Examination of Witnesses (Questions 840-859)
MR MARTIN
IVENS, MR
ALEX THOMSON
AND MR
MARK URBAN
2 JULY 2003
Q840 Mr Roy: So no one was tempted.
To go back to the 101st Airborne, you knew they were going to
go into action at some point, so nobody was tempted to look particularly
intelligent and say a couple of hours before that they thought
the 101st Airborne might come in at some point? Was there a temptation
to do that?
Mr Thomson: Huge; yes, for me.
Brims showed us how he was going to fight the war.
Q841 Mr Roy: Did you succumb?
Mr Urban: We did succumb, yes.
Before the war we ran a thing which included this assessment that
guerilla resistance would be an important factor, in which the
war plan was addressed and discussed in very broad-brush terms.
Clearly it was not based on any official briefing at all, because
self-evidently the terms on which that would have been given,
as with Alex, was that . . . you know. It was based on the common
sense of deployment and the fact that basically the marines were
going to be on the right and the army was going to be on the left
and that Saddam was not going to defend his frontiers, all of
which took you in certain directions. There was only one mechanised
division. It was pretty obvious, once you knew they were on the
left, that they were only going one place and it was obvious where
it was going if you looked at it.
Q842 Mr Howarth: May I ask you a
question about the embedded journalists in Baghdad? To what extent
did you, back at base, filter the information which was coming
out of Baghdad, knowing that they were under these restrictions?
We all got bored of hearing that these reporters were reporting
under Iraqi restrictions, but quite a strong resentment was developing
that these embedded people had developed a bit of a Stockholm
syndrome. To what extent were you, particularly the BBC, who perhaps
came in for more flak than other broadcasters, concerned that
the wrong impression was being given, that somehow the BBC was
being neutralised between good and evil?
Mr Urban: I have to say that is
above my pay grade. That is a question for editorial management.
It was not my personal responsibility to define the terms on which
those reports should be introduced or to try in some sense to
balance or correct or whatever else. It really was not a job which
fell to me personally.
Mr Thomson: They were not embedded.
That is a curious use of the term "embedded".
Q843 Mr Howarth: That was deliberate.
Mr Thomson: They were in a hotel
and if you stayed at the Rashid or the Palestine you might think
it was embedded.
Q844 Mr Roy: May I move on to news
values? How aware of western news values were you when you were
editing the images of the combat itself, that is dead bodies,
body parts? How much did that play in your final product, that
is what the viewers saw, heard and read?
Mr Ivens: Do you mean on grounds
of taste?
Q845 Mr Roy: Yes.
Mr Ivens: If that is western values,
then we were influenced by them.
Q846 Mr Roy: Did you have to edit
them down?
Mr Ivens: It is a sensitive matter
whether you show horrific pictures altogether. There are degrees
of taste about it and we would not go for something which we would
consider to be needlessly gratuitous.
Q847 Mr Roy: Would you like the openness
of the images that al-Jazeera were able to broadcast? Does it
play a part in the mindset in the United Kingdom that it has to
be edited down to make it more socially acceptable?
Mr Thomson: Yes; absolutely. Television
does. If you are working for a programme which goes out at seven
in the evening, there are enormous considerations that children
often are watching.
Q848 Mr Roy: If that is the case,
how would you square that with live television? What is the mechanism
you would use? At some point in time, some soldier is going to
lose his life at five o'clock in the afternoon when the kids are
back from school and it is going to be an absolutely horrific
scene.
Mr Thomson: It is an absolutely
horrific scene.
Q849 Mr Roy: I know it is, but they
have never seen it before.
Mr Thomson: No and you are going
to. You are going to see it. Sooner or later it is going to happen.
How they deal with that, I do not know. I really do not know.
Fortunately I am not paid to make those decisions. Yes, technology
being what it now is, you can and will in the future be sitting
on that APC and something is going to happen. Yes.
Mr Roy: I remember watching some live
footage coming in on a Saturday afternoon with two guys lying
on concrete shooting at something and I thought that if these
guys got shot, it was ten past three on a Saturday afternoon and
it was going to be absolutely horrific.
Q850 Rachel Squire: You were talking
earlier about the dangers faced by the lone unilateral journalist.
Going to the other extreme, the impression we all got from the
media information centre at CENTCOM, was that you just had massed
ranks of media. Would you like to comment on how you felt that
CENTCOM media information centre operated and, frankly, whether
you found its output disappointing or very positive?
Mr Thomson: I could not comment
myself. I just had no contact with it. I did not see it.
Mr Urban: The problem is that
none of the three of us was there. We would be reluctant to talk
on behalf of colleagues.
Q851 Chairman: It seemed to be a
pretty superfluous exercise out there.
Mr Urban: Yes, it is a matter
of recorded fact that they waited rather longer to mount their
first briefing than the baying mob they had at the front would
have liked. It is interesting when you hear in this debate post
war from people in the military or the MoD this idea about the
mosaic or the snapshot or whatever. Clearly from their point of
view, the media operations plan involved having this CENTCOM central
briefing. I know there was some discussion about whether they
should do something in Kuwait on a similar pattern and it was
decided to keep it in Qatar. I think it disappointed the military.
One of the responses in London centrally was that MoD started
putting on briefings and making certain people available for interview
more often. The Secretary of State was able to appear on Newsnight
quite a few times. You would have to ask them, but my understanding
was that they had to do more here than they had originally anticipated
doing because CENTCOM had disappointed in terms of being the central,
whatever you want to call it, rebuttal or information point that
people had thought it might be before the war.
Q852 Rachel Squire: Media organisations
themselves came in for some criticism from all sides during the
war. Fox TV in the US was considered far too much in favour of
the war, the BBC got it from both sides, from the military and
being at times critical but the anti-war movement saying you were
biased. Then, those of us who watched al-Jazeera's output from
time to time got a very different slant on the war to that of
the western media organisations. Would you like to say anything
about whether you felt there was a very different approach amongst
the different networks to their coverage of the war and to what
extent the western media was too much influenced by western attitudes
in its coverage?
Mr Thomson: That is a big one.
The overwhelming thing is simply self-censorship in our country,
in our culture. It probably just is almost a British and Irish
thing. Even in Europe standards are different and tastes are different
as to what you can show. So much so that Channel Four, for instance,
put out The War you never saw at half eleven at night principally
to get over the fact that in a war people get killed. It made
one or two other significant points as well. That is an expression
almost of the feeling that we had sanitised this one just like
we sanitised the last one in 1991 and to some extent Afghanistan
as well. It is very hard to see a way around it, it really is,
particularly for programmes like mine at seven in the evenings.
It is very difficult.
Q853 Chairman: It is the bias of
the media we keep banging on about. Forgive us for this. What
happens if you are a journalist in a certain newspaper and the
editorial line is very gung-ho for the war or very hostile to
the war? What if you then send up a story that does not reflect
that editorial or ownership bias? Do you think the organisations
you serve were reasonably fair in their output?
Mr Thomson: I never saw the output,
because I was there.
Q854 Chairman: You were the output,
were you not?
Mr Thomson: Yes, to some degree.
No, a colleague of mine, Nick Parker, from The Sun came
there to do The Sun thing and that is "I'm Nick Parker.
I'm from The Sun. It does what it says on the tin".
Q855 Mr Howarth: Could you just explain
what you think The Sun thing is, apart from Page Three?
Mr Thomson: Apart from Page Three,
"Our boys done a great job". That is The Sun's
line and Nick was there and did a very good job and I am sure
he did what his editor and the editorial line wanted. That is
a given, is it not? The job pays your mortgage. You are not going
to turn round and give the editor what he does not want. In so
far as I can understand it, that is the newspaper world.
Mr Ivens: No, it is not the entire
newspaper world. I think that is absolutely wrong. By and large
you got rather interesting coverage of the war. People may have
been over zealous for and against the war before the war started,
but a lot of the papers which were pro or against the war said
some rather interesting things about that campaign during its
course which did not reflect the editorial line of their newspapers.
The readers by and large wanted that. In the case of my paper,
they knew where we were: we were in favour of it. We would have
broken trust with them if we had not written things which were
not embarrassing to the allied cause. You have to be very careful
before you broad brush the newspapers in that fashion.
Mr Thomson: I was simply saying
what I saw with my good friend and colleague Nick on The Sun,
that is all. I was not making any bald point at all. Clearly some
newspapers have an editorial line and some reporters follow that
pretty much to the letter; others do not.
Q856 Chairman: We had Air Marshal
Burridge before us, who said these flattering words of your profession
"you stand for nothing". What do you think he meant
by that? I suspect it was in terms of journalistic impartiality
or partiality.
Mr Thomson: I think what he means
by that is that we do not stand for what he stands for.
Q857 Chairman: That is a clever answer;
a good first try. What else do you think he meant? That you had
no sense of loyalty, patriotism, playing the game? Do you think
the Ministry of Defence expected a greater sense of empathy with
the military?
Mr Ivens: It is an interesting
question. I do not think it deserves a simple answer. The statement
came at a particular time in a particular campaign. Had we been
talking about a war against the Nazis or putative World War 3
against the Soviet Union, there might have been a different reply.
You are talking about complicated, despite what looks like the
large scale of it, medium-sized campaigns, which were reflective
of this country's own experience in the 1940s and 1950s by and
large, which were controversial in that context. If you look back
at the campaigns in Cyprus, Aden and other post-war conflicts
and the Mau-Mau rising in Kenya, those were not somehow politically
isolated. A very, very good example would have been Enoch Powell,
of all people, who criticised the behaviour of British troops
in the Mau-Mau campaign. You are not talking about a war to the
death of British society, are you? To throw it back: what do you
expect of us? We are there to give you uncomfortable truths at
a difficult moment.
Q858 Chairman: The Cold War. Those
were the great days. That was when MI5 were safely embedded in
the upper echelons of the BBC. Things have changed since then.
Mr Thomson: Christmas trees.
Q859 Chairman: What are your views
on the hiring of armed guards for unilateral journalists? I know
you were not unilateral.
Mr Thomson: We were actually towards
the end.
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