Examination of Witnesses (Questions 770-779)
MR MARTIN
IVENS, MR
ALEX THOMSON
AND MR
MARK URBAN
2 JULY 2003
Q770 Chairman: Thank you for coming,
gentlemen. I am sorry we have lost one of your colleagues. We
had an interesting session this morning with journalists who were
embedded and now we are eliciting the experience which you had
during the conflict. We have a lot of questions and as a Welshman
I am not fit to tell anybody to give brief answers but if you
want to escape by five o'clock then brevity would be appreciated.
Do you feel that an accurate picture of the war emerged during
the major combat phase of operations?
Mr Urban: I was in Shepherd's
Bush bravely holding the fort. From the outset it was clear that
the conflict had certain characteristics which made it quite unlike
some previous ones. If, for example, you were not expecting there
to be much organised resistance at the borders of the country
and you were expecting the coalition forces to penetrate quite
quickly into the country and for some sort of guerilla type of
resistance to be mounted, as indeed happened, it was always going
to be a little difficult to find out about the nature of that
resistance, where the hot spots were, how organised it was, how
spontaneous it was. With the exception of that factor, which clearly
was a significant factor, as to exactly what was going on in Nasiriyah
in the first few days of the war or some of the other towns there,
there was a pretty accurate picture in the early days of the war
and as it progressed it became more accurate. It was certainly
possible, sitting at an information hub to piece together from
a wide variety of different sources, including the embeds of course,
quite a lot of information which proved to be pretty reliable.
Mr Thomson: I was in the forward
transmission unit, which was certainly a unit which was transmitting
but not particularly forward; we were in Iraq just over the border
from Kuwait. Yes, the picture which emerged was quite accurate,
but it emerged almost by accident and emerged in many key instances
largely by virtue, to put it politely, of the misinformation which
the Army gave to journalists on the ground about what was happening,
in particular the fall of Umm Qasr, which did not fall until several
days after Geoff Hoon told the House of Commons it had; the first
uprising in Basra, which turned out not to exist; the second uprising
in Basra which did not exist; the tank column coming out of Basra,
which turned out not to exist. The problem with that, as a reporter,
was simply that it gave the impression first and foremost that
expectations and hopes were raised in terms of the way the campaign
was going, only for it then to emerge that in fact what had been
said, possibly in the heat of battle, who knows, turned out not
to be the case. The emerging picture was that the Fedayeen, the
militias, were putting up more of a fight than people expected.
Mr Ivens: You wanted to balance
it, so you were not suggesting that the whole campaign was a cakewalk
on the one hand, nor that the resistance was of a nature that
more over-heated commentators would say was of a Stalingrad nature.
It was our job to try to give balance to that sort of coverage
of the war. If you took a cooler approach, you tried to steer
between those two extremes.
Q771 Chairman: Which parts of the
war do you think less reflected the reality which emerged afterwards?
Mr Ivens: There is a pressure
of events on twenty-four-hours-a-day news organisations. I agree
with my colleagues, that was partly the result of the information
which had been pushed out by allied forces, which sometimes led
to expectations of over rapid success very unnecessarily. The
war, by and large, was successful and therefore to jump the gun
over the fall of various strategic positions was unnecessary and
does not ultimately aid morale—if that is the concept—back
home, does it?
Q772 Chairman: Can you guess which
is a genuine mistake, which fog of war?
Mr Ivens: There is a bit of both,
is there not? There is fog of war and there is a sense of over-eagerness
and anticipation and the allied governments wanting things to
work well as soon as possible.
Q773 Chairman: Was there the same
problem that there was during the Falklands, where you will recall
the MoD suddenly relented and agreed to take a lot of journalists
as opposed to the handful they were going to and it appeared that
whoever was around in the newsroom was then asked to volunteer
to get to Portsmouth, or wherever, the following day. The result
was that not every member of that cohort of the press was a PhD
in war studies from King's College. Was there problem? Do you
feel that a lot of the people who were reporting back, as there
were so many journalists, really were as new to war and defence
issues as they would have been if they had been sent off to Birmingham
to cover a riot of some kind?
Mr Thomson: That is undoubtedly
true, more particularly, the people in the forward embeds were,
simply because of the numbers involved, not in every case the
most seasoned war correspondent. In terms of the examples I have
just outlined, every single one of those came not from journalists
but from the military themselves. So something. Fog of war? I
do not know. Something odd was going on and was going on repeatedly,
because they were simply breaking a very basic rule, not just
of PR, but of fighting military campaigns. They were reporting
back things as having happened when they clearly had not. That
was not the journalists.
Q774 Chairman: What about the BBC?
I presume you are all great experts out in the field there, seasoned
campaigners, men and women.
Mr Urban: The BBC does have the
advantage of the size of the organisation. It does have quite
a lot of seasoned people—you were talking to Gavin Hewitt
this morning. It also has, which pretty much all of the newspapers
have lost, a good number of analysts who can be put, whether it
is in Shepherd's Bush or whether it is Qatar or one or two other
places, and people who are in the business of trying to put it
together and make sense of the disparate strands of information.
In a sense in a situation like that, one is grateful to be working
for the BBC in that environment. Certainly, looking at the newspaper
where I used to work and looking at other places, you saw that
their ability to respond to a huge story like that by putting
informed people all over the place was definitely less, inevitably
as small organisations.
Mr Ivens: It depends on the size
of the newspaper. I represent the Sunday Times and we were
able to field four foreign correspondents who had been given the
title Foreign Correspondent of the Year. We had had one journalist
in Baghdad whose experience of war went right back to the killing
fields in Cambodia and we were able to see things within the light
of that experience and we gave our readers an extremely good idea
of how the war was being conducted. We had one particularly good
illustrative picture of the war from a particular correspondent
called Mark Francetti, who was embedded with the 1st and 2nd Battalion
of Marines at Nasiriyah, who observed American soldiers firing
at will on civilians attempting to leave the town at night. Typically,
we were praised by New Statesman for providing the best
accountant of the war. Given the lead times, you could actually
put up quite a good show in terms of correspondents, so I do not
think it is just a matter of the BBC being able to field a decent
operation, Fleet Street could do rather well at it.
Q775 Chairman: You all represent
very reputable organisations, but there must have been a number
of people reporting in that vast number of journalists who were
distorting, either because of wilfulness, or because of lack of
an ability to interpret or to investigate and other reasons. Without
in any way asking you to shop your colleagues, did you get the
impression that overall outside your own specific areas of employment
that your profession did a very good job, good job, reasonable
job or not such a very good job as a whole, if one can generalise?
Mr Urban: It is reasonable under
the circumstances. It is clearly a problem, if you want to talk
about journalism as a whole. What is required in a situation where
there are hundreds of embeds and other reporters on beats in northern
Iraq and Jordan and all over the place, is a kind of surge capability,
in military terms. It is plain that in the culture of many newsrooms
in the course of the 1990s knowledge of defence and specialism
in defence was held pretty cheap and did decline in importance
as a specialism. When required to have a surge capability, some
organisations were probably more embarrassed than others, but
whether you had been able to put two people with a track record
either of war or defence reporting, or whether you had been able
to put six, it probably was not going to be enough to fill all
the billets required in a surge situation like that. Then of course
you do get people—I am sure you can all think of episodes
or reports—who are reporting heavy fire fights in certain
places. In a way, the definition of a heavy fire fight is one
you are in the middle of. It is often the case for soldiers themselves
that they may over-estimate enemy casualties as a result of what
has happened. They may over-estimate the significance of the episode
they have just been involved in. If you feel that you have done
reasonably well to get away with your life at the end of a particular
day, then you may well over-estimate the importance of the episode
and clearly journalists, in common with soldiers occasionally
fall into that trap.
Q776 Chairman: You are all veterans
of foreign wars. Comparatively speaking were things better this
time in relation to the quality of information which comes from
organisations such as yours compared with the last Gulf War?
Mr Thomson: I covered the last
Gulf War. It is very difficult to say, because it was such a completely
different campaign and largely happened in terms of an air assault
and then a 100-hour dash through the desert. There really were
not the same sort of parameters and equally the same sort of hub
and spoke operation had not been put in place. In terms of quality
of reporting, to take Mark's analogy, it depends how embedded
you get psychologically. If you are going to have a surge, it
depends how willing you are simply to take what people are telling
you with whom you are surging. Equally there were plenty of instances,
let us be frank, of reporters who were not particularly experienced,
using words like "enemy", talking about us and reporting
the war in those terms with, frankly, complete insouciance about
what they were saying, which perhaps some people might take issue
with. A little bit of Stockholm syndrome goes on inevitably in
these situations, which you have to be aware of and you have to
fight against.
Q777 Mr Howarth: Do you think the
conduct of the campaign was influenced by the media?
Mr Ivens: What does that mean?
Can you define your terms a bit?
Q778 Mr Howarth: You had your 700
embeds all out there with their little shaft of light on individual
scenes. Meanwhile you were back at base pulling all this information
in and trying to build the composite picture from the individual
contributions you received for the viewers back home. Obviously
the media coverage was influential in the sense that it informs
public opinion, but did you perceive from where you were sitting,
talking as you were with "experts", that there was a
sense in which the way in which you were covering it was influencing
at all the military campaign or was it a campaign which had been
already forged and it just carried on?
Mr Thomson: General Brims took
us to his tent two nights before the invasion began and told us
the plan; there it all was on the wall, this was how they were
going to fight the war. To me it did not seem particularly that
that was going to be done according to the conveniences of the
media. To flip the coin for a moment, it would be naive to suppose
that the Army would end up in a situation where an awful lot of
correspondents were based with units who plainly were not going
to do anything, although that did happen in certain cases. For
instance, the smart money at one point was on the Paras being
awfully involved and quite a few journalists spent the entire
time sitting out with the Paras, doing not very much as it turned
out in terms of the invasion. There is both of those sorts of
extremes to take into account.
Q779 Mr Howarth: Did you yourself
see any evidence of the manner in which the war was being fought
being affected by the presence of journalists? Did you get a sense
in which the military were hugely sensitive to the presence of
the journalists right up on the front line and were tailoring
their campaign in the full knowledge that what was happening was
coming back through you and out to the public?
Mr Thomson: I suppose I had better
answer that as I was there. In terms of Basra, for instance, I
genuinely did not, no. They originally said that Basra was never
going to be a military target and they were essentially sucked
into a situation where it became one by virtue of the deployment
of the militias and what they subsequently did. I personally did
not think anything was being tailored at all in terms of being
done for the cameras, which is basically what you are driving
at.
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