PERSPECTIVES ON WAR
The British See Things Differently
British newspapers responded to the attacks of September 11 just as American papers did: saturation coverage and outrage. But it didn't take long before reporting and commentary in Britain revealed essential differences between journalism in the U.K. and the U.S. — differences in style and substance as well as in the trans-Atlantic perspective.
On September 12, Britain's famously competitive national press spoke with one voice, with full-page photographs of the collapsing World Trade Center towers on nearly every front page. The Sunday Times of September 16 included a twenty-four-page ad-free section headlined america at war.
The Guardian's media critic, Roy Greenslade, was struck by the rare unanimity. "What was so notable about all the coverage was the way in which British newspapers treated the United States as 'one of us,'" he wrote in his review a week later.
Coverage has continued to be exhaustive. The Times has had as many as ten reporters in and around Afghanistan; the Guardian and its Sunday sister, the Observer, share six; the Mirror, up to fourteen in Asia and America. On a Thursday in mid-October, the Guardian had sixteen pages of coverage, the Times and the Mirror fifteen, the Sun and Daily Mail nine each. Most of that coverage was staff-written, though it's hard to be precise because British papers typically use wire service material without attribution.
Neither the unanimity nor the unquestioning support lasted long, however. By November, Prime Minister Blair's director of communications, Alastair Campbell, was complaining of the "corrosive negativism" of Britain's liberal media, which traditionally are friendly to the Labour government. While Britain's leaders provided unswerving support for the war on terrorism, the press in Britain quickly asserted its independence. Observers on both sides of the Atlantic noted differences in tone and content between the British and American press. As an American living in London from September to December, I was one of those observers.
'It Just Didn't Happen'
Reporting on civilian deaths is one area of difference. In the
twentieth paragraph of a December 5 New York Times story from
Tora Bora, for example, John Kifner and Tim Weiner relayed reports
that some bombs had gone astray: "The bombing, which the
United States aimed at Al Qaeda command and control centers, also
hit civilian targets, villagers and independent witnesses said."
Richard Lloyd Parry, correspondent for The Independent of London, addressed the same topic. On December 4, his first-person report ran in the top right-hand corner of the paper's front page. Detailed in observation, bitterly sarcastic in tone, his piece reacted to the claim by an American spokesman that nothing untoward had happened:
The village where nothing happened is reached by a steep climb at the end of a rattling three-hour drive along a stony road. Until nothing happened here, early on the morning of Saturday and again the following day, it was a large village with a small graveyard, but now that has been reversed. The cemetery on the hill contains 40 freshly dug graves, unmarked and identical. And the village of Kama Ado has ceased to exist.
Many of the homes here are just deep conical craters in the earth. The rest are cracked open, split like crushed cardboard boxes. At the moment when nothing happened, the villagers of Kama Ado were taking their early morning meal, before sunrise and the beginning of the Ramadan fast. And there in the rubble, dented and ripped, are tokens of the simple daily lives they led.
A contorted tin kettle, turned almost inside out by the blast; a collection of charred cooking pots; and the fragments of an old-fashioned pedal-operated sewing machine. A split metal chest contains scraps of children's clothes in cheap bright nylon.
In another room are the only riches that these people had, six dead cows lying higgledy-piggledy and distended by decay. And all this is very strange because, on Saturday morning — when American B-52s unloaded dozens of bombs that killed 115 men, women and children — nothing happened.
We know this because the U.S. Department of Defence told us so. That evening, a Pentagon spokesman, questioned about reports of civilian casualties in eastern Afghanistan, explained that they were not true, because the U.S. is meticulous in selecting only military targets associated with Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network. Subsequent Pentagon utterances on the subject have wobbled somewhat, but there has been no retraction of that initial decisive statement: "It just didn't happen."
Three weeks later, on December 22, based on reports from tribal leaders, Independent correspondents Andrew Gumbel and Kim Sengupta filed from Kabul this lead: "American warplanes have destroyed a convoy of vehicles, killing at least fifteen people, in what was claimed to be a disastrous attack on a party of tribal elders traveling to today's inauguration of the new Afghan government." The page-one headline: campaign against terrorism: us airstrike 'kills allies of new kabul government.'
The New York Times account on the same day, in the third paragraph of a dispatch by Amy Waldman from Kabul, had another perspective: "While an Afghan Islamic Press report said that tribal elders on their way to Kabul were in the vehicles, the Defense Department expressed certainty tonight that the AC-130 gunships and Navy jets had found their desired targets: Taliban fleeing a compound that also was attacked."
The facts remained elusive for weeks. In early February, The Washington Post quoted Afghanistan's new leader, Hamid Karzai, as saying that U.S. authorities had admitted to him that they had indeed killed innocent people in the convoy. Karzai said U.S. forces had been purposely misled into believing the convoy included Taliban officials. Up to sixty-five people were reported to have been killed in the raid.
Those two samples reflect aspects of the broad differences between not just these correspondents, but British and American print journalism. Peter Preston, who has edited both the Guardian and the Observer, points out that the two nations' newspapers are "far apart in their basic impulses." Those impulses arise from geography, tradition, and competition.
'Artificial Balance'
Geography dictates, first, that the British press, like its government and economy, is centralized in London, with the entire nation within easy reach by road and rail. Ten national newspapers are published within a few miles of each other, though none is any longer actually on Fleet Street, which gave the British press its nickname. Geography also has forced Britain and its journalists to pay far closer attention to the outside world than most Americans, or most American journalists, usually do. This international experience has produced a number of reporters of great experience and sophistication in foreign coverage.
The tradition of the British press is, in the words of George Brock, managing editor of the Times, one of "partisanship and polemical writing." Objectivity, as it is generally understood by American journalists, is not a core value for the British. "We will encourage writers to be opinionated within limits — analytical and interesting — but only inside the guideline that they write what they know to be the truth to the best of their belief," said Brock. "That falls well short of any encouragement or incentive to bend the truth as they see it. We think that intelligent readers understand that an artificial requirement for 'balance' hampers, rather than promotes, understanding."
Like many British journalists, Brock regards most American papers as boring. In the fiercely competitive world of the British national press, dullness is a cardinal sin. While most American papers enjoy something close to local monopolies, ten London dailies fight for about 13 million readers on thousands of newsstands.
Broadly, the papers divide along lines of class and ideology. The mass circulation tabloids — most notably the Rupert Murdoch-owned Sun (circulation 3.4 million) and the Mirror (circulation 2.2 million), owned by Trinity Mirror — have little overlap of readership with the broadsheets. The Sun is conservative and strongly nationalistic. The Mirror, equally working-class in its appeal, traditionally supports Labour governments.
Colin Harrow, managing editor of the Mirror, is used to Americans who equate tabloid journalism with The National Enquirer and similar supermarket titles. A bit defensively, he begins a conversation, "The Mirror is a newspaper, not a celebrity scandal sheet." Though admitting that his paper shows its share of celebrity faces — if not as many other body parts as the Sun famously displays on its page three — he provides a definition of the tabloid's role: "We are there to say to an audience that doesn't have time to pore over the Independent or the Times, these are the issues. Here's one view — not the only view."
The Sun and the Mirror, as bitterly opposed ideologically as they are commercially, have staged their own war within a war. The Sun strongly, even violently, supports the war and urges greater British involvement. The Mirror, while generally supportive of the Blair government, has questioned both America's tactics and Blair's unquestioning cooperation.
The fall of Kabul brought out the heavy artillery on both sides of the newspaper war. David Yelland, editor of the Sun, thundered in an editorial afterward that The Mirror, the New Statesman, The Observer, the Guardian — all the defeatists who had said the allies faced disaster in Afghanistan — were "traitors" and had been "wrong, wrong, wrong." The Mirror, in a full-page editorial the following day, carried photographs of Hitler, Stalin, Osama bin Laden — and David Yelland of the Sun, arguing that the Sun was guilty of the same kind of ideological blindness as the dictators and terrorists.
Britain's broadsheets include Murdoch's Times (678,000), Hollinger's Daily Telegraph (974,000), and the Guardian (424,000), which is owned by a family trust. The Times and the Daily Telegraph, as well as the Financial Times (446,000), owned by the Pearson Group, are conservative in both tone and politics. The Guardian and the Irish-owned Independent (203,000) are leftist. Straddling the class divide are the conservative Daily Mail (2.4 million) and the increasingly moderate Express (877,000).
The Independent has been more consistently critical of the war than any of its competitors, but it has not been alone. In both coverage and comment, the broadsheet Guardian and the tabloid Mirror have questioned American and British policies. Even generally supportive publications, such as the Times, the Daily Telegraph, and Pearson's weekly Economist, which has a U.S. circulation of 235,000, have published sharper criticism than readers of the American press are accustomed to seeing. (In the U.S., a review of post-9/11 coverage in selected outlets by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from September through December the percentage of stories that could be perceived as dissenting from the administration's point of view never exceeded 10 percent.) This critical stance in Britain includes not only commentary on editorial and op-ed pages but a consistent inclination to question official announcements and draw conclusions in the reporting. A few examples from three months of reading:
On October 29, the Guardian headlined an analysis bombs go astray, the casualties mount . . . and the doubts set in. An editorial cartoon in the November 30 issue showed an American soldier outside a besieged bombing site shouting, "Come out in pieces with your hands tied behind your backs!"
The Mirror on November 20 ran one of its frequent page-one editorials, this one objecting to American reluctance to deploy British troops. The headline: do not dither with our boys mr. president. The theme was that America was taking British support for granted. Yet the Mirror also published a strongly anti-war series of analytical reported pieces by journalist-turned-activist John Pilger.
After a November 19 press conference announcement by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Times summed up in a headline across the top of page-one: america will take no prisoners. The story quoted Rumsfeld's comment, "The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders, nor are we in a position, with relatively small numbers of forces on the ground, to accept prisoners." The Times correspondents and headline writer then marched through the ambiguity to draw their own conclusion. The lead: "American forces attacking Taleban fighters in Afghanistan are under orders to take no prisoners, the US Defence Secretary said last night."
The Economist on December 1 said the Rumsfeld press conference
"came horribly close to an invitation to kill even surrendering
combatants." And in the same issue, the magazine began a
report from Afghanistan: "Are the laws of war being broken
by America or its Afghan allies in their fight with the Taliban?"
British reporters often showed their readers more of the horrific details of war than did American writers.
A Times correspondent, Oliver August, reported the aftermath of the Taliban uprising in the prison at Kala-i Janghi with this lead: "Standing in a puddle of blood, I stared into the face of the boy soldier. His broken body was propped up against one of the few buildings left standing in this arena of the damned, as if he were taking a break from the fray to smoke a cigarette. His mouth gaped open. He looked strangely bewildered, almost regretful." The accompanying four-column photograph showed a Northern Alliance soldier prying a gold tooth from the mouth of a dead Taliban soldier. (The Telegraph found such writing a bit much. Its Media Diary — a standard feature in papers that write about each other much more than American papers do — commented, "We can't remember what award we gave to Anthony Loyd of the Times for his purple prose from Afghanistan, but he's got to give it back. His colleague, Oliver August, wins hands down . . . .")
'Unable to Confirm'
In intellectual circles, meanwhile, the ideological jousting drew blood. The October 4 edition of the London Review of Books published a collection of short essays reflecting on the attacks. They included one bombshell by the Cambridge University historian Mary Beard, who commented that "when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn't just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price."
The response was immediate. An American academic, Marjorie Perloff, wrote from California: "I hereby cancel my subscription and shall urge my Stanford students and colleagues to boycott the journal." Two months later, the letters pages of the Review continued to resound with argument and name-calling and, in at least one case, the withdrawal of a promised review. This division among academics mirrored a broader division in public opinion. While polls continue to show wide British support for America, the war itself was less popular.
Sensitivities about America were in such a state by the end of January that Hugo Young felt compelled to start a column in the Guardian — a piece critical of President Bush's State of the Union address and the U.S.'s current with-us-or-against-us mood — this way:
This will sound to some people like an anti-American column. It is not . . . . I am not anti-American in any of the conditioning senses the epithet usually signifies: ethnically hostile, corporately obsessed, economically resentful, chanting every night the well-known litany of Washington's postwar dirty deeds. . .
Andrew Anthony, writing in The Observer on November 18 about the war of opinion, argued that at least "there is room in the British press for a range of opinions."
American media watchers, including Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post and Eric Alterman of The Nation, have made similar points. The Guardian's Roy Greenslade, on a visit to the States, commented on the "easy ride" being given President Bush and contrasted that to the vigorous poking and prodding to which the British press subjects the prime minister and his cabinet.
Yet if the American press could be faulted for a shortage of critical coverage, it also has managed to avoid some spectacular gaffes to which the British seem prone. Even British journalists concede that the dark side of their emphasis on speed and exclusivity is the persistent problem of inaccuracy. Indeed, that problem is so great that The Associated Press is particularly hesitant to pick up material from the national newspapers unless it can be independently confirmed.
One highly visible example: The Times reported at the top of
page one on December 8, "Mullah Muhammad Omar was last night
being held captive as the Taleban lost control of their spiritual
stronghold Kandahar in a major breakthrough for the American-led
coalition." The New York Times, on the other hand, acknowledged
that report but added that the American military was "unable
to confirm" it. Nor could anyone else.
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