Robert Skidelsky on lying 'pro bono publico'
War poses an agonising problem for the media. One of the main functions of the press is to expose official cant, corruption, and incompetence. Never is this more needed than in war when millions of lives may be at stake. Yet war also makes a diametrically opposite demand: to write or show nothing which can help the enemy or weaken one's own side. Once convinced of the media's importance, war leaders saw it as part of the war effort. So one gets the dilemma. Truth is desperately needed, but cannot be allowed. In order to keep up morale, politicians and generals must apparently be given carte blanche to blunder away lives and destinies.
Here is the story of how the press has allowed itself to be suborned to their purposes. At each stage of the process a growing official awareness of the usefulness of the media has been met by a growing willingness of the media so to be used. If Philip Knightley's book* disappoints, it is because he does not deal with this developing relationship systematically. He writes about the main modern wars as separate episodes. The same reporting problems keep coming up in each one, but there is no sense of a developing argument. But the subject is important. Knightley has assembled a great deal of scattered information on war reporting. He gives a fascinating insight into the psychology of the war correspondent. Above all, he is scrupulously fair, thus providing in his own book a model of what he thinks good reporting should be.
War journalism proper begins with William Russell's famous dispatches to the Times from the Crimean War. Almost from the start, the war journalist identified completely with his "side". "It is not within the province of your correspondent to criticise what has been done by the army or the navy," wrote a Northern journalist in the American civil war. It was a typical attitude. At first, the army was far from identifying with the journalist. Military men regarded him as an infernal nuisance, to be kept as far away from the battlefield as possible. Soon they began to appreciate his possible usefulness. Good publicity could advance a general's career. Governments, too, realised the value of having successes written up or invented, war aims explained or fabricated, in an attractive style. Thus the initial bias towards simply suppressing all bad news gave way to cautious encouragement of the press as junior partner in a common effort.
How did the media come to accept this role? One explanation has to do with its own development. The popular press grew up in the
*The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero. Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam, Philip Knightley (Andre Deutsch £5,95)
late nineteenth century to cater to the needs of a newly literate public, including its apparently insatiable appetite for violence and slaughter. This encouraged a simple type of "us-them" reporting, based on the heroic incident or dramatic visual image, which exactly suited the way governments and generals wanted wars to be reported and presented. What it discouraged was analysis or reflection, any emphasis on context and justification. Covering wars in gory detail has been both a way of making money and of strengthening public identification with military exploits.
A second factor is the tremendous pressure that government and military can put on the media at all levels. At the highest, they can promise proprietors and editors substantial personal rewards (ennoblement or other honours, a special relationshp, even political. office) if they play the game: and threaten official censorship if they don't. Churchill wanted the Times commandeered in the first world war in order to secure "an authoritative means of guiding public opinion" — a singularly inept choice, as the Times has always furnished a classic example of voluntary identification with power. At a lower level, journalists were entirely dependent on military patronage to get the news and to get it onto people's breakfast tables or (later) television screens. This dependence has, if anything, increased over time.
The psychology of the war correspondent has also been very important. Knightley points out that most war reporters in the later nineteenth century were soldiers manques, driven by a thirst for adventure to escape the dullness of bourgeois life. War, as one of them put it, was a "big factor in the joy of living". This pattern continued in the twentieth century. According to Philip Gibbs, war correspondents are "all the men who get lost somewhere between one war and another." A photographer, Tim Page, who had been badly wounded covering Vietnam, was asked by a publisher to write a book which "once and for all" took the glamour out of war. Page's response was incredulous. "Jesus! Take the glamour out of war. How the hell can you do that? You can't take the glamour out of a tank burning or a helicopter blowing up. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex. War is good for you."
War in the nineteenth century could still be regarded as an adventure. Paradoxically, it was • the growth of its horrors which cemented the relationship between the media, the military, and the government. The more "total" war became, the greater the need for government to mobilise the "home front," and the more crucial the role of the press for that purpose. In the first world war, the media emerged for the first time as a fully fledged arm of the war machine. For the war to continue at all, says Robert Graves, if became necessary "to make the English hate the Germans as they had never hated anyone before." To this end the British developed a "propaganda machine . . that became the envy of the world" — as well as the model for Goebbels. Its main weapon was the atrocity story, made more vivid by the use of photography: the same pile of corpses could do service for any number of horror stories. It fed on German ineptness in handling "human interest" cases like that of Nurse Edith Cavell. In fact, reports of German soldiers raping 'Belgian nuns, which combined pornography and propaganda in an unbeatable combination, were mostly invented by British Intelligence. When correspondents, further, presented their own troops to readers as "greyhounds on the leash, impatient to leap out of the trenches and charge from shell-hole to shell-hole, from cheer to cheer" it became clear that the aim of concealing the truth from the enemy had degenerated into a conspiracy to conceal from populations the criminal ineptness of High Commands. The cost in human lives of this double process — inventing a uniquely wicked enemy and concealing one's own blunders — ran into tens of millions of lives; to Europe's future it is for ever incalculable.
The final ingredient in what Knightley sees as an increasingly corrupt relationship was provided by ideology. With the rise of communism and fascism, ideology became a powerful instrument of political manipulation, demanding a committed media. At the same time, it became a reality for many of those engaged in transmitting news, and thus affected the way they handled it. Ideological hatred for Communism led all but a handful of editors and correspondents — notably John Reed and Morgan Philips Price — grotesquely to overestimate White Russian strength in the Civil War. Almost all the correspondents covering the Spanish Civil War consciouslY invented or suppressed facts to help the side they supported. Finally, in the two post-1945 Asian wars fought by America — in Korea and Vietnam — racism has provided a powerful psychological support for free world rhetoric.
In all this, there are many fascinating questions which Knightley touches on but does not develop. One is posed by William Randolf Hearst's famous 1898 telegram to a bored photographer in Cuba: "You furnish pictures, I will furnish war." How important has the press been in creating the wars, and incidents in war, which were So good for selling copy? Another question concerns the merits of formal and voluntary censorship. Editorial self-censorship has been the characteristic Anglo-Saxon adaptation to war conditions. Yet the evidence of this book suggests that the truth is sometimes more likely to come out when government controls the press than when editors censor themselves. Germany alone of the World War Two combatants was prepared to admit a major military defeat — when it declared four days' national mourning for the loss of its army at Stalingrad. The best reporting of the decisive Russian front came from Cuzio Malaparte, writing for Corriere della Sera in Mussolini's Italy. This is an aspect which would repay further study.
Perhaps the real significance of war for the media is that it exposes in its sharpest form an ongoing tension between the claims of criticism and the claims of morale. Without criticism society freezes; without morale it disintegrates. The media generate both criticism and morale. One's final reflection on this book is how difficult it is to do both simultaneously, no less in peace than war.
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