KK-Forum,
noe om journalister og dekningen av Kosovo-krigen. For et år siden var det,
så vidt jeg husker, noen som mente dekningen av denne var svært mye bedre
enn deknignen av Golf-krigen.
(http://www.newsunlimited.co.uk/Print/0,3858,3975978,00.html)
Noen klaget til og med på f.eks. Paul Watson, Los Angeles Times, fordi han
klarte å være i Kosovo hele tiden og mente han var kjøpt og betalt av
Milosevic. Men for britiske NATO journalister var betingelsene slik:
'The 17 correspondents eventually accredited had to sign forms agreeing to
accept censorship at source by six MoD "public relations officers". And
they were told that it was their duty to "help in leading and steadying
public opinion in times of national stress or crisis". The result was that
the war was reported exactly how the military wanted it to be.'
Videre:
'The sad truth is that today government propaganda prepares its citizens
for war so skilfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the
truthful, objective and balanced reporting that hero war correspondents
once did their best to provide.'
og
'Armed with information like this, the likelihood is that governments will
find further justification for managing the media in wartime. In fact, I
predict that control of war correspondents - both open and covert - will be
even tighter, and that this will be accepted by most media groups because
in wartime they consider their best commercial and political interests lie
in supporting the government of the day.'
Knut Rognes
********************
Fighting dirty
Phillip Knightley changed our view of war and the media with his book The
First Casualty. To mark its updating, he argues that the war correspondent
has an easy choice: become part of the military's propaganda machine - or
quit.
Phillip Knightley
Monday March 20, 2000
The Guardian
When groups of old war correspondents gather in a bar - as they have been
known to do - they shed a nostalgic tear for Vietnam, the days when they
were heroes, famous and important.
In Vietnam, the United States military accepted them, called on all ranks
to give them full cooperation and assistance, transported them, fed them on
a reimbursable basis, briefed them, armed them when necessary, defended
them, drank with them, and treated them like members of the team. Free from
any censorship, the war correspondents went where they chose, reported the
truth as they saw it and, according to the military establishment, thus
lost the United States the war.
Robert Elegant, a long-serving Asia expert, wrote later: "For the first
time in modern history the outcome of war was determined not on the
battlefield but on the printed page and, above all, on the television screen."
The military was bitter. War correspondents had been patriotic in the
second world war and on side in Korea. What was wrong in Vietnam? "So
you're Malcolm Browne," said Admiral Harry D Felt when he met the legendary
Associated Press journalist. "Why the hell don't you get on the team?"
Now fast-forward 25 years to Kosovo in March last year. More correspondents
than ever were all set to cover the conflict - an astonishing 2,700 media
people accompanied Nato forces when they entered the province at the end of
the bombing campaign.
Official arrangements for them were awe-inspiring. There was a daily
briefing at Nato's headquarters in Brussels, a series of briefings at the
Ministry of Defence in London, media meetings at the Pentagon, press
conferences at the White House and statement after statement from President
Clinton, Prime Minister Blair, and numerous other Allied ministers. Nato
generals lined up to be interviewed and armchair strategists jostled for
air time. There were even Allied correspondents in the enemy capital,
Belgrade, and Serbian journalists attended Nato briefings in Brussels.
The revolution in communications technology; the satellite phone - the star
of the war; instant TV links from the front to the studio and between
correspondents in the field; electronic transmission of still photographs;
and - the latest arrival at the front - the internet; all were available to
provide the public with an unprecedented overview of the war. The ordinary,
literate citizen would be able to know more about the conflict than any war
in history.
Instead, we drowned in wave after wave of words and images that added up to
nothing. "Kosovo ... turned out to be the most secret campaign in living
memory," wrote the British war historian Alistair Horne. "We were given
lots of material but no information," says Sky war correspondent Jake
Lynch. British journalist Peter Dunn wrote that it was "the first
international conflict fought by press officers." General Sir Michael Rose,
former commander of the UN force in Bosnia, said that at Nato "rhetoric has
taken over from reality".
What had changed between Vietnam and Kosovo? Basically, the military has
won its 150-year battle with war correspondents: journalists want to tell
the public everything; the military's attitude is: "Tell them nothing till
the war's over, then tell them who won." Defeated by the military,
governments and spin doctors, war correspondents now face an agonising
choice. If they can no longer be heroes, do they want to continue as
propagandists and myth makers, subservient to those who wage the wars?
The turning point in the battle was the Falklands. The nature of the
campaign - a seaborne task force sailing to invade a group of islands 8,000
miles from Britain and 400 miles from the nearest land mass - meant that
correspondents could not get to the war unless the Ministry of Defence took
them. In return for access to the action the correspondents had to accept
the MoD rules.
These were crippling. British correspondents only; no impartial neutrals.
The British applicants were vetted - no room, for example, for veteran
photographer Don McCullin, because his photographs tended to be too realistic.
The 17 correspondents eventually accredited had to sign forms agreeing to
accept censorship at source by six MoD "public relations officers". And
they were told that it was their duty to "help in leading and steadying
public opinion in times of national stress or crisis". The result was that
the war was reported exactly how the military wanted it to be.
From this success, a theory developed. If you confronted the media groups
and told them that, unlike Vietnam, this was a war that they would not be
allowed to cover, they would become so desperate and divided that you could
do a deal - they would be allowed war coverage but only on the military's
terms.
This theory was tested in the American invasions of Grenada and Panama, and
worked brilliantly in the Gulf war. There the United States and Britain
operated a "pool system". Only a limited number of journalists would be
allowed near the battlefield; they would be escorted by officers who would
decide what they would see; and the journalists would have to make their
reports available to everyone.
Although media organisations complained that this amounted to censorship
more dangerous than "blue-pencil editing", they ended up accepting it
because they had no choice. They also accepted the "advice" of their MoD
minders on what they could write because, as the Economist put it, "the
truth about the Gulf war ... must await the end of the fighting".
So by the time Kosovo came around, the lies, manipulation, news management,
propaganda, spin, distortion, omission, slant and gullibility involved in
trying to report the conflict brought war correspondents to the current
crisis point in their short history. Their role has never been more insecure.
The most shameful event for the media during the Kosovo war was a United
States Congressional fact-finding mission to Yugoslavia between April 18
and 21. Congressmen felt they could trust neither the administration nor
the media to tell them what was really happening - what an indictment of
war correspondents. How did they allow this sorry state of affairs to come
about?
One difficulty is that the media have little or no memory. War
correspondents have short working lives and there is no tradition or means
for passing on their knowledge and experience. The military, on the other
hand, is an institution and goes on forever. The military learned a lot
from Vietnam and these days plans its media strategy with as much attention
as its military strategy.
The Pentagon and the MoD have manuals, updated after every war, which serve
to guide the way they will manage the media - as does every other major
military power. What media organisation has anything similar?
All these military manuals follow basic principles - appear open,
transparent and eager to help; never go in for summary repression or direct
control; nullify rather than conceal undesirable news; control emphasis
rather than facts; balance bad news with good; and lie directly only when
certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of the war.
We are learning only now what lies we were told and what secrets were kept
from us during the war in Kosovo. We were not told that the CIA helped
train the Kosovo Liberation Army before the bombing began. We were not told
that the KLA realised its attacks on Serb policemen would bring retaliation
on ethnic Albanian civilians but it went ahead anyway because it hoped that
Serbian atrocities would bring in the west - as they did.
We did not realise at the time that Nato was lying when it said it did not
deliberately attack civilian targets. It was not until June that Nato's
commander, General Wesley Clark, admitted to the BBC's Mark Urban that Nato
planes were targeting "phase 3" [civilian] targets.
We believed Nato when it said that after the war it would disarm and
disband the KLA. But Jonathan Dimbleby wrote in January that the KLA
remained in control of the streets, Nato had delivered Kosovo from one
catastrophe straight into another and western leaders had stayed shockingly
silent about outrages taking place there. "So much for moral crusades,"
said Dimbleby.
We believed Nato when it said it was systematically destroying the Serbian
army in Kosovo, only to learn after the war that this was simply not so. We
believed the figures the State Department and Pentagon released for the
number of ethnic Albanians murdered by Serbs, only to see them come
tumbling down - 500,000, then 100,000, then 10,000 - when Nato entered
Kosovo and sufficient mass graves failed to materialise.
True, the nature of the war played into the military's hands in keeping the
true face of battle from the public. It was fought entirely from the air by
means of a high-altitude bombing campaign, so no one - except the victims -
really knew what was happening on the ground.
Since they could not go to the fighting, correspondents either gathered at
Nato headquarters in Brussels or clustered along the borders of those coun
tries surrounding Kosovo and tried to peer over. There they were
interviewed on television by fellow journalists in studios in Europe and
the United States - who often had to brief them about the latest news
before the interview started because the reporter on the spot usually knew
nothing.
According to veteran correspondent Robert Fisk, one of the few heroes left,
this lack of access to the war produced two types of journalists - the
"frothers" who had "convinced themselves of the justice of the war and the
wickedness of the other side" - and the "sheep" who blindly followed Nato's
word.
The Russians watched and learned. When Moscow began its campaign against
Chechnya, it used a system of news management based on Nato's. An
information centre in Moscow offered Nato-style briefings which had to be
accepted at face value, while at the front everything possible was done to
hinder war correspondents and exclude them from battle zones. They were
denied accreditation, detained, searched, intimidated. "How can you cover a
war you can't get to?" one foreign journalist asked the Moscow Times.
The sad truth is that today government propaganda prepares its citizens for
war so skilfully that it is quite likely that they do not want the
truthful, objective and balanced reporting that hero war correspondents
once did their best to provide.
Studies carried out after the Gulf war by Dr David Morrison, of the
University of Leeds, showed that if there were a British mistake that
caused a war to go badly, most people in the study felt that this mistake
should never be reported, or only after the war was over.
Further, where reporting in the Gulf was dominated by television as in no
other war, most viewers were quite content with the reporting and
considered it to be accurate and fair. If viewers had any complaint at all,
it was that TV stations devoted too much time to the war and that this
disrupted their favourite programmes.
Armed with information like this, the likelihood is that governments will
find further justification for managing the media in wartime. In fact, I
predict that control of war correspondents - both open and covert - will be
even tighter, and that this will be accepted by most media groups because
in wartime they consider their best commercial and political interests lie
in supporting the government of the day.
• Phillip Knightley's book, The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as
Hero and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, is published by Prion Books,
price £12
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc. 2000
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