War Reporters Under Threat

Chris Paterson

Description

War Reporters Under Threat describes the threat of violence facing war reporters from the United States government and some of its closest allies.



Chris Paterson argues that what should have been the lesson for the press following the invasion of Iraq - that they will be treated instrumentally by the US government - has been mostly ignored. As a result, even nominally democratic states cannot be counted upon to protect journalists in conflict, and urgent reform of legal protections for journalists is required.



War Reporters Under Threat combines critical scholarship with original investigation to assess the impact of the US government's obsession with information control and protection of its own troops. While the press-military relationship has been well researched, this book is the first to elaborate the US government threat to journalists.
Preface

1. A Hidden War on the Media

2. The Culture of Press Intolerance: Collaboration and Suppression

3. Patterns of Violence: The Media Installation and the Media Worker

Part I: Escalation

Part II: Expansion of Anti-Press Violence

4. Media Response

5. Legality

6. Invisible Conflict?

Appendix I: A Chronology of Attacks on Media Facilities and Personnel Linked to the U.S. Government

Appendix II: Media Safety and Media Freedom Organisations

Notes

Index

Sujets

• Political Freedom
• Political Science
• América del Norte
• North America
• Media studies
• Middle East
• Media

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783710331
• Langue: English

Extrait

War Reporters Under Threat
War Reporters Under Threat
The United States and Media Freedom
Chris Paterson

Pluto Press
www.plutobooks.com
First published 2014 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Distributed in the United States of America exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © Chris Paterson 2014
The right of Chris Paterson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 3418 9 Hardback ISBN 978 0 7453 3417 2 Paperback ISBN 978 1 7837 1032 4 PDF eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1034 8 Kindle eBook ISBN 978 1 7837 1033 1 EPUB eBook
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This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin.
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Who overcomes By force, hath overcome but half his foe.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Contents
Preface
1.
A Hidden War on the Media
2.
The Culture of Press Intolerance: Collaboration and Suppression
3.
Patterns of Violence: The Media Installation and the Media Worker

Part 1: Escalation

Part 2: Expansion of Anti-Press Violence
4.
Media Response
5.
Legality
6.
Invisible Conflict?
Appendix 1: A Chronology of Attacks on Media Facilities and Personnel Linked to the US Government
Appendix 2: Media Safety and Media Freedom Organisations
Notes
Index
Preface
As a teacher of journalism in the United States in the early 2000s, I found it troubling that the values espoused in textbooks and which seemed so integral to our teaching were so readily and fully abandoned in the post-9/11 age. The idea of an unfettered and independent press as a cornerstone of US democracy and an aspect of the US system of governance that other nations might emulate had always been worth treating with a dose of scepticism, constrained as it was by a market logic which has no inherent interest in participatory governance, but even sceptics like myself could acknowledge the value of encouraging aspiring journalists to pursue the ideal of a watchdog press, unwaveringly protected by law in its pursuit of truth, even truths which those with power would prefer to remain in the shadows.
I found, increasingly, that this idea bore little resemblance to the post-9/11 world, where the leading sources of news in the US played patriotic music, covered the television screen in flags, and lashed out at journalists daring to tell another story; where the brother of a journalist killed by the US Army had to give up his career to tour the US in a fruitless search for accountability; and where one of the international news agencies which had hosted me in my research had appeared to become a routine target of the US military. The ideals of free expression and the reality of post-9/11 international journalism were becoming increasingly polarised, and with little fanfare the US had become one of the most significant threats to the media. Remarkably, this is an issue that much of the analysis of this decade of conflict has let pass with little comment. After a decade exploring these concerns and the US ‘pre-emptive war’ in Iraq, and amid escalating concern about secret US government actions aimed at the press and the public, I offer this exploration. US behaviour towards the media should alarm us all, for these issues are not limited to the parochial concerns of journalists, media educators, or even those in government who stand accused of betraying the principles of liberal democracy – they are a stark warning of the potential for an Orwellian future where human rights and public disclosure become intolerable inconveniences for all states.
The title of this book was a compromise in the context of a market filled with similarly titled studies of the complex media–military relationship, and any number of particular aspects of this. Those books, and an even larger number of scholarly articles and research reports, provide a thorough record of that troubled and complex relationship – and the broader dangers of a Fourth Estate which exists precariously and consistently under threat. This book, though, sets out to tell a story which many others have only hinted at. This is the story of a superpower drunk with power and willing, both through wilful ignorance and through design, to sacrifice media workers and media independence to military adventures fuelled by a potent mix of Machiavellian strategy and paranoid fantasy, driven with remarkable success by a neoconservative cabal which has come to profoundly infect and affect US society and US foreign policy alike. 1
The whole of this book’s title is key: that war reporters are under threat will not be news to those reporters or anyone else; indeed, it is why they often hold a lofty, even heroic, status in their organisations and wider society (a status some commercial media organisations milk for all it is worth, as with ‘scud-studs’ and ‘hotzone’ correspondents). But what is new is the very idea that a threat to journalists should be linked to the nation which has promoted as policy – more consistently than any other – the ideology of a free and unfettered media: this is news . And it is news that news media have actively chosen to ignore at their peril. As leading historians of the military–media relationship, such as Knightley, Taylor and Carruthers 2 have documented well, the US has grudgingly accepted cooperation with the media at times of conflict in various forms and in countless wars – but it has never, until just over a decade ago, become a leading threat to media workers. This is a work more of compilation than investigation: the stories this book tells are (mostly) publically and thoroughly documented.
And so the aim of this book is to position the US among those states – and non-state actors – with little meaningful concept of ‘media freedom’ (or a broader human rights agenda), and to encourage media workers everywhere to confront their own double standards and take greater courage in challenging and defending their profession from a nation which, along with some of its closest partners in the Middle East, says one thing and does another when it comes to respecting and protecting the media. Any hopes we hold for governments to be accountable to the rest of us may depend on their willingness to do so. This is a goal which is vital to preserving what remains of US legitimacy internationally, and to preserving the US’s ability, including that of its military where necessary, to play a positive international role, as it has done before and potentially could do again.
One of the central themes of this book is that a conventional hierarchy of media producers contributes to easy acceptance of the concept that some media producers – because they are foreign to us, or small, or affiliated with a government, or because they take an editorial stance we don’t agree with – are inherently less worthy, and perhaps even deserving of violence directed toward them. For this reason, this text goes beyond the standard stylistic convention of italicising established periodicals – such as major newspapers – and uses italics to designate all media producers, whether Fox, WikiLeaks, Reuters , the New York Times , or Al Jazeera , as a means of highlighting their legitimacy – and corresponding right to expression.
I hope this book will be useful to researchers and educators, in offering a take on war reporting that prior scholarship has downplayed. My greater hope, however, is for it to shine light on a problem which is already well known to many in the news media and to scholars of international journalism, and which has been a key concern of the professional organisations concerned with the safety of journalists for over a decade – but which has yet to resonate with the much larger, escalating debate about what kind of presence in the world the US, and its third of a billion citizens, wish to be.
This is the story of a curious and disturbing trend in international journalism; a trend few people want to talk about, despite its potential to permanently shut the door to independent witnesses of international conflict. We begin by examining the evolution of a culture of intolerance to the Fourth Estate among US power elites and – among media itself – a commercially driven acquiescence to that intolerance; in other words, an abandonment of the watchdog role of the press. Together, these trends have permitted an increasingly hostile environment for investigative reporting to flourish and become normalised.
1
A Hidden War on the Media
The purpose of this book is to examine and expose a deadly paradox which has become apparent since 9/11: that of an entrenched culture of acceptance and impunity 1 which permits states that are nominally democratically governed, human rights oriented, and bound by democratically established national and international legal conventions, to conceal violations of human rights and rules of war, and to kill, injure and arrest those journalists who are in a position to witness and report on those violations. Such states do so virtually without challenge, for only infrequently do the many defenders of the right to practice journalism freely and safely 2 look closely at the democracies with vibrant commercial press systems, the world’s ‘models’ of press freedom.
This chapter suggests why