War: What is it Good For?

This week in our journalism lecture we looked at war and disaster reporting. Marie spoke of the dangers involved, both physical and psychological, and the problems of remaining impartial when journalists are embedded with military units and rely on them for protection.

Over the last century the role of the war correspondent has evolved from a soldier with a camera or typewriter under direct military command to a civilian journalist either working as a freelancer or for a news organisation. 

Military control over reporting has also changed. Previously, stories that arrived back home were filtered through military censors and editorial systems supportive of the war effort and were usually up-beat stories of how the war was being won

During the Vietnam War  this began to change. Accredited civilian journalists were given an honorary military rank and were allowed great freedom in their ability to move around the war zone, hopping on and off military transport as space allowed. Photographers and journalists could be in the middle of a jungle firefight and yet still be back in Saigon in time for drinks a few hours later. This freedom, along with improvement in communications systems, meant that TV viewers back in the US could see the death and destruction of war for themselves the very next day. Journalists were also no longer relying on military press releases for their information. They'd seen first hand how events had unfolded in the field and began to doubt the official record on how well the war was going. This discontent spread to the American people and the US government started to lose support for the war.

The negative Vietnam War reportage led military commanders to try to limit reporting during the invasion of Iraq in 1991 and Afghanistan in 2001. Strong media criticism followed and so the US military began the practice of embedding journalists with military units in the field for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many questioned the impartiality of these reporters, who now relied on the soldiers around them for food, transport and safety. John Pilger's 2010 documentary "The War You Don't See" is also heavily critical of the role the media has played in recent times, a media that seemingly never questioned the evidence presented by US and British governments in their justification for war.

Of course, the problems of being allowed to get close enough to the action to report is not new.  Martha Gellhorn, already a seasoned war correspondent who'd reported on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the Japanese invasion of China, had problems getting access to the front line in 1944. US army public relations officers felt women needed to be kept away from these areas. Gellhorn had other ideas and smuggled herself on-board a hospital ship to witness the Normandy invasion for herself, and later reported on the atrocities of Dachau. She was also a correspondent in Vietnam. Highly critical of the US war machine, her reports from that time are still powerful pieces of journalism.

If you want to read some great war and conflict reporting I'd suggest Gellhorn's "The Face of War" and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq" by Dahr Jamail. If you want to read about photojournalists then try "The Bang-Bang Club" by Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva. The authors and their friends, Ken Oosterbroek and Kevin Carter, were photographers covering the township wars in South Africa during the early 1990s. And of course, read and watch John Pilger!