RR Phantom
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 |  Subject: Inside or outside the military bubble, the media have their own battles  Thu May 03, 2012 8:47 pm | |
| It was the article that brought down America's top general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal.
After Michael Hastings's piece appeared in Rolling Stone two years ago, revealing McChrystal's true feelings about his political masters, President Barack Obama sacked him.
It's hard to argue with the magazine's characterisation that the profile ''changed history''. But does Hastings's new book The Operators, about how he got the story others didn't, give the complete picture about war reporting?
Hastings, who will be in town this month for the Sydney Writers' Festival, is the definitive lone-wolf journalist who dared to write the ''truth'' about Afghanistan and the American cowboys who were running that miserable war.
His book is a riveting read, and many a journalist will identify with the carry-on - the bragging and buffoonery - that sometimes occurs when one goes ''on the road'' with high-powered political or military officials.
In his original profile, ''The Runaway General'', Hastings revealed everything he saw when those officials, in his company, let their guard down. He defends that practice in his book and criticises mainstream journalists for not doing it.
By Hastings's account, the reason mainstream journalists (those who cover a regular beat) don't usually do this, and why they thus protect their subjects, is that they fall into the ''access trap''. That is, he writes, ''By becoming so indebted to them for the access they'd given me, I'd lose my objectivity''.
It is tempting to buy into his appraisal of how easily the media are ''co-opted'' by militaries and governments in times of war. There is much historical evidence (going back to World War I) to support his thesis.
But the notion that it's all about the intoxicating lure of access to power tells only part of the story.
Hastings felt the ''pull'' to trade his objectivity for access when McChrystal's close advisers invited him to join them on the ''NATO tour'' (eerily reminiscent of the film Almost Famous, about a young Rolling Stone reporter who goes on assignment to cover a rock band).
He accepts the invitation, and writes: ''I was getting inside the bubble - an imaginary barrier that popped up around the inner sanctums of the most powerful institutions to keep reality at bay.''
This bubble, which operated in the White House, on the campaign trail and around embassies and large corporations, ''compensated for its false impressions by giving bubble dwellers feelings of prestige from their proximity to power''.
Hastings - a seasoned war reporter who covered the Iraq war as well as Afghanistan for various publications - resisted, and was rewarded with his explosive article and now the book.
But the ''access trap'' theory omits a number of important factors that influence how mainstream journalists, of whom Hastings is disdainful, cover war.
There is the obvious one that governments (and militaries) lie.
Nor are governments and militaries averse to bullying reporters whose stories they find unbalanced or unhelpful. In other words, access is not just about appealing to a reporter's vanity - it also determines whether a journalist is able to do his or her job. A reporter's ability to operate in a war zone, for instance, is severely affected when a hostile military refuses to supply a flight in or the opportunity to talk to its troops (Hastings was afforded both by his American subjects).
Susan Carruthers, an American history professor, describes this phenomenon in the build-up to the 2003 Iraq war in her 2011 book The Media at War. The Bush administration, she writes, sought to '''domesticate'' the media by rewarding sympathetic reporters with ''leaks, background interviews, and seats on official flights'', while freezing out those who didn't play along.
Lest one scoff at the timidity of a reporter who allows the threat of bullying to influence their writing, there is another pressure journalists covering wars must deal with. It comes not from those in power but from the public.
In Western cultures where soldiers are venerated as heroes, where losing one's life in battle is seen as making the ultimate sacrifice, to seriously question the validity or conduct of a war can be construed as unpatriotic and even traitorous.
Put simply, reporting can be seen as an extension of the war effort.
Carruthers writes that in wartime, ''Members of the public duly rebuke the media when they fail to display sufficient support for 'our troops', question the wisdom of strategy or appear too sympathetic to the plight of an enemy population.''
The vicious public reaction to the army's chief prosecutor, Brigadier Lyn McDade, in connection with the charging of Australian soldiers over the deaths of Afghan civilians in a botched raid three years ago comes to mind here.
It is 11 years now since the war in Afghanistan began. It has become much harder for governments, including Australia's, to spin the line that continuing to pour money and lives into such an obviously futile cause is vital to our national security or strategic interests.
The US has decided to end the war (in 2014), an Australian general has said that in human terms the war has not been worth it and commentators previously defensive of the war have turned against it, as has public opinion (Lowy Institute polling in 2007 found 46 per cent of Australians opposed the war; by 2011 it was 59 per cent).
But it wasn't always thus.
Carruthers writes that history demonstrates how we're often ''intolerant of dissent, disdainful of protest and reluctant to contemplate how our wars appear to those on the other side - or those who refuse to take sides''.
''We don't want to hear or see too much in close-up, often announcing a preference to wait until it's all over for revelations that might only damage morale or 'hurt our troops' while conflict continues.''
We all - not just journalists - need to be more sceptical about wars fought in our names. History suggests we'll continue to do otherwise.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/inside-or-outside-the-military-bubble-the-media-have-their-own-battles-20120503-1y1nv.html#ixzz1trDxFxaI
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