Telegraph claims MOD will censor war reports in the run up to the election

Allegations in the papers this morning that the MOD is planning a gag on the media reporting bad news from Afghanistan ahead of the general election.

The Telegraph leads with the story that

British journalists and TV crews are to be banned from the Afghan front line once a date for the election has been set, while senior officers will be prohibited from making public speeches and talking to reporters

. adding that according to a memo leaked to the paper

MoD websites will also be “cleansed” of any “non-factual” material including anything containing troops’ opinions of the war

I sincerely hope that this is a non story

The latest embedded techniques in Afghanistan

As Mark Glaser,reports

The U.S. military has had an uneasy relationship with soldiers using blogs, video and photos to offer an unvarnished, uncensored view of war.

So a new initiative that they are launching will be closely watched.

30 days through Afghanistan hopes to do what it says on the tin

Its day 4 and it's Kabul

I’m all about eyeballs. There’s something truly beautiful about them. If you give me a good eyeball, I’ll stare at it for hours like it’s a sneak peek at the next big movie.
The beauty doesn’t stop on the surface, where the rich blues, browns and greens reside. The beauty continues below the surface and if you let yourself go, you will be carried on a journey into their owner’s soul.
I was taken on such a journey by two Afghan college students today. Their words were interesting and informative but they shared something deeper with me, and I felt honored.

It is is written by two Air Force sergeants who both have backgrounds in the media and besides blogging they will be using video,audio and images to tell the story.

People are no longer interested in war images they are only interested in celebrity

I have just been listenig to the veteran war reporter Donald McCullin on the Radio 4 today programme.

He has an exhibition of his work at the Imperial War Museum North In Manchester which I will most definitely be paying a visit to.

A fascinating interview which he ended by saying that people are no longer interested in war images they are only interested in celebrity

R.I.P Rupert Hamer

The bare realities of war reporting for the journalist were brought home vividly yesterday as the death of Sunday Mirror reporter Rupert Hamer in Afghanistan was announced.

39 year old Hamer was embedded with the US marines and was killed in an explosion in ­Helmand province.his photographer,Philip Coburn,suffered severe leg injuries.

He is the first British journalist to be killed in the campaign and his death highlights the risks that journalists take on to report on conflicts around the world.

He leaves a wife and three young children.

Pulitzer Prize winner dies

William Tuohy,a foreign correspondent who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The Los Angeles Times, has died.

According to the obituary in his paper

When he was awarded his Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for international reporting for his coverage of the Vietnam War, Pulitzer judges noted that "few correspondents have seen and written more about the war in Vietnam than William Tuohy."

He was at the LA Times for 29 years ,serving as bureau chief in Saigon, Beirut, Rome, Bonn and London.During that time he covered wars and conflicts in Southeast Asia but the Middle East, Northern Ireland, Iran and the Falkland Islands,

Journalist recounts suicide attacks

Over at the committee to protect journalists,Mohamed Olad Hassan, a reporter for the BBC and The Associated Press, and chairman of the Somali Foreign Correspondents Association, recounts his experience covering a deadly ceremony in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Olad narrowly escaped death after a suicide bomber killed at least 23 people on December 3 at the graduation ceremony at Hotel Shamo.


Three journalists were killed in the attack and Mohamed recounts a typical graduation scene

Proud parents beamed at their graduating loved ones, who were also sitting in the hall. Journalists, particularly the cameramen, were right in the front for a good view. People were making speeches, and we were taking notes, as usual.

Then,he says all this brightness turned to darkness.

All I remember is being covered in dust. Some debris apparently from the roof of the hall hit me and there was no light anywhere. I looked across and the young guy sitting next to me was dead. The seat he had been sitting on was mine. We had changed positions for one moment, when I had left momentarily to move my recorder nearer to the speakers. That’s when the explosion occurred. It was my luck not to be sitting in that chair.

Fox attracts the largest audience for Obama's Afghnaistan speech

It appears that over in America,politicians can still command large TV audiences.

The figures out for Barack Obama's speech at Westpoint academy when he announced future policy in Afghanistan reached over 40m people.

The strange thing being,or perhaps not so strange was that it was Fox news that got the highest ratings attracting over 4.55 million of those viewers, more than CNN and MSNBC combined.

The irony being that that was the station that the Obama regime attempted to freeze out earlier in the year.

Remember this from Anita Dunn, the White House communications director.

“We’re going to treat them the way we would treat an opponent,“As they are undertaking a war against Barack Obama and the White House, we don’t need to pretend that this is the way that legitimate news organizations behave.”

Conventional ideas of balance are all but redundant in modern conflict

Charlie Beckett gives a good synopsis of Polis' debate this week on Managing the News in Conflict: Covering Gaza under the Media Ban.

Reporting war is getting more dangerous, difficult and complicated but working with citizen journalists is one way of getting around the censorship, lack of resources and danger.

The debate featured Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East Editor, Alan Fisher and Sherrine Tadros, both Al Jazeera English, and Louise Turner, Unseen Gaza Dispatches Director/Producer.

What was interesting says Beckett

was the consensus that conventional ideas of balance are all but redundant in modern conflict where so often the sides are disproportionate.

and

There was also a thoughtful debate around whether TV channels serving western audiences should show as much gore as Arab broadcasters routinely do. Bowen thought that the BBC could show more but as soon as you go too far it loses its impact. And both Fisher and Tadros agreed that to get the most impact, you don’t have to resort to explicit horror. Louise Turner watched hours of rushes of stomach-churning imagery in the making of her documentary about Gaza and she said that the effect was to numb not to inform.

Pakistan faces up to its media horrors

With the contining battle against terrorism in Pakistan,this guest post on the Dawn blog looks at how the sensativities of the population have been numbed by the media

It seems being the frontline ally in the war against terror has numbed our sensitivities. And the ongoing quest for the highest ratings among the broadcast media is adding wind to the sails of insensitivity.

adding that

you realise how worthless the loss of human life is and how easily people get away with murder. Now that sense of worthlessness is being compounded in the name of free media.

It's a question that the media worldwide has to grapple with balancing the often gruesome facts of reporting with the need to self regulate tbroadcasting of the horrors.

When decision makers at channels are asked if it’s appropriate to sully the airwaves in this manner, they shrug and offer the evergreen reply that it is their responsibility to report what is happening.

Their solution?

Broadcasters need to carefully consider – on a case-by-case basis, no less – what constitutes good reporting, and what is mere exhibitionism. And in an ideal situation, viewers need to be given a choice about what kinds of images they consume, rather than being forced to scamper for the remote and change the channel every time blood or a body part flash across the screen.

Ht-Adrian Monck

Military battles are not the only Taleban victories

There was a very good article in the Times this morning investigating how the Taleban was winning the propoganda war in Afghanistan.

since 2006, the Taleban have been harnessing that same despised technology in an escalating campaign of propaganda against which Nato appears to have no effective answer.

As well as the obvious methods of the internet

the Taleban produce magazines, dozens of DVDs of attacks and hundreds of different Taleban song cassettes — mournful chants promoting Taleban heroes and martyrs. There are even downloadable Taleban mobile phone ringtones. On the ground in southern Afghanistan, Taleban fighters leave “night letters” in villages and wandering preachers propagate the Taleban message.

The American military wants happy stories

Frontline reports that after six years of blogging,a soldier's perspective has closed its doors

With this message posted up

Blogging is no longer worth the trouble. Everything is fine as long as the stories are happy and positive. The military wants happy stories, not honest stories. Everything must be 100% in concert with the Army spin. If it's not, you're considered an "embarrassment" to the Army, the installation, and/or the NCO Corps. Integrity is no longer an accepted method of leadership. If I can't be honest and open, I won't write at all. I refuse to allow my private blog's message to be dictated with threats and intimidation. It's been a fun six years!

A tactic too far for the Sun

Every since the Sun announced that it was switching allegiances at the next election,the paper has been running a simmering campaign against Gordon Brown.

Now there is nothing wrong with that,any publisher is entitled to its opinion but the tone of the attacks has changed across the weekend combining the attacks with criticisms of the war in Afghanistan,the memorial services and personal grief.

Yesterday the paper launched into the fact that the Prime Minister had forgotten to bow at the cenotaph.

Today though sees a new low as it publishes the transcript of a phone call that the Prime Minister made to the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.

I can understand the grief that the mother is going through and no doubt part of that anger manifested itself in the decision to tape the phone call and offer it to the Sun.

The paper though,should have had nothing to do with events after that.By publishing its contents,it has used a mother's grief to broaden its own message to the country.

It is a tactic that will ultimately fail,I am sure.Regardless of what we think about the government's conduct of the war,this is not the way to highlight it.

Enough said

The spotlight on war reporting moves to Afghanistan

Straws in the wind?

The New York Times' Brian Stelter reports that

No longer overshadowed by Iraq, the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan, as news outlets had once called it, is suddenly very visible. Television networks have opened small bureaus, and major newspapers have assigned more staff members to the country, and its neighbor to the west, Pakistan. But with the media business under great strain, this war is being covered on a budget.

as now for the For the first time in years, Afghanistan has “emerged as the top story” for news organizations in the United States.

The country provides a number of challenges for journalists,safety obviously being the top one but also financial

Battered by the recession, some news organizations have made deep cuts to their already small foreign staffs, making it difficult to finance continuing coverage of wars in two theaters. While no one says news organizations are skimping on security measures, it is evident that they are trying to maintain flexible presences in Afghanistan.

Farrell files his account of his kidnapping

The news of his kidnapping may have been subject to a blackout but Stephen Farrell is quickly using technology to post an account of his ordeal at the hands of the Taliban in Afghanistan

You can read it in full at the New York Times,here is an excerpt as he is rescued and his interpreter is killed

Vague sounds coalesced into northern British vowels. One voice was urging someone to get a ladder up over the wall and into the compound we had just left. Pressing my face down as low as I could I screamed, “British hostage, British hostage,” and flashed the light once, very briefly to tell them the direction. I heard a voice saying something like: “British hostage approach me with your hands in the air and lie down on the ground.”
I complied, dropping the camera bag and all its contents. While I wanted to keep my equipment, emerging suddenly from the dark carrying a bag seemed an insane risk.
I lay on the ground, gave my name and newspaper and pointed to where Sultan was lying behind me, telling them I thought he had been shot.

War reporter calls it a day with embedding in Helmand

An independent war reporter has had enough of the military's embedding policy in Afghanistan.

Frontline'sDaniel Bennett reports that Michael Yon

claims that the Ministry of Defence has been trying to have him removed from the area of Regional Command (South) and from Thursday he will be reporting unilaterally from Helmand province.

adding that

Yon was annoyed that his embed with 2 Rifles in Helmand was ended by the Ministry of Defence last week, and says his "days of covering British operations are over."

He recently wrote on the topic that

"The Pentagon and British MoD spin lies (though I have found Secretary Gates talks straight), but veins of pure truth can be found right here with these soldiers. The Pentagon and MoD as a whole cannot be trusted because they are the average of their parts. There are individual officers and NCOs among the U.S. and U.K. who have always been blunt and honest with me. Among the higher ranking, Petraeus and Mellinger come to mind, but for day-to-day realities this is where it’s at. Out here. Nothing coming from Kabul, London, or Washington should be trusted."

Press casualties in Afghanistan

Military casualties in Afghanistan have been in the news for the last couple of months but the nature of the conflict has meant that casualties in the media have been light.

Now however AP reports that

A roadside bombing has wounded two Associated Press journalists embedded with the U.S. military in southern Afghanistan.
Photographer Emilio Morenatti and AP Television News videographer Andi Jatmiko were traveling with the military when their vehicle was struck by the bomb Tuesday.
Both were immediately taken to a military hospital in Kandahar. Jatmiko suffered leg injuries and two broken ribs. Morenatti, badly wounded in the leg, underwent an operation that resulted in the loss of his foot.

via CJR

Al Jazeera critical of media coverage of Gaza

Journalism.co.uk hosted an online interview with Al Jazeera's Ayman Mohyeldin at the end of last week and was rather critical of the Western Media's coverage of the conflict in Palestine.

"The western media has failed tremendously in covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict accurately and contextually.

adding that

"They would not tolerate what has continued for decades and now what is happening in Gaza. I am extremely frustrated by how Gaza and the entire Israeli-Palestinian conflict is portrayed, in the western world particularly,"

Sherine Tadros went further and said that

"I think it comes down to finance and editorial judgement," Tadros said. "Unless there is a military operation - i.e a sexy picture - editors won't spend on deploying teams to cover humanitarian tragedies.

Cockburn looks back at the Iraq war

There is a good piece in the Indy this morning by Orwell winner Patrick Cockburn on the reporting of the Iraq war by journalists.

Could somebody outside Iraq reading the newspapers, watching television or listening to the radio have got a real understanding of what was happening in the country? Was the news reporting better than it had been in Vietnam to which it is often compared?

he asks and he makes the point that

The most frustrating moment for me and many other reporters came as the war escalated in 2004. It soon became clear that the US-led occupation forces controlled only islands of territory and their military position was deteriorating. But George Bush and Tony Blair were able to maintain that the war was confined to only four out of 18 provinces of Iraq and the extent of the violence was being exaggerated by the media. This was quite untrue, but journalists could not disprove it because if we ventured into these supposedly pacific provinces we stood a good chance of being kidnapped or decapitated.

How the media sanitises conflict

There is a good post over at a blog that I have been following recently dedicated to creating media awareness of the conflict in DR Congo.

It is a topic that has been raised on this blog a number of times and will well summed up in this comment

that the consequences of conflict are very rarely shown in the media, and if they are, they are sanitised to such a degree that the ethical and moral implications for the audience are lost.

There is a fine line between what is often called the breakfast test,would you see this over your cornflakes and sometimes what is necessary to get the horrors across to the reader.

Sometimes the media can sanitise war to such an extent that it is portrayed rather like a video game with targets mere dots on a computer screen and deaths a video scoring system.

The hard hitting image of its consequences is a responsibility of the media to remind us about the horror of war and prevent us slipping into it as we did in 2003.

Fisk takes a nostalgic look at the past

Robert Fisk asks an important question in this morning's Independent.

His article War reporters used to prefer morality over impartiality asks whether the modern war reporter lives up to the language and writing of the old time correspondent

It's not just the power of the writing I'm talking about here; the screaming soldiers, the dying Communard, the condemned men, the woman wanting to sell her car, the death of an age, the flowers. These reporters were spurred, weren't they, by the immorality of war. They cared. They were not frightened of damaging their "impartiality". I wonder if we still write like this.

asks Fisk.

Worth a read