How closely can journalists work with combatant forces in a war and still remain independent and impartial? That’s a question dozens of news organisations - including Reuters - have been asking ever since the start of the Iraq War in 2003, when the practice of “embedding” with US and British forces became commonplace.
Just in the last couple of weeks, we made a decision to embed one of our French television crews, Laurent Hamida, with British forces in Afghanistan, and he has agreed to describe his experience and answer your questions about how he goes about his job.
As news editors, one of the most worrying decisions is sending such staff into war zones. While our 500-plus TV customers around the world can decide not to go to a place like Iraq, they expect Reuters Television to be there, and we have been - continuously - since before the war began, with some 30 foreign and local staff in Baghdad and in around a dozen locations around the country. We put our staff through hostile environment vourses, provide them with safety equipment, and all those who go in are volunteers, but safety concerns remain a constant part of our lives.
Embedding with US and British forces has been a fairly routine way for international news organisations to cover parts of the war and continuing conflict, both for safety reasons, and to get access to areas they might not otherwise be able to get to.
It’s a hot topic in the journalism industry though, with the media constantly debating whether embedding is ethically acceptable, whether journalists compromise themselves by abiding by military restrictions, and whether the military has used the embedding programme to manipulate news coverage.
In July, the journal “Foreign Policy” reported:
“…the military has started censoring many [embedded reporting] arrangements. Before a journalist is allowed to go on an embed now, [the military] check[s] the work you have done previously. They want to know your slant on a storythey use the word slantwhat you intend to write, and what you have written from embed trips before. If they dont like what you have done before, they refuse to take you.”
These restrictions (which many senior military officers say don’t exist) were a main topic of conversation at the television industry annual convention called NewsXchange in Istanbul this year, and have been for several years.
If embedding were the only method of reporting the conflict then that would be deeply troubling for myself and my fellow editors in text and pictures. It is clearly impossible to report a war in a balanced way if all you can - or are prepared to - do is travel with one of the combatant forces. Thankfully this is not the case for us. Most of our television reporting is independent (and we could not function without the outstanding work of our local Iraqi camera crews across the country), but we do occasionally embed. A good example was the US attack on Fallujah in 2004, where we had journalists both with American forces, and inside the city with the civilian population.
What is important is for us to accurately report not only the news, but also the circumstances around how that news is gathered, telling the public if we are embedded, and if there have been any restrictions on our coverage. As the public demands more insight into how news is gathered, we have to be more transparent about the newsgathering process.
In many ways too, embedding is just a fancy word for what journalists have always done - reporting from the front lines with combatant forces. We’ve been doing it since the Crimean War, through the Boer War, World War One, World War Two, Korea, Vietnam, Bosnia, two Gulf Wars, and a myriad of smaller conflicts in Africa, Asia and Central America. However, just as we are not prepared to restrict our coverage to being embedded with forces allied to the United States and “the West” in general, we - and other respectable news organisations - insist on our right to report from the other side too, whether that’s travelling with the Taliban in Afghanistan (see the controversy over the BBC “embedding” with the Taliban in 2006, the Lords Rebel Army in Uganda, Communist rebels in Nepal, or the FARC in Colombia.
One of the challenges for us is to make sure that American, British and other “western” military forces understand that when we do this, we’re simply doing our job as impartial journalists.
John Clarke is Global Editor of Reuters Television. If you have any questions about TV newsgathering and the issue of embedding then contact John via the comment box below.
You can follow Laurent Hamida’s experience of embedding in Afghanistan by reading his ‘Diary of a video embed’
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9 comments so far
I believe the practice of embedding the media with combat forces should be stopped at once.
There are methods, details and actions necessary during times of war the public cannot handle and does not need to know of. As horrific and unfortunate as it may be, the public simply cannot fathom the brutality it takes to put down one’s enemy.
I largely blame the inability of the Bush administration to properly conduct this war, along with the prevailing national sentiment against the war and our imminent loss on the media’s unprecedented access to our troops.
Putting everything out there for everyone to see has never been a good idea, and in this case it’s destroying our way of life.
- Posted by Dave BlantonI fully thank all journallist who will risk their own lives to offer a balanced and impartial report on our world. I think that having the grime details of war are important to keep the general public from burying their heads in the sand. However one result of our constant exposure to war is an unnecessary fear of places where war happens and the peole that live there.
As soon as we have acts of war in our own countries we claim they are terrorism and something much different from what is happening on the other soil of the War. I do not condone any acts be we might think that the labels that we create only continue to allow people to ignore that other people are experiencing the same fears of WAR as we are.
Other peoples lives are also being destroyed.
Please continue to inform us on both sides as best as possible.
- Posted by Jennifer Wiley-VallerandTo Dave Blanton,
As a news editor, you’ll not be surprised that I would argue against the suggestion that the news media should be prevented from covering wars simply because one of the participants might not want the public to know what is going on.
Ever since the media has existed, there have been calls to restrict legitimate reporting of war, and the results have rarely been a source of pride in hindsight. In the US, The Alien and Sedition Acts were passed in 1798 because of the possibility of a war with France(that never happened) but they were blatantly used politically to close down newspapers the ruling politicians and judges didn’t like. Abraham Lincoln closed down newspapers he didn’t like, and there were restrictions on freedom of speech in World War One, World War Two, and especially through the Cold War with the McCarthy red scare. The pattern has generally been that American society has regretted these excesses, with the Supreme Court belatedly restoring constitutional values.
The most important recent case was the Court refusing a Nixon administration attempt to suppress the Pentagon Papers in 1974, which detailed the truth behind the Vietnam War. I would find it hard to believe that reporting of Vietnam for example somehow contributed to the US loss in that conflict - indeed, it could be argued that US lives may have been saved by the reporting of the truth, which in part led to the end of the war. I would similarly find it hard to believe that our reporting of the Iraq War has contributed to US military problems there -
journalists covering wars find it very easy to distinguish what might be construed as tactical information another force might make use of (locations, troop numbers etc and refrain from publishing that) from coverage of the battle zone and the human and political implications of that warfare.
There will always be a temptation to try to restrict public information in wartime, and I can understand that sentiment, but the counter argument is very simple - it is exactly when young men and women are going off to fight and die in war, that the public has the most right to know about, and debate the merits of, that government action.
If you are interested, there is a book called “Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime from The Sedition Act of 1798 to The War on Terrorism” by Geoffrey Stone, which details the history of this issue.
John Clarke
- Posted by John ClarkeNews Editor, Reuters Television
Dear John
IO appreciate that the above blog is close, but I would like to pose the following rhetorical questions:
Iin the contextt of your defence of journalists’ “free speech”:
Did the American people have a right to know when and where the D-day landings would be in world War II, prior to the landings taking place?
Did a journalist in possession of that information have a duty (the converse of his right) to tell the Germans?
Do you consider democracy (eg., USA) a superior regime to a despotism (eg., Iraq), and if so, can journalists be independent of both without implicitly supporting the despotism?
kind regards
- Posted by David LongDavid Long
David,
Your questions are real ones that journalists have to deal with all the time.
Regarding D-Day, I think my Dec 12 posting answered this sufficiently:
“journalists covering wars find it very easy to distinguish what might be construed as tactical information another force might make use of (locations, troop numbers etc and refrain from publishing that) from coverage of the battle zone and the human and political implications of that warfare.”
Regarding democracy, I don’t think I’d be crossing any lines of journalistic impartiality to suggest that regardless of individidual politics, the vast majority of journalists (myself included)support democracy, if only out of self-interest - it’s democracy that allows us (and me) to do our job independently and impartially. A more important question perhaps is how you define democracy - there are any number of countries around the world with the external trappings of democracy (such as holding elections), which of course aren’t democratic at all - democracy involves not just elections and political parties, but civil society, an independent judiciary, checks and balances on power, and freedom of speech (in which a free press is implicit). In it’s broadest sense then, journalism is therefore not independent of both (democracy and despotism). It would be a fallacy to think however that you could take the free speech piece out of the democratic equation…without free speech, a free press, the ability of ordinary people to gain information, to question, to criticise and report on government action (including military action), I’d question whether you’d really have a democracy at all.
John Clarke
- Posted by john clarkeNews Editor, Reuters Television
Dear John
- Posted by David LongMany thanks for your answers. The definition of a democracy is not problematic - “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is the hall mark of a free society. However, if we looik at the history of, eg., the Vietnam War, we find that the way it was reported, actually favoured the North - by accepting its propaganda and characterising the Viet Cong as freedom fighters rather than right hand of the despotism the North was. Tactically, the execution of the war by the US and its allies was terrible and the lost because of it. Whoever believed that the enemy could be bombed into submission had only to reflect on the London blitz to know that was not correct.
A recent case is the coverage given to middle eastern terrorist organisations (by definition, those whose actions are designed to terrorise civilians rather than attack military targets). You speak of the importance of free speech to democracy but extend the benefits of free speech which the right of reply provides to this despotism? Reuters (and AFP) makes use of Palestinian journalists to report on the conflict with Israel. It can hardly be said that Palestine (depite elections) is democratic since Hamads uses guns to oppress Fatah and vice versa (tyranny of majority - Federalist 51).
What ever the democratic inclinations of some journalists (and news oganisations) they have found the use of pictures and video to be far more commercially newsworthy and often prejudicial than rational analysis. The best example of this was the film about the alleged shooting of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Dura.
Again, many thanks
David Long
David,
Thanks your response. We should close off this discussion now as we’ve veered too far off the original subject - embedding - and other topics (such as our use of local journalists)will no doubt be part of future blogs and discussions.
John Clarke
- Posted by john clarkeDear John Clarke,
i am currently doing a little research on embedded journalism in the Middle East for Humboldt-University in Berlin.
I have a question to you: Is there any possibility for local (Iraqi) journalists to embedd with the US-forces? Can other journalists with Arabic background (Palestineans) embedd?
If the answer is yes: What would be an example of an Arabic journalist to embedd with the US-forces?
- Posted by Anat MtoumbaAn interesting example of this is the stunning piece of reportage seen on Panorama a few week’s back, Afghanistan: The Soldier’s Story. Against all the odds, the reporter did a good job of not slipping into over-romanticising the horrors of frontline combat.
And for John Clarke, I am very much trying to get in contact with you - I’m a masters student of TV Journalism who is interested in being part of the Reuters TV team, but I can’t locate an E-mail address. Could one be sent to my address?
Thanks in advance,
Bill Code
- Posted by Bill Code