- 6 hours ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:18This is an image of war from Vietnam.
00:21This child, burned by napalm, is the focus of television and press cameras.
00:27What is the role of the media in wartime?
00:31Is it simply to record, or is it to explain, and from whose point of view?
00:35The military, the politicians, or the victims?
00:41General, how would you assess yesterday's items of the embassy?
00:46...from the Joint Chiefs of Command, high-ranking Soviet leaders.
00:58This is the common face of war.
01:00Atrocity, indignity, suffering, inhuman squalor as a life ebbs away in mud.
01:06But apart from those who were there, who suffered, the images of war remembered and celebrated are often far removed
01:13from the squalor, and as such are acceptable.
01:19Lists of names in splendid marble, moving ceremonies at the homecoming.
01:27And a large, ugly box, bearing the remains of wasted young men, disguised by the bright colours, not of life,
01:35but of a symbol used to rationalise war, a flag.
01:38...
01:44...
01:54...
01:55...
01:55...
02:14In the summer of 1854, the editor of the Times received an urgent message from one of his foreign correspondents,
02:21an Irishman called William Howard Russell.
02:24Am I to tell these things, or to hold my tongue, wrote Russell, to which his editor, John Delane, replied
02:31that he should go ahead and tell the truth.
02:34It was a rare moment of glory in the history of war reporting.
02:38Russell was the Times man of the Crimea, a war which Queen Victoria described as popular beyond belief.
02:45It certainly wasn't that after Russell had got through with it.
02:49He reported the charge of the Light Brigade as the disaster it was.
02:53He reported the waste and the blunders and the carnage of the whole British adventure.
02:58A government fell because of what he wrote.
03:01The establishment grew to hate him, and Prince Albert called him a miserable scribbler.
03:07According to his epitaph in St. Paul's Cathedral, Russell was the first and the greatest war correspondent.
03:14Now, whether or not he was that, his readers certainly got the facts of war faster in the age of
03:20the horse than you, the television viewing public, got the facts of the Falklands War in the age of the
03:27computer and the satellite.
03:28And, of course, the truth of that war is still coming in.
03:33Indeed, the Crimea was the last British war before censorship.
03:38This film is about the reporting of truth in wartime.
03:42An important subject because it can often determine how those who govern us can justify other wars, regardless of the
03:51lessons of history.
03:54Before the Crimea, the military reported its own wars, with generals informing the public of their great deeds, often months
04:01after a battle was won or lost.
04:03Wellington, for example, reported Waterloo.
04:09The Times then experimented with hiring a junior officer, but that didn't work either, much the same reason.
04:17And then, 1852, they decided the thing to do was to send a civilian for the first time.
04:24And, of course, the army hated it.
04:27Russell described himself as the miserable parent of a luckless tribe, the tribe being war correspondents.
04:33He wrote in a deeply personal style.
04:35He didn't aspire to objectivity as a holy grail to be worshipped at all cost.
04:40He wrote the truth as he saw it.
04:42He described the brutal neglect of ordinary British soldiers.
04:45He described the absurd privilege of officers in their entourage of wives, chefs, and gentlemen friends there to watch the
04:53war as they would a cricket match.
04:55He accused the expedition and its leader, Lord Raglan, of incompetence, ignorance, blunders, folly.
05:02General Sir George Brown would physically shudder at the very mention of the times.
05:07And, not surprisingly, Russell was called a traitor, which, of course, he was not.
05:12Like so many of the luckless tribe, he never questioned the war itself or the institution of war.
05:21The advent of the telegraph during the American Civil War changed almost everything.
05:26Now it was possible to get news straight from the front.
05:28And the first circulation battles were based on war stories.
05:32Any war stories.
05:33The editor of the Chicago Times sent this message to his reporter.
05:38Telegraph fully all news you can get.
05:40And when you can't get news, send rumors.
05:43If you were a general, you rapidly learned that you could buy a war correspondent for fifty dollars.
05:49If you were an artillery officer and you wanted to advance your career,
05:52then fifty bucks would get you a war correspondent who would say that you were the best artillery officer
05:57in the whole of the Union Army.
05:59Instant hero?
06:00Instant hero.
06:03Had censorship begun then?
06:05No, you could write what you liked.
06:08There was no possibility of censoring you anyway because immediate access to the telegraph
06:13meant that the story was in the papers before the generals knew what you'd written.
06:18A few, but only a few, reported the bloody futility.
06:22Ned Spencer of the Cincinnati Times made no name for himself when he wrote,
06:26As I sit tonight writing this epistle, the dead are all around me.
06:30The knife of the surgeon is busy at work,
06:32and amputated legs and arms lie scattered in every direction.
06:36I hope my eyes may never again look upon such sights.
06:43There are two divisions in the world, wrote Kipling, Germans and human beings.
06:49The First World War had begun.
06:51Life was so cheap that the Daily Mail in 1915 gave only a few lines to the latest casualty figures
06:57from Germany,
06:58two and three quarter million dead.
07:01The great American crusading journalist I.F. Stone once wrote,
07:05All governments are liars, and nothing they say should be believed.
07:09He exaggerated, though I wonder by how much.
07:12World War One is a prime example.
07:15It was the big lie.
07:16There was a deliberate state-run conspiracy to lie to the British people about the futility of the war and
07:23its carnage.
07:24But what was significant was the extent to which the press, and the reporters themselves, took part in the conspiracy.
07:33Philip Gibbs was war correspondent of the Daily Chronicle.
07:37He later became Sir Philip Gibbs, knighted by a grateful establishment.
07:41We wrote the truth, said Gibbs, apart from the naked realism of horrors and losses and criticism of the facts,
07:48which did not come within the liberty of our pen.
07:51In other words, Gibbs was admitting that the correspondents wrote not what they knew to be true, but what they
07:58were told was true.
07:59There was no need for censorship, said Gibbs, for we were our own censors.
08:04Has that changed, I wonder?
08:06In 1917, with millions dead and more recruits needed, the editor of The Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott,
08:12had a private conversation with the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.
08:16Said Lloyd George, if people really knew the truth, the war would be stopped tomorrow.
08:22But, of course, they don't know and can't know.
08:33The post-World War is very common to use a sporting analogy.
08:37Going over the top was portrayed as being the start of a rugby match or beginning of a cricket match.
08:43There were even stories that war correspondents wrote of officers who were going over the top tossing a cricket ball
08:49from hand to hand
08:50or leading troops in a charge kicking a football across no man's land.
08:55And that sporting analogy tended to take away the actual horror of the event that was being described.
09:01And, of course, this infuriated the troops to read that they regarded going over the top as a great game
09:08and couldn't wait until they were charging down the mouths of the German machine guns
09:15and that their officers were sort of captains of a team that were about to embark on a great sporting
09:23game with the enemy.
09:24Infuriated them because, as they knew, the better analogy would have been them barring like sheep as they went to
09:29the slaughter.
09:43So efficient was the machinery of British propaganda during the First World War,
09:47fueled by a policy of total censorship, that, according to Philip Knightley,
09:51Dr. Joseph Goebbels based Nazi propaganda in World War II on the British model.
09:57During the Second War in Britain, censorship was tight, except for those American correspondents who often painted
10:04what one of them called a hearts and flowers picture of all Britons pulling together.
10:09This, of course, was true up to a point, but there was another side,
10:13such as the efforts of the well-off to send their children abroad and the support among some MPs for
10:19negotiations with Hitler.
10:21During the Blitz, money and position could buy you a better place in a better shelter,
10:26and those jolly cockney images of life in the underground were not completely true.
10:31The tube became a terrible stinking slum and a health hazard.
10:36Not a single British correspondent was a Dunkirk,
10:40and yet a romantic version of eyewitness heroics obscured for many years the full story,
10:46a story of military incompetence and disaster.
10:57The Korean War broke out in 1950 and was described by the journalist James Cameron as a prep school for
11:03Vietnam.
11:04It was a racist war and many correspondents were under instructions to play down the suffering of the Korean people.
11:11They are a hardy race and can exist on a much lower sustenance level than white troops.
11:17Instead, the war was reported, by and large, like the World War that had preceded it,
11:22as a boy's own annual saga of good versus evil.
11:26Air and ground, we bring you the most dramatic air attack pictures of the world.
11:31Dramatic, yes, but what was the truth about Korea?
11:35During the war, Robin C. Miller, an editor of the United Press, said this.
11:39There are certain facts and stories from Korea that editors and publishers have printed which were pure fabrication.
11:46Many of us who sent the stories knew they were false,
11:49but we had to write them because they were official releases,
11:52even though the people responsible knew they were untrue.
11:59New deadly weapon, belly tanks loaded with napalm, also known as Jelitol.
12:03It's a highly inflammable jelly which has fused and dropped to spray flaming death on enemy foxholes and gorilla positions.
12:13Napalm was a new American weapon, and Rennie Cutforth of the BBC believed it important to describe its use.
12:20Over this scene of silent desolation, he reported, crept a reassuring smell that immediately took me back to Sunday dinners
12:27in Britain.
12:28The smell of roast pork, for that's what a napalmed human being looks like.
12:32This dispatch was never used, and the BBC never satisfactorily explained why.
12:38And rockets hissed down with terrifying accuracy onto the reds below.
12:44These reds below were so-called political prisoners.
12:47They included innocent civilians and children, victims.
12:54James Cameron, in Korea for picture posts with photographer Bert Hardy,
12:59witnessed their brutal treatment by Britain's South Korean allies.
13:02After a futile protest to United Nations officials,
13:06Cameron wrote an article illustrated by Hardy's pictures.
13:09The prisoners are roped and manacled, he reported.
13:13They are compelled to crouch in pools of garbage.
13:16They clamber into trucks with a numb air of men going to their death.
13:20Many of them are.
13:22The Cameron article was on the presses when the proprietor, Edward Houlton,
13:26instructed the editor, Tom Hopkinson, to scrap it.
13:29Hopkinson refused and was sacked.
13:32Cameron resigned in protest.
13:35Telling the victim's story, decreed Houlton, would give aid and comfort to the enemy.
13:41It might also have given that war a bad name.
13:47Flight which brought man terror also gives him life, hastening the wounded back to base.
13:53In the 1950s, few questioned the objectivity of this newsreel style of reporting.
13:59But today we look back on it and smile, for it was clearly our propaganda.
14:05So how will the news of the Falklands War be regarded in 30 years time?
14:09Or more to the point, why do we have to wait that long to find out?
14:16To the badly wounded, blood from their homeland brings life.
14:20Replacing the blood they so freely gave that freedom might live.
14:23In contrast with this diet of propaganda, the people of Britain and the United States never knew that the atomic
14:30bomb was almost used twice in Korea.
14:33The young American said in death, there must be better ways to settle a dispute.
14:39Korea has given his answer.
14:41When all the people of the world will it, man will live in peace and die honoured in his own
14:47bed.
14:52This was Vietnam.
14:54In 1967, a Gallup poll revealed that half the American people had no idea what the war in Vietnam was
15:00about.
15:04It was the first war that had been covered without censorship of any kind.
15:09American war.
15:10And it was the first war on television.
15:14And for all of us, that was a first.
15:18Really and truly.
15:19In the kind of graphic detail that we were able to provide because of the extraordinary assistance of the Army
15:27of the United States.
15:29They wanted that coverage.
15:31They wanted that relentless coverage.
15:34They thought they were going to get something else.
15:37Instead, they got a confusion of images of a war in which progress was measured by something called a body
15:43count.
15:43Or, as in this extraordinary film, an aerial turkey shoot.
15:48Okay, napalm now. There it goes. Ah, look at it burn. Look at it burn.
15:52Okay, we got more napalm coming down here.
15:55We bombed, first of all, and then the napalmers come across.
15:58And we, uh, we strafed immediately in front of them.
16:03See, to keep their hands down, we were receiving heavy ground fire.
16:06You could see the tracer bullets coming up past us.
16:09Fantastic!
16:10And, uh, we really made them run.
16:12That's outstanding.
16:13Because when they get out of their trenches in the open, we can really hit them.
16:16And that's what we like to do.
16:18That's what we're here for.
16:19And, boy, it's outstanding to really catch them out in the open.
16:22We don't do that very often.
16:25It wasn't only the media that invented the image of the Vietnam War.
16:29It was the CIA that virtually invented the war.
16:33Ralph McGee spent 25 years in the CIA, much of it in Vietnam,
16:37and retired with a Medal of Commendation.
16:40He is an expert on the CIA's manipulation of the media.
16:44The CIA is not an intelligence agency.
16:47The CIA is the covert action arm of the presidency.
16:50And in that capacity, it supports or overthrows other governments.
16:54And it utilizes the techniques of disinformation as part of its covert action responsibility.
17:01And I claim that Vietnam is its longest and most successful disinformation operation.
17:09It is not an intelligence agency.
17:11It is a covert action agency.
17:13Could you explain what disinformation is to the layman and in particular related to Vietnam?
17:21Disinformation has many, many ways of coming about.
17:25You have the techniques of white, grey and black propaganda.
17:29White propaganda being a government, virtually a government statement.
17:32This is the US government saying this.
17:34Grey propaganda being, well, you don't know quite who's saying it.
17:38And black is where you speak in the voice of your enemy.
17:44The Communist Party of China is saying this when actually it's going to be the agency doing it.
17:49Black propaganda, in the case of Vietnam, they have a very famous example.
17:56In early 65, they wanted justification for sending American troops in to participate in the actual fighting.
18:03And they wanted to begin bombing North Vietnam.
18:05But the story that was being told to the American people was the war was an invasion of South Vietnam
18:12by North Vietnam.
18:15But they had to have evidence of this.
18:17They only had a couple of North Vietnamese soldiers that they had captured.
18:20They needed some way to document this.
18:23So the agency loaded up a junk, a North Vietnamese junk, with communist weapons.
18:28And the agency maintains communist arsenals around the United States and around the world.
18:34They loaded the weapons onto the junk.
18:37They floated it down off the coast of central South Vietnam.
18:42They shot it up, made it look like a firefight had taken place.
18:46Then they brought in the American press, the international press, and the International Control Commission.
18:50They said, here, here's evidence that the North Vietnamese are invading South Vietnam.
18:56Based on this evidence, two Marine battalion landing teams went into Vietnam and began actual combat operations.
19:05And a week after that, the American Air Force began the regular bombing of North Vietnam.
19:11Sustained bombing in what they call Operation Rolling Thunder.
19:19Rolling Thunder was reported as a coal statistic.
19:22Bridges, trains, and industrial complexes were reported bombed as if Asian Pittsburghs and Birminghams were down below.
19:31But an industrial complex was more than likely to be made of straw and contain children.
19:41Films such as this seldom appeared on television screens during the war.
19:48It is from the other side, North Vietnam, whose moonscape I first saw as if I'd stumbled upon some great
19:56and unrecorded disaster.
19:57The terror and suffering of these people was seldom reported.
20:01They remained simply the Communists.
20:05The statistic of Rolling Thunder, the body count, the towns and villages marked as industrial complexes on Air Force maps
20:14and bombed back to the Stone Age with the craters now merged into swamps.
20:19Not a single dollar in reparation or aid has helped them to rebuild their homes and lives.
20:24A town I saw called Hamlong, just like this village, ought to have been as famous as Dresden
20:31because it was bombed much more than Dresden or London almost every day for four years.
20:36But few knew about it then and know about it now.
20:39Its people were, and are, only victims.
20:57What's the principal illusion that you think everybody is still subscribing to?
21:02That it was an invasion of, it was an invasion of South Vietnam by the North Vietnamese.
21:11That there was no popular support for the Communist government when there certainly was.
21:17That whatever government we happened to be backing at that time was the popular government.
21:21So that when we went, sent the American troops in, we were in there to fight for the people
21:26when actually, in fact, we were fighting against the people.
21:28And those illusions still exist.
21:37In 1965, American Marines entered the village of Cam Ney
21:42and burned it down with Zippo cigarette lighters and flamethrowers.
21:48Reporter Morley Safer and a camera crew from America's CBS network
21:53were there to record what was one of the first television atrocities.
21:59It was a shock to me.
22:04I'd not, I'd been in, you know, in battle before and I'd been, I'd covered other wars in Vietnam,
22:09but I'd never, and I'd heard of this sort of thing going on in the war in Algeria,
22:14it went on all the time, but I'd never seen it.
22:17Uh, whether this simple punishment, it has appeared to me, of a, of a village.
22:26Only three or four houses had been burned down, said the military.
22:30In fact, reporters counted up to 400 houses destroyed.
22:33The presence of bunkers, said the military, proved the village was a Viet Cong stronghold.
22:38But reporters knew there wasn't a hamlet in Vietnam that didn't have a bunker to protect it,
22:43often from American bombing.
22:48But even without censorship, it took almost two years for the full story of the massacre at My Lai to
22:54get out,
22:54long after one man, Lieutenant Calley, had been charged with the murder of 102 civilians in March 1968.
23:02The reason was not lack of evidence, but a resistance to the story on the part of the media itself.
23:10The word atrocity implies something out of the ordinary, but the massacre at My Lai was nothing unusual.
23:16The smashing of this home, and the dislocation of these lives, was also nothing unusual, an everyday atrocity.
23:23But unfortunately, refugees, victims, are seldom newsworthy.
23:29It's part of a long historical process in which the civilians have become more and more the target for military
23:36hardware.
23:37I mean, let's go back to look at the parallels between the Boer War and Vietnam, for example.
23:43Just as the Americans tried to do in Vietnam, the British government tried to remove from the Boers, the Boer
23:50guerrilla forces,
23:51their major source of sustenance, the Boer civilians, by putting all the women and children into concentration camps.
23:59So that anybody who was out there in the wilderness still must be a Boer supporter and therefore became a
24:05legitimate military target.
24:07Much the same thinking of the Americans in Vietnam.
24:11Already in the Boer War you begin to get the idea that civilians are legitimate military targets.
24:16Second World War, that's continued.
24:18As a deliberate act of policy, I mean, the British government's or the Allied government's policy in the Second World
24:24War was to bomb,
24:26area bombing of civilian housing.
24:29And we denied it at the time.
24:31We said we were bombing purely military targets.
24:32We were bombing areas of Germany, large civilian populations in German towns.
24:40The aim being to break German morale.
24:42Then you reach what was probably the ultimate in attacks on civilians.
24:47We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
24:48They weren't chosen as targets in which there were large military installations.
24:53The principal reason was to break Japanese morale by showing what a large number of your people we can wipe
24:59out.
25:04So by the time you get to Vietnam, the idea of civilians being killed in war has become acceptable.
25:10Large numbers of civilians suffer in war.
25:13So it's a natural progression to now we're in the ultimate where the sole target in a nuclear war will
25:20be the civilian population.
25:23The purpose of dropping nuclear bombs on Russia or the Russians dropping nuclear bombs on the United States is not
25:28to wipe out the...
25:29Part of it is to wipe out the retaliation, the retaliatory capacity.
25:32But you're not aiming at their industrial complex or the major military targets.
25:37You're aiming at the civilian population.
25:39The civilians have now become the major targets.
25:48Considering the likely nature of the next world war, should not the facts about it be reported now?
25:55There won't be much chance to debate the rights and wrongs afterwards.
25:58And honesty now may help to prevent it.
26:18The Vietnam War, which I reported, was often regarded by the American military as a war between cowboys and Indians.
26:27It was rampant technology against the peasant people.
26:31Cluster bombs and chemical bombs against an enemy in rubber-tyre sandals.
26:35And innocent civilians known as gooks or dinks, or by the military term of collateral damage.
26:42In most of the news agency officers in Saigon were pictures that were never published or never sent.
26:48Pictures of atrocities, the real face of that war, of any war.
26:54Protecting your compassion, the most precious thing next to your life, became more and more difficult the longer you stayed.
27:00The longer you contrive to remain aloof from the suffering and the criminal stupidity of it all.
27:08There is a myth that the media lost the war.
27:11But was the war ever winnable?
27:13And regardless of the relentless media coverage, why did it take American public opinion ten years to tire of the
27:20war?
27:21In 1967, a Newsweek survey found that television actually encouraged people to back up our boys and support the war.
27:30Five years later, during some of the heaviest bombing in history, another survey showed that people had developed a tolerance
27:37to all those little pictures of horror and fireworks from far off Asia.
27:43Had they simply merged with the fireworks of Kojak and with the soap operas and the soap commercials?
27:49But just as the media did not lose the war, neither of course was the war maintained simply by the
27:56coverage on television.
28:00What was often missing was an attempt to explain the truth, past and present, of what those pictures really meant.
28:07An historical perspective was needed, any perspective, other than merely the news of the day.
28:14And when the truth finally came out, it was too late.
28:18Millions had died yet again.
28:22Millions were maimed and dislocated.
28:24A beautiful land ravaged.
28:28And the punishment of Vietnam continues.
28:31On June the 21st, 1983, the European community decided to block food aid to Vietnam as part of the embargo
28:39initiated by the United States.
28:42Stockpiles of dried milk have never been higher in Europe.
28:46Young children in Vietnam are hungrier now than during the war.
28:51Such is the indifference towards Vietnam today.
28:57No one believed in that war.
28:59And that's the tragedy, really, of Vietnam to me, that it was as thought out as the Children's Crusade was
29:06thought out.
29:10So, well, you'll look for scapegoats.
29:14Perhaps the place to start looking for a credibility gap is not in the offices of the government in Washington,
29:21but in the studios of the networks in New York.
29:24In Britain, pressure on the media is less obvious, more subtle.
29:32I think that after Vietnam, in fact, I know that after Vietnam, the British government had a very close look
29:41at the effect that the presence of television cameras on the battlefield and that the free reporting, newspaper reporting, of
29:50a war could have on the aims of the government in that war.
29:56And I think there was a symposium at the Royal United Services Institution at which somebody said, I forget who
30:03it was, one of the participants said,
30:04we will have to very carefully consider whether it will ever be possible to have television cameras on a battlefield
30:11again.
30:12This was the lesson they were looking at from Vietnam.
30:14And then from that moment on, the MOD had a plan of how they would control the media in any
30:21coming war in which Britain would be involved.
30:26And that plan was put into operation for the Falklands.
30:29Well, I think the key difference between reporting in the Falklands and certainly all other war situations I've been involved
30:37in is that we were, we, the hacks who were down there, were totally prisoners of the Ministry of Defence
30:43in the sense that they controlled our access to the outside world.
30:48We had no independent way of contacting our newspapers or radio stations or television stations.
30:54Now, that's not normally the situation.
30:57Well, I suppose that the Falklands War was the most managed story in the history of journalism, managed by the
31:05people who managed the war.
31:06The most extraordinary piece of news management, handpicked correspondence, no foreign correspondence, total control of communication, absolute control of communication.
31:24I mean, it's a censor's delight.
31:30And I've spoken to various Vietnam diplomatic and military people during the Falklands War, and they just were green with
31:43envy.
31:43Oh, if we could have run Vietnam the way the British were in the Falklands.
31:48I think they're deluding themselves because Vietnam went on a few more years in the Falklands.
31:55I think the real issue that came out of the Falklands, and indeed I think if you go back and
32:00look at Vietnam and Afghanistan, is how do you deal with a sophisticated public?
32:10How do you deal with an ever-growing mass of media communications which record things instantly, transmit things instantly?
32:19And, you know, what impact is this going to have on a war, both in terms of military security and
32:26sustaining popular morale?
32:28And the two things actually do go together.
32:32Because I don't believe any democracy can win a war unless it has active public support.
32:40Does the current war in Northern Ireland have active public support?
32:44The answer would seem to be no.
32:46But reporting the undeclared war in Ireland has special pitfalls, especially for television in Britain.
32:53For example, the guidelines of the Independent Broadcasting Authority say that any plans for a program which explores the views
33:02of people who within the British Isles advocate violence for political ends must be referred to the authority before filming.
33:10However, any program giving the views of people who use violence outside the British Isles for political ends may go
33:18ahead without first consulting the authority.
33:22The point is that life is made extremely difficult for a British journalist reporting any British war in Ireland or
33:30in the Falklands.
33:37The original idea was there should be no reporters at all with the task force.
33:40Total control of access, nobody there at all.
33:44And like an American censor said during the Second World War, when asked, what should we tell the people?
33:50He said, tell them nothing until the war is over, then tell them who won.
33:53That was the MOD's original plan.
33:55The task force would go down.
33:57One day would be announced that it had been successful and the Falklands were once again under British sovereignty.
34:05But under pressure from Downing Street, they modified the plan so as to allow some reporters along.
34:11But it was no accident, for example, that there were no neutral reporters.
34:15There was no room, not even for one American correspondent.
34:18Not one Frenchman.
34:20No neutral correspondents at all.
34:2216 to 18 British correspondents only.
34:27Nobody was known to be too anti-war, too radical, too against British involvement was allowed.
34:33There was no room, for example, for Donald McCullen, one of the most compassionate and best war photographers there are.
34:41No room for him because they said they couldn't squeeze it, they couldn't find any accommodation.
34:45And as McCullen pointed out, they had room for 300 miles, 3 million miles bars, so surely they could squeeze
34:51one more photographer on board.
34:52But the great catch-all that they could use to restrict anything that you said was this phrase, damaging to
34:59morale.
35:00Now, you could argue that more or less anything could be damaging to morale.
35:04There was, for example, when we were sailing down to the Falklands, there was an incident on the Canberra when,
35:11after an evening's drinking, a few paras climbed into one of the lifts.
35:17Too many of them got into the lift on the Canberra, pressed the button and the lift broke and it
35:22fell three or four storeys through the ship.
35:25A couple of the paras were quite seriously injured. We were not allowed to report that because it was felt
35:30it would be damaging to morale if it was seen that British troops were getting drunk and were having accidents
35:35on a ship.
35:36This was before we'd even got to the Falklands.
35:38The Ministry of Defence lost credibility, particularly with foreign correspondents.
35:44And there were several examples of major news organisations in the States saying that they put no basis at all
35:50on what the British press was saying about the war because they regarded it as a propaganda job.
35:55So I think internationally one saw a turnaround of support from being very pro-British to being far more neutral.
36:02And certainly Argentine sources came to exercise much more influence than they had done at the beginning.
36:08Offensive land operations are at this moment in progress in the Falkland Islands.
36:18You will understand that I cannot at this stage go further.
36:23Well, in the Falklands, Mr. McDonald, giving a press conference, knew that anything he said, he said with the absolute
36:33confidence that no one in the room knew more than he knew or knew the truth, if he was telling
36:39a fudge.
36:40In Vietnam, the poor old briefer knew that everyone in the room knew more than he knew.
36:47So that, because, at least those of us who'd been out of Saigon at all, and I would be less
36:57than honest if I didn't confess that we used to love to go and tweak the briefers, whether they're the
37:01military or the civilian briefers,
37:03because if you came back to the story and you were an eyewitness or you spoke to an officer in
37:07the field, got the story, filed it, went to the briefing, the so-called five o'clock follies.
37:12And at that point, the only purpose in going was to find out, now that you know what happened, to
37:18find out what the government says happened.
37:19The absence of foreign journalists helped to narrow our perspective on what was going on.
37:28Probably reporters from any country are peculiarly involved in a war which is affecting their own country or their own
37:36countrymen.
37:36But, obviously, the presence of foreign journalists would help to give you a wider view of it.
37:43I think it would have made things a lot more difficult.
37:46I don't think that any of the American reporters I've ever come across would have put up with half of
37:51the nonsense that we put up with.
37:52They simply wouldn't have tolerated it.
37:55Usually one guarantee of keeping a balance of reporting in a war is having reporters from other countries there.
38:02Why weren't there no foreign journalists with the task force?
38:06With hindsight, I wish we had had one or two.
38:09Although, as I said to the State Committee, I think we, curiously enough, had too many journalists on the task
38:16force to handle as well as we ought to have been able to do.
38:23Did the number of journalists matter?
38:26Or wasn't it more important that as wide a spread of views as possible be represented on the task force
38:31and at the front line?
38:32To represent, for example, the substantial minority of the public who had serious misgivings about the war.
38:40I think we all, to varying degrees, had a sort of love affair with the military.
38:45We all became troopy groupies.
38:47That's the phrase that's been used, and I think it's quite true.
38:51And it did affect our reporting, there's no doubt about that.
38:54It certainly affected mine, and I would not pretend that it didn't.
38:58But it was a very, very peculiar situation.
39:02You had a group of reporters, by and large, who were not experienced war correspondents, who were pretty run-of
39:10-the-mill Fleet Street reporters, and I include myself in that category, who were pitched off on this peculiarly sort
39:18of wild colonial expedition.
39:20I mean, kind of bizarre thing to be happening in the 1980s, really.
39:24And inevitably, we became friends.
39:26We drank together in the bars.
39:28We started doing physical exercises together.
39:31We became interested in their life.
39:34They became interested in ours.
39:37And by the time we landed, we were quite good friends.
39:39Oh, shit.
39:45All right, two there.
39:47By this stage, we've got controlled access, the MOD's controlled access to the war.
39:52They know what sort of reporters they're going to send, and they've got a fairly good idea that they can
39:57rely on those reporters' sense of identification with the troops to self-censor, to censor themselves.
40:03So you've got the three main elements tied up before the fighting even begins.
40:08I think there was a feeling that a war fought in the 1980s with modern technology would be vastly different
40:14in the way it would be covered to any other war.
40:16And what one actually found was that television played very little part in actually covering the fighting.
40:23We saw virtually no pictures of fighting on the screens until the war was all but one.
40:28And I think the best analogy with the Crimea is to say that at the time of the Crimea, Russell's
40:34first dispatch about the charge of the light brigade got back to London in 20 days.
40:38And some television pictures took 23 days to get back from the South Atlantic.
40:43Well, I think the Falklands was peculiar in the sense that the lack of television coverage except on a delayed
40:50basis.
40:52Now, that was for technical reason. It wasn't a prevention.
40:56And it is an absolute canard that people tried to stop television.
41:01It just didn't happen.
41:03And a lot of this was, if I may say so, whipped up by the television people because radio came
41:08back into its own again during that period of time.
41:10If they had wanted to, there's no doubt in my mind whatsoever that they could have given us independent communication
41:19system, if they had wanted to.
41:21I say this because the SAS, for example, had their own independent network.
41:27They had small, a number of small satellite dishes, which they carried in ordinary backpacks.
41:34And the way they operated was basically they poached time on American satellites flying overhead.
41:41And they could relay messages back to their headquarters in Hereford.
41:45Indeed, there's at least one occasion on which one of the commanding officers in the SAS was telephoned his wife
41:51in Hereford.
41:53It could have been done. This stuff is expensive.
41:56It may have not have been the Ministry of Defence's job to have supplied it to us.
42:00But the equipment was there. The technical equipment is there if they had wanted to supply it to us or
42:06to tell us that we could go and get it.
42:09All these stories about we have not got the technical facilities to enable instantaneous transmission of television footage from the
42:17battlefield, all untrue.
42:19The satellites were there. The time was there.
42:22They could have sent back to London within hours of it occurring, perhaps within minutes.
42:26I think it may have even been technically possible to have transmitted live from the battlefield.
42:31It wasn't done. Not because of any reasons of giving away information to the enemy.
42:37Not for any reasons of being technically difficult.
42:40Because they knew that material sent live from the battlefield would show scenes of two groups of men doing some
42:50very nasty things to each other on a far away South Atlantic island.
42:53And the scenes of the horror and the ghastliness of war would remove the will of the nation to continue
43:01fighting it.
43:03These news pictures are among the closest the British public got to seeing the ghastliness of the war.
43:08They were delayed 16 days. The pictures show no ghastly burns, no ghastly blown away arms and legs.
43:17They lent heavily on the broadcasters to try and sanitise the image of the war,
43:22Particular examples spring to mind. The British government asked the BBC not to show a picture of a body in
43:31a bag.
43:32It asked a reporter not to use the phrase horribly burned.
43:36It tried to prevent the broadcasters from showing a pilot who'd bombed the runway at Port Stanley,
43:41saying that he was scared fartless when he was doing it.
43:46When Brian Hanrahan reported on the casualties at Bluff Cove, he reported of hearing the cries of men trapped below,
43:54dying in the flames.
43:55The Ministry of Defence asked for that line to be cut.
43:59So I think there was a tendency to look back to Vietnam and to use it and to think,
44:05we must not let war be seen in that light on British screens, and I think they succeeded.
44:10I had one experience myself, which I didn't write about until the war was over,
44:16which was on the first Saturday after the landings, a week after the landings.
44:24By chance, I helped to unload the bodies of dead paratroopers who'd come back from Goose Green.
44:31Now, we expected, we'd all been told that there would be body bags for these men,
44:35and it would all be neat and clean and tidy, and none of these blokes had got body bags.
44:39They were in an appalling state. I mean, they were just bodies with limbs all over the place.
44:44Shirts pulled over their heads to disguise them, blood and muck and filth, and it was just horrible.
44:48I mean, it was just absolutely awful, absolutely horrific.
44:53And I wrote about that when the war was over.
44:56I didn't write about it at the time.
44:59Perhaps I should have done.
45:01Why didn't you?
45:04I think I didn't feel it was fair, somehow.
45:08I just didn't feel it was fair.
45:10I mean, that's a testimony to how involved I was with those blokes by that stage.
45:15But I somehow didn't feel they deserved it.
45:19It wasn't about whether we were going to win or that you only had to report good things.
45:24It was an emotional thing.
45:27You know, I mean, I've seen plenty of dead bodies before.
45:30You don't get normally that involved with them.
45:33But, I mean, I actually knew some of those people.
45:35I mean, it was... It affects you.
45:38I mean, we'd spent two months with them.
45:40I mean, really closely with them by that stage.
45:43I mean, it was just... I just didn't think it was fair.
45:46I think what pointed up the Falklands War was the fact that, in its closing stages,
45:52one had the Israeli attack on the Lebanon.
45:56One had censorship of pictures, the way the journalists could cover it.
46:02And the journalists made a point, particularly the American journalists,
46:06of telling the public that they couldn't report the whole story.
46:10And something which had a sensational impact on American television was that news films which had been censored,
46:16they'd leave black spacing in and say, these pictures have been censored,
46:19and would say, we are operating under conditions of censorship.
46:22Some British correspondents were doing the same from the Lebanon.
46:25But no British correspondents were doing that from the task force.
46:29Some of them tried.
46:30The PA reporter tried to say, this copy is being censored.
46:34And the word censored was censored.
46:36There was no great stamp which said, censored, not to be used, on the copy.
46:42There were gentle, diplomatic little notes saying, editors are requested not to use this information,
46:48because it could be of use to an enemy.
46:51And please omit this, if at all possible.
46:54And it was all terribly, terribly gentlemanly in its style.
46:59You felt that the whole thing was really being sorted out in a rather convivial club.
47:06And was it sorted out?
47:07Would an editor, by and large, take note of those little remarks?
47:12I have not come across any examples where any editors in Fleet Street did not do what they were asked
47:22to do by the Ministry of Defence.
47:25When we were at Teal Inlet, we were held up.
47:28The advance on Port Stanley was held up principally by the weather conditions.
47:34Because there was such a low cloud base, and because the rain was so heavy,
47:37helicopters couldn't fly troops and supplies forward to Mount Kent,
47:43from which the military intended to attack Port Stanley.
47:47And I wrote a story basically about the weather.
47:50I wrote about a thousand words just about the weather,
47:53and how the weather was holding us up.
47:55And the key sentence in the piece was that only the weather now holds us back from Stanley.
48:01When this dispatch reached London, it had been changed into
48:04and so only the politicians now hold us back from Stanley.
48:10What are you going to do with dissent at home?
48:13Well, that turned out to be very easy.
48:15In the name of patriotism, you call upon the nation to get behind our effort.
48:21You do that probably through a statement by the Prime Minister.
48:24And that atmosphere is immediately picked up by those newspapers
48:27who either felt that the war was a just one and it should be fought the way it was being
48:32fought,
48:32or who saw an opportunity to consolidate their circulation, perhaps improve it,
48:40by adopting an attitude of fierce patriotic endeavour.
48:46And that pressure tended to suppress any dissent.
48:50So with a brilliantly controlled operation that doesn't look to be censorship,
48:54you've got total control over what is reported about the war.
48:57Well, I think there was a period for a short time at the beginning of the Falklands
49:01when at least some parts of the media were setting themselves up
49:05or appearing to set themselves up as an impartial referee.
49:10And, you know, the same degree of credibility was being given to the Argentine
49:14as was being given to the British.
49:16Isn't that the role of the press, to be impartial?
49:20It's a new one on me, if it's so.
49:23I mean, I'm sure it's part of press ethics.
49:25I doubt very much whether it has ever been impartial.
49:27Everybody's biased. I'm biased, you're biased.
49:30And I just don't believe in this great piece of objectivity and, you know, lack of bias.
49:35We all have emotions, we all have feelings, we all have attitudes.
49:40Sir Frank is right, we all have our biases.
49:43The problem seems to be that the moment journalists run seriously against the grain of established thinking,
49:49as represented by the government and the Ministry of Defence,
49:52they are accused of not being objective,
49:55as if objectivity is alright only as long as it is part of the official line.
50:00This, of course, applies in both war and peace.
50:04Perhaps a truly objective appraisal of Bluff Cove,
50:07where 50 men died like sitting ducks,
50:10would not have been to allow the bravery and heroism of the men
50:13to obscure the fact of a blunder and a disaster.
50:21The self-censorship of both editors at home and correspondents at the front,
50:28not to tell the truth about the horrible way in which men die,
50:33and using it as an excuse for not doing that,
50:37the sparing of the feelings of relatives back home again,
50:41takes away from war the real horror of it.
50:44And in its, with all good intentions, prepares us for the next war.
50:50Because if it's not so bad, if it's not so horrific,
50:52if you're never told, people who've never been to war are not told what it's like,
50:56then they're more willing to embark on the next war
50:58than they would have been if they'd known what really occurred.
51:24CYBUS
51:25CYBUS
Comments