Bell reserves his most telling scorn for television war reporting. He says it is not for journalists so much as for performers. “Some networks even have a style coach to teach their people to talk and walk and wave their arms at the same time. . . Television is also deeply culpable for th e censorship it imposes on itself. This has nothing to do with operational security. It is applied to cut out from the coverage of armed conflict the images of real world violence that might upset the viewers.”
Bell says that he fought this battle with his editors, and lost it, throughout the Balkan wars of the 1990s. “We showed the outgoing fire and not nearly enough of the effects of the incoming: the death and destruction, the bloodshed and the horror, the waste of young lives, even in some cases the grieving of relatives, because that would be too upsetting. We were not just prettifying war, we were falsifying it. And this is dangerous because if you obscure the reality, it then becomes an acceptable way of settling differences. No wonder this generation of peacetime politicians resorts to it so easily.”
Bell calls on a “thoroughly-modern soldier”, General Sir Rupert Smith, and his book, The Utility of Force, to help make his case. The book, published after the Iraq war of 2003, has been as influential in analysing the nature of war in our time as Clausewitz was in his. Bell says that no aspiring commander of forces in the field, “from West Point to Sandhurst to the Emirates of the Gulf can afford not to have read it.”
General Smiths central thesis is that war has ceased to exist. “Confrontation, conflict and combat undoubtedly exist. States still have armed forces which they use a symbol of power. None the less, war as cognitively known to most non-combatants, war as a battle in a field between men and machinery, war as a massively deciding event in a dispute in international affairs, such war no longer exists.”
It has been replaced, Smith argues, by what he calls “war among the people”, in which the application of military power on an industrial scale, is actually counter-productive. “Go in amongst the people, and every time we use our strength, we fail to achieve our objective. Instead we often reinforce our opponent’s ability to achieve HIS objective because his strategy is to get us to over-react.”
Bell comments: “This was one of the lessons of the war in Iraq. Another was that, like war itself, war reporting as we have known it no longer exists. Hence the death of news.”
Bell accuses no war reporter of outright lying. But he argues that lying by omission is common. He says the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission reported a two-day battle in Helmand province in June 2007 between British forces on one side and the Taleban on the other. Neither side appeared to suffer any military casualties. But air strikes left 27 civilians dead including 17 children.
“At the time the incident went unreported in the media. Either by accident or design, the embeds were nowhere near it. It is hard to escape the conclusion that in the absence of independent journalism that has been driven from the field, embedded reporting is by its nature deeply and dangerously misleading.”
But where is the outcry from the readers and viewers accusing the media bosses of failing properly to report wars? The sad truth is that in the new millennium government propaganda prepares its citizens for war so skilfully that a change in the media attitude would probably make little difference.
A study by David E. Morrison, Television and the Gulf War, showed that viewers made little demand to be shown the “true face of battle”, many saying that images of bomb victims and battle casualties would be “too upsetting”. If fact, if viewers had any complaint about television coverage of the war it was that stations devoted too much time to it (“squeezed it for everything it was worth”) and that this disrupted their favourite programmes. It is hard not to despair.
*Published in the UAE's KHALEEJ TIMES on October 13, 2008. Phillip Knightley is a veteran British
journalist and commentator. |
