Some notes from class

1. 1

2. 2

3. Kate Adie
• Adopted by a Sunderland
couple as a baby
• Libya (1986)
• Shot in arm at Tiananmen
Square (1989)
• Gulf War 1 (1991)
• Bosnia (1992-1995)
• Rwanda (1994)
• Sierra Leone (2000)
3

4. Four forms of reportage:
1. Technical
2. Official
3. Ideological
4. Critical
4

5. 1 - Technical
• Relates to how near or far from the conflict
journalists can get
• Portability of equipment:
– 'All the gadgets a reporter needs can be carried
in a single suitcase that fits in the overhead
compartment of most planes'.
• (Peter Johnson, 'Media's war footing looks solid',
USA Today, 17 February 2003)
• GW1 - drive for ‘newness’
• GW2 – language/technology of war – ‘smart
bombs’, ‘daisy cutters’, night vision, MOABs,
Patriots, etc
5

6. 2 - Official
• Journalists and the Task Force to the Falklands
• Thatcher wanted to ‘manage’ journalists
• Influence on type of news produced
• Certain news suppressed
• Misinformation?
– “The BBC had made it clear there were some things it
could not reveal. If at the end of the conflict it had to
confess to the public that it had deliberately misled it,
rather than withheld certain information in the
interests of safeguarding life, the BBC’s credibility
would be gone.” (Former BBC editor)
6

7. 3 - Ideological
• Whose side should we be on?
• How do we decide?
– “When one’s nation is at war, reporting
becomes an extension of the war effort”
• Max Hastings (former editor of the Telegraph and
the Evening Standard) quoting his TV reporter
father’s famous line about WW2
7

8. 4 - Critical
• Ideals of journalistic objectivity/impartiality
– reporting the facts?
• Self reflective?
8

9. 9

10. • WW1:
• DW Griffith’s Hearts
of the World, 1918
10

11. • WW1:
• Frank Hurley
• Australia’s official war
photographer
• Melded composites
11

12. • WW2
– Radio reports central
– Cecil Beaton images (often staged)
– Disney/Capra films (Why We Fight)
– The Empire Marketing Board film unit
12

13. Propaganda?
• 1st
televised crisis – Suez, 1956
• PM Anthony Eden tried to use BBC for
propaganda
• Vietnam (1957-1975) – myth of the body
bag
• Falklands (1982) – 2 important factors:
– Lobby system
– Pooling system
13

14. Falklands
14

15. • Glasgow University Media Group:
• “There is no absolute unity of interest
among the media, the government and the
military”
– 1985, War and Peace News
15

16. 1. Many journalists like the idea of being a war
reporter - ITN correspondent:
 ‘There was never any danger that this good
wonderful war could escalate into anything like The
Day After (nuclear war film). It was a good gutsy
war but it was a safe gutsy war.’
1. BBC/ITN/Sky seek to be the nation’s news
service, so want to appear to be in tune with
national mood.
2. Normal news reporting features official sources
anyway, so why would broadcasters,
journalists change format now?
16

17. Gulf War 2
• Present attitude towards
(mediated) war?
• Civilian deaths?
• Surgical, precise, clean
strikes?
• ‘Smart’ bombs?
• Information
leakage/flow?
• www.iraqbodycount.org/
17

18. ‘Always on’ media
• 31st August 1997
• 11th September 2001
• 7th July 2005
• Speculation,
commentary and hourly
attempt to return to an
authoritative summary
18

19. Key changes in coverage
1. Increased availability of channels to view news
and many of these are not ‘home-grown’ –
e.g., Fox News, CNN, BBC World, Al-Jazeera.
2. Proliferation of news channels might suggest
news is increasingly important but news is
expensive and the modern media seek more
cost efficient soft news and entertainment
(visuals over analysis?)
19

20. Other changes
– AP & Reuters have financial constraints – must
cover wars adequately but can’t increase
subscription costs
– Satellite news channels lose ad revenue because
viewers want non-stop coverage & advertisers don’t
want to be associated with disasters.
– News producers cut back on foreign
correspondents (lack reporters)
– The attempt to be neutral and balanced can make
for boring news (Fox News vs Al-Jazeera)
– Europe’s anti-war sentiment? (Tumber & Palmer,
2004, point to the lack of space given to anti-war
voices).
20

21. 21

22. Questions to consider
• To what extent is it possible to separate
the fact from the propaganda/spin?
• How complicit are journalists in this
process?
• How might the demands for copy impact
upon public knowledge?
22

23. • Ray Heibert (1991) Public Relations Review
• Public relations and public communications
would play an increasingly significant role in
warfare
• The battle for public opinion would be as
important as the engagement of soldiers on the
front
23

24. • Ray Heibert (2003) Public Relations Review
• We don’t think about facts but about the way
those facts are framed
• Framing an issue becomes THE most powerful
way to control our response to something.
24

25. 25

26. 26

27. 27

28. • See Lakoff (2003)
• Classic narratives:
– Self-defense story
– Rescue story
28

29. • Global audience = occasional language
slip-ups
• “Crusade”
• “Axis of Evil”
• “Operation Enduring Freedom”
• “Coalition of the Willing”
• “Saddam’s Fedayeen”
29

30. • The essential strategy for becoming the
standard of truth when no one believes you is
to open your operations to the kind of risk that
no one would take if he were planning to lie.
Spin is out of the question. Good or bad, the
story is there for the reporter to see. In a
company criticized for, say, global labor
practices, this would mean opening overseas
factories to unscheduled media visits. In this
war, it means embedded reporters”
– Clark S Judge, 2003,
http://www.whwg.com/thefirm/sample.php/54/Clark_S._Jud
30

31. 31

32. • CentCom (Qatar)
• $1.5m briefing centre
• Plasma screens, mini studious, phone banks
• Designed by Hollywood set designer, George
Allison
• Platform for truth (US General Tommy Franks)
• Seating arrangements reflected pecking order
32

33. • “When Americans wake up in the morning, they
will first hear from the [Persian Gulf] region,
maybe from General Tommy Franks, then later
in the day, they will hear from the Pentagon,
then the State Department, then later on the
White House will brief.”
– Suzy DeFrances, President Bush’s deputy assistant
for communications cited in Douglas Quenqua, March
24th
2003, PR Week
http://www.prweekus.com/White-House-prepares-to-feed-2
33

34. 34

35. 35

36. • “Photos of sleek fighter jets, rescued POWs, and
smiling Iraqis cheering the arrival of U.S. troops
are easy to find among Combat Camera’s public
images. Photos of bombed-out Baghdad
neighborhoods and so-called ‘collateral damage’
are not.”
– cited in Heibert, 2003: 252 36

37. 37

38. 38

39. 39

40. • [S]ome of us have led a very different existence
these past weeks. A daily shuttle, hundreds of
miles from the action, from a comfortable hotel
to the press centre at the drab as-Sayliyah
military base, home to CentCom's forward
headquarters. And while we allowed ourselves
to say "here at CentCom", we knew that we
were being held at arm's length.
40

41. • We were rarely allowed to stray from the spartan
warehouse with its hi-tech briefing room and
cramped, woefully inadequate work-spaces. The
real business of running the war was taking
place in other, equally spartan warehouses
some distance away in this vast, faceless facility.
It is an odd way to cover a war, and some
wondered if it was really worth it.
– Paul Adams, 2003, ‘Reporters’ log: final thoughts’
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/world/2003/reporters_lo
41

42. • Iraq:
– 2000-2500 reporters
– 600-700 embedded (500 US journalists)
• Embeds
– officially placed with military units
• Unilaterals
– roving, independent journalists without military
support taking huge risks to get access to stories
42

43. • “The broadcast networks are complicit. With
their embedded teams producing great visuals,
what need is there for broader analysis from the
battlefield? One British network was instrumental
in getting one of its own unilateral reporters
kicked out of an embed position for rocking the
boat…”
43

44. • “…ITN, Sky and the BBC all belong to an
exclusive club: the Forward Transmission Unit,
based just inside Iraq and attached to the
military, which allows a select few
correspondents to package the war. With such
extreme limits on access, why jeopardise what
you've got?”
– Lucy Mangan, April 7 2003, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/apr/07/mondaymed
44

45. Dangers facing unilaterals?
• “Two weeks into this war, the constraints are
tightening. Previously slack border points are
now closed. Those unilateral journalists entering
Iraq "illegally" do so at higher risk, with no
expectation of any assistance from a coalition
army warned away from them”
– Lucy Mangan, April 7 2003, The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/apr/07/mondaymed
45

46. • Death of ITN journalist Terry Lloyd
• Palestine Hotel attack (Reuters)
• In The Line of Fire (BBC)
46

47. • “US forces must prove that the incident was not a
deliberate attack to dissuade or prevent journalists from
continuing to report on what is happening in Baghdad.”
– Robert Menard, secretary–general of Paris–based Reporters
Without Borders. Cited in Ciar Bryne, April 9 2003,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/apr/09/pressandpublishing.iraqa
47

48. • “There’s nothing sacrosanct about a hotel with a bunch
of journalists in it.”
– (Retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, reported by
Washington Post, April 9)
48

49. • “If you look at what fills newspapers now, it’s the
equivalent of reality TV – it’s superficial, there’s very little
news reporting, there’s very little analysis, but there’s a
lot of conjecture. The media thought they were going to
get a one-hour-45-minute Hollywood blockbuster and it’s
not like that. War is a dirty, ugly thing, and I worry about
it being dignified as ‘infotainment’”
– (Air Marshall Burridge, Daily Telegraph, April 7 2003)
49

50. • ‘The most obvious casualty has been the distinction
between warrior and correspondent. First-person plural
is now the pronoun of choice, whether subconscious or
not. Take Mark Franchetti in the Sunday Times: "Back in
Kuwait, as we had edged towards the border ready for
the advance, we had been dozing in our assault
vehicle... [Now] we were racing across the lunar
landscape in attack formation...To the occasional
stunned shepherds, we invaders must have seemed
like ghosts out of a Mad Max movie.”’
– Lucy Mangan, April 7 2003, The Guardian
50

51. • Sometimes the urge to identify subsumes gender. A
report by Sarah Oliver in the Mail on Sunday opened
with the arresting line: "We rode at dawn, the men of
the 1st Royal Irish," before going on to describe how
"our column thundered through the Rumailah oilfield"
and closed with the news that "Last night we were
holding 37 officers, 277 men and expecting another
200".’
– Lucy Mangan, April 7 2003, The Guardian
51

52. The ‘fog’ of war
• The Guardian: April 11, 2003
• See this link for claims and denials at the
time
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/apr/11/pres
52

53. How should journalists show the
reality of warfare?
• Clip from C4 show “Iraq: The Hidden Story”
• 2008 53

54. 54

55. Questions to consider
• To what extent is it possible to separate the fact
from the propaganda during conflicts?
• How complicit are journalists in this process?
• How might the demands for copy impact upon
public knowledge?
• Can embedded journalism ever be balanced?
55

56. Questions?
1. So we have ‘nowness’, we have immediate coverage,
we have words and images but what do we know about
war?
2. Should war reporting be for information or an extension
of the war effort?
3. As viewers we can watch the news non-stop – does this
mean that we understand the news as a construction
(as provisional, disputed, happening as journalists
speak)?
4. Does news become reduced to narrative with points of
closure – do we stop viewing when the statue is pulled
down? When do we start to watch again, or really listen,
or even think?
5. How long did our interest in Iraq last? Are we concerned
with it today? Should we be?
56

57. • How does the press cover war today?
57

58. Additional resources
• David Leigh, 2003, ‘False Witness’-
examples of military disinformation and
the media. Available at
– http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,92931
• Report of faked war report from Sky News.
Actual footage available at:
– http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3078693.stm
58

59. The DA-Notice system
• http://www.dnotice.org.uk/
59

60. Non-voluntary alternatives
• Criminal law
Official Secrets Act(s)
Terrorism Act 2000/2006
Prosecution follows publication
60

61. • Tension between free speech and national
security/media and government
• DA-Notice system is voluntary and extra
legal
• Arrangement between government and
media not to publish certain information
61

62. Free Speech
• Various theories justifying free speech –
‘free speech as an argument from
democracy’ most relevant here
• Not an absolute right – national security is
a legitimate reason for limiting free speech
62

63. DA-Notices: Still Useful?
• No
the internet has increasingly changed the way the
public accesses news and information
increased information available in the ‘public domain’
(international news, war bloggers, www.arrse.co.uk)
• Yes
System still useful for old technology – hard copy print
media, radio & television (also have internet platforms
that need policing)
Represents an alterative conciliatory approach
63

64. 64

65. Princely PR
• Caroline Gammell, March 1 2008, The Telegraph, ‘How the Prince Harry
blackout was broken’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1580111/How-the-Prince-Harry-
blackout-was-broken.html
• Non attributed, March 2, 2008, The Independent, ‘The people's prince: with
Harry in Afghanistan. Dog of war or PR pawn?’
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-peoples-prince-with-
harry-in-afghanistan-dog-of-war-or-pr-pawn-790323.html
• Peter McKay, March 2 2008, Mail, ‘Prince Harry in Afghanistan: Oh! What a
lovely PR stunt’ http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/columnists/article-
524341/Prince-Harry-Afghanistan-Oh-What-lovely-PR-stunt.html
• Peter Wilby, March 3 2008, The Guardian, ‘'Harry's war' - it's just a blatant
PR stunt’
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/mar/03/royalsandthemedia.pressand
publishing
65

66. 66

67. Madrid 2004
67

68. Madrid 2004
• Guardian changes colour
68

69. Madrid 2004
• The Times airbrushes
69

70. Madrid 2004
• The Telegraph airbrushes
70

71. 71

72. 72

73. What can the news actually
show us?
73

74. 74

75. 75

76. Sodomized with a knife?
76

77. 77

78. What can the news actually
show us?
78

79. 79

80. Ahmed Chalabi
• Interim oil minister in Iraq April-May 2005 and December-
January 2006
• Deputy prime minister from May 2005 until May 2006.
• Pre-2003 invasion, under his guidance the Iraqi National
Congress, supported by lobbyists BKSH & Associates, provided
substantial info on which U.S. Intelligence based its
condemnation of Saddam Hussein, including reports of
weapons of mass destruction and alleged ties to al-Qaeda
80

81. Useful material
Control Room
(2004, Jehane Noujaim)
WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
(2004, Danny Schechter)
Panorama Special: In The Line of Fire
(21st
Nov 2004, BBC)
Al- Jazeera on war coverage http://youtu.be/NTo6dbqKlsw
Al- Jazeera discusses the PoWs
http://youtu.be/mWdDMAH6Kvw
81

82. 82

83. Restrepo
(2010, S. Junger & T. Hetherington )
83

84. Restrepo
• The Korengal Valley
• Embedded with Second
Platoon, B Company, 2nd
Battalion, 503rd Infantry
Regiment (airborne), 173rd
Airborne Brigade Combat
Team of the U.S. Army
84

85. ‘Grunt documentaries’
• ‘by privileging personal experience over
historical awareness, these accounts
construct a version of the war in which it
becomes impossible to apprehend such
atrocities as Haditha, Ramadi, Abu Ghraib’
– Tony Grajeda 2007
85

86. Misrata, Libya - 20 April 2011
86

87. Homs, Syria - 21 February 2012
87

88. Homs, Syria - 22 February 2012
• Marie Colvin
• Remi Ochlik
88

89. 89

90. Ofcom: Section 1
• Violence and dangerous behaviour
• 1.11 Violence, its after-effects and descriptions of violence, whether verbal
or physical, must be appropriately limited in programmes broadcast before
the watershed … and must also be justified by the context.
• 1.12 Violence, whether verbal or physical, that is easily imitable by children
in a manner that is harmful or dangerous:
– must not be featured in programmes made primarily for children unless there is strong
editorial justification;
– must not be broadcast before the … unless there is editorial justification.
• 1.13 Dangerous behaviour, or the portrayal of dangerous behaviour, that is
likely to be easily imitable by children in a manner that is harmful:
– must not be featured in programmes made primarily for children unless there is strong
editorial justification;
– must not be broadcast before the watershed (in the case of television) … unless there is
editorial justification.
90

91. Ofcom: Section 2
• Harm and Offence
• 2.4 Programmes must not include material (whether in individual
programmes or in programmes taken together) which, taking into account
the context, condones or glamorises violent, dangerous or seriously
antisocial behaviour and is likely to encourage others to copy such
behaviour.
• 2.5 Methods of suicide and self-harm must not be included in programmes
except where they are editorially justified and are also justified by the
context.
91

92. Questions to consider
• Why do some journalists risk their lives to get stories?
• What can the mainstream media show us? Should there be limits?
Why/not?
• To what extent is it possible to separate fact from propaganda/spin?
• How complicit are journalists in this process during wartime?
• How might the demands for copy/footage/stories impact upon public
knowledge?
92