort of excitement without misery version of war? Tim Page: We're getting a very kind of sterile war. It's almost a repeat we have out of the first Gulf War, and in that sense it's hard to remember, unlike Vietnam, any iconic images from that Gulf War except for those kind of lost television images, as a missile hits a bridge, hits a truck, hits something. It's like you just blinked or something, did it happen? So far, the embedded photographers are getting out a lot of pictures; it looks very clean, it's almost like a glorification of the coalition. Mick O'Regan: Is it different because there's such a volume of material that's coming back? I mean there is a sense when you had fewer photojournalists operating of selectivity, that people were choosing images and then editors were choosing images. Now in the almost live action broadcasting, if you like, of the war, it's as though there's a sort of wallpaper of conflict that's going on. Does that reduce the impact of images? Compared, say, to the images of the young Vietnamese girl who ran after the napalm attack. Tim Page: So far, and I haven't been buying every paper every day in this country, but I've seen some really nice, good pictures, but I haven't seen anything that makes me snap, and remember that one. There hasn't been that head-jerk of the icon yet. But again, I seem to feel the same thing started to happen from Bosnia, and I think again, you look back to Somalia, you look back to other conflicts, the imagery doesn't seem to be as powerful. But again, is it because we were there in Vietnam for such a long time and honed a skill? Also you must remember that Vietnam was the first time a war was taken in colour, it's the first time a freelance had turned up properly. It was the first time we had television; it was the first time the voting age was dropped to 18. A lot of firsts happened, and maybe we're using those firsts as all-time superlatives, and I don't mean to say that I want this war to drag on and on to develop a whole school of photo-journalism in a new kind of digital kind of age. But I think that it is a new kind of coverage and we've been processing digital images now here from the end of the Bosnian war, the Balkans, and it's been honed, it's been refined. And I can almost hear an editor, none of the photo editors, the image managers, saying, 'I want a tank, burning oilwell, throw in a camel and one of them ragheads. Camel, oilwell, some armour, American flag in there.' Mick O'Regan: So there's almost like a photo shop element to it. Tim Page: I get a feeling the pictures have, I mean a full page picture of a Cruise missile leaving a guided missile or something in wherever it happens to be, and I go, Well that's just set that one up. There seems to be less the photo of opportunity if you were asking, it's a question of not just creating your own chances to be at a place where things were put, and using the intelligence of the moment to get to that place, because once you're in the middle of a battle, I don't care if it's a jungle or a desert, even to move five feet you can be, dead. Mick O'Regan: Did you ever choose not to take a photo because of the sensitivity of the image? Tim Page: The second combat operation I went on, I was out with Eddie Adams, the guy who took the execution picture. Mick O'Regan: That's the famous picture of the Mayor of Saigon shooting a collaborator? Tim Page: The one shooting the VC prisoner, which won the Pulitzer in '68 during the Tet Offensive. I didn't know arse from a hole in the ground, and I came on the scene of VietCong being interrogated with a bayonet in the gut, and Eddie was busy making the frame. I took one look and threw up. The next morning in my pigeonhole was 'Roxy running front page New York Times, you same op where pic?' the AP's run the picture, you were on the same operation, you know, running kind of shadow on Eddie, you goofed. I don't think after that moment I hesitated to take images which shock. Mick O'Regan: The British photojournalist Tim Page, recalling his days working in Vietnam. & Now lets move forward to the images that currently dominate our newspapers and magazines. The pictures that confront us over breakfast provide a stark example of the power of the media to represent the war. But do they enhance or distort our understanding of the conflict? Michael Bowers is the Managing Editor, Pictorial, for Herald Publications in the Fairfax Group of newspapers. Each day he chooses from hundreds of photographs, the images that will make the next day's edition of The Sydney Morning Herald. So, what determines the photos, which make the paper? Michael Bowers: It's purely a visual criteria. The pictures that speak the loudest in a visual sense are the ones that make it to conference in the afternoon, and there's no direct line from anywhere up the chain of command, it's just purely the visually strong images. You have to follow where the story is going to a certain extent. We're also very conscious because of the amount of material coming out from embedded photographers with the troops, that they're seeing one end of the picture, so the other day we ran a photo of a Javelin missile being fired, and you've got to take great care not to over-glorify things because while that was a spectacular shot, it must be kept in mind that at the other end of that shot, quite possibly it maimed and killed people. So you've got to try and run a balance where you show whilst we're clambering for shots, and while these dramatic shots that are coming out from embedded troops are dramatic, there's a very serious side to war in that that dramatic shot has a consequence at the other end which is death and destruction and not very pleasant. Mick O'Regan: So that's quite a conscious decision on your part, to try and acknowledge that, if you like, there were two sides to any image that you might show? Michael Bowers: Well I think if you don't, because of the amount of material that's coming out from the coalition side, you will run the risk of glorifying the war to a certain extent. I think we need to run a certain amount of the gore to try and balance it out. Today we ran a picture, it was just the shoes of a dead Iraqi soldier, and they were worn out and holes in them, and it was just his shoes, very, very close up, and to me that was just the saddest picture because this man who wasn't even equipped properly with shoes, has died fighting this war and to me it said so much and it was important I think that we run these things. Mick O'Regan: What about the actual images of death and destruction, is there some criterion that you employ to say, No, that is simply too gory an image to confront people with in their morning newspaper? Michael Bowers: There are some very distressing images coming in. Personally I don't think you need to get those really gory images out there. I don't think it serves any purpose. If you need to look at these things, there are various publications around the world you can log on to and see them, but I mean public taste I suppose dictates it a bit. I think you could mount a strong argument to say perhaps we should be running more of this material, and then people would probably never want to go to war again. But there are sort of unwritten laws I suppose about what you can and can't run, you know. Large amounts of blood generally cause huge reactions from the public if you're running shots with a lot of blood in them, you'll get a lot of complaints. Public taste sort of dictates how far you can go I think. Mick O'Regan: Michael, the other thing that interests me is that the photos that we see in newspapers, are they the photos that have been taken, or is there manipulation of photos? For example, are photos cropped in order to fit on the page better that might actually have an effect on what they depict? Michael Bowers: It's very easy to change the focus and the impact that a picture has, merely by cropping out a certain part. This week on an ABC News program, they ran some very graphic still pictures which had come in on the wires, and one of them was of a young girl who was being handed off the back of a truck by her father I take it, he was an old man, and she had a serene look on her face, it looked like she'd passed out and had a little bit of a splat of blood, it didn't look like she was too badly injured. However if you followed the photo across to its right-hand side, both her feet had been blown off and were dangling, and when you initially look at the photo you don't see the feet, when you look down and it's just a powerful and horrific picture. The ABC News program concerned had cropped off the feet, so it just looked like she was a slightly injured girl and it had changed entirely the impact of the picture, so yes, it is very possible to manipulate images and it's very possible to make them say what you want to say if you don't run them in their entirety. Mick O'Regan: Did Fairfax run that photo in its entirety? Michael Bowers: No, we didn't. We ran a picture of another injured girl from that same event, but it was a very, very deeply disturbing picture this one, and I judged, and the other people who make the decisions, judged it to be just too graphic in its content. Mick O'Regan: So the criterion you employed that it the level of distress that the photo might cause to readers meant that it shouldn't be run. Michael Bowers: It was shocking, it made you feel physically ill when you looked at it, yes. Mick O'Regan: Do you get anxious about that sort of filtering? As you said earlier, this is the sort of reality that people are confronting on the ground, is that the sort of reality that we who are sitting comfortably at home following the news coverage of the war should also be confronted with? Michael Bowers: I think you could make an argument for that. I think a newspaper has to have certain sort of criteria, you just can't run the most graphic and gory shots. I think there's probably a forum perhaps we can look at putting a page of very graphic things in our online service, and it's something I think we're going to investigate doing so it's got a warning on it, but I certainly do think you need certain standards with regards to this, and you just can't put everything in a newspaper as a forum for that, I just don't think it's appropriate. Mick O'Regan: Michael Bowers, the Managing Editor, Pictorial, for the Herald publications in the Fairfax newspaper group. Now The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised against Australian involvement in the war in Iraq. Not so the newspapers published by News Limited, one of which is The Courier-Mail in Brisbane. Does the newspaper's editorial approval of Australia's participation in the fighting have an influence in the selection of images that depict the war? David Fagan is the Editor of The Courier-Mail. David Fagan: No I don't think it is. I think in the end what is guiding us in our choice of words and pictures is the news itself, and the events that are on the ground, rather than the view of the paper which has been expressed quite separately in the editorial column. Mick O'Regan: Within News Limited more broadly, there was recently a report that showed an extraordinary editorial unanimity among newspapers within the News Corporation group, and with News Limited in Australia; does that make it unlikely that images in The Courier-Mail would be images that would be either so distressing to show the ugly reality of war, is there any sense that you are falling within the broad parameters of where News Limited and News Corporation publications are heading? David Fagan: In the sense of pictures, do you mean? No, I don't see it in a sense of falling into the parameters of any group of newspapers. At the end of the day we have a team of people here who are choosing what we believe are the best pictures to show the story each day, and the considerations you talk about, about what other newspapers are doing, really don't come into that. It's what is the best picture to go with. Now it was interesting I think last Saturday, every newspaper in the country and not just the News Limited papers, all went with essentially the same picture, because it was such a strong picture and it was of one of the Iraqis surrendering I think to American troops, a very, very strong picture. Nothing to do with, I think, any sort of view at this newspaper of what other newspapers were doing, it was just overwhelmingly the best picture. This morning we published the same picture on page 1 that The Australian did, and that was of the oil fires around Baghdad, again illustrated very strongly, the way the story was last night and seemed to be heading today, which is the difficulties that the coalition troops will have if they want to get into Baghdad. But when it came down to it, the consideration wasn't what anyone else was doing, it was what was best for this newspaper to present the pictures and the story of the day. Mick O'Regan: Have you received much feedback from your own readership about the particular images, because there is one that did strike me, and it was of two dead Iraqi soldiers in a trench with a white flag lying beside them. Now it's difficult to see how they died, but it looked as though they had suffered terrible, terrible wounds to their heads. Now as you looked at it, it really spoke volumes about the reality of war in Iraq. Do those sorts of images draw a response from the public? David Fagan: That was a very strong image, and it illustrated what I was just talking about, about the terrible reality of war. In that particular case, we did have a couple of phone calls, but it was less than a handful of calls from people who were unhappy about that particular image. I defend that particular one, because I think it was a picture that I think after a weekend where we'd been watching the war on TV and in many cases it looked very much like almost a Space Invaders sort of game being operated by remote control, this brought home the fact that this was a war being fought at close quarters, with real human cost, and clearly distress in it. Mick O'Regan: David another key issue that's come up this week is the media's reproduction of images of American POWs, in North America itself, in the US, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, actually approached media outlets to tell them not to run those images; what happened in Australia? David Fagan: In Australia we received a fax about 6.30 on Monday night from the Defence Department advising us that they prefer we didn't run them because we may be in breach of the Geneva Convention. Now these were images that had run on the internet, they'd run on television, and I think that they were clearly real people, real soldiers who were prisoners-of-war. I'm not sure we had a duty to pixillate them, which is what the Defence Department was asking us to do. I think probably the best thing to do was to run their faces in the paper again so people could see the reality of what war was, that people would be taken prisoner, that people were fighting a war and they weren't anonymous, distant people just fighting a remote control war, but that this was a real battle. Mick O'Regan: David Fagan, the editor of The Courier-Mail newspaper. & Mick O'Regan: And that's the program for this week. My thanks to the production team of Caroline Fisher and Jim Ussher. Guests on this program: Michael Ware Journalist, Time Magazine, currently based in northern Iraq Tim Page British photo-journalist Michael Bowers Managing Editor, Pictorial for Herald Publications. David Fagan Editor of the Courier Mail newspaper, Brisbane Presenter: Mick O'Regan Producer: Caroline Fisher © 2003 Australian Broadcasting Corporation |