Closely related to this point is, of course, that of censorship. My own interest in all things military was first sparked by reading my father’s old reports as World War II correspondent of a well-known weekly of the period, Picture Post. A collection of his dispatches was published in Britain in 1942 under the ironic title “Passed As Censored”. When I was 20 years old, just starting to understand some of the realities, as distinct from the boyish illusions of war, I read again my father’s account of accompanying a Bomber Command raid upon the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau at Brest. I challenged him: “Why have you written about something like this as if it was an adventure which the crews enjoyed ? This isn’t how most men really feel about flying bomber operations”. Father answered by saying simply: “We were at war. What I was doing was part of the war effort. You start telling people the truth about what happened when the blackout curtains come down, and it’s all over”. Winston Churchill, as Britain’s Prime Minister in 1944, told the House of Commons that he was causing censorship to be tightened, after the publication of some dispatches from the Italian front which declared that “desperate” fighting was taking place. Churchill said: “Such words as ‘desperate’ ought not to be used about a position in a battle when they are false. Still less should they have been used if they were true”.
Now these remarks applied to a war of national survival in a way they cannot to modern so-called ‘wars of choice’. When I was reporting abroad for British newspapers and the BBC in Indochina, the Middle East, Angola, India and so on, my job was simply to tell as much as I could discover to readers about what was going on, to evade military censorship in these countries if I could. If, in Israel, that meant flying to Cyprus from Tel Aviv with film in my shoes, so be it.
Yet I must admit that I felt differently in the Falklands. Living amid the task force at the other end of the world, I felt much more conscious of being British than of being a reporter. I wanted our side to win. I had no misgivings about telling their story as sympathetically as I could because, during those months in the South Atlantic, I found myself falling in love with many of the men whose deeds I was reporting.
I only once knowingly distorted the truth in my dispatches. In the days after the landing at San Carlos, I wrote stories which represented our morale as a good deal higher, our confidence rather greater, than in truth it was. For at least ten days, we were watching our ships take a battering at the hands of the Argentine air force. Operating in this desolate wilderness so very far from home, for a time we felt very fearful of defeat. When the media postmortems took place after that war, I admitted my excess of optimism and was publicly rebuked for it by some colleagues.
But that war was in a host of ways very old-fashioned. The circumstances attending it will never be repeated, in the age of satellite phones. The censors had absolute control of our communications, and would never have let any of us to file a dispatch declaring that the Task Force was deeply disheartened, and that one more good push by the Argentine air force might prove decisive. Even had I been able to, would I have wanted to ? Some of my British colleagues, and a lot of my American ones, would say that I should have done. They declare a loyalty to our trade which is independent of and superior to any which they owe to their country. Me, I believe that none of us in our trade can expect to convince the public that the ethics of journalism have a special priority. In war as in peace, we can surely defend our actions by only one set of criteria: the public interest. Obviously, there will always be ferocious arguments about how such interest should be defined in given circumstances. But this must surely be the fixed point in any argument about what represents acceptable media behaviour, above all when lives are at stake. I suspect that most people here today would agree that no responsible reporter should file reports which might risk lives by giving details of upcoming operations. Yet some modern journalists would passionately disagree. They would say that it is our rightful job to tell the world whatever we can find out. That view does as much as anything to make professional soldiers chronically wary of us.
In the Falks one big advantage- the war was being well run, and we won amazingly quickly. In Iraq and Afghanistan today, very different issues. Inconclusive at best, doubtful cause. In my own writing about these conflicts, like that of most other correspondents, patriotism and love of the British Army has never caused us to hold back from criticism, and indeed pessimism.
One of the biggest problems about reconciling the demands of the media with those of modern war, is the fact that very few modern journalists know much about armies. No Nat Service, unless you know just a lot of men running about in camouflaged suits. Many reporters whose work one reads or sees on screen are obviously very brave, and often highly skilled writers of broadcasters. But it seems much more doubtful how much they understand about what they are watching. This is bound to remain an intractable problem for the media in modern wars.