Caught in the crossfire: broadcasting in wartime

War presents special problems for broadcasters. War involving the nations to which they broadcast is the most problematic.

The BBC has spent more time than any other broadcaster wrestling with these issues. In its early days, under John Reith, the BBC adjusted naturally to the role of British state broadcaster, it supported the government in the 1926 General Strike, and restricted radio access for critics of government policy in the 1930s.

In the second world war, the BBC engaged more obviously – but less controversially – in quasi-governmental activity. How could the state broadcaster not identify with a battle for survival of the state? Yet the BBC gained an enviable reputation for objective reporting, even in rather artificial circumstances.

The BBC signalled its separate status from government during the 1956 Suez invasion, when British and French troops launched an illegal (and disastrous) military operation in Egypt. Even as British troops were in action, the BBC weathered the anger of the Conservative prime minister, Anthony Eden, as it allowed the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell airtime to reply to Eden’s statement to the nation.

Since then, despite a number of instances of questionably close relationships with ministries and secret services, the BBC has demonstrated increasing independence. During the 1982 Falklands campaign, when the government of Margaret Thatcher sent a military force to recover a group of islands in the South Atlantic, the BBC’s chairman and director-general were howled down at a meeting with Conservative MPs after BBC news broadcasts had declined to simplify combatant status into crude “them” (‘Argies’ or Argentineans) and “us” (Brits). The main commercial network, ITV, was also criticised in 1982 for interviewing Argentinean leader General Leopoldo Galtieri, and during the first Iraq war in 1991 for interviewing Saddam Hussein.

All this was consistent with repeated attacks on the broadcasters for interviewing members of Provisional Sinn Fein and its armed wing the Provisional IRA, during the long guerrilla war in Northern Ireland. The argument went that “opponents of democracy” (that is, people who supported armed struggle rather than to accept electoral decisions within contested boundaries) should not be given the “oxygen of publicity”.

From time to time, politicians proscribed these organisations so that interviewing them was either illegal or beyond the bounds of regulated broadcasting. But this made little sense when print media were entirely free to do what was forbidden to broadcasters. Gradually, politicians were persuaded to leave to the “good sense” of the broadcasters what could or could not be said. Muted self-censorship was preferable to overt control.

The war of perception

The most recent conflict, in Iraq in March-April 2003, threw up new problems. In the weeks before the invasion, the official Conservative opposition was even more pro-war than the governing Labour Party, and UK broadcasters – led by the BBC – struggled to comply with the requirement for impartiality and balance.

Labour Party rebels, the Liberal Democrats and mass demonstrations were set against prime minister Tony Blair, a majority of his party and nearly all Conservatives. Studio debates were set up between the prime minister and tiers of vocal critics, one ending in a slow handclap of disapproval for Blair’s unwavering line.

At this stage, several national newspapers and a majority of the British public were opposed to war, especially in the absence of a second Security Council resolution explicitly endorsing action against Saddam Hussein. Yet at the same time news editors were carefully orchestrating access to British and US forces assembling in the Gulf. A new idea – ‘embedding’ correspondents with particular units – would give unique insight into soldiers in action, but also make reporters both more likely to identify with Allied troops, and easier to control.

The Sky News correspondent who managed to move around between a series of front-line units made himself extremely unpopular with the military chiefs; an ITN reporter was killed while operating independently of the embedding system. The relatively high level of casualties amongst non-embedded journalists, and the seemingly deliberate attack on the al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad, underlined the unusual degree of dependence that the new process engendered. Some reporters – notably with US news services – became so gung ho that the only surprise was they did not become outright combatants.

UK reporters largely avoided the worst of these risks, and found themselves condemned by many US commentators for their attempts at objectivity – they were promptly dubbed ‘liberals’, as was the BBC by many in the Pentagon and US media. Even so, the very resources devoted to war coverage, and the degree of front-line access allowed, seemed a further legitimisation of the war for the viewing public. That the battle was concluded successfully, thanks to overwhelming firepower, only added to the sense of drama and righteous purpose. Whereas in Vietnam, pictures of a long-drawn out war with its mounting casualties eventually alienated the US public, images from Iraq served the opposite purpose.

In theory, war is not a controllable event, suggesting that even embedded reporters are free to show viewers “whatever happens”. The military, of course, wishes both to control and to be seen not to do so. It was notable that the form of words used by embedded BBC reporters and those based in Baghdad to describe the limitations on their freedom of manoeuvre, though quite similar, left the impression that direct censorship applied far more to the latter than the former, even though by the end of the second week of the war there was little Iraqi capacity to influence news reports.

For the most part, thanks to weak Iraqi resistance and rapid US advances, the coalition forces managed to impose their view of the war. There were some minor exceptions, notably the BBC radio reporter in Baghdad, Andrew Gilligan, who became even more of a thorn in Tony Blair’s side after the war, as he alerted the public to resentment amongst intelligence service professionals at the political spin put on their reports about the reality of the threat from Saddam Hussein.

Yet broadly, the coalition viewpoint prevailed, culminating in the televised pulling down of a statue of Saddam by a small crowd assisted by an American tank, conveniently just outside the main hotel housing western correspondents (reminiscent of the CIA-sponsored “protests” that led to the overthrow of Iran’s prime minister, Mohammad Mossadeq, in 1953). All in all, once the campaign started, the political debate, on and off air, was largely suspended.

When combat started, the effect – however unintentional – was immediate. Support for the war, despite the embarrassing failure to win the promised Security Council resolution, swiftly rose amongst the UK population in opinion polls, along with prime ministerial ratings. Pride in military achievement replaced doubts about legality and justification. War became a well-produced event, rather than a subject of controversy. This echoed a similar process in Britain during coverage of the Queen’s jubilee and the Queen Mother’s funeral in 2002, as hitherto latent (or perhaps non-existent) reserves of royalism were summoned up by expertly-delivered evocative pictures.

Within and beyond orthodoxy

Did the BBC, and other UK broadcasters, become complicit in what many non-combatant countries regarded as an illegitimate attack? Newspapers, by and large, maintained their editorial lines – for or against war – irrespective of the nature of the pictures they printed. But broadcasters were trapped by the rules of impartiality. They could only reflect the balance of opinion in their own society. Each nation’s “objectivity” was different – hawkish in the US, dove-ish in France or Greece, but essentially driven by the same logic.

That definitions of objectivity might vary so much from country to country should not surprise students of philosophy or observers of politics. The ability of national governments and political leaderships to set the agenda that defines supposedly balanced debate is well-established. It is only alien eyes and ears that recoil from displays of advocacy masquerading as news reports.

It was instructive to watch CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, in the run-up to war, excoriate France, Germany and Russia (he meant Belgium of course) as disloyal Nato allies, and invite Richard Perle (as an “objective observer”) to announce the death of Nato after the failure to agree to insert additional “defence” resources in Turkey (despite Turkey’s own parliament showing no enthusiasm for US troops using its territory as a launch pad for the Iraq invasion).

Of course, by the standards of Fox News in the US, this was pretty tame stuff (Rupert Murdoch often described CNN’s founder, Ted Turner, as too liberal, just as Turner denounces Murdoch for his right-wing politics). US radio has shifted even more dramatically to the political offensive, with committed commentary overpowering relatively straight news reporting. Newspapers seem almost balanced by comparison.

Radio has not just become more overtly political: there are also reports of creative artists – musicians, comedians, actors – who are critical of government policy being excluded from airplay. But few in Europe are exposed to US radio, whereas US-originated TV news is readily available, even if usually in toned-down international versions. It is interesting to watch regulators like the ITC, implementing impartiality requirements on news stations licensed in the UK, criticising Kurdish news bulletins but for the most part keeping silent about Fox News and its counterparts.

The stridency – and popularity – of Fox News has triggered differing responses in the UK. Whilst BBC director-general Greg Dyke self-righteously contrasts the outspokenness of the Fox product with the BBC’s carefully-managed attempts at impartiality, BBC news executives muse openly about the continued justification for requiring all TV stations to be impartial – even when there is no longer a basis in spectrum scarcity for such a demand, and when newspaper readers seem able to differentiate between comment and news. Newspapers often take a line that most of their readers do not endorse – almost certainly true, for example, of the Mirror, which fiercely opposed the war.

Is it not time, these news executives ask, to let TV grow up? Of course, the unspoken logic of such an approach is that the BBC’s unwavering commitment to impartiality would shine forth even more markedly in such a context, adding an extra argument to its claims for continued funding through the licence fee.

Perhaps the strongest challenge to orthodox thinking has come from al-Jazeera, the Arab-owned news station whose willingness to treat all parties in the various Middle East conflicts as equally legitimate sources of comment and subjects of coverage has attracted criticism and praise in equal measure.

The UK recently witnessed the bizarre spectacle of a BBC documentary on al-Jazeera’s coverage of the Iraq war itself becoming the subject of fierce controversy for including, however briefly and however carefully obscured, footage of dead British soldiers, as used in al-Jazeera’s broadcasts. Even though UK and US stations seemed relaxed about carrying pictures of dead, wounded or captured Iraqi combatants, tabloid tirades against the BBC for showing (some of) what al-Jazeera had broadcast did not diminish.

The ambiguities of professionalism

The debate on war coverage threw into strong relief the special difficulties war brings to broadcasters. Television needs access, far more so than print journalists – or newspapers themselves with their range of picture sources. That, combined with the pressure to reflect the domestic political context that defines “impartiality”, was a significant factor in the reporting process.

What in normal circumstances allows television and radio to command far more trust than unregulated print media proved an ambiguous asset in time of conflict. The sheer professionalism – and huge commitment of resources – on display from the broadcasters confirmed, in a sense, the political and military urgency of taking decisive action against Saddam.

Inevitably, that effect is fading, and there may even be some boomerang factor. The post-war newspaper campaign to discredit Blair’s rhetoric on the imminence of the threat from Saddam is rather broader than the opposition to war in the first place (it suits some right-wing publications to attack Blair, even if they do not regret the overthrow of Saddam). This has shifted the agenda for the broadcasters, and public opinion has accordingly swung back, not so much against the war (that is seen as over) as against the artificial adrenaline rush that preceded it.

Even so, there are no doubt many who are reluctant to abandon a position of support adopted during the heat of battle, whatever wisdom after the event might suggest. And even if its impact diminishes with time, the disturbing process by which broadcast professionalism is converted to stage-managed triumphalism in a period of national combat is perhaps the most concerning aspect of coverage of the war in Iraq.

The state broadcasters, caught in the crossfire between expectations of impartiality and the exigencies of modern war reporting, found themselves inadvertent combatants in the struggle for public opinion. That is no doubt why Greg Dyke has welcomed some of the attacks on BBC coverage, especially from the Pentagon: these “battle honours” will assuage internal anxiety about the role the BBC played. Yet paradoxically, the more meticulous and sophisticated the BBC’s editorial decision-making is in these times of war, the more danger of being conscripted to the “coalition of the willing”.