Reporting Under Fire: a Survey of a Century of War Correspondents

The New York Times, World: Reporting Under Fire: a Survey of a Century of War Correspondents
MANCHESTER, England — Within a few hundred yards of each other in Old Trafford lie the Manchester United Football Club and the Imperial War Museum North. One is a monument to the global sport that unites continents and peoples, the other a monument to the study of forces that divide and despoil them.

Pass through the dagger-sharp, mirrored entrance of the Imperial War Museum North, and one of the first things you see inside are museum shop replicas of World War I and World War II military posters, and coffee mugs emblazoned with the British monarch’s crown and the even more British Churchill-era slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Just a few yards farther and you are dragged straight into Bush- and Blair-era Iraq, with the crumpled, rusting hulk of a car that was destroyed by a marketplace bomb in Baghdad in 2007.

The museum covers wars since 1914, and the number and range of the exhibits from the past century puts into poignant context a quote by Martha Gellhorn that is framed in stark yellow and black in the museum’s latest exhibition, “War Correspondent: Reporting Under Fire since 1914.”

The featured journalists are mostly British, although the exhibition also gives prominence to Ms. Gellhorn, an American who reported from the Spanish Civil War, and Alan Moorehead, an Australian who reported during World War II from the very same North African cities that feature in today’s headlines, including his entry to a ruined Benghazi on Christmas Day, 1941.

Indeed, what is most striking as you walk around the exhibition is the permanency of the themes. Ms. Gellhorn from 1937 Spain and her successors during the 1990s war in the Balkans made very similar observations about their drive for morality and truth rather than striving endlessly, and perhaps fruitlessly, for the appearance of absolute objectivity.

“We knew, we just knew, that Spain was the place to stop Fascism. That was it. It was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt,” says another of Ms. Gellhorn’s quoted remarks on the walls. And the many television screens embedded in the walls feature interviews with correspondents of a more recent era: Vaughan Smith of the Frontline news agency giving his assessment that “objective journalism isn’t wrong, it just needs to be identified and clearly packaged and labeled,” and Maggie O’Kane of The Guardian on her refusal while reporting from Sarajevo to equate documented human rights abuses on one side with unverifiable claims by spin doctors on the other.

The methodology of the reporting changes almost beyond recognition — from handwritten scribbled notes with a censor’s blue marks to dispatches delivered live on satellite feeds.

The terminology also changes over time. “Accredited” correspondents wearing military uniforms and epaulettes during World War II become “embedded” correspondents wearing “Press” flak jackets in the Persian Gulf.

However, the issues and problems remain constant: the struggle with censorship, the difficulty of balancing access to military commanders with control by them, the problem of identifying with the soldiers around you, the guilt of wearing helmets and bulletproof jackets while reporting from among civilians who do not have them, the struggle not to become inured to suffering and cynical in the face of abuses of power, the debate over whether to show graphic images of suffering, and perennial struggle to assess, minimize and justify the dangers involved in reporting from the front lines.

“A long career of risk-taking has taught me that gambles tend to come off: it’s the failure to take the plunge which you usually regret later,” opines John Simpson, the BBC’s world affairs editor. “You can’t take no risks,” is the blunter conclusion from one of his television colleagues.

‘Sorry, but It’s Over’
The displays are certainly up-to-the-minute. They include mentions of Osama bin Laden’s death in Pakistan, and one contribution from a British television correspondent recorded on the roof of his hotel in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, during which he, somewhat glumly, illustrates the level of control that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s government exerts over the Tripoli “pack” by pointing to the government-sanctioned transportation waiting in the parking lot for the next government-sanctioned photo opportunity.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the exhibition is the transition from a tone of almost sepia-tinged nostalgia during the early stages, to one of elegiac lament for what many of the participating correspondents regard as the imminent death of traditional war reporting.

That seems premature. Even a cursory glance at the changes on display, from the trenches of the Somme to a map of television correspondents embedded on D-Day in the Normandy landings, to Vietnam to Libya, would suggest that reporting — in some form or other — has survived profound technological, military and social changes.

However the section on social media and phenomena such as “citizen journalism” is as fascinating as any of those that preceded it. Furthermore the exhibition is as multimedia in presentation as in content. There is a section on Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger.

Large screens carry the opinions, expressed on Twitter, of visitors to the exhibition. Facebook responses are actively sought, and questions are also pasted to the floor as you walk around the museum, inviting written responses on cards offered just before the exit.