For the record, Tim Henman is a tennis player, not a war reporter. I was thinking of Tim Hetherington, RIP.
Haha yeah I was confused there for a second, but I thought perhaps there were two Henmans.
The military controls access to the area of operations where US forces are fighting, in general, though in asymmetrical wars like we usually have it is of course a rather porous region. Going in without sanction puts reporters at serious risk of being (mis)identified as combatants, etc. whereas being officially recognized they military provides a modicum of security and supposedly knows they are there.
As @MelesMeles notes, there are of course people all over the place reporting this and that in war zones, but we’re talking about the formal, supported presence of mainstream media reporters in the combat zone. And we’re talking about the expectation of readers/viewers for serious, vetted, and reliable independent coverage as opposed to the wildly hit or miss variety you get from today’s freelance culture.
Of course. What we don’t have is the legion of American journalists, working more or less independently with the even grudging cooperation of the military, reporting from alongside the troops on a regular basis with only basic OPSEC censoring. The reason you have so many independent freelance types roaming around is that the military is not assisting journalists to actually cover the war. The net result is a bunch of very courageous reporters of often quite variable skills and abilities and motivations providing a disparate flow of inputs which the public has no way of filtering. It ends up just flowing into the massive firehose of Internet info and often gets lost in the shuffle.
Y’all’s war journalism discussion brings to mind David Axelrod’s latest Axe Files podcast. He talks with a war correspondent named Clarissa Ward. Skip ahead to about 30 minutes for her stuff about covering Iraq and Afghanistan.
-Tom
There’s nothing suspect about working freelance. Working freelance has various pros and cons over signing up with a news organization, but some of those people still have rock solid credentials, and there are also war reporters who work regular beats for news organizations.
They’re the ones who get the most play, especially in a high profile conflict like Afghanistan, because if you’re an esteemed news organization, you also have a reputation to maintain, so you can’t do like Buzzfeed or Vice and just work with anyone who claims to be on the ground.
The key is the editors at home. If they are doofuses or they work with doofuses out in the field, you get doofus journalism. If they’re serious people who work with serious people, you get serious journalism.
I’m not sure what you expect. The military fights wars, it doesn’t work for the press.
The fact that they allow embeds is pretty generous. If you’re a combat soldier, risking your life or your mission so a civilian can get a story is not a small thing to ask.
Also, I would point out that coverage of the military is better than it has ever been. It takes journalists considerably less time to uncover something like My Lai today than it did in Vietnam.
I’m pretty impressed that a US soldier can’t put a knife into a dying talib without someone knowing about it.
That has nothing to do with the military and everything to do with cable tv and the internet. You are what you eat, man.
30 years ago, news were about informing you. Everyone would cluster around their TV sets or have a newspaper subscription because they wanted to know. I remember my parents weeping when they realized the wall had come down overnight, and getting up at ass in the morning to watch the start of the first Iraq war.
That doesn’t happen anymore. Today news are primarily there to fill 24 hours of uninterrupted airtime, and entertain you with the latest grizzly car crash, who kissed who at what party, and who tweeted what back in 2012. People seem to care a lot more about that than they do about foreign affairs.
That said, most of those same institutions and the people who work for them are still around, and they are still doing incredible journalism, the New York Times coverage above being a perfect example. Use them.
The military doesn’t don’t do it to be generous. They do it, as @cannedwombat says, in an attempt to control the narrative. The soldiers themselves aren’t being generous, either, as they have no choice in the matter.
My point is: Duh.
The journalists are completely aware of that, but they can still use the knowledge they gain to develop stories once the embed is over, or share their information with someone else who can.
You can’t expect any person or organization to act against their own interest. Especially with a 24 hour news cycle. That’s a lot of time to ruminate on stuff that isn’t even remotely important.
If you had to answer every minor niggle about whether a machinegunner from C Company kicked a sheep in such and such a village, on such and such a date, and whether that was really okay or not, you would need more PR people working for the military than combat soldiers.
The soldiers I know didn’t mind having embeds. The journalists were very considerate and respectful and enjoyable to be around, and they pride themselves on being able to keep people safe under dangerous conditions. But it is still an added risk, and that is not lost on them either.
I thought your point was “the fact that they allow embeds is pretty generous.” Maybe I read it wrong?
This.
I actually think these wars were covered much better than Vietnam. The problem with Vietnam, is that big name anchor like Cronkite and Brinkley would parachute into Vietnam, and breathless report some new facts based on being in country for 48 hours. Cronkite was always too optimistic about Vietnam before Tet and then his take on Tet was simplistic and wrong. The press relationship with the armed forces was extremely adversarial from about 1965.
The Pentagon switched gears and started their very effective (from the perspective of the Pentagon not necessarily the US Public) embedded program during Desert Storm. Now the pendulum swing too far, with the only embedded reporter having access to anything, which lasted through the first few years of the Iraq invasion. Sometime around 2006, the free lancers, along with a whole raft of reporters working for the major networks, and newspaper. realized they could get the stories without being embedded,. They had also earned the trust of company and battalion commanders while they were embedded and now were back as generals. You ended with books and movies like Jake Tappers, Outpost, Restrepo, Generation kill, with a fair amount of depth and nuance.
I’ve been watching PBS Newshour and ITN reporters give reports from Afghanistan for more than a decade. The most recent being Jane Ferguson, who was reporting both before and after Clarissa Ward, in the last few month. The problem is no one cared and no was watching before the collapse.
But this is entirely predictable. the corollary to newspaper adage “if bleeds it leads”, is no blood,no viewers. Before the August deaths we hadn’t had causality in 18 months. We’ve had a stalemate in Afghanistan, for a decade, it was WW I without the trenches. Now maybe if you show a map of Taliban control regions, you could see the slow Taliban takeover. But “Taliban control” is subjective.
2020 was news heavy year, so it no surprise that network news show combined spent 20 minutes talking about Afghanistan. What was there to report?. Another general saying, we are making progress training troops, but we still have challenges ahead." The fall of two province to the Taliban,and recapture of one? The latest of peace negotiations with Taliban, after the previous six tries ended in failure?
I think we have actually fine press coverages of the wars. The reason that no one watches is that, it is just not relevant to most Americans, because there has not been much news.
We used to have a partnership between the military and the society it serves. That was when we had a draft. The expectation was the military had an obligation to facilitate access and coverage of what it was doing, within the limits of operational security of course. There was also the assumption that what we were doing was capable of sustaining the light of examination. None of that is true now. When the military became able to totally control the flow of information about what it was doing, democracy took a huge hit. Especially as we have not technically had a real legal war since WWII, as everything since then has arguably been constitutionally questionable at least.
As I noted, I’m not impugning the motives or skills of many of the freelancers. I’m pointing out that a thousand freelancers reporting to thousands of different outlets has far less impact, and is subject to far less overall scrutiny, than a smaller group of journalists funneling stuff through a small number of larger outlets. True, you get less chance of one big organization shading things one way or the other, but on the other hand, you get so much input that no one can really follow it all and the best stuff gets lost in the shuffle.
It has a lot to do with the military, because they have actively worked to restrict journalist access, treated journalists like the enemy often enough, and have made access like embedding subject to so many caveats and limits that the officially sanctioned coverage is fairly useless. The freelancers can provide a lot of good coverage around the fringes of operations, but there is little to no direct coverage of what happens at the sharp end on a day to day basis. Not like there was in Vietnam at least.
There is good journalism, of course, but it’s usually after the fact, investigative, and subject to limits like not being able to access the areas and individuals involved on our side at least. My point is not that we don’t have good journalism sometimes. My point is that the US military has in the past half-century effectively made the press persona non grata and abandoned any pretense of being an extension of the national society, and instead sees itself as separate from that society, and in fact has elevated its own tactical and operational needs above those of the nation as a whole. That is a leadership problem both political and military, of which the way the press is handled is but one symptom.
The anchors were not the source of the good journalism. That was from the reporters in the field, who had much more freedom than today. I’ll have to disagree with you about today’s coverage being better, for sure, though. I feel we got very little information about the day to day conduct of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, though admittedly probably more because no one cared and hence the journalism outlets didn’t focus on that than anything else.
Not to say that Vietnam was a sterling example of good journalism, either. It was just IMO a better example than more recent wars. Again, my major point, and I emphasize it’s just my take on it, is that today’s military seems to view its own citizens as the enemy far too often.
Dude, back in the day, press coverage amounted to newspaper stories printed weeks after events.
There was no constant daily news feed like we have now. It wasn’t until Vietnam that people had war come into their living room.
There was very little “examination” conducted by the people of the society at large.
One thing to keep in mind when talking about the Afghan war is that there’s been an enormous difference in the casualties suffered by the US forces and the Afghan forces.
E.g. “We” had not had a casualty in 18 months, but the Afghan security forces had ~10,000 KIA during that period. Us Americans had already made our separate peace and so were not the primary targets during that period.
I think it’s 3000 of ours to 60.000 of theirs.
But according to Joe Biden, the Afghans weren’t willing to fight. Buncha wimps.
It was much more rapid than that, even in the Civil War, much less WWI/WWII. But yeah obviously no TV cameras, just articles by war correspondents. Radio journalism was obviously a thing by WW2.
Vietnam was the first losing war the military had to deal with the press on. It also came at a time when the trust in all institutions was declining rapidly. The military unsuccessfully attempted to stop the press access. You had occasional press briefings at MACV (Headquarters), which were packs of lies, and then the bad reporters would dutifully file their reports get together at the hotels, and get drunk.
The good reporters would go to the countryside to find the really ugly stories like Mai Lai, or they go find the short-timers, and misfits, at local bars and whorehouse and get the dirt on how fucked up the war was it. Both types of stories sold newspapers and magazines.
The military and press ended up thinking each side was the enemy, and the public suffered. We got the worse of both worlds. The NY Times and WSJ dutifully reported the misleading and often made up metrics from MACV, body counties, tons of bombs dropped, and the number of mules killed on the Ho-Chi Minh trail. The more progressive press, portrayed the military at best.as, stoned fuck ups, and worse potential Lt. Calley, just waiting to kill children.
The public was completely clueless as to the strategic situation of the war. Hence the impossibility of convincing the public that Tet was actually a strategic loss not a win for the VC. Meanwhile, individual soldiers were vilified. Going to class in the mid 70s at Berkeley, in my Air Force ROTC uniform, I was spat on and called baby killer a couple of times and that was several years after we had pulled out all troops and over a year after Saigon had fallen.
Now, I’m not claiming the press lost the war in Vietnam. The generals, Sec. McNamara and President Johnson deserve most of the blame. I firmly believe that US army in Vietnam, had the lowest morale, and worse discipline of any soldiers the US has sent into battle. But, I don’t know to this day how much of my opinion is based on my own reading and research and how much is because is I spent a decade listening to the press tell me how fucked up the army was.
Embedding journalists, in Desert Storm was smart PR on the part of the Pentagon and was in some respect a throwback to WWII. The great WWII journalist, Ernie Pyle alternated between embedded with units and doing his own independent reporting.
I really think the public needs both. Reporters need to understand how the military works, and nothing prepares them better than spend several weeks living with the soldiers. Now does that influence them to be less critical, of the guys who may have just saved their life? You bet. Which is why they need to go out and talk to Afghanistan villagers and even the Taliban like some of the braver reporters have done.
Jake Tapper did a 2 hour CNN special what wrong in Afghanistan. He talked to most of the commanding generals as well as a number of regular soldiers and I think he got some surprisingly candid answers. In large part, I think that because Jake spent time embedded, and wrote non-fiction book and helped make a documentary, military folks trusted him. In some cases, he has been interviewing the same people for a decade. It was a good documentary, a fine first draft of history.
Not only didn’t we get anything like this in May of 1975, I don’t think it was possible to do it because there was no trust. I suspect that the military today views the press as something to manipulate, pretty much like most institutions. It is a huge step up from Vietnam where the press was viewed as an enemy of the people.
It was a rare week in the mid-60s when less than 100 men were killed in Vietnam/. The draft was a factor in every young person’s mind. So, it is not surprising, the Vietnam war was was front and center of our news coverage. I’m very grateful that wasn’t the case in Afghanistan.
I don’t want anyone to be killed in a war, really. On the other hand, if there were a broad-based draft for every war, one that upturned the lives and plans of a substantial number of people, maybe we’d take on fewer wars. And that would be a good thing.
My understanding of the press / public view of Tet was not that it was a strategic win, but that it demonstrated something the government had told them was impossible. The government line was that the VC were mostly beaten and incapable of operations on such a scale. When Tet happened, the media and the people suddenly understood that either the military was lying about the war, or the military really had no idea what the situation on the ground was. Once you understood that, you weren’t really going to take the assurances at face value anymore.
I don’t agree. True, there was less material available, but people actually did pay attention to the network news and many of the better national papers. And in WWII, while timeliness was not great, the coverage was pretty extensive and fairly gritty. The papers of the era carried a lot of good war reporting.
Depends on the year I think. 1965-67, the Army was damn good, overall. After that, it went downhill fast as it became clear the war was unpopular, unconventional, and increasingly unwinnable. One factor, something my father used to comment on (he was an officer in Vietnam) was that some number–maybe not huge but significant–of young men who might have made good leaders avoided being drafted by various means, fair or foul, leaving the Army to work with what it got.
I feel like the timeliness in WWII was pretty dang good, or at least I don’t see much reason why it wouldn’t be, at least in the European theater. If you’re a journalist covering e.g. D-Day I assume it’s not hard to get access via radio or telegraph or something to London, and any copy that gets there is in New York same day.
Here is the NY Times front page for June 7, 1944:
Now one difference with Vietnam is that after Pearl Harbor I don’t know if many (any?) mainstream news outlets were questioning whether we should be fighting at all, though I imagine there was spirited discussion of strategies, commanders’ competency, etc. I feel like the tone of the hard-bitten Ernie Pyle stuff was in the mode of “war is hell, but it’s gotta be done” (correct me if I’m wrong; this is not an area of expertise for me). There was a lot of emphasis made on the suffering of the regular soldier, for sure. See John Huston’s war documentary The Battle of San Pietro.
On the other hand, there have been other wars where the question “should we fight” was actively debated in the press, whether it be the Civil War (where newspapers were basically loyal to one party or the other, so pro-Copperhead/Democratic papers sniped constantly at Lincoln) or e.g. the Philippines War, which some prominent figures e.g. Mark Twain vocally opposed.