The Media in its Present Form
The traditional concept of the media has been substantially eroded over the past decade with the emergence of a disturbing new trend. In a potentially confusing marriage of fact and fantasy, the entertainment industry has tightened its grip on the companies that produce news worldwide. CNN is now owned by Time Warner, of Warner Brothers fame, the 26 billion-dollar group that brought the world the Harry Potter phenomenon. The American ABC is owned by Walt Disney, the 23 billion-dollar conglomerate that produced the juvenile giants The Lion King and Lilo and Stitch. CBS is owned by Viacom, which has also purchased Paramount Pictures, Nickelodeon, MTV, Showtime and the Movie Channel. America’s NBC news channel is owned by General Electric, which also owns the Biography Channel, CNBC, Fox Sports, the History Channel and National Geographic, among others. Significantly, News Corporation is also the owner of Twentieth Century Fox Studios, and its Fox News Channel is a strong challenger to CNN.
This new ownership structure has an impact that is uniquely economic. The news arm in each of these corporations is now treated as a business unit, in the same way as the movies, and cartoons and sports channels. The equation is simple: either news draws advertising dollars and high ratings, or news programs and news personnel must change. News is now a market commodity, rather than the ethical value it once was.
The push to ‘market’ news has led to the advent of what is known as ‘soft’ news—stories that resemble movie themes, and analysis that is driven towards entertainment rather than enlightenment. ‘Soft’ news is modelled on the movie format, with heroes and villains, drama and action, laughter and tears. Such stories are typified by cameo accounts of the SAS in Afghanistan, or tearful family reunions as a warship returns from the Gulf. The Australian Army in operations today is a goldmine of such ‘soft’ news, and the Army should be milking the moment for all it is worth. ‘Soft’ news will see the transformation of 19-year-old US Army Private Jessica Lynch into a hero and a Hollywood star, and the immortalisation of her dramatic rescue from an Iraqi prison during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Yet the same process will allow the story of African-American prisoner of war Shoshana Johnson to go largely unreported.
The birth of the entertainment conglomerates has also heralded the arrival of the major corporate accounting practices that have accompanied these mergers. Again, the effect on the news media has been simply stunning. he economies of corporate accounting have led to a dramatic reduction in personnel staffing newsrooms throughout the world, and the increased ‘pooling’ of footage and stories. Nowadays, the journalist in an area of operations is not only filing for television, but doing interviews for radio subsidiaries and writing articles for newspapers. Enter the video journalist, the nom de guerre for that unfortunate journalist that not only researches and writes the story, and records all interviews, but is also responsible for shooting all the relevant footage with no crew to assist.
Martin Bell, the BBC journalist that covered the Bosnia conflict, rightly observed: ‘we were so busy filing that there was no time to go out and collect the news about what was happening’. Unhappily, this trend continues. 1 The ‘embedding’ of journalists with US and British forces in Iraq has ensured that vivid snapshots of a war and daily life on the battlefield are the food and drink of the screens, but the wider picture remains largely obfuscated.
Also on the increase is ‘parachute journalism’—militarily escorted, protected and cocooned bands of journalists given short-term and limited access to the peripheries of combat zones in order to satisfy the industry’s needs for pictures of any kind. Significantly, the cameramen in these ‘pools’ are the wholesalers of news as well as the retailers. Across every news channel from one side of the world to the other—in New York, in Sydney, in Hong Kong—the pictures are the same. The scripts may be altered to reflect local accents, but the core material comes from a small band of cameramen positioned around the globe to provide the pictures. The same applies to print and radio, with increasingly syndicated columnists and reporters that represent groups of radio stations.
The Revolution in Media Affairs
The transformation of the media has been dramatic and far-ranging, and extends beyond even the aftershocks of the emergence of conglomerate ownership structures. The Revolution in Media Affairs has changed the media in three distinct ways: through technology, new business practices and the changing nature of journalism in a cyber-world.
The changes wrought by the advances in media technology have been extraordinary. Laptops, videophones, field editing gear and handheld videocameras have changed the nature of reportage, allowing for instant—if somewhat limited—pictures, but starkly devoid of analysis of any form.
For good reasons, combatants from both sides want access to satellite television in order to convey their own message undiluted—the so-called ‘CNN wars’ syndrome. They are highly resistant to any analysis, distortion or filtering of their message by reporters. Today’s combatants use the new technology as a weapon to capture the ‘mediaspace’ while ruthlessly driving the media out of the battlespace.
For RMA-rich countries (in this context, the Revolution in Military Affairs), it means projecting the image of war without dead bodies, of precision-guided munitions hitting targets, not people. It is the comforting projection of what Michael Ignatieff calls ‘virtual war’ in his book of the same name. Ignatieff argues that:
war becomes virtual, not simply because it seems to take place on a screen, but because it enlists societies only in virtual ways. Nothing ultimate is at stake: neither national survival nor the fate of the economy. When war becomes a spectator sport, the media become a decisive theatre of operations.2
RMA-poor countries, for their part, certainly do not want the media to witness their excesses, including those in Bosnia, Kosovo, Timor and, currently, Zimbabwe. These countries are also particularly averse to having the media signal their military preparations.
Journalists are also increasingly being called to testify at international tribunals on war crimes. The BBC reporter Jacky Rowland, for example, is the latest to testify at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. A natural consequence of such testimonials is that reporters are being given even less access to combat areas, in case they subsequently turn witness for the prosecution. It is interesting to speculate what legal testimony by journalists might mean for the future role of the International Criminal Court in examining coalition operations in conflicts such as Afghanistan. If courts can force journalists in war crimes trials to reveal their sources of information, it reflects a sea change in the way the military-media relationship develops. Hence the advent of what is termed ‘soldiercam’—pictures provided by the protagonists themselves, without the filter of journalism.
Soldiercam pictures from either side of the conflict are now readily provided to the media. Yet, the average journalist has no basis for judging whether these pictures are real or manipulated. There is controversy, for example, over the pictures of US Special Forces attacking Mullah Omar’s stronghold in Afghanistan on 20 October 2001. Allegations that the raid went horribly wrong and the pictures are, in fact, of a totally different parachute drop by the rangers on an airfield that had already been sanitised are rapidly gaining currency. Seymour Hersh reports that the real raid on Mullah Omar’s stronghold was anything but the ‘cakewalk’ it was purported to be. 3 Yet, as is becoming increasingly obvious, if the soldiercam pictures are sufficiently exciting, the infotainment industry will use them, despite their dubious veracity.
Future combatants, particularly RMA-poor combatants, will devote as much effort to training soldier-cameramen to provide these pictures as they will for training combat soldiers. Indeed, the videos released of interviews with Osama bin Laden in recent times prove the efficacy of this tactic. The use of soldiercam amounts to a form of Information Operations waged on global television. Yet this is an admission that no news editor will make, since it imposes the obligation to adopt radical and dangerous new ways of gathering news to replace the current modus operandi.
As a postscript to this comment on technology, it is interesting to see the rise of Al-Jazeera television and alternative media sites such as <www.mediachannel.org>. Al-Jazeera is a new phenomenon, a purely Arab-owned network that has recently gained such extraordinary credibility that Western leaders are being forced to engage with it, rather than use the customary CNN channels to transmit their messages. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, this channel truly gained the ascendancy, with most global television networks using its footage, even while some of them decried it as Arab propaganda. Al-Jazeera’s success led to attacks on its English-language website by hackers, who apparently did not want another viewpoint seen by English-language speakers. It also saw the rise of rival television stations such as Abu Dhabi TV and Al-Arabia TV, which are attempting to capture a share of the vast Middle East viewership. Whether this trend will be replicated elsewhere in the world in a bid to combat the current Hollywood monopoly of news networks has yet to be seen.
In one sense, this infotainment approach to the coverage of major issues has given rise to the escalation of asymmetric warfare. Since blockbuster pictures are what the networks will use, blockbuster pictures are now what an RMA-poor enemy will aim for as the most effective means to transmit its messages. The World Trade Center attacks were as much intended for the American networks as the body politic itself. Similarly, it would be interesting to speculate which high-profile Australian target could be used by an enemy to create the same effect. The answer is that it may not be a military one at all.4 Certainly the targeting of the Sari nightclub in Bali delivered the message that non-military venues were equally pre-eminent as targets of terrorist attack.
The Impact of the Accountant
The ubiquitous accountant has scored a direct hit on the media’s combat reporting. he first symptom of cost cutting has been the departure of experienced and highly paid journalists in favour of younger and cheaper models. The appointment of less experienced reporters is a simple, but extremely effective, cost-cutting measure. These younger journalists have little combat experience and are more interested, as are their masters, in the immediate tactical drama, rather than an analysis of the wider strategic picture.
A second point of impact has seen an increased reluctance to put staff journalists in the field, and a corresponding increase in reliance on freelancers. Insurance premiums for staff correspondents are regarded as prohibitive. Conversely, there are no on-costs related to freelancers. However, since freelancers have to take greater risks than the staff correspondents, more and more of them are being killed in the frontline. These journalists are not only at risk from crossfire but also from bounties. The Taliban, for example, were allegedly offering $50 000 to Afghans who killed Western journalists in the early days of that conflict. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, at the time this article was written, twelve journalists had lost their lives, many of them as a result of the tragic accident of ‘friendly fire’, but others in circumstances of less clarity, marked with the suspicion that they were deliberate targets.
The high cost in lives has led to a sharp focus on tactical, dramatic images, with little questioning of the information that accompanies these pictures. Thus the military enjoys the ascendancy while the media scramble for the scraps. The one area where the media have taken a stand appears to be over the request by the ADF not to show pictures of US prisoners of war during the Iraqi conflict. Most stations ignored the advice, which this author believes was a result of pressure from the Bush Administration.
Yet, as media commentator Mark Day points out, journalistic bias has been part of one network’s deliberate plan to attract huge audiences. He quotes Peter Chermin, the Chief Executive Officer of the Fox Group, as addressing a management conference with the following thoughts: ‘Our content has to be the dramatic opposite of bland—incredibly innovative, ambitious and competitive. It has to seize the edge, because the most dangerous thing in the anti-bland world is to play it safe’.5
Given this assessment of the nature of the public appetite, it is somewhat unsurprising that the chauvinistic, hysterically patriotic approach of Fox News has won the battle for US viewers’ hearts and minds so convincingly.
The State of Australian Journalism
For the first time in the annals of Australian journalism, a generation of news editors and news executives has emerged that belongs to the post-Vietnam era and whose members have no service experience. True, most Australian reporters have done some kind of ‘battlefield survival’ course, but that is largely concentrated on combat first aid, rather than analysis of big-picture military activity. It certainly allows them, having been briefed, to use military terms with easy familiarity.
The ‘dumbing down’ of news stories in the electronic media has been accompanied by an excess of opinion over analysis in the print media. This opinion overload has had the effect of turning audiences away from the subject of defence, since the opinions being provided are consistently sourced from the same group of ‘experts’, with the same lack of relevant military understanding. The largest source of Defence writing at present resides in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. At the heart of the gallery is a core of reporters that value the political dimension of any story over the strategic dimension. These reporters are very much subject to the influence of the political lines that are purveyed on all sides of Parliament House. As one of them told me recently, ‘you can’t fight chauvinism with strategic analysis’.
News editors have not yet grasped the fact that the military has learnt significant lessons from past military-media interaction and applied these to reap a considerable military advantage. The military has been smart in second-guessing the way journalistic and editorial thinking works. Military operators watch with growing satisfaction as initial military reports become headline news, while the corrections come many days later and are relegated to the back pages, with the original statements still largely in the public mind.6
The lesson taken from Iraqi Freedom—the first total ‘information war’ in history—is this: the initial report from the military will always be the one that captures the headlines. Even if that report is wrong or corrected later, the ‘information operations’ element of it is successful.
The Army and the Current Media Environment
The Army is currently enjoying a media honeymoon as the halo effect from Timor and Afghanistan, and more recently Iraq, remains undiminished. Nowhere in the past five years is there a major blip or trauma such as the one that affected the US Marines and the Canadian Special Forces in Somalia. The Army has certainly been stung by unflattering accounts of activities within the 3rd Battalion, the number of unauthorised discharges from Steyr rifles, the Black Hawk tragedy and problems with acquisition. In the context of the bigger picture, however, these are not major catastrophes, though they do point to some challenges in the way these issues have been managed.
It is on the home front, then, rather than on operations, where the current challenges lie. Incredibly, there is still an extraordinary reluctance at all levels of the Army to accept the fact that issues management is as much core business as operational activity. Incidents are not managed by commanders, but rather are fed into a process-driven environment that almost guarantees that both the Army and the alleged victims or their families end up in the arms of the lawyers. Too often, this is followed by recourse to the media, with negative consequences for the Army.
The Army has a policy that espouses the axiom ‘people first’. Put to the test, however, it often translates to ‘process first’. This is plainly obvious in the number of stories that are highlighted in the main news and current-affairs programs that deal with alleged victimisation or neglectful treatment of individuals. These personal stories are the very essence of the new ‘soft’ news-driven media. They pit small heroic Davids against the Army’s rigid and unfeeling Goliaths. They are battlers against warlords. They are the widows and children of heroes, confronting an unfeeling bureaucracy. Time after time, the Army steps into this ring and takes a public beating.
Yet another indication that the Army does not view media preparation as core business is the number of times star-rank officers have been thrown to the currentaffairs wolves without adequate preparation. The resulting images do nothing to enhance the reputation of the organisation, or the internal image of those hapless officers caught in the crossfire.
The Key to a Better Public Image
The Army must develop a more sophisticated incident and reputation management capability. In addition, media awareness courses at all levels of training, both for officers and senior soldiers, is crucial. Training in high public profile areas such as boards of inquiry and courts martial must also be embedded in the pre-command and post-command environment. Indeed, transcripts of recent boards of inquiry and courts martial often contain instances where the board and the presiding officer have been led to comment on areas that would be extremely damaging to the organisation’s reputation should the transcripts ever be produced before a court of appeal. Common transgressions include prejudicial comment, prejudging review outcomes, personal comment on individual witnesses, threatening letters to witnesses and allowing inadmissible evidence, to cite but a few. There is a lack of general guidance on how to handle the media in open courts martial, and the thorny issue of media access to transcripts, which also compounds this particular issue.
The Army must closely examine public interaction, particularly in areas that may ultimately damage its reputation. This is an issue that deserves more careful handling than has occurred in the past. Preparation and appearances before Senate committees is one such area that incurs much greater risk than ever before. The committee system is public theatre, and one in which the military players have yet to learn how to perform in order to allow the Army to reap maximum advantage.
The Army must also scrutinise the way in which the various commands engage the Australian public. Open days, parades, and exercise briefings are inevitably populated by the usual familiar coterie: the Mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, local sporting heroes, the Chief Minister or Premier. Notable omissions to these select gatherings include women’s groups, university and student bodies, arts communities and other such groups that form a significant part of the fabric of Australian society. How often are the conductor and staff of the various symphony orchestras or the heads of the major art galleries featured on the command invitation list to the mess?
In an operational sense, then, what are the challenges and opportunities for the Army in this current media environment? Not surprisingly, opportunities abound for maximising coverage from the vast range of operational deployments that characterise today’s Army. Pre-eminent among these opportunities is the chance to bolster the morale of servicemen and women and their families by taking reporters on tours of Timor (the forgotten peacekeeping ground), of Bougainville, of Bosnia and Sinai and Sierra Leone (all equally forgotten). The benefits of deepening the understanding and awareness of the media include not only the implicit guarantee that tactical stories will remain in the foreground, but also the development of key relationships between defence and diplomatic correspondents and the Army. These relationships will provide crucial support when the Army faces its next media challenge.
The Media and the Future
A significant question surrounds the way in which the media might respond to the challenges that it faces both internally and externally. The media is currently characterised by a lack of debate among news editors about how much the military controls the news and information agenda in various operations.7 Operation Enduring Freedom is clouding the vision even more. Looking beyond the present, past the current anti-terrorism operations, it seems inevitable that news editors will come to the conclusion that soldiercams are a good idea—yet these will be the media’s own soldiercams.
In a future media infiltration of the battlespace, former Special Forces personnel will be recruited and trained to use cameras and sent to infiltrate the very areas that are currently barred to journalists. Who better than a freelancer that knows how to survive in a terrain supremely hostile to the journalist?
Ultimately, however, the future of the media is linked to the exploitation of technology. Civilian high-resolution satellites, such as the space-imaging ‘ikonos’ series, will be used to overlook battlefields with real-time video. Since journalists are now increasingly becoming primary targets in an area of operations, editors may well embrace the technology of the unmanned aerial vehicle to gain pictures of the battlefield, however limited and grainy, to be analysed ad nauseam by armchair strategists.
The Internet will remain dominant as an information-gathering tool, continuing its spectacular rise since its initial use during operations in Kosovo. In the murky theatre of the Balkans War, journalists were universally barred from areas where atrocities were being committed; they resorted to the Internet to contact victims for their stories. The Internet and the new use of ‘Blogs of War’ (daily diaries on the web from civilians and soldiers in the area of operations), have been a vital battleground for the information warfare that characterised Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The use of webcams will be far more frequent, given the ease with which they can be secreted in strategic places, particularly in cities and towns. The webcam will become the primary tool for relaying pictures to news organisations increasingly barred from the area of operations. Interestingly, a Spanish company submitted a proposal to transmit webcam images from Baghdad during the war, although this request could not be implemented because it came too late in the operation.
Inevitably, the military will fight back, and greater restrictions will be imposed on the media. The strain on the military-media relationship will deepen as journalists pursue their stories through the families of soldiers, trying to gain their insights from sources outside the usual channels.8 For the Australian Army, a far less adversarial way to develop this relationship is to engage the media more than ever before. Journalists should be offered attachments to Australian peacekeeping units around the world so that they can write their stories and simultaneously develop an understanding of what peace operations are all about.
Media organisations should be offered places at the Australian Defence College, or on Chief of Army scholarships, so that a new generation of journalists is equipped with a deeper understanding of military strategy. Moreover, media organisations should be offered opportunities for their trainee cadets to visit and be briefed by divisional commanders, in order to gain an understanding of the Army. Ideally, journalists should be provided with a background brief by media-smart military officers prior to the commencement of boards of inquiry and courts martial, so that they have a greater understanding of the process.
Another way of projecting the military message is to encourage potentially good writers and thinkers at the various military institutions to submit articles for publication in newspapers, without fear that this might be a ‘career-threatening move’. Publication would create a core of informed commentators, who could represent the Army with a cultural familiarity, in sharp contrast to the current small band of ‘experts’.
Following the Tom Clancy model, the Chief of Army may wish to consider collaborating with a publisher to encourage the writing of novels on the Army. Clancy is renowned as an authority on the CIA and the US armed forces, and may provide a useful model for a promising Australian author.
Military leaders must also engage with the vast tapestry that is the multicultural media as well as understand and tap into Australia’s cultural diversity. Buddhism is the fastest growing religion in the country today. There are also many military men and women who are adopting Islam as their faith. Yet the Army still has its twin denominational chaplains and a rabbi, to provide spiritual succour to its people. Even the New South Wales Police Force has added a mullah to the ranks of its spiritual leaders.
Of immense value would be the development of joint initiatives between the Minister, the Secretary and the Chief of the Defence Force to brief the Canberra Press Gallery, allowing its members to gain an insight into government thinking. This would avoid the current climate with its high risk of misinterpretation, as press secretaries and media liaison officers are left to guess at the nature of the Government’s current approach.
In order to raise awareness of the Army’s role in the community, Army commanders should hold information sessions for non-traditional audiences in the arts, business, sporting and other sectors. Information dissemination has traditionally remained the purview of the recruiters that have, correctly, a narrow focus for their aims. Above all, the Army must clearly understand that holistic communication strategies are the responsibility of all commanders, from divisional to platoon level, and that winning the media war is as much its core business as winning the battlespace. Without an understanding of media relations, the military will reproduce a variation on the old saying: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got’. The lessons drawn from Operation Iraqi Freedom will provide strong comfort to an Army that has achieved all its objectives without sustaining any media flak at all. It is on the home front, however, where the challenges lie ahead.
Endnotes
1 Interview in BBC documentary series Making the News, August, 2000.
2 Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War, Kosovo and Beyond, Chatto and Windus, London, 2000.
3 Seymour Hersh, ‘Escape and Evasion. What Happened when the Special Forces landed in Afghanistan?’, in The New Yorker, 12 November 2001.
4 This comment was written two days before the Bali bombing.
5 Mark Day, ‘Bias all Part of Fox’s Battle Plan’, Media Supplement of the Australian, 10 April 2003.
6 Among the disproven statements: hundreds of coffins and corpses at a warehouse near Zubayr were signs of atrocities; Private Jessica Lynch had multiple gunshot and stab wounds when she was rescued; two British soldiers had been ‘executed’ after being captured by Iraqis; drums of chemical weapons had been found in Iraq.
7 At the time of writing (February 2003), the glimmerings of such a debate are stirring, though not in the Australian media.
8 It is a two-way street, as the current controversy over anthrax injections for troops pre-deployed to the Gulf indicates.
