CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by University of Lincoln Institutional Repository AFGHANISTAN, WAR AND THE MEDIA: DEADLINES AND FRONTLINES EDITED BY RICHARD LANCE KEEBLE JOHN MAIR Published 2010 by arima publishing www.arimapublishing.com ISBN 978 1 84549 444 5 © Richard Lance Keeble and John Mair All rights reserved This book is copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author. Printed and bound in the United Kingdom Typeset in Garamond 11/14 This book is sold subject to the conditions that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Abramis is an imprint of arima publishing. arima publishing ASK House, Northgate Avenue Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP32 6BB t: (+44) 01284 700321 www.arimapublishing.com Contents Acknowledgements vii Editors ix Preface Huw Edwards, presenter of BBC News at Ten xi Section 1. Frontlines and deadlines 1 From the poppy fields of Helmand to the rebirth of “embedding” John Mair, Senior Lecturer in Broadcasting, University of Coventry 3 In defence of the non-embed Allan Little, Special Correspondent with the BBC 6 The rough guide to roughness Alex Thomson, Chief Correspondent of Channel Four News 13 The case for the honest embed Stuart Ramsay, Sky News Chief Correspondent 23 Embedded – with the Taliban Alex Crawford, Foreign Correspondent, Sky News 33 The “brittle” compact between the military and the media Vaughan Smith, independent video journalist who ran the freelance news agency Frontline News TV (from 1989) and founded the Frontline Club in London 42 Why embedded reporting is a necessary evil David Hayward, head of the journalism programme for the BBC College of Journalism 49 Challenges facing media coverage: an Afghan perspective Hanan Habibzai, freelance journalist covering Afghan-related issues 56 iii Section 2. Putting it in perspective: journalism and history 63 Applying the microscope to the Afghan coverage John Mair 65 Afghanistan, truth and the unexamined war Kevin Marsh, Executive Editor at the BBC College of Journalism 67 Compromising the first draft? Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent 85 How the media distorted the truth on Afghanistan, ignored it or focused on soldiery valour in the face of evil Phillip Knightley, author of the seminal history of war correspondents, The First Casualty 105 “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive”: Sherlock Holmes and the Wootton Bassett jihad Will Barton, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication, Coventry School of Art and Design 117 Section 3. Other battles, other frontiers 127 Banging the drums of war – and promoting peace Richard Lance Keeble, Professor of Journalism, University of Lincoln 129 How to improve reporting of the war in Afghanistan: feminise it! Jake Lynch, Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney, Annabel McGoldrick and Indra Adnan, Director of the Soft Power Network, Australia 133 “Enduring Freedom”: reporting on Afghan women from 2001 to the present Corinne Fowler, Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature at the School of English, Leicester University 146 iv Humanitarian cost of the media’s military embeddedness in Afghanistan Alpaslan Özerdem, Professor at the Centre for Peace and Reconciliation Studies, at Coventry University 167 An “AfPak” weekend: US interest and The New York Times’ news coverage Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor of Journalism at Bowling Green State University, Ohio 177 Section 4. Deeper meaning 201 Deconstructing “Hero Harry” coverage and the dilemmas of reporting secret warfare Richard Lance Keeble 203 Soldiers and citizens: the Afghan conflict, the press, the military and the breaking of the “military covenant” John Tulloch, Professor of Journalism, University of Lincoln 206 Operation Moshtarak and the manufacture of credible, “heroic” warfare Richard Lance Keeble 229 Afghanistan: civilian casualties of the PR war David Edwards and David Cromwell, of Media Lens, the media monitoring website 261 “Can’t talk now, mate”: New Zealand news media and the invisible Afghan war Donald Matheson, Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand 276 v Acknowledgements With many thanks for getting this book to market in record time to: BBC College of Journalism (Kevin Marsh, David Hayward and team) Coventry University Vice Chancellor Madeleine Atkins Coventry Pro Vice-Chancellor David Pilsbury Denise Skinner, Dean of the Business School at Coventry University for “seed” money for the Coventry conference Journalism.co.uk (Laura Oliver and Judith Townend) John Ryley, Editor in Chief, Sky News Jon Williams, Foreign Editor, BBC News All the contributors, even those who promised but did not deliver. Our families who lived with the project for three months. vi The Editors Richard Lance Keeble has been Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln since 2003. Before that he was the executive editor of The Teacher, the weekly newspaper of the National Union of Teachers and he lectured at City University, London, for 19 years. He has written and edited 17 publications including Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John Libbey, Luton, 1997); The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, 2005, fourth edition); Ethics for Journalists (Routledge, 2008, second edition); The Journalistic Imagination: Literary Journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter (Routledge, 2007, with Sharon Wheeler) and Communicating War: Memory, Media and Military (Arima, Bury St Edmunds, 2007, with Sarah Maltby). He is also the joint editor of Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. John Mair is Senior Lecturer in Broadcasting at Coventry University. He is a former BBC, ITV and Channel Four producer/director on a wide range of programmes from daily news to investigative documentaries on World in Action to more considered pieces on Bookmark. A Royal Television Society Journalism Award winner, he publishes widely in the media and journalism press including the Guardian and journalism.co,uk. This is his fourth co-written or edited book. For the BBC, he co-wrote Marx in London, with Asa Briggs, in 1981.With Richard Lance Keeble, he edited Beyond Trust (2008) and Playing Footsie with the FTSE? The Great Crash of 2008 and the Crisis in Journalism (2009), both published by Abramis. vii Preface Huw Edwards Shortly after my return from Lashkar Gah in 2008, I was confronted by a man on a train heading for London. In a blistering conversation that lasted no more than five minutes, he raised fundamental concerns about the BBC’s coverage of Afghanistan. They were all linked in some way to the nature of the British media’s relationship with the armed forces. He had been enraged by our “twisted” reporting, our status as “prisoners” of the forces during our stay in Helmand, and our seemingly wilful refusal to report “the truth”. Ah, yes. The truth. As one author notes elsewhere, it is the journalist’s “most elusive aspiration”. In war reporting, that elusiveness is taken to even more daunting levels. This book allows some of our leading practitioners of war reporting to have their say. The commentators also have theirs. It is a sobering read, to put it mildly. Reporting from Afghanistan, as Channel Four’s Alex Thomson points out, remains an exceptionally dangerous activity. Embedding is one of the solutions available. Indeed, it is an unavoidable arrangement for most British journalists, but the editorial pressures are clear to everyone. As a result, the desire to push the boundaries of any agreement rarely fades. The Ministry of Defence knows that. The soldiers on the ground know it, too. In my experience, the visit becomes a daily tussle with “Media Ops”. We are there to obtain memorable, newsworthy material and to explore the main challenges. They want to sell the best story and keep us safe. There is a constant tension which tends to militate against any temptation to collude or be complicit. The task of covering the conflict and discovering “the truth” has become even ix more complex in recent years. The BBC’s Kevin Marsh rightly draws attention to the rock-solid political consensus which propelled us towards war after 9/11. He argues that any failure of journalism to “give a full account” of the war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with “embeds” or questions of access, and almost everything to do with “the failings of editors in London”. Those failings have to be seen in the stifling context of 9/11 and the global response to that event. As the number of British losses rises, government ministers and senior military officers try to make it difficult for journalists to question the true purpose and value of the mission. But question we must. Clearly, the quality of the answers will depend on the merit and variety of our sources. Will Barton makes the point that our information needs to come “from beyond the compounds of the British army”. In an area of increasingly trenchant debate, the last point is one on which we can all come together. Huw Edwards presents BBC News at Ten x Section 1. Frontlines and deadlines 1 From the poppy fields of Helmand – to the rebirth of “embedding” John Mair The war in Afghanistan passes new and grimmer milestones every day. As I write in mid-June 2010, the US/UK/ISAF forces have suffered their worst month of casualties – 29 dead, 10 on one day.