Chris Paterson. War Reporters under Threat: The United States and Media Freedom. London: Pluto Press, 2014. 216 pp. $29.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-7453-3417-2; $80.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7453-3418-9.
Reviewed by Amy Lucker
Published on H-Socialisms (October, 2014)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
War and/on Journalists
“War is not healthy for children and other living things.” Thus went a popular anti-Vietnam War slogan, found on buttons, posters, and bumper stickers in the 1960s. War is—and always has been, of course—particularly unhealthy for the journalists (writers and photographers) who choose to cover it for mass media outlets. Are war reporters less safe than ever before? Chris Paterson looks at the threats faced by reporters in fields of war largely focusing on 1999 to the present (First Iraq War, Afghanistan, and Second Iraq War), demonstrating that despite words to the contrary, the United States has shown blatant aggressiveness toward news media and personnel. What does this mean for the future? Is there any hope of free flows of information coming out of war zones?
That journalists are particularly vulnerable has been brought to the fore recently with the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff. In both cases, their kidnappers (presumed to be the same ISIS group) petitioned (threatened?) the U.S. government to intercede (i.e., pay ransom) in order to save their lives. In both cases, the U.S. government declined to do so. But Paterson is not just detailing the dangers that war journalists uniquely face. His purpose, rather, as stated in the first chapter, is “to examine and expose a deadly paradox which has become apparent since 9/11: that of an entrenched culture of acceptance and impunity which permits states that are nominally democratically governed, human rights oriented ... to kill, injure and arrest those journalists who are in a position to witness and report on those violations” (p. 1).
The book's six chapters move from exposing these issues to exploring the pervasiveness and patterns of violence against the media. Paterson discusses media responses (or lack thereof) to the violence and questions of legality; that is, what, if any, legal protections exist for journalists and why these appear to have been so ineffective. Finally, he returns to the problem with which he starts, the largely invisible nature of the violence that allowed it to grow and flourish with little challenge. As he states in the first chapter, "A Hidden War on the Media," "the following chapters are intended to explore the trends and scraps of evidence suggesting that ... there are good reasons to suspect links between US information policy and the desperately treacherous situation of journalists in Iraq, Afghanistan and other contemporary zones of conflict" (p. 17). Appendices and extensive footnotes provide details that for the most part back up the claims that Paterson makes throughout and furnish suggestions for further reading and research.
In the first chapter, Paterson sets out some devastating statistics; "at the time of writing, the US government has been directly responsible for the violent deaths of over 40 journalists and media workers in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq" (p. 2). What is even more distressing is the extent to which commentary of this violence has been muted through willingness by the media to accommodate the wishes of a government responsible for the violence, as well as willingness by the same media to allow the violence to remain largely hidden. Paterson details the extent to which the perception of the U.S. government and U.S.-based media outlets have been shaped almost entirely by politics, such that U.S.-based media are judged more trustworthy than outlets based in eastern Europe or the Middle East. The mistrust of Al Jazeera is a prime example; throughout the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. government tried endlessly to conflate Al Jazeera with Al Qaeda. So, for example, a document leaked through WikiLeaks shows "that U.S. officials suspected high-level cooperation between Al-Jazeera and al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations."[1] It has become accepted in the United States and western Europe that while their media are able to be objective, the enemy's media (or, in the case of Al Jazeera, media assumed to be more sympathetic to the enemy than to the United States, which is unacceptable in an environment of "you're either with us or against us") is, and can only be, propaganda spreading tools. And by "objective," Paterson implies media that are willing to abide by and disseminate mainstream U.S. government propaganda; that is, whatever message predominates in the government—for example, the message that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction ready to deploy, regardless of what facts did or did not support this message. Our propaganda is good, theirs is evil.
The second chapter outlines the degree to which media outlets have been complicit in the war against them. Paterson describes a "tolerant, cooperative and, at times, eagerly collaborative news media" which, in essence, conspires with the government to cover up attacks against journalists (p. 19). Much of this is caused by "an almost fully commercial media system" supported largely by wealthy neoconservatives through ownership of the media and lobbying of government agencies and politicians (pp. 26–27). In particular, since the attacks of 9/11, the United States (and western Europe) has been dominated by what Paterson terms "the culture of fear" (p. 28ff.). This concept is not unique to Paterson; Brian Massumi, for instance, has written convincingly on recent government use of fear in furthering political goals.[2] According to Paterson, the use of fear was devastatingly effective; "within months of 9/11 it was clear to the Bush administration that US corporate media posed no threat to ambitious plans to clamp down on civil liberties at home and launch imperial wars abroad" (p. 47).
In the third chapter, Paterson goes into greater detail about the patterns of violence against the media. Here he delves somewhat into the history of interactions between the media and government during wartime, outlining, for example, the persistence of the "Vietnam syndrome." By this, he means U.S. reliance on "covert warfare" techniques, use of "information warfare," and a demonstrated lack of concern among the U.S. public at large and the news media about the controls being exercised by the government over the media (pp. 60–61). Paterson further describes how an "ideological hostility to journalists," prevalent in the United States at least since the Vietnam War, has progressed to "quasi-legal justification," based on three "myths": incitement, involvement, and the falsehoods regarding so-named phoney journalists (p. 94). Briefly, incitement is the belief (long since disproven) that seeing violence (e.g., on the TV news) incites people to violence. Involvement is essentially the contention that there is no such thing as "objective journalism," thus the journalists of our enemy are our enemy. And the third myth entails assuming that any journalist, anywhere, at any time, "might be an enemy combatant posing as a journalist" (p. 95). These factors, combined with the warfare conditions found in Iraq and Afghanistan, have led to a pervasive "shoot first, ask questions later" environment lethal to any citizen, and certainly to journalists.
While the text goes into detail about a few instances of attacks on journalists by the U.S. government, the appendices include a long, and fairly convincing, list of examples. Appendix 1, “A Chronology of Attacks on Media Facilities and Personnel Linked to the US Government,” lists twelve episodes dating from 1999 to 2004 in which a total of twenty media workers were killed. The second part of the appendix lists attacks on individual media personnel, dating from 2003 to 2011. This list includes thirty-two known and three disputed cases of journalists, or those working with journalists, such as translators, who were killed by U.S. troops. A footnote explains, “including all attacks on media facilities and personnel by Middle Eastern governments allied to the US would extend this list significantly, but is beyond the scope of the present research” (p. 212n2).
The fourth and fifth chapters discuss media response to these attacks and the legalities involved. Both chapters are brief; media response has been, to say the least, brief. And the U.S. government does not seem particularly concerned that attacks against journalists are illegal. In both chapters, much of Paterson’s incidental evidence has been previously outlined in earlier chapters. For the media, speaking up has not been in their (commercial) interest. Moreover, strong right-wing, conservative support of the media has largely guaranteed that official U.S. accounts do not get questioned. Any journalist caught in the crossfire is considered, if not at fault, accepted collateral loss. Insofar as the laws are concerned, the United States does not appear to feel itself tied to international law; "despite the clarity of international law, its neglect by the US and other nations which attack the press has led to widespread impunity and a desperately dangerous situation for journalists everywhere" (p. 149).
So, is there any hope, any light at the end of the tunnel? Unfortunately, it does not appear so. There is no happy ending. In the final chapter, Paterson states, "an anti-press attitude has been permitted and encouraged within the civilian and military ranks of the US government since the Vietnam War, culminating in the past 15 years in the easy acceptance of media casualties" (p. 163). Indeed it is unclear what could change the situation, although presumably Paterson hopes, with the publication of this volume, at least to open the eyes of some of the unseeing public. In the end, however, he declares that any substantive change "would require a painful rejection of the patriotism, militarism, nationalism, exceptionalism and fearmongering that has so gripped US media and culture" (p. 164).
This is not entirely new ground, but Paterson is thorough. Moreover, he does not claim to have uncovered hitherto unknown evidence; rather, he states that "this is a work more of compilation than investigation: the stories this book tells are (mostly) publicly and thoroughly documented" (p. xi). The biggest issue is that he occasionally veers into crazy-conspiracy-theory territory that takes away from the huge amount of data, which is well presented and logically organized; he is certainly hyperbolic, for example, when he describes the United States as "a superpower drunk with power, and willing ... to sacrifice media workers and media independence to military adventures fuelled by a potent mix of Machiavellian strategy and paranoid fantasy, driven with remarkable success by a neoconservative cabal" (p. ix). To some extent he downplays how much of this type of activity did occur in the past; that is, while he does go into the "Vietnam syndrome," there is no conversation about Korea or WWII. Along these same lines, he does not acknowledge that in the past editors and publishers were equally as profit driven, and equally as partisan and therefore willing and able to be persuaded by government officials to take a particular position or to censor certain issues. While it may be that there have been more (obvious) deaths of journalists in the post-1990 conflicts, it is clear from reading other authors that heavy-handed censorship of the press is nothing new for the U.S. government, and in fact much evidence of it can be found preceding the Vietnam War, during WWII and the Korean War.
Thus, we might want to look briefly at some of the historians and critics with whom Paterson is (or could be) in dialogue. Certainly it would behoove any scholar of media and war to be familiar with these texts, both to balance (and support) Paterson's rhetoric and to better contextualize the issues historically. Paterson cites particularly Phillip Knightley (The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq [2004]) and Philip M. Taylor (Munitions of the Mind: A History of Propaganda from the Ancient World to the Present Era [2003]), both of which provide wide-ranging and historically sweeping overviews of the work of the media during war times.
In addition, Paterson cites Susan L. Carruthers's work (including The Media at War [second edition, 2011]) as having well documented the grudging acceptance of necessary cooperation between the media and the U.S. government, even though she does not stress the outright violence visited upon the media by the military. She does, however, review and refute the post-Vietnam War claims that "civilians, lacking any stomach for casualties, will recoil from the sight of human suffering and demand a precipitate end to war."[3] Carruthers also stresses, and this is a point that Paterson dwells on as well, that for the most part media outlets tend to support, not to challenge, their governments' stance on any given war. That is, as commercial enterprises subject to marketplace pressures, most media concerns, and most journalists, do not really pose considerable threats to the "accepted" truisms for which the military is said to be fighting. Where then does the perceived threat come from? Paterson argues that the proliferation of media outlets (professional and amateur) and the diffuse wars in which the United States has been engaged have led to a sense of lack of control by the military and government, such that any media, whether in fact "friendly" or antagonistic, is seen as a potential enemy. The practice of embedding journalists has made them less independent, but at the same time closer to the action and in better positions to see what really goes on. Thus, tighter controls must be exerted to make sure that the stories these journalists tell are the stories the military wants told.
In War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War [2010], authors Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin offer possible reasons for military and government antipathy toward reporters, including an environment of "diffused war"; changes in patterns of communication; and with digital tools such as iPhones and platforms like YouTube, the ability for anyone, anywhere to be a reporter. Thus, there is a need for "big media" to hold on to their commercial viability, which, as Paterson certainly outlines, leads them to be willing conspirators. Further, within an environment of "diffused war," the government and military have far less control over anything, hence the tendency to overreact (i.e., shoot first, ask later). Finally this volume too stresses the post-9/11 rule of fear and U.S. governance by fear, privileging threat or potential of violence over fact, again bringing to mind the work of Massumi and others. Hoskins and O'Loughlin also introduce the concept of the mediatization of war that creates an environment of greater uncertainty and "more diffuse causal relations between action and effect."[4] Mediatization "matters because perceptions are vital to war" (p. 5). This volume provides one version of a theoretical underpinning for some of Paterson's discussions about propaganda and war.
Daniel C. Hallin's The "Uncensored" War: The Media and Vietnam [1986] provides historical context for Paterson's work. Government reaction to the press is often based on the myth that the press had unfettered access to the field of war and to soldiers during the Vietnam War. That the press lost the war for the United States was part of the myth. Thus, once the war was subject to historic revisions (by U.S. presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, as noted by Hallin, Carruthers, and others, and seen in cultural artifacts such as the Rambo series of films, for example), this myth became even more prominent, leading to greater shut downs of press accessibility in later conflicts, starting with the treatment of the British journalists covering the U.S. invasion of Grenada (as discussed by Carruthers and others). But the reality was that press personnel were handled during Vietnam; the "5 o'clock follies" and even embedding were the norm. And numerous journalists and photographers lost their lives during the Vietnam War; some most definitely as a result of "friendly fire."
In Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare, Richard Keeble asks: "from the very beginning, war correspondents faced a dilemma that remains unresolved to this day: whose side are they on? Correspondents have to choose because the aims of the military and the media are irreconcilable." Correspondents are pledged to tell the truth, as they see it, regardless of whether or not that truth can be harmful to the army and/or country. Issues of patriotism have become ever more difficult in the post 9/11 world; a journalist is a reporter first and foremost, at least in his own mind. "And what if reporting patriotically involves telling lies? Is that journalism or propaganda?" The myth of Vietnam War reporting remains relevant: "an enormous amount of planning went into the Administration's strategy for influencing and managing the media to make certain that the public was convinced of the need to invade Iraq and that ... reporting supported the war and did not—as it had during the Vietnam War—undermine national policy.”[5] It is not a huge leap from this to a sense that the military could move from a grudgingly accepted cooperation with the media to a more forced cooperation; what Paterson terms "a deteriorating and increasingly violent relationship between the media and the US government" (p. 7). But, even during earlier wars, straying from the official line was not particularly well received; so during the major amphibious landing at Inchon during the Korean War, "any attempt to by-pass the official channel in sending home the story of the landing was heavily punished.”[6] The nature of war itself, or at least how it has been sold, has changed; from hand-to-hand combat and on-the-ground fighting to "high-tech, low-risk conflict which should and could right the wrongs that exist around the world" (p. 159). Again, as with other authors, Paterson paints a picture of uncertainty, perceived dangers around every corner, and an environment in which journalists (along with other civilians) are at increased risk of harm.
Greg Mitchell, in a column entitled "Shoot the Messenger (Literally)," provides an example from Iraq in 2004 of the "you're either with us or against us" mentality. The military and right-wing bloggers attacked a journalist, Kevin Sites, and also a soldier with whom Sites was embedded who had the temerity to support the journalist. "Now each and every embed is in enemy territory.... There is probably not a marine or soldier who will even attempt to save you if they don't accidentally shoot you first."[7] His examples provide backup in visceral ways to Paterson's, although the writing differs greatly. Mitchell is a correspondent, and writes personally. Paterson's approach, heartfelt though it is, tends more to the explanatory and academic.
Paterson adds greatly to the conversation regarding relationships among the U.S. government, the military, and the media at times of war. While his beat is particularly the violence visited upon journalists and media outlets, his work helps paint the picture of the contemporary world of media and war, a world that apparently will not change any time soon. He furnishes readers with a great amount of specific detail concerning attacks on journalists and media outlets, even as he does so with perhaps less vision of the historical context than one finds elsewhere. With renewed conflict in Iraq, ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and a resurgence of the Cold War's pugnacious Russia—all trouble spots for the United States—there continue to be wars to cover, and journalists will continue to be driven to cover them. It is unclear if works like Paterson's, or indeed events like the recent beheadings of journalists by ISIS, will have any lasting effect on the risks experienced by journalists in the theater of war. But at the very least, perhaps one or two more people will be aware of what is going on, and may be inspired to work toward change.
Notes
[1]. Cliff Kincaid, "U.S. Officials Suspected Al-Jazeera Ties to Al-Qaeda," Accuracy in Media (April 25, 2011), http://www.aim.org/aim-column/u-s-officials-suspected-al-jazeera-ties-to-al-qaeda/). The leaked document is titled "SECRET / / NOFORN / / 20330404DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE HEADQUARTERS, JOINT TASK FORCE GUANTANAMO U.S. NAVAL STATION, GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA APO AE 09350."
[2]. Brian Massumi, "The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat," in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 52-70.
[3]. Susan L. Carruthers, The Media at War, 2nd ed. (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan), 5.
[4]. Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 3.
[5]. Richard Keeble, Secret State, Silent Press : New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (Luton, Bedfordshire, UK: University of Luton Press, 1997), xi.
[6]. Ibid., 371.
[7]. Greg Mitchell, "Shoot the Messenger (Literally)," in So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq (New York: Union Square Press/Sterling Pub, 2008), 106.
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Citation:
Amy Lucker. Review of Chris Paterson, War Reporters under Threat: The United States and Media Freedom.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41996
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