War Reporting

Pauline Hadaway

‘Perception is as important as reality’, said British army Lieutenant-Colonel Nick Clissitt in 1999, referring to ‘media operations’ during NATO’s war against Serbia, a war in which not a single NATO combatant was killed in action, against estimates of between 10 -15,000 civilian dead. As the US and British military push ahead with their latest bloody intervention, no one can doubt that the pressure is on to demonise the enemy, distort the truth and bury unfavourable news stories. Where strategic war aims are unclear, the battle for public opinion may seem more important than battles for towns and cities.

Take, for example, last week’s supposed ‘liberation’ of the south western town of Safwan, during which the Kuwaiti Ministry of Information filmed ‘scenes of chaos’ as Red Crescent workers and US troops dispensing ‘humanitarian aid’ retreated from an angry crowd of newly ‘liberated’ citizens, who, while battered and hungry, nevertheless appeared to be demonstrating a good deal of antipathy towards their ‘saviours’.

  While Blair and Bush dream of smiling Iraqis presenting western troops with flowers, the reality is that substantial numbers appear to have a rather different kind of floral tribute in mind, a difficulty, which presents the US/UK coalition with serious PR problems. The military response, direct targeting of civilian infrastructure, not to mention civilians, may yet prove a PR disaster for ‘caring’ Tony Blair, though doubtless the spin doctors are already at work.

When it comes to war propaganda, there seems to be no shortage of public scepticism. In fact, the readiness of governments to misinform seems to be so widely accepted as fact that it might be assumed any reasonably informed reader or viewer is not only capable, but willing and eager to see beyond the sanitised reports of ‘embedded’ journalists, to the hunger, thirst and human misery, which is the reality of this war. So, how do we explain continuing public passivity and compliance?

It could be argued that problems interpreting media coverage of the current war have less to do with government propaganda and censorship and more to do with inconsistencies within new approaches to news reporting.

Throughout the 1990s, western journalists took a campaigning role in legitimising military interventions in troubled post communist and post colonial states around the world. Strident and often emotionally charged media campaigns contributed to the building of a ‘new imperialism’, which, disdaining principles of national self determination, favoured a new world order, where one set of nations was granted authority to interfere in the affairs of other nations, deemed incapable of properly running things for themselves.

Of course, moral considerations become subordinate to military might and strategic purpose, just as, humanitarian wars kill children as surely as any other kind of war. Yet, absurdly, those sections of the media, who consistently accused the US of shirking its moral responsibilities in the last decade, now complain at the level of commitment the US is showing, imposing its ‘morality’ in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The invasion of Iraq has been further legitimised through appeals to another principle, beloved of the media- public safety. The endless proliferation of media scare stories and moral panics around issues as diverse as GM crops, joyriding, foot and mouth, vaccines, paedophilia, asylum seekers, terrorism, anti social behaviour and ‘killer’ viruses has contributed to an atmosphere of anxiety, so extreme, that it is now possible for political leaders to argue the case for all out war on the ‘precautionary’ grounds that an already ruined and impoverished third world country, like Iraq, might, at some point in an increasingly uncertain future, pose a threat to a military superpower like the United States.

As millions of Iraqi people face real and imminent calamity, western journalists who recognise a responsibility to challenge the simplistic and self flattering messages of official war time propaganda, might do well to question their own prejudices by opening up informed debate around the new moral absolutes they have helped to impose.