The war on journalism

As seven western correspondents are killed in one week in Afghanistan, author Phillip Knightley asks if frontline reporters are now considered legitimate targets

So far, not a single British or American soldier has died in action in Afghanistan. On the other hand, in just one week, seven Western war correspondents were killed there. The conclusion is inescapable - it is now safer to be a member of the fighting forces than a representative of the media. What's going on?

All those killed were experienced correspondents who would have considered the risk acceptable. So did they die because they miscalculated? From bad luck? Or are war correspondents now considered legitimate targets? And if so, who is responsible for this change? In the old days, correspondents were thought to be neutral, objective observers and enemy soldiers seldom deliberately fired on them. In the American Civil War the correspondents considered wearing white uniforms so that troops would know who they were and "to indicate the purity of their character".

In the second world war there were casualties among correspondents, but mostly from being in the wrong place at the wrong time not from being deliberately targeted. This began to change in Vietnam and it was partly the correspondents' own fault. Some of them began to carry arms and take part in actions. Peter Arnett, of the Associated Press, had a Mauser machine pistol. Charlie Black, of the Columbus Inquirer, killed at least three Vietcong. Charlie Eggleston, a United Press photographer was shot dead trying to avenge four correspondents killed by the Vietcong - but not before he had killed three Vietnamese.

Other correspondents were appalled, arguing that if even only one war correspondent went armed, this entitled the Vietcong to assume that all correspondents were armed, and to react accordingly. No wonder that at the end of the war 45 war correspondents had been killed and 18 were missing.

By the time we get to the wars in the former Yugoslavia the conventions had changed utterly. Wearing a jacket with "press" badge and travelling in a civilian vehicle flying a white flag actually attracted fire. Several correspondents there recalled driving for their lives as snipers from both sides tried to pick them off. One said, "The locals feel we are leeches sucking away at their misery." And why should individual soldiers feel that this attitude is wrong when Nato justified bombing the Belgrade TV station and now the Pentagon bombs the Al Jazeera TV station's office in Kabul?

As early as 1983, the International Committee of the Red Cross discussed how the death toll of war correspondents might be reduced. It concluded that there was no way to eliminate the risk entirely and that correspondents themselves would not want this if the result was anodyne reporting. Last year, the European Centre of the Freedom Forum, an American philanthropic organisation, persuaded all the major European news organisations to send their journalists to hostile environment training courses to help them survive while reporting wars and revolutions.

The Centre also funded a professional study into post trauma stress disorder (PTSD) among war correspondents. This revealed that they experience a higher prevalence of PTSD than police officers, and are often on a par with combat veterans.

So, if being a war correspondent is so risky, if you survive then to discover that you have a post trauma stress disorder, why do so many journalists want to cover wars?

Some feel they have a duty to inform the world, others seek adventure. It can a very quick path to fame and promotion. In 1982, Max Hastings was a 38-year-old reporter for the London Evening Standard when he went to the Falklands.

He walked through British lines on the last day of the war and "took" the capital, Port Stanley, single-handed. In no time he had been appointed editor of the Daily Telegraph and then editor of the Standard, where he remains today. John Simpson of the BBC walks into Kabul ahead of the liberating forces and has his burst of fame. A measure of how well known his reporting of 31 wars has made him, is that a World Service colleague says, "Throughout all my years of doing foreign affairs for the BBC, wherever I go all people ask is: 'Do you know John Simpson?'"

The American writer Nora Ephron notes that unlike fighting in the war itself, unlike big game hunting, working as a war correspondent is almost the only classic male endeavour left that provides physical danger and personal risk without public disapproval. "The awful truth is that for correspondents, war is not hell. It is fun."

So, despite an ever-rising death toll, war correspondents are going to continue to do it anyway. And who is to say that protecting them would be a good idea. No correspondents were as well protected as the six British journalists who reported the first world war - officer rank, uniforms, chauffeur-driven cars, armed escorts, batmen, personal censors, lodgings in French chalets. The result: not one was killed but they produced the worst war reporting in the history of the business.

· Phillip Knightley is the author of The First Casualty (Prion), a history of war correspondents

The result: not one was killed but they produced the worst war reporting in the history of the business.

Here's another reminder of the true nature of the media.

Stalin's Apologist

The Paper of Record
An apology that is long overdue.

The Paper of Record

An apology that is long overdue.

Mr. Stuttaford is a writer living in New York.

May 15, 2001 8:55 a.m.

Imagine, if you can, Berlin in November 1938, the grim capital of a savage ideology heading deeper into horror and cruelty. The New York Times correspondent has just emerged from an interview with the Fuhrer. It is an exclusive. His editor will be pleased. On the way home the Times man passes a looted synagogue, and the broken bodies of those who were worshiping there. Elsewhere, homes and businesses are being ransacked, and their occupants are under attack. Other victims are rounded up and dragged to the concentration camps from which far too few will ever emerge. Filing a report that night, the journalist prefers not to dwell on such distasteful events. Instead he contents himself with a comment that stories of a Kristallnacht pogrom had been exaggerated. Yes, there had been some scattered excesses, but they had been the work of a few hotheads, nothing more.

Delighted by the coverage, the Nazi hierarchy gives the correspondent privileged access. He becomes the doyen of the Third Reich's foreign press corps, the essential contact for every new visitor to Berlin. In the ultimate accolade the journalist wins a Pulitzer Prize for the "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity" of his reporting from Germany.

In the years that follow, of course, it becomes impossible to deny the reality of Hitler's charnel-house state. The reporter is revealed for what he really was, evil's enabler, a greedy, venal man, whose soothing words had done much to calm the fears of an outside world that might otherwise have tried to step in to stop the slaughter. Amazingly, however, more than 60 years later his Pulitzer still stands, and with it, his distinguished place in the history of the New York Times.

Last month, the newspaper, as it does once every year, proudly published the honor roll of its Pulitzer-winning writers. It is not difficult to find the name of the dictator's apologist. It is right up there near the top, fitting company, in the view of the New York Times for the other journalists on the list: Walter Duranty is still, it is clear, a man with whom the Grey Lady is in love.

It is a remarkable, and disgusting, story. Sadly, it is also true, with only one qualification. The journalist, Walter Duranty, was a propagandist for Stalin not Hitler, the evil that he was to witness took place in the Soviet Union, not Nazi Germany.

For well over a decade, Duranty's influential reports from Moscow described a Soviet Union run by a tough, but dedicated, elite, who could, he conceded, be cruel, but only in the cause of improving the lives of the people. As the Times man liked to say, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

To Duranty, Stalin ("the greatest living statesman") represented progress and the chance of a better future for the once benighted masses. In one typical passage he gushed that, "Stalin and his associates have carried with them the strongest and most intelligent elements of the Russian people, and have created a national unity and enthusiasm which the Tsarist Empire never knew. They have learnt by their own errors and pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, and the nation has followed them." It was, he wrote, "a heroic chapter in the life of humanity."

That this "heroic chapter" was to prove fatal for large numbers of that same humanity did not seem to trouble Duranty too much. "I'm a reporter," he explained, "not a humanitarian." In fact, he was neither, something that can be seen most clearly from his treatment of the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3. This man-made famine, a deliberate attempt to break the Ukrainian peasantry, is one of history's most terrible episodes (In his Harvest of Sorrow Robert Conquest estimates the death toll in the Ukraine and neighboring regions at seven million). Walter Duranty of the New York Times, however, did what he could to cover it up.

It was behavior that puts the Pulitzer winner in the same moral category as the present day's Holocaust deniers, if not somewhere worse. Today's revisionists, I suppose, can at least claim the excuse that they were not there. By contrast, Duranty was right on the spot, in Moscow and briefly, even, in the killing fields of the Ukraine itself. He knew. Privately, he told British diplomats that as many as ten million people might have died, "The Ukraine," he admitted, "had been bled white."

Publicly, however, his story was very different. He claimed that tales of a famine were "bunk," "exaggeration," or "malignant propaganda." There was "no actual starvation." As other accounts of the tragedy filtered out, Duranty was forced to backpedal a little: his reports still avoided references to famine, but he conceded that the annual death rate in the affected areas might have trebled from its normal level of around one million to a total of three million. These unfortunates had perished not so much from "actual starvation as from manifold disease." It is an absurd distinction, as grotesque as any made by those revisionists who argue that many of the deaths in the Nazi camps were the product of typhus. Typically, such people will then sidestep the issue as to why it was that those victims were in the camps in the first place. Duranty took a similar approach. The increase in the death rate by two million was presented to his readers as an almost passive tense disaster: it just happened, nobody was really responsible.

In reality, of course, the famine was, as Duranty well understood, the organized product of a murderous regime. Had he told the truth, he could have saved lives. When today's revisionists deny the Shoah, their lies, thankfully, have little or no impact. They are simply irrelevant. Duranty's distortions, by contrast, helped mute international criticism of Stalin's lethal project at a crucial time, criticism that might, perhaps, have made the killing machine at least pause. Instead, the "Great Duranty" kept quiet, pocketed his Pulitzer, and crossed the Atlantic the following year in the company of the Soviet foreign minister, who was on his way to Washington to sign off on U.S. diplomatic recognition of the Stalinist state. Within four years an emboldened Stalin had launched the Great Terror.

As I said, it is a disgusting story, but not a new one. Back in 1974, Joe Alsop used his final syndicated column to attack Duranty's pro-Soviet stance, and Robert Conquest covered the same ground in rather more detail a few years later. 1990 saw renewed focus on this subject with the publication of Stalin's Apologist, S. J. Taylor's invaluable biography of Duranty. The New York Times responded with a favorable review of Ms. Taylor's book and an editorial comment that Walter Duranty had produced "some of the worst reporting to appear in [the] newspaper," citing, in particular his "lapse" in covering the Ukrainian famine.

That, at least, was a start, but eleven years later Duranty's name still features in the paper's annual honor roll of Pulitzer winners (the only change has been that he is now described as having won the award for his "coverage of the news from Russia," previously he was lauded for his "dispassionate interpretive reporting" of the news from Russia). For a journal that prides itself on its sensitivity this is another remarkable "lapse," one made stranger still by the Times's understanding in other contexts that the symbols of the past can still hurt. Its attacks on, say, the continued display of the Confederate flag might have more moral force if the paper could bring itself to stop its own annual celebration of an employee who was, in effect, a propagandist for genocide.

Nobody should ask the Times to rewrite history (that's something best left to Stalinists), but a Pulitzer Prize has, in the past, been withdrawn. It is a precedent that the paper should urge be followed in the case of Duranty, not for his opinions (loathsome though they may have been) but for the lies, evasions, and fabrications that characterized the reporting that won him his award. Beyond that, the paper should ask itself just what else it is going to do to make some amends to the memory of the millions of dead, victims whose murder was made just that little bit easier by the work of the man from the New York Times.

An apology might be a start.

Good info. Wasn't there a reporterette from Boston who a Pulitzer for a series of stories that was later proven to have been entirely fictional?

More about reporters. News Watch

...There were some common themes in these fiascoes:

*The reporters believed the "noble" ends they were pursuing justified the questionable means.

*The journalists involved all were highly experienced and celebrated prize winners of their craft. They were trusted.

*Unnamed or fabricated sources played a role in all of the stories.

With the problems of Monica and the media, the public had a serious one-two punch that left it even further disenchanted with the press. To put a point on that, here are some recent findings from various polls and surveys:

*A Freedom Forum survey released last October found that 88 percent of the public believes that reporters "often" or "sometimes" use unethical or illegal tactics to investigate a story.

* Sixty-six percent of the respondents felt that journalists often or sometimes fabricated stories.

*An American Society of Newspaper Editor survey, released December 1998 and fleshed out more at April's ASNE convention, found that 80 percent of Americans believe the media sensationalize stories to sell newspapers and attract large audiences.

*Seventy-eight percent of those responding to the ASNE survey said there is bias in the news media, although they varied on the definition of bias and blamed television more than newspapers.

* More than three-quarters of the ASNE respondents expressed concern about the credibility of news stories that use unnamed sources, and 45 percent said the story shouldn't run at all if no one will go on the record.

*In a Scripps Howard survey last fall, 74 percent of respondents said that reporters sometimes or often fail to accurately report major stories.

* More than 90 percent said reporters invade people's privacy.

*That survey also found that 43 percent of respondents said their faith in the accuracy and fairness of the news has decreased in recent years; 41 percent said it was unchanged.

*A Pew Research Center poll conducted this February found that the number of Americans seeing news organizations as "immoral" has tripled since the mid-1980s, leaving the public evenly split (38 percent to 40 percent) on whether the press is immoral or not.

* Similarly, the two-to-one belief in 1985 that the press protected democracy has evaporated. Today, 45 percent say the news media protect democracy, and 38 percent say the press hurts democracy.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.