Beyond the mere debunking of personalities, I believe Knightley misses the essential point about war reporting. All journalism is about trying to build jigsaws with many of the pieces missing. The media is doing, even in peacetime, to get the story half right, when most of our sources of information, including official ones, lie or distort routinely. Politicians and civil servants are doing their job by putting a spin on their every pronouncement and action, just as we are doing ours by trying not to be bamboozled. But in war, far more of the jigsaw pieces are absent. It is seldom remotely possible, during a conflict, to learn the other side of the story from the enemy. Almost everything we know about the Taliban, for instance, comes from what we are told by British or American intelligence. Likewise with the insurgency in Iraq. It is hard to paste together enough fragments from the side one is accompanying to create a plausible image. To get it right 40% in wartime is a remarkable achievement for a journalist. One is groping, fumbling in half-darkness. The choice is not whether to tell the public, the reader, lies or the truth, as Philip Knightley’s book suggests. The choice is between reporting the fragments of truth one can garner – or nothing at all. One is struggling for insights. I shall always remember the sudden flash of understanding that came to me and a colleague in Sinai in October 1973. for days the Israelis had been telling us that their cross-Suez operations were mere commando raids. Suddenly, we perceived that in reality, these represented the Israelis’ major thrust against the Egyptian front. We then had to go to tortured lengths to find our way through the dark to the Canal, at an hour when in the movement of forces there was least chance of two journalists on illegal business being intercepted, to confirm our guess. We were proud, when we filed a version that we somehow got through the censors – the first foreign reporters’ dispatches from the Egyptian bank of the Canal – that we had managed to find out as much as we did. Yet if I looked up that dispatch today, I know that I should find that we were wrong on all sorts of things. What I wrote contributed nothing of the slightest value to a military historian. Our readers had to be content that we had conveyed one simple fact – that the Israelis were across the Canal in strength, and that this was plainly their major counter-offensive.
Armed forces, the most disciplined element in their own societies, will seldom or never sit comfortably with journalists, the least disciplined and most anarchic breed of men and women. Nor will it ever be easy to reconcile the fact that, except in wars of national survival such as we hope we shall never see again, it is the duty of editors and reporters to maintain a constant distance and tension between ourselves and our governments. That does not mean believing that everything they say is wrong, but it does demand sustaining a scepticism which events suggest has been richly justified in Iraq and Afghanistan. There can never be a universally applicable formula for relations between governments and the media at war. A good journalist will always perceive himself or herself as facing dilemmas in reporting conflicts in which our own society’s perceived interested are pitted against those of its enemies. Throughout my own war corresponding career, I had one big advantage which some of my colleagues lacked: my own liking for soldiers. I respect them, get on pretty well with them, and count a good many among my friends. That is a great help if, on the battlefield, one is totally dependent upon their goodwill to do one’s job, and sometimes even for one’s own survival. Pat Bishop.
In my own case, when reporting of the British Army in N Ireland, Falklands, more recently and briefly in Iraq and Afghanistan, always sense of privilege. Great institution, see Brits doing something wonderfully well, even if causes to which committed sometimes imperfect.
As a young English journo reported a lot of failures and frustrations in our national polity in 60s and 70s. with soldiers saw them doing it well. Lucky to have chance. Some of my colleagues have since reproached me for a lack of objectivity towards the British Army, for sacrificing my sense of detachment. Yet in truth, I felt then what I still feel now – a sense of intense pride and pleasure in having had the opportunity to see them doing a lot of things very well. The reporting of military operations by journalists need not always be a tale of bitterness, alienation and castigation of the armed forces. It can also be, as it has often been for me, a story of respect, affection and admiration.