Five links from 2011: 'War Reporting'

This year I bookmarked at least 530 links on delicious. I know that because I try to tag each bookmark by year - I'm three hundred or so links down on last year's total of 854.

Seeing as we're coming to the end of the year I thought I'd pick out a few of the 'best', 'most interesting', 'memorable' or simply 'random' links on various topics from among the 530.

In this post, I've selected from those that are also tagged 'war reporting'.

1. Sebastian Junger remembers Tim Hetherington

In April, photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed while reporting from Misrata in Libya. Colleague and friend Sebastian Junger reflects on his life and death:

"That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things."

2. Libya conflict: journalists trapped in Tripoli's Rixos hotel

"It's a desperate situation," [the BBC's Matthew] Price told Radio 4's Today programme. "The situation deteriorated massively overnight when it became clear we were unable to leave the hotel of our own free will … Gunmen were roaming around the corridors … Snipers were on the roof."

3. War, too close for comfort

Simon Klingert talks to some people on a train about his life as a photojournalist:

““So have you ever seen someone die?” It was about two minutes into our conversation when the question had popped up. The question. Not that I minded though. After all, it seems like a natural question to ask when you tell people you’re trying to make a living as a war correspondent and it dawns on them you actually like what you are doing..”

4. The hazards of war reporting from behind a desk

BBC journalist Alex Murray reflects on reporting the conflict in Libya from his computer screen:

"But the war has been very close to me, too close sometimes. Viewing them [videos from Libya] in a corner of the newsroom on a screen with nobody else sharing the experience at that moment is a dissociative experience. The process of analysing it, effectively repeatedly exposing myself to the same brutal events, does not make it easier."

5. Image of the child of fallen soldier trends on Facebook

I typed 'Afghanistan' into the Kurrently search engine one day and noticed that this photo was being passed rapidly around Facebook in the United States. I find the photo jarring and unsettling: the artificial neatness of a homely, yet staged photograph here represents the tragic consequences of a chaotic, complicated and distant battlefield.      

Ghosts of Afghanistan: An interview with foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele

At the back end of last month, I spoke to foreign correspondent Jonathan Steele about Afghanistan for the War Studies podcast. I've embedded it below in case you missed it.

Steele's new book, Ghosts of Afghanistan, compares the experiences of Russian (1979-89) and US/NATO (2001-) forces in Afghanistan.

He argues that President Obama can learn from how Mikhail Gorbachev began withdrawing Russian troops in 1988.

In Steele's estimation, Obama should be pursuing a negotiated settlement with the Taliban and other parties with more vigour.

Notes on 'Reporting Libya and the Arab Spring' at the Media Society

So yesterday I tried to fit too many things at too many different places into one day and ended up being late for the Media Society event on reporting Libya and the 'Arab Spring'.

But here are a few incomplete notes on the panel discussion...(cross-posted at the Frontline Club)

1. BBC vs Sky News reporting of Tripoli

I think this has largely been put to bed. The general consensus seems to be that while Correspondent Alex Crawford and her Sky team did a great job of covering the fall of Tripoli, criticism of the BBC's reporters on the ground was not justified.

ITV's Bill Neely described flak levelled at the BBC team who decided not to proceed with the rebel convoy as "grossly distasteful". But...

2. BBC: Live vs Bulletins

...we did learn from Kevin Bakhurst, Deputy Head of the BBC Newsroom, that one of the reasons Correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and his team did not follow the story into Tripoli was because they stopped to file a piece for the Six O'Clock News.

While they were doing this, Bakhurst said they became detached from the rebel convoy and the team adjudged that it would have been highly dangerous to try to rejoin it - "the right decision for the situation they were in".

Of course, the team may still have made a decision that it was not safe to travel with the convoy even if they had not become detached. It is worth pointing out that Rupert Wingfield-Hayes was caught in an ambush the following morning while travelling with the rebels.

Although secondary to safety concerns, therefore, this does nevertheless raise the question of whether the BBC should prioritise rolling news or bulletins.

On the 'bulletins' side of the argument is the fact that bulletins have much larger audience figures than rolling news (Ten O'Clock News, 5 million; BBC News Channel 9.6 million per week).

For the 'rolling news' case, Sky's Alex Crawford was deemed to have "owned the story" and there is a feeling that increasingly audiences are consuming news live, a point raised by the BBC's Jon Leyne. Further research anyone?

3. Blown budgets

It appears that money for international news in 2011 has already run out.Both Kevin Bakhurst and Sky's Head of International News, Sarah Whitehead, said they had blown their budgets and had asked bosses for additional funds.

Ben De Pear from Channel 4 News said he had spent his "tiny" budget by July and had been forced to raid the coffers of other departments. When Bakhurst was asked what he would do if another major international news story broke later in the year he said: "I don't know".

4. Social Media

(Unless I missed something at the beginning)...there wasn't much discussion of social media.

Professor Tim Luckhurst argued that the 'Arab Spring' had stressed the importance of traditional media journalists. Initially, he was talking about 'citizen journalists' not replacing professional reporters which I'd agree with.

But I'm not convinced about the statement that followed from that premise:

"Yes, social media makes a contribution but it makes the least contribution when you need it most. And it cannot always be relied upon. And it can only be relied upon when it is curated by professional journalists".

The first problem here is the identification of 'social media' with 'citizen journalists' when all and sundry are now using social media - especially professional journalists.

Leaving that aside, the crux of the issue is the idea that people who are not professional journalists make least contribution to the news through social media when 'we' need it most. I'm just not sure I agree.

I would argue that generally people who are not professional journalists have much less desire to spend the time, energy, trouble and money to report the news on social media platforms when there is no great pressing need.

The Arab Spring has shown that in the context of state censorship of traditional media and political repression, social media provides a (nevertheless contested) space where people who have a frustrated need to share news, ideas and information can do so.

You might call this a very different form of 'journalism'.

You might reject that understanding of 'journalism', but surely the contribution of these individuals to the news and even 'traditional journalism' when 'we' needed it, has been rather important (even if their contribution was subsequently often curated and brought to a broader audience by professional journalists)?

It's both, not one or the other.

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I'd be interested in your thoughts...

The book launched at the event, Mirage in the Desert? 'Reporting the Arab Spring', is available on Amazon and includes a chapter by me on the Gay Girl in Damascus blog.

Gaza media coverage - alternative voices and blogs

Part two of an unintended series on Gaza media coverage on the Frontline blog.

This post was sparked by a commenter who pointed out that the media often end up recycling the same old Israeli voices.

I've also linked to a few blogs which might provide an alternative perspective and dug out a BBC Editor's blog post from the archive. (If anyone knows where I can get some virtual dust for my delicious account, let me know).

War Reporting Conference: Part Two

Here's the second half of my update on the war reporting conference on Wednesday.

After Martin Bell had stepped down, Rafael Marques talked about the difficulties of reporting civil war in Angola.

• In the general debate on the nature of a war reporter's duty, he felt the journalist was obliged to tell the stories of those who are caught up in the suffering of conflict.

Martin Huckerby, former foreign editor of the Observer, argued that journalists reporting war must have a degree of humility.

• The facts, he said, are not always obvious and there is a need to recognise different approaches and analyses. (This has been brought to the fore by the space for discourse available on the World Wide Web, a place where a multitude of viewpoints are published.)

• He also noted that journalists need to be aware that they can be co-opted in the information war by both sides.

Stuart Allan took us for a quick spin through the development of blogging and new media in war reporting.

• The blogs he mentioned (Salam Pax, Baghdad Burning, Stuart Hughes's Iraq Blog, Chris Allbritton's Back to Iraq) do perhaps represent a new type of war reporting that might save the genre from the decline that Martin Bell predicts.

• Allan's example of the coverage of Saddam Hussein's execution is indicative of the way in which the citizen journalist is much more likely to give us a raw, unedited account of an event. In this instance, it became apparent that the solemn silent coverage of the execution was rather misleading when it was compared to the mobile phone footage taken by a nearby guard. The audio track revealed a much more chaotic scene than the mainstream media had depicted.
  

Journalist Yvonne Ridley was concerned that there 'appeared to be deliberate attempts to target journalists that were not embedded' by US forces in Iraq.

• She cited the cases of ITN reporter, Terry Lloyd, and the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad just over 5 years ago.

Jonathan Baker, deputy head of newsgathering at the BBC, said 'the face of war reporting has changed beyond all recognition'.

• He noted that technology was leading some of the changes - editing in the field, satellite phone, 24 hour news on TV and radio.

• He was worried about keeping track of all the information available on the World Wide Web, and argued that the BBC must use the same rigour online as they do for other sources of information.

• But he believed that the BBC is in a good place to filter and sift through the information thanks to its network of correspondents in the field, the expertise of the language services and the work of the Monitoring Service.

• In an age when 'everybody is potentially a reporter', the BBC has a role to play as a 'trusted guide' through 'the noise'.

War Reporting Conference: Part One

I've just made the short walk from Fleet Street to my department at King's College, London.

I was at a war reporting conference at St Brides Church, the 'spiritual home of printing and the media'. The opening address was given by Philip Knightley and panellists included veteran war correspondent Martin Bell, leading media academic Stuart Allan, and Jonathan Baker from BBC Newsgathering.

The event was chaired with consummate style and ease by Magnus Linklater.

There were lots of interesting points made. Here are some of the key themes I picked up on:

Phillip Knightley opened up with an exploration of the competing duties that a war correspondent faces. He particularly brought to the fore the difficulties of covering a war in which the correspondent's own nation is involved.

• There are two types of war, he claimed: the real one on the battlefield and the one presented to us by the media. The two rarely meet.
• Hawks are newsworthy; doves are not.
• Not covering a war would be a neglect of a journalist's duty.
• He wondered whether journalists do have a duty to try to move events forward in the 'right' direction.

• My view
• A fairly uncontroversial start which comprehensively flagged up some of the key competing duties which face a working war correspondent.

Next came Martin Bell, whose outspoken views are only matched for boldness by an insistence on wearing his iconic white suit.

• He developed a theme he had written about in The Guardian earlier in the year, arguing that 'war reporting' is over, adapting an idea borrowed from General Rupert Smith about the state of warfare in the 21st Century.
  
• He maintained his general pessimism about the state of the media industry including a dig at the BBC's Madeleine McCann coverage, and various swipes at 'rooftop' and 'embedded' journalism.
  
• He concluded by arguing that the readers of The Times in 1854 were better informed about the progress of the Crimean War than present-day audiences are about Afghanistan and Iraq.

• My view
• Although Bell has some valid criticisms of the media industry in general, and of war reporting more specifically, claiming that this represents the 'death of war reporting' or the 'death of news' probably goes too far. (But then it's less entertaining to be this conservative ((and wear a black suit)). War and war reporting are changing significantly but I'm not convinced Rupert Smith ever argued that war was over, merely that a new form of warfare needed to be addressed. The same could be said of war reporting.
  

• One point, in particular, which Bell failed to address was the impact of bloggers and new media on war reporting despite being specifically challenged on the issue by the chair. Part of the antidote to the embedded and rooftop journalism that Bell criticises is the capacity of bloggers such as Salam Pax to provide audiences with unmediated accounts of places and events that these journalists cannot reach. This is especially relevant in today's war zones which everyone at the conference seemed to agree are far more dangerous for journalists than they have been in the past.

• Indeed, if you turn to the blogs then I think you can build up a better picture of what is going on inside Afghanistan and Iraq. But that's not to say there aren't significant and troubling blindspots in what we know about the conflicts.

War reporting: behind the scenes

ITV news have started a series of behind-the-scenes video blogs, including one which follows Mark Austin's team in Lashkar Gah. In this video, you get a tour of the team's tent, aka the 'Helmand Bureau'.



I picked this up courtesy of Charlie Beckett's blog.