Abstract
So little pains do the people take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand.
In the public’s imagination, war correspondents experience conflict as action, power and adrenaline. Conflict is a hectic series of military, physical and ideological clashes. War correspondents are pictured with mud spattered all over their faces during the day and sharing a drink with soldiers around the campfire at night. It has also been claimed that in many ways war reporting is easier than other types of journalism as action drives the story and naturally attracts an audience. 1
The articles gathered in this special issue 2 offer first-hand accounts to help re-think the crucial role of war correspondents as well as the changing nature of the job on the ground. The authors have decades of experience under their belts and have been invited to reflect upon the nature of their profession, the challenges and constraints they face and, of course, the intellectual and professional rewards they enjoyed throughout their careers. One article, by Marie-Soleil Frère, gathers interviews with 33 journalists from Burundi and offers new vital information about the challenges faced by journalists at times of political turmoil and ethnic conflict.
The starting assumption of our discussion is that war reporting remains a vital tool in the democratic process. Despite the advantages offered by social media and the new ‘citizen journalism’ phenomenon, in-depth reporting, observation and analysis continue to be necessary. In fact, we argue, it is even more vital than ever before. The result of a bombing campaign cannot simply be understood through a mere list of casualties and damages. It is true that a photograph uploaded from a mobile can convey the horrors of war more than a long wordy article but, as the authors in this issue argue, the impact of a conflict on the local communities, their society and economy needs to be examined closely in the light of interviews, photographic evidence and in-depth analysis and contextualization. 3
The second point made by our contributors is that the nature of the profession has changed radically over the past decade, with significant acceleration in recent years because of the new information environment created by social media and a tightly connected world. The public is continuously inundated with information and updates; immediacy and speed often replace accuracy, contextualization and analysis. The role of war correspondents – as well as journalists and ‘experts’ more generally – is often criticized as unnecessary and the value of their added contribution diminished. Yet, precisely because of the cacophony of constant updates and undigested news, accurate and balanced journalism is more necessary than ever. Assumptions and stereotypes must be challenged, wrongdoing must be brought to the attention of the public and their governments, and long-term trends and challenges need to be assessed and integrated into our mainstream discourse about the nature and future of conflict and society (Kaufhold et al., 2010).
Finally, war reporting continues to be a notoriously challenging and extremely dangerous profession. There are concerns for the personal safety of the journalists as well as a variety of logistical problems about reaching the war zone, locating witnesses, reporting back. There is also the old-age risk of being manipulated by the military and the politicians as well as being misguided by personal views, concerns and assumptions. The authors open a window onto the daily life of war correspondents to allow academics and scholars to gain a better understanding of the reporting process in its entirety.
The origins of modern war reporting
Writing about war is as old as war itself. In the past, people – primarily generals and commanders as well as kings and their aristocracy – often wrote their version of conflicts and battles for posterity. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, which dates back to 431 BC, is often referred to as the beginning of Western historiography and can be read as the first account of war by somebody who played a key role in it. In effect, however, war reporting predates Thucydides by thousands of years and we could look at the Palaeolithic cave paintings, like those in Lascaux, as the first kind of war reporting.
The primary target audience of these works was firmly placed in the future. The aim was to shape historical memory and to ensure fame through clear and memorable writing. The authors’ goal was to make sure that future generations would look admiringly upon them. In Thucydides’ own words, ‘My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the needs of an immediate public, but is done to last for ever’ (History of the Peloponnesian War, 431–404 BC: 1.22.4). The writing was therefore pondered carefully, enriched with classical references, highly polished. Time was not of the essence, while elegance and eloquence were crucial.
Because the writing of these accounts occurred several years after the end of the conflict and because it was carried out by those who considered themselves the winners, there was little concern about objectivity, censorship and accuracy. It was a classic example of ‘great men’s history’, in which the complex nature of the economic and social context was systematically overshadowed by the heroic role of the few courageous men, one of which was usually the author.
According to Philip Knightley, journalist and author of The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq (2004[1975]), the most comprehensive account of the evolution of the role of war correspondents, war reporting in the modern sense of the word was born during the Crimean War (1853–1856). ‘Billy’ Russell, who covered the British army for The Times, was critical in shaping the new role. ‘In his hands’ – Knightley (2003) says – ‘war correspondence became a power that began to shake the generals.’ 4
The war in Crimea was the first to be reported almost instantly. It was only a matter of a couple of days between the reports being written by Russell in far away Crimea and then read in London. It has been pointed out that the rise of modern war reporting was influenced by two key technological developments: the railways and the telegraph. Correspondents could move fast and witness conflicts firs-hand, they could speak directly with military commanders and soldiers returning from the front. Their reports reached their editors in a fraction of the time and the reader could follow the rapid successions of battles, victories and defeats at a much faster pace. The newspaper culture, which was already established at the time, received a massive boost and it was events like the Crimean war and even more so the American Civil War that truly unleashed the power of the press and created the figure of the war correspondent as an almost mythical hero (Therenty and Pillet, 2012).
In Crimea, two new characteristics emerged as the defining features of modern war reporting: the race to ‘get in there’ first so as to be able to get the report out as quickly as possible. This, as discussed at length by several scholars, often sacrificed accuracy and an all-round view of the events and their implications (see McLaughlin, 2002; Perry, 2000).
The horrors of war had never been so close to home. Modern news reporting brought a new focus on the action on the battlefield. The reality of the front hit the newspaper front pages. The human and psychological consequences, the economic costs and human sacrifice became new central features of war reporting. The public could learn about the unprecedented number of casualties, military defeats as well as success on a daily basis. In a time of mass mobilization and political involvement, this had immediate political repercussion. Governments and military became aware of the importance of sympathetic reporting from the front to maintain public support for the war effort and to boost the morale of the troops at the front. Referring to Napoleon III, Thérenty and Pillet (2012) identify the Crimean War as the beginning of ‘a tacit compromise’ between correspondents and the imperial power in which the authority allowed access to the front in return for a not unkind portrayal of the situation at the front.
Censorship and control of the media became therefore a corollary to the birth of modern war corresponding. Marc Martin (2002) has examined how, during the French Second Empire, ‘War Information’ was produced and carefully controlled by the government and the military commanders. The English initially lagged behind in understanding the impact of war reporting on the public mood as well as on strategy on the ground and Russell benefited from more room for manoeuvre longer than his French counterparts. Russell did not hesitate to challenge the government’s operations and the top British commanders in Crimea. As a result, he was blacklisted by British commanders and accused of having undermined the security of the troops (Knightley, 2003).
Challenging the official version of the nature and course of the war is at the core of what defines modern war reporting. The audience is no longer the reader of the distant future; the concern is not to shape the long-term perspective on the conflict and its memory. These issues are certainly present in the journalists’ and – more so – in the editors’ minds but the primary objectives of modern war reporting are to inform the public and to guarantee transparency and accountability of the military and political leaders.
The challenges for today’s war correspondents
Today, war reporting is defined by its fast pace, a new holistic approach to the nature of conflict and its impact on society, economy, individuals and the environment, and the new relationship with the governments and military authorities. The nature of war reporting today is heavily shaped by the social media environment in which the public is constantly bombarded with news, images and updates, and in which it is increasingly difficult to distinguish between accurate and balanced reporting and less reliable – even fake – information. The articles included here are rich in examples and reference to these new challenges, which can be grouped into four key themes.
1. Relationship with governments and military authorities
There is an obvious tension between the journalist, serving his or her readers’ interests and acting as a watchdog of democracy, and those in power, who do not necessarily share the urgency to divulge the whole truth, especially in a war context. Yet, both positions are interdependent and closely linked to one another. The interviews collected in this issue by Marie-Soleil Frère show how the concept of framing can help analyse the nature and content of reporting within Africa. Exiled journalists feel they are in a unique position to report from their country as they are free from the constraints imposed by the authorities. The journalists left in Burundi equally claim that because they are on the ground, they know more about what is actually happening. New frames of objectivity and evidence-based journalism emerge and are often in contradiction.
As Richard Norton-Taylor demonstrates in his article, the two need each other in an almost symbiotic relationship. Military and political leaders need to ensure that the public support the war effort. This can be achieved only if the public has a sense that what they are told corresponds indeed to the reality on the ground. Official communiqués and press releases are not only aseptic in the sense that they lack the human dimension but that they are viewed with suspicion by the majority of the public.
As the only source of information on the Western side, NATO also had trouble being believed by its own public. Norton-Taylor examines NATO’s predicament: on the one hand, the Alliance needed to establish more conducive relations with the press while at the same time making sure that NATO’s side was not misrepresented. Norton-Taylor strongly argues for journalists to access a more transparent flow of information to hold the Alliance and the governments to account. 5
Norton-Taylor’s piece explains how on several occasions in his career the military and political leaders have no option but to establish some form of cooperation with war correspondents. Yet, this was – and still is – a mutually suspicious and highly volatile relationship. In the history of modern war reporting, this relationship has ranged from a total laissez-faire approach (Vietnam War) to absolute control of what the war correspondents could say or even refer to (Falklands War) to embedding journalists with military troops on the ground (Iraq War). 6
The immediacy of war reporting creates security implications, which has often been used to justify further controls on what the media can say about the ongoing conflict. If correspondents discuss, for example, the movement of troops or resources, this information could be easily picked up by enemy forces and used accordingly. Hence, national security and strategic secrecy are now more than in the past obstacles to the freedom to correspond to report aspects of the conflict. In addition, today as in the past, any reporting that is seen as undermining the war effort or sapping the morale of the public or of the troops is defined as counterproductive and often reduced to a minimum. As Martin Plaut and Keith Somerville (this issue) point out, there is a certain self-censorship that war correspondents become acquainted with in time.
2. Relentless pressure in the new social media environment
Today, in an era of social media and 24/7 news updates, war reporting faces new challenges. Martin Plaut discusses the relentless demand placed on reporters. There is a feeling that foreign correspondents ‘work more, run faster, for less impact’. The immediacy of social media means that the public is often already aware of developments that occurred between the report being ready and its actual broadcast, thus making the report itself less useful and even, in some cases, counterproductive. However, the amount of information does not substitute the need for in-depth analysis.
In today’s world, conflict itself is difficult to define. International Relations (IR) scholars and security experts suggest that in the post-9/11 era there is a fluid definition of conflict and our societies are in a permanent state of alert. In this sense, social media become ‘weaponized’ and used as information tools in their own right. In recent years, the use of social media has been linked to the ‘fake news’ phenomenon, which implies a tendency to wilfully manipulate the facts, to fuel fear, hatred and violence, seed division within society, spread panic and misinformation and raise racial hatred. False information has been circulated on social media and has taken a life of its own, thus fuelling the public’s imagination. Following the invasion of Crimea in 2014, for example, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe has raised the question of the erosion of journalists’ integrity both in Russia and the West (see the report of the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, 2015). The report points to the fact that ‘national courts and regulators struggle in their analysis of propaganda, hatred, incitement and war’ and it calls for developing international and intercultural dialogue among journalists (pp. 1–2). This is not a problem only restricted to the Ukrainian crisis. International organizations like NATO and the EU, for example, have now established agencies to respond to miscommunication and propaganda campaigns, coming mainly from Russia. 7 Other open source websites like Bellingcat and Stopfake.org gather open source information and invite contributions from the wider public to challenge the creation and circulation of fake news. There are new avenues and possibilities that the war correspondent can tap into. 8 The concept of ‘citizen journalism’ is welcome as it enriches the field and allows the public to play an active role in the process of collecting and disseminating news. 9 If anything, the authors in this issue argue, it makes it all the more necessary. Statements and information must be verified and contextualized. Stereotypes and labels must be challenged to allow the public to gather a sense of the complexity and multiple dimensions of a crisis or conflict.
Yet, nothing substitutes the work of journalists. It may be worth mentioning here that journalists adhere to a well-defined ethical code that has developed over several decades and which is constantly adapting to respond to the ever more sophisticated nature of information (and misinformation). The code ensures accuracy, transparency and accountability. The Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists adopted in 1954 is the guiding principle for all journalists and their unions to enforce ethics and quality in journalism. For over 60 years, 600,000 journalists represented by the International Federation of Journalists are called to respect the truth and to protect the independence of the media ( IFJ Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists ).
3. Framing, questioning and understanding
As Patrick Cockburn has argued in the London Review of Books (2013), recent conflicts have been ‘propaganda wars’ in which journalists played a central role. According to Cockburn, in the wars fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, the outside world has been left with misconceptions even about the identity of the victors and the defeated.
The articles in this issue of Keith Somerville and Marie-Soleil Frère help us to gain an insight into the complex theoretical framework linked to objectivity and contextualization. To start with, as Somerville explains, war reporters are often attached to news corporations, with their own ethos and ethical posture. Western broadcasters are different from their Asian counterparts, for example. They have different priorities and concerns as well as using a different lens through which they look at the world. Somerville runs a survey of how African conflicts have been covered by the Western media since the Second World War. He demonstrates how ‘tribal’ rivalry has been used to explain decolonization movements and contemporary ethnic conflicts used to distinguish the specific nature of Africa. The supposedly ‘tribal’ nature of the African conflicts reinforced the idea already present in the Western public’s mind of the Continent as backward, primitive and violent. During the Cold War, for example, decolonization wars were defined as tribal to avoid reference to self-determination and to place the conflicts in an entirely African context in which anti-Western opposition was pushed to the margins. In the post-Cold War context, African conflicts have been increasingly defined as humanitarian crises. The conflicts have been labelled as an humanitarian emergency and the ‘tribal’ label has been replaced by more refined descriptions that nevertheless continue to suggest that the Continent remains primitive, backward and violent.
It is interesting to read Keith Somerville’s article along with that of Marie-Soleil Frère. The latter focuses on the divide between exiled journalists and their colleagues left in the country. The interviews demonstrate vividly how the location and the personal and political experience of each journalist deeply shape their view of the conflict, of the responsibility of the authority and ultimately of their role as journalists.
Somerville argues convincingly that the use of labels and ‘frames’ allows the journalists to pack a dense and complex content in a short report without losing clarity and efficacy. Yet, they reinforce stereotypes and preconceptions already widespread among their public rather than challenging existing narratives and exposing the true nature of the conflicts being reported.
4. Logistics of modern war reporting
The authors of the articles in this issue explain how much of what they experience and see on the ground is left out of their final reports even if it shapes the journalists’ views and perceptions. Martin Plaut’s piece is a vivid portrayal of the logistical and organizational preparations before the actual departure to the war zone even takes place and it is very interesting for those of us who have had a chance to experience it yet are often in a position to examine the content of war correspondents’ reports. Plaut explores issues from the reduction of foreign desks to meeting with the High Risk team to decide the security and safety implications of a trip to a war or crisis zone. Very helpfully, Plaut delves into practical issues like equipment storage and translation issues as well as the changing narratives over a series of reports and the problem this creates for the journalists and their editors.
Again, as in the case of Somerville’s article, Plaut focuses on the specific challenges of reporting from Africa. Linking back to what Somerville argued about framing and the need to build a link with the ideas that the public already has about a region or a country, Plaut explains how very often the choice of whether to report from a specific war zone depends on the existing awareness and interest of the Western public. The result is that some regions tend to be continuously overlooked while others get more attention, often at the expense of the importance of the events that are actually developing on the ground. In addition, there is the competition between news corporations and given that, as a rule of thumb, ‘if it bleeds it leads’, atrocity stories are highly sought after even if not necessarily representative of the nature of the conflict. As Plaut and Somerivlle explain, reporters know that their editors have an eye on what their competitors might run. Witnesses themselves are not always reliable and their testimonies not immediately verifiable. For this reason, a solid and clear ethical and theoretical approach is essential.
One of the benefits of having Plaut’s and Norton-Taylor’ articles published together is to compare the challenges linked to being embedded with the military in an actual war zone and to be working alongside NGOs during humanitarian crises and human rights violations.
The articles by Plaut, Somerville and Norton-Taylor are very different in their content and approach, yet they all point to the fact that the immense logistical and technical challenges on the ground as well as the cultural background of the journalists and of their public are critical in shaping the content of their reports and, as a consequence, our views of certain areas of the world. Scholars working on the history of media and communication studies will find helpful information about the process of reporting and new tools for carrying out content and language analysis.
Conclusions
The fight for ethical and accurate reporting is never won. Today – probably like never before since the birth of modern war reporting – the commitment to be objective, to go beyond the easy framing of complex questions and scenarios is vital. Journalists must challenge the accepted views, shake up the rights and wrongs that are too often taken for granted by readers and editors. They must also fight against a continuous cacophony of news and updates, and stand up for fair, accurate and transparent reporting. The articles gathered here help us to understand the complexities and challenges of the profession, and allow us to gain a more articulated understanding of what lies behind reports and media coverage.