REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/21723
When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was in South Africa to report on the Boer War, he saw a British soldier with whom he had once shared a 70-run partnership in a cricket match. He gleefully wrote, "Now here we are, partners in quite another game". This statement sums up the relationship between the establishment media and the military.
As Phillip Knightley's excellent book on the history of war correspondents documents, their weapons may be words but they have been used to achieve the same end as the military's bombs and bullets — to win the wars of the rich and powerful.
From the 1854 Crimean War to NATO's attack on Yugoslavia, almost all war journalism, as John Pilger points out in his introduction, has been indistinguishable from the propaganda. The capitalist media has "marched to the drum beat of war", shouldering aside truth.
After 400 British soldiers were callously sent to their deaths in the ill fated charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War, the London Times, which made no bones about its role as "protagonist" in the war against Russia, reported the slaughter in patriotic terms. Its war correspondent chose to submit reports of bravery and glory rather than express his private disgust at the criminal recklessness of the army brass.
War correspondents have never been chosen by media managers for their objectivity or anti-militarist values. During the American Civil War, the Times' pro-slavery proprietors and editors employed anti-Northern correspondents who displayed all the "sensationalism, exaggeration, outright lies, puffery, slander and faked eyewitness accounts" that marked the reporting of that war.
In the late 19th century, British war correspondents, thirsting for adventure, added other strings to their imperialist bows by doing intelligence work for the British foreign office and taking part in combat ("potting Dervishes" was part of the "joy of living", one reporter wrote one in 1898).
The first world war took the war correspondents' patriotic servility to nationalism and imperialism to new depths. Although military censorship was strict, reporters displayed a distinct lack of moral courage. They saved protests about the horrific butchery of 1914-18 for their memoirs. As one correspondent conceded, "there was no need of censorship of our despatches. We were our own censors".
The Times saw its role as increasing the flow of recruits and did not employ correspondents who be tempted to report on what happened to them once they became soldiers. British Prime Minister Lloyd George knew the purpose of military censorship, and of the press, was not to conceal facts from the enemy but to conceal truth from the people at home. He said, "If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and can't know. The correspondents don't write, and the censorship could not pass, the truth."
If the first world war revealed the patriotic bias of the correspondents, the war of intervention against revolutionary Russia after 1917 war revealed their class bias. As 16 capitalist countries sent 300,000 troops to fight the Bolsheviks, urged on by the Times ("The remedy for Bolshevism is bullets"), the war correspondents willingly took part in the "giant conspiracy" to put a positive spin on the attack and to slander the Red Army and socialism.
Some joined the staff of the counter-revolutionary forces or worked for British intelligence. The loyal scribes' wishful thinking, woeful ignorance of the support for the revolution and vitriolic hatred of the Bolsheviks resulted in worthless media coverage.
Knightley praises the work of the few reporters, like John Reed, who openly acknowledging their support for the Bolsheviks and were in touch with social reality of the revolution. These reporters captured with their pens the vigour and idealism that abounded as the working masses made history.
Partisanship for a good cause carries risks, Knightley warns. During the Spanish Civil War, many correspondents who were ardent supporters of a democratic Spanish republic sometimes let their enthusiasm take over from conscientious reporting. They concealed defeats, invented victories and failed to report the Stalinist cancer that grew within the left and contributed to the defeat of the revolution.
A similar problem afflicted correspondents during the second world war. Their anti-fascist passions were unleashed in a torrent of "hearts and flowers" writing and the making of many myths around the Blitz, the Battle of Britain and Dunkirk.
A few reporters questioned the "we are all in it together" when, for example, there was a mass exodus of the rich for the Bahamas and other spots safely away from Blitz-scarred Britain. However, their voices were snuffed out by censorship and editorial power.
To report Allied atrocities such as the fire-bombing of Dresden was seen by the media as scoring own goals. As one correspondent admitted, "even if we were free to do so, it was imperative not to play into the Germans' hands" by giving them a propaganda weapon.
Other reporting omissions were designed to maintain Allied unity. Australian residents of Darwin, Perth and areas north of Townsville never learnt that, as General Douglas Macarthur was pledging the "full resources and all the mighty power" of the US to defend Australia, he was prepared to sacrifice these parts of Australia to a Japanese invasion.
The Press and military underwent even tighter bonding with the coming of the Cold War. In Korea, censorship was hardly necessary to make the war correspondents "get on side". Some carried guns to kill "gooks".
A craven deference to authority affected all. One anti-communist reporter admitted in 1952 what he wrote was "pure fabrication". If a journalist tried to expose the ugly facets of the war, it was seen as "helping the Reds" and was not published. This was as true for the "reputable" as well as commercial media institutions. The BBC, for example, refused to report the use of napalm by UN troops.
The reporting of the Vietnam War added new twists. The myth was created that courageous reporting of the truth about the war helped to end it. As Knightley shows, the alleged "anti-war" correspondents did not question the war itself, only its effectiveness.
One Time journalist, with M-16 in hand, took part in the retaking of Hue after the Tet offensive. For every reporter who developed a troubled conscience about the war, there were literally hundreds who remained detached from the moral and political dimensions of the war in the interests of "professional objectivity", were "war junkies" hooked on the "glamour of danger", or who had no desire to probe the military's and governments' official version of the war.
The establishment media did not help to end the war in Vietnam. The massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in the My Lai in 1968 was not reported at the time by any correspondent. It was left to Seymour Hersh, a rogue investigative reporter, to break the story in the face of media indifference and opposition. Even then, Time headlined it "An American Tragedy".
It was the growth of the mass anti-war movement that forced the press to report US atrocities. The establishment media did not fuel the growth of the anti-war movement with honest reporting.
Nevertheless, Western capitalist governments have convinced themselves that the US lost the war in Vietnam because too much latitude was given to the media. Governments and militaries now wage meticulous PR campaigns in which war correspondents are little more than front line propaganda troops.
During the 1991 war against Iraq, stories of atrocities were faked to demonise the enemy, such as the report of Iraqi soldiers ripping Kuwaiti babies from incubators, and were treated as gospel by the capitalist mass media. Correspondents revelled in the sanitised, "surgical" war waged by "smart" bombs, undisturbed by the charred bodies of civilian "collateral damage".
Knightley's book convincingly shows that even before imperialist wars clock up their first flesh-and-blood victim, truth has become the capitalist media's first casualty.