As every half-decent journalist should know, the first casualty of war is truth. Censorship, spin, embedding, restricted reporting, misinformation and opinion dictate the reporter’s copy making the job of the war correspondent the most challenging of all reporting jobs.
If you were to read Ernest Hemingway, however, you could be forgiven for thinking that the war correspondent was some romantic hero, swashbuckling his way to the frontline with typewriter and toothbrush, dodging bullets, cavorting with the local women and consuming vast quantities of wine. Well, it may have been like that for Hemingway, but it’s a very distorted view. Not only does the war correspondent need to deal with the dangers involved in battlefront situations, but they also have to unearth the facts, make sure they are not putting colleagues or interviewees in danger, deal with the military and, finally, make sure that their reports get back to base as quickly as possible when conditions are hardly conducive. It’s a thankless task and many have died in their pursuit of truth.
The first war journalist is generally acknowledged to have been John Howard Russell of The Times, who reported on the calamity that befell our troops at Balaclava in what was later to be coined the Charge of the Light Brigade. Indeed, it was mainly thanks to Howard’s reporting that the legend of Balaclava was born, although ably assisted by Tennyson’s epic poem. Interestingly, Howard’s reporting turned out to be hugely inaccurate. Howard had reported on devastating numbers of British cavalrymen being killed when he filed his report. Days later, however, soldiers began to drift back into camp. What had happened was that their horses had either been killed or had bolted in that “valley of death”, leaving the riders horseless and the cavalrymen forced to crawl back to camp under cover of darkness. But the myth had already been created by Russell and Tennyson and the true numbers of dead – far fewer than Howard had reported – are glossed over even today.
Reporting of the First World War was dogged by censorship and xenophobia with journalists rarely writing about the full horrors of the conflict. The Second World War proved a different challenge, with newspapers, politicians and the general population all of the same mind that fascism had to be defeated.
Vietnam was the first television war. journalists had easy access to the country and television pictures, usually shown within 24 hours of an event, brought the horror of napalm and scorched earth bombing into everyone’s living rooms. Eventually it was to have a detrimental effect on American morale, leading to disillusionment and protest. British generals did not make the same mistake when it came to the Falklands. But the problem here was that getting to the Falklands was impossible. You couldn’t just hop on a plane or boat; instead you were obliged to hitch a lift with the navy and that meant that you were then in their control. Journalists struggled to release themselves of the stranglehold the military had on them. It became known as embedding.
ITN’s Michael Nicholson in a video interview at this exhibition tells us that the most censored war he ever reported on was the Falklands. All reports should have carried a warning, he says, telling viewers that that they had been compiled under restricted circumstances. It was a scandal.
In the Gulf conflicts, the British military adopted the same technique of confining all the journalists and by controlling their movements was able to control the output of news.
Manchester’s Imperial War Museum North has put together a superb exhibition focused on the war correspondent with contributions from many familiar faces, including Martin Bell, Kate Adie and Mike Nicholson. And nor have they been neglectful of women war correspondents whose contributions have regularly surpassed those of their male colleagues. An excellent book (War Correspondent by Jean Hood, Conway Publishing, £25) with some stunning photographs accompanies the exhibition.
In the past few years, there have been dramatic changes. News reports can now be beamed directly into news bulletins, while reporters can be interviewed live from battlefronts and all with the minimum amount of equipment. And now we have the added confusion of citizen journalism with blogs, Twitters, Facebook and digital photos able to be sent from war zones and hotspots around the world by any individual to everyone’s phone within seconds. But that in itself presents an enormous challenge. How do we know that what we are seeing is genuine or that what we are told is accurate? In the end, it’s the job of the war correspondent, as ever, to decipher the facts and get to the truth.
The exhibition continues until January 2 2012
