Examination of Witnesses (Questions 820-839)
MR MARTIN
IVENS, MR
ALEX THOMSON
AND MR
MARK URBAN
2 JULY 2003
Q820 Mr Roy: Levels of censorship.
Mr Thomson: I have desperately
being trying to think up more. As perhaps is inevitable, I do
not know, one can be a bit precious about it, there was a departure;
obviously once battle commences sensitivities get very high about
things like tone and taste and embarrassment and issues like that.
Just the examples I quoted were fairly minor because obviously
the invasion went reasonably well. One can only guess again that
what needs to be stressed is that these media operations grow
organically. What we have here did not just happen, it grew out
of the Falklands and it grew out of Kosovo and it grew out of
1991 Gulf War and that is pretty much now the blueprint. What
has to be taken on board is that this is fine and the military
are getting coverage which would break the budget of any advertising
agency in terms of showing what you are doing on television. When
things start to go wrong, as they inevitably will in future conflicts,
one wonders at that stage how things will play out in terms of
holding back material, withholding material, preventing material
getting back and so forth.
Q821 Mr Roy: You said earlier that
it was the most unpopular war.
Mr Thomson: No, I did not. I said
it was an historically unpopular war.
Q822 Mr Roy: Can I tell you that
in my constituency, that was not the case. In my constituency
it was not historically the most unpopular war.
Mr Thomson: This is an important
point. I did not say historically the most unpopular war. I said
it was an historically unpopular war as wars go. For instance
compared to Kosovo, compared to the last Gulf War, compared to
the Falklands, in terms of recent history, this was a good deal
less popular.
Q823 Mr Roy: Therefore it is more
unpopular.
Mr Thomson: Yes.
Q824 Mr Roy: Does your perception—and
that is your perception—
Mr Thomson: No, no; that is not
my perception. It is important. That is a matter, I think, of
demonstrable fact, in terms of opinion polls, at least one million
people demonstrating in London. It is not a matter of perception,
it is a matter of fact.
Q825 Mr Roy: The United Kingdom does
not finish in the streets of London, let me tell you. What I really
want to get at is that if that was your viewpoint, would that
then follow through to the type of reporting you would do, or
your organisation would do, on a particular war which was historically
unpopular or historically popular? I am trying to connect this
to censorship and things. Does that come through in the type of
reporting you do?
Mr Thomson: Unquestionably yes.
It was incumbent on people like me for instance to ask the likes
of Robin Brims and equally soldiers on the ground whether it affects
their morale knowing that they are out there to fight this war,
which the government have embarked upon, knowing that war is very
unpopular in many quarters. It is clearly not a question one would
ask in terms of some other conflicts which have involved this
country.
Q826 Mr Roy: Equally, do you take
into account the effect that could have on the service personnel
reading, listening and viewing the news? We were told this morning
that did have an effect on the service personnel. Are you aware
of that?
Mr Thomson: Then that is reality:
it had an effect on service personnel. I would say to you that
I would suspect that effect was already there. There were soldiers
who would say that while it does have an effect, a lot of the
lads were asking questions about what it is all about, that sort
of stuff, they were actually very forthcoming—and this speaks
well for the military that you are not in a situation completely
where "You can talk to anyone you want, so long as you talk
to him, him and him" and him, him and him all say the same
thing. We have moved slightly beyond that. Soldiers are thinking
people, their families are thinking people. They do not, nor should
they, live in a vacuum, without information, without questioning
what is going on.
Q827 Mr Roy: What would you say if
I said to you that we have already been told that some service
personnel became disillusioned during the war after reading the
reports, not before it, as you are saying. They obviously had
their own opinion before it, but they became absolutely disillusioned
on reading the reports and listening and viewing. Are you aware
of that?
Mr Thomson: If those reports were
the truth and they responded in that way, then that is the reality
of it. We are not here to imbue the troops with any feelings whatsoever
for or against the war. We are there to find out what their views
are about fighting the war, if they feel able to give them. If
those feelings are positive or negative, so be it.
Q828 Mr Roy: What kind of responsibility
do you have to the United Kingdom citizens? Do you have any responsibility?
Mr Thomson: If you are trying
to argue that it is the business of the press and the media to
uphold the morale of the troops in times of war, I disagree.
Q829 Mr Roy: Let me be clear. I am
not trying to make an argument, I am just trying to fish out exactly
what your feelings are about whether you have responsibility?
Mr Thomson: What my job is, is
to go and find out what is going on. In this case—and this
is not my perception, it is a matter of incontestable fact—this
was a very unpopular war. I am not saying that most people opposed
it: I am just saying that an awful lot of people had very strong
feelings about the war and why it was fought. That being the case,
soldiers not living in a vacuum, it is incumbent upon journalists
to reflect what the feelings in that regard are on the ground,
in so far as they can get them.
Q830 Rachel Squire: Did it encourage
you to look for criticism and discontent?
Mr Thomson: In the sense that
meant did I go out there and ask soldiers those sorts of questions
in this conflict, which perhaps would not have been in the forefront
of my mind in 1991, or in Kosovo, then the answer to that is yes,
of course it did. I would not be doing my job, if I did not.
Q831 Rachel Squire: Where does journalistic
impartiality come into that when your questions had a clear bias
to them?
Mr Thomson: My questions do not
have a bias to them. My questions were reflecting that there was
unpopularity at home. It is an interesting and perfectly legitimate
job to find out whether that is having an effect on morale in
the field. I cannot see anybody having a problem with that.
Q832 Mr Roy: I accept that there
was unpopularity at home. During the time of the conflict did
you reflect that that had actually changed once the war began?
Mr Thomson: Yes. In the context
that this is before the war began. Once the war began, fine, we
have had our demonstrations and there has been a big political
row about what has been going on or otherwise; a lot of people
had question marks. That was then and now here we are going over
the border and frankly there are much more congruent issues to
talk about and report on once the troops are over the border and
invading another country.
Q833 Chairman: If you are TV or radio,
there are public standards you have to adhere to in terms of balance.
If you are a newspaper, it appears there are no such standards.
If you happen to be supporting the government and reading The
Independent, The Guardian, the Daily Mirror,
then you are in a losing corner, because you are unlikely to get
a great deal of information to sustain your views. This is not
asking a question but what irritates are the newspapers who, the
deeper they went into the war, the more successful the war was
from the standpoint of the government, the more their hostility
was made obvious. This is irritating when public service broadcasters
and television and radio broadcasters, who do have to adhere to
certain standards, produce one set of broadcasts and information
which is reasonably fair—there are exceptions—but
the others can just hammer away incessantly undermining morale
with no impetus whatsoever, either internally or externally generated,
to be fair, if by fair it means treating the British Government
as fairly as they would treat other combatants. That is what truly
rankles. I would never expect the media simply to shout appreciatively
and wave their flags, but it is possible it is quite damaging
if some newspapers go in absolutely the opposite direction. You
can produce evidence with certainty and so can I, but I admire
those journalists who try to be fair.
Mr Ivens: Yes, but we must be
fair to newspapers which have been opposed to the war before the
campaign began. They are very often broad churches and we were
editorially out of sympathy with some of the newspapers you describe,
but they would have different journalistic perspectives and they
would try hard to have a more balanced view of the war than just
something which was programmed by the office to say that they
were to do their damnedest to oppose it in what they reported
from the field. There is a danger of being a little too hard on
them.
Mr Thomson: In times of war the
last thing you want to do is live in a country where none of the
media rankles you with what they are saying. Being rankled is
a sign of health.
Q834 Mr Roy: May I go back to the
issue of censorship and whether there was censorship and in what
form?
Mr Urban: This is where I have
the disadvantage of weathering the conflict in W12. The short
answer to your question is no, there are not nightly phone calls
from some strange government committee, call it the D-Notice Committee,
call it what you will, saying you will not report on these two
members of the SBS who are now E&E-ing their way towards Syria
because they had an unfortunate mishap with their Land Rover.
We did show their Land Rover, but we were not even aware, say
in that case, that there were two people on the ground and there
was no attempt, in that case, for example to say to us "Don't
use those pictures". They had already been all over Iraqi
television. In that sort of heavy-handed, overt, obvious way,
it does not happen, but, equally, like Alex, I would agree that
we need to be grown-up about it and when we sometimes have voluntarily
agreed or we have entered into an arrangement, we need to be mature
and to confess or be honest with ourselves or our viewers or our
readers that yes, there are certain circumstances, clearly in
the context of the embeds, where you were not going to reveal
future operations. There was one situation where, after a discussion
with the Ministry of Defence, I decided not to do a particular
story at that time. Was that censorship? No, in the sense that
it was clear at the end of the conversation that we were perfectly
at liberty to go ahead and broadcast the story or to talk about
the subject I wanted to talk about. In that sense there were not
late night phone calls to the DG, nothing like that. There was
no attempt in any sense to say "Drop the story" or "If
you run the story, there'll be trouble". However, there was
a discussion in which the pros and cons of running it were discussed
and I decided on balance, with the editor of Newsnight, it was
probably best not to run it at that time. I do not know whether
that is censorship or not?
Q835 Mr Roy: I suspect all the programmes
and newspapers were read and watched and radio listened to very
closely. You mentioned the embeds there. Could the embeds have
become a tool of propaganda? Was there a danger? Did you ever
feel there was ever a danger that they could become tools of our
government propaganda, MoD propaganda, or, worse, inadvertently
a source of intelligence to the Iraqis.
Mr Urban: My assessment would
be that if you had an Iraqi military intelligence cell monitoring
the output of all the embeds—and let us not forget the vast
majority of these people were with the US forces and they were
Americans—that you could learn an enormous amount of military
value. For example, it was fairly clear to me roughly what the
plan was beforehand from various sources and I decided that the
commitment of the 101st Airborne Division would be a significant
factor when it happened. So every day I would check up on Rick
Atkinson, who was a very celebrated writer and author of one or
two very good books, a top class journalist and who was an embed
with the 101st Airborne Division. I would check up with him on
the Washington Post to see where he was and what he was
up to and generally if he did not file, or if he said "Preparations
to move out", I knew which corner of Kuwait they were in
and I could understand that when the 101st Airborne Division was
committed it would be a good sign about the 3rd Army's main axis.
Q836 Mr Roy: Were you never tempted
to mention the 101st Airborne before they committed?
Mr Urban: Yes, we did mention
them. I am pretty sure that when they started moving we mentioned
it, because it was then on the Washington Post website.
I am quite convinced that an army that was capable of large-scale
effective resistance could have gleaned much of value from the
embed system, but that the assessment of the Pentagon was that
they would not be capable and that the requirement of getting
the message out, call it what you will, was higher in their list
of priorities than the danger to operational security. Following
what Alex said about the way these things develop, I am sure he
is right, but equally, like Afghanistan, if for some reason in
the future, in a large-scale military operation, they decided
it was not in their interest to have embeds, I am sure the system
would be uninvented over night. In Afghanistan you had mainly
special operations forces for some weeks operating at the sharp
end. Clearly they did not want lots of journalists running around
and there were various other considerations. They just did not
want them there and they were not there. After a while they took
a few people into that base near Kandahar and all the journalists
were chafing at the bit and saying they had not been told anything.
I think that was clearly a war where they judged that the operational
security benefits of not having embeds were greater. In this one,
they made their judgments. I certainly think it is the case that
you could derive much of military interest from the reports of
embeds.
Q837 Mr Roy: Did you need to verify
that? I understood that in a twenty-four-hour news cycle there
was not an awful lot of time to verify stories. Could you talk
us through that? Was there a need to verify or did people just
wing it at times and is there a lesson to be learned from the
lack of verification?
Mr Urban: No, we are talking now
about the specifics of whether a particular brigade or something
is engaged and then where they are and what their mission is.
I got various things wrong or misunderstood at the time and it
showed in the presentations. That was not one of them. I do not
think we ever showed a significant error on where we placed any
of those units. The reason was that there was normally more than
one embed in each brigade, many in each division, which allowed
you to get some collateral and sometimes there were other contacts
by phone or whatever other method with colleagues and they would
say "We've just been north east of Kuwait and there are 300
helicopters there".
Q838 Mr Roy: So that allowed you
to back check?
Mr Urban: Yes. We would not have
run it on the basis of just talking to a colleague, because then
you get into the whole opsec thing. The fact that it was on the
Washington Post website and you could get collateral, then
gives you the confidence to draw the line on the map, as it were.
Mr Thomson: May I just say, because
I think it is an important feature, that the Americans were far
less concerned, for the reasons Mark has just outlined, on the
issue of opsec, the future stuff, than the British were. There
is no doubt about that.
Q839 Mr Roy: Was it a cultural thing?
Mr Thomson: Possibly. I was not
with the Americans. I cannot speak for them. It was the first
and only commandment with the British that you do not give away
opsec and that was it and everyone knew that, so much so that
nobody ever sat in on our edits or anything like that. They could
have done and we would have objected, but nobody bothered because
they knew what we knew; we had had the broad-brush picture and
they trusted us.
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