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War and Truth: Conflict, Security and the Media Transcript War and Truth: Conflict, Security and the Media Transcript Date: Tuesday, 13 November 2007 - 12:00AM CONFLICT, SECURITY AND THE MEDIA Robert Fox It is a portentous title, isn't it, 'War and Truth'? I can't claim copyright - it was invented by Peter Hennessey, so blame him! I would like to begin with a word of thanks and warning: I am honoured to be the fourth Peter Nailor lecturer in defence in this series, which was opened by Sir Kevin Tebbit in 2001, followed two years later by Admiral Lord Boyce, and two years ago, by Sir David Omand. I did not know Peter Nailor well, but I do realise that our paths did cross, particularly at Greenwich, where I did the session on the military and the media at the staff course, but of course I know of his work and reputation. But I do wonder what he would make of me - a hack, a journalist, the lower pond life, reptilia, the fourth estate - giving a lecture in his name. My predecessors, in title and style, with two knights and a baron, you might question my title to be here giving this lecture, but I speak to you as a journalist and a reporter; the other party, the counterparty, in the dialogue with the community integral to the subject and themes of my three predecessor. Defence, to be understood, requires a relationship with the media. My subject is the role of media reporting and journalism in our world today: how it informs or misinforms the collective memory, that pool of public information which will come to be known in time as history. In recent years, we have been wont to hear, particularly in defence circles, of the Revolution in Military Affairs, the RMA. I am sure Sir Michael Howard will be able to correct me on this in his response, but I believe that this expression has been around for rather longer than we think. I certainly have found examples of it towards the beginning of the 20th Century, and I think that it has almost been concomitant with the introduction of industrial warfare. But my subject is the other RMA, the Revolution in Media Affairs, and that has come so very swiftly upon us it is actually, in terms of the spectrum that I am going to give you, less than twenty years old. So it is a very swift and major change in terms of the way we receive news and how we digest news. It has brought us satellite, radio and television, the video phone, the mobile phone, and the internet - instant communication with the theatre of operations, the scene of action. In format, we have the blog on autonomous journalism, the free sheet, Talk Radio, and the players are the blogger, the citizen journalist, empowered by being at the scene with the means of communication, frequently a mobile phone with a camera facility. We had a very powerful example of that in the transport bomb attacks two years ago on the 7th of July. This has led to a huge expansion of what we must describe as the information space, making it truly global. But at the centre of this editing and management are becoming increasingly fragmentary, with a sense of growing uncertainty of exactly what their remit is and to whom they are transmitting the message. It is a fragmented medium. This has been marked that this is an important component in the decline of what I would call metropolitan print media. In this country, we are still the world leaders for the national newspaper, but national newspaper readerships, I think the world over are in decline. The other part of my newspaper life has been working in Italy, and I have worked in and around newspapers there for more than thirty years. I find it quite striking because when I was shared from the BBC by the Corriere, Britain and Italy were roughly the same population, within a few hundred thousand. It is only in the last four or five years that the population of the British Isles has been increasingly significantly, and likewise, Italy has begun a serious decline, but it is still around, 56, 55 or 56 million. But think of this: the current daily newspaper readership in Italy is around two million, and going down, and I think we are beginning to see the same here. There are fewer journals of record. Another example case could be in the US, where the journals with a true metropolitan reach, speaking for the whole of the domestic territory of the USA, could be counted on the fingers of two hands. I won't exaggerate - obviously, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Philadelphia Enquirer, and so forth, are newspapers that you can buy in London, Paris or Berlin, but it is still in huge decline. That has been followed by centralised metropolitan broadcast news services. We see, on the other hand, the rise of information by other means, particularly through the internet and broadcast through the internet. I think that even the BBC will acknowledge more young people in this country under the age of 25 receive what we would call news information through means like U-Tube, which is broadcast on the internet, than they do from mainstream BBC television news. This enormous change has given tremendous opportunity for those who can use the new means as not only instruments of propaganda, but for malign, offensive purposes. Let us paraphrase Clausewitz again: it is for them, for organisations like Al Qaida, the prosecution of war by other means. So, faced with this enormous change and the fragmentation at the centre, what is to be done by the citizen and the community, the journalist, and the Government? Or do we just accept the situation and just shrug shoulders and say, as my friend Rupert Smith says, in his book, The Utility of Force, 'Media is like the weather and you must put up with it or work with it'? Looking at this dilemma, I have come to some very provisional conclusions, and the accent is on provisional. No one agency in the present information and media spectrum can hope to dominate the information space. You cannot have total control of information now. I think that this is the dilemma that the generals in Burma/Myanmar faced, because even if they could shut down the internet, and we know they could, for a day or so, the news would get out by other means, through the periphery, particularly from travellers getting out to Thailand and neighbouring countries, including China. This is where the propagation of notions such as 'global war on terror' gets into trouble and has got into trouble. There will always be competition out there for any notion of a single driving message and a single conception of reality. Therefore, given that, you cannot hope to dominate the total information space, there are vital lessons to learn in terms of defence, security, and public support: you have to control your own narrative, tell your own story, or someone else, not particularly well disposed very often towards you, will tell it for you. In doing this, you have to work with some notion of truth. It sounds rather odd and naïve to say that, but let me expand a little: by that, I mean that one should ground truth, facts on the grounds you might call it. By this I mean that you narrative should be based on empirical testing and the discovery of facts, and they should be open to the ability to test them thoroughly and continuously. Now, this does not sit well with the commercial dynamics of much current media practice and much of current media structures, where they have the maxim, as you well know, 'Comment is cheap; news is expensive.' I am coming to this entirely, at this point, as a journalist and a reporter. This is where I differ from my predecessors. I am an outsider, looking in. I have to slightly show the lining of my jacket here, the colour of my money: I am a reporter with some historical training and background and stimulation, which I still enjoy, and I continue to enjoy writing popular history and following some of the new and current thinking in history and historiography. At this point, if you will forgive me, I would like to indulge myself in acknowledging the influences of my teachers: K. D. McFarlane, Karl Leizer, Angus Macintyre at Magdalen College; Franco Venturi, and A.J.P. Taylor, whom I came to know as a journalist, as his producer at the BBC; and finally, a remarkable Irishman called Liam Depoor. All did as great things for journalism as they did for history. By the way, I thought of trying to emulate Alan Taylor, talking without notes, but I would not remember even the meagre sprinkling of quotations that I have in this text. I am aware of two awful warnings about journalists sounding off on platforms, from their armchairs, or in the columns of the Times and the Guardian, or even booming through the microphones in the cosy studio of the Today Programme. 'Any journalist who tells you he knows what's going on is probably missing the real story going on under his very nose.' That is a quote from the whodunit, 'Sinking the Unsinkable Rubber Ducks', out this year, by that master of tartan noir, Christopher Brookmyer. But more poignant is something which think of and dwell on more and more, as well as depend upon it when I am out in the field: 'He who pretends to give an account of a great battle from his own observation deceives you - believe him not.
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