Redstate

By streiff Posted in User Blogs — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

While it is easy to understand a reporter accompanying an armed unit, of whatever allegiance, into combat, what kind of person would wait on a street corner, knowing a fellow human was to be butchered by a third party, and say nothing? What kind of person would encourage a mob to mangle corpses for the sake of video footage? An amoral freak? Or a journalist?

But is this behavior new?

Read on.From the 1987 PBS series Ethics in America an episode entitled Under Orders, Under Fire. The moderator is Charles Ogletree. The two panelists in this vignette are Mike Wallace (60 Minutes) and Peter Jennings (ABC).

Moderator:You are safely traveling with an enemy unit as a foreign war correspondent.  As fate would have it the enemy unit you are traveling with is about to ambush an American unit.

Jennings:  As a reporter you have to make the decision going in that there is a possibility that you may come upon an American unit.  My feeling is that, as a reporter, you have to make that decision before you went.  And that if you are in, you are in.  I would live in fear of coming across an American unit.

Moderator: So if you made that decision you would then film the enemy unit shooting the American unit?

Jennings:  (Long pause...thinking)  No...I guess I wouldn't.  I'll tell you now what I'm feeling rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself.  If I were with the enemy I would do what I could to warn the Americans.

Moderator: Even if it means not getting the live coverage?

Jennings:  I don't have much doubt it would mean my life.  I'm glad this is hypothetical.  I don't think I could bring myself to participate in that fashion, by not warning the Americans.  Some other reporters may feel otherwise.

Wallace: Some other reporters would feel otherwise.  I would regard it simply as another story I was there to tell.

Moderator: Enemy soldiers shooting and killing American soldiers?  Could you imagine how you would report that to the American people?

Wallace: Yes, I can. (Talking down to Jennings) Frankly, I'm astonished to hear Peter say that.  You are a reporter.  Granted you are an American.  But you are a reporter covering combat.  And I'm at a loss to understand why, because you are an American; you would not cover that story.

Moderator: Don't you have a higher duty as an American citizen to do all you can to save the lives of American soldiers rather than this journalistic ethic of reporting the fact?

Wallace: No.  You don't have the higher duty.  You are a reporter.  Your job is to cover what is going on in that war.  I would be calling Peter to say, "What do you mean you're not going to cover the story."

Jennings:  I think he's right.  I chickened out.  I agree with Mike intellectually. I really do.  And I wish at the time, I'd made another decision.  I would like to have made his decision.  

This attitude is not isolated in time. Fast forward to October 12, 2001. A scant month after the attacks of September 11. Loren Jenkins, senior foreign editor for National Public Radio in an interview:

"The game of reporting is to smoke 'em out," he says. Asked whether his team would report the presence of an American commando unit it found in, say, a northern Pakistan village, he doesn't exhibit any of the hesitation of some of his news-business colleagues, who stress that they try to factor security issues into their coverage decisions.

"You report it," Jenkins says. "I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened."

"I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened." An incredible claim, to say the least. But is it true? Is Mike Wallace really there to cover a war? Is Loren Jenkins really covering history? Or is it a massive conceit that masks another motivation.

Of course, part of this can be written off to the good old-fashioned kneejerk anti-Americanism that seems to be dominant world view among those who consider themselves part of the intelligentsia. That can explain some of these rather incredible statements concerning purportedly American journalists covering Americans fighting men at war. But is it sufficient?

Finishing a re-reading of Christopher Duffy's authoritative Military Experience in the Age of Reason I could not help but be struck by the incredible similarities between a class of journalists as represented by Wallace, Arnett, Jenkins, Burns, and others and the nobility who provided the officer corps to European armies of the 18th century.

There are similarities in the adherence to a code of honor that applied only within the class but not to those outside. Thus we are struck by a profession that feeds upon the grief of others, as in the inevitable television shot of a grieving family being asked how they feel, and even rewards those who traffic in the death and misery of others.

Indeed the attitude of journalists towards the rule of law one is reminded of  this definition of honor in the military regulations of mid-18th century Saxony:

The point of honour commands us to prefer duty to life, and honour to duty. The point of honour forbids kinds of behaviour which are permitted or even encouraged by the law, just as it allows certain conduct which is legally forbidden.

This adherence to a code of honor is a subset of a larger phenomenon: the loyalty to caste rather than nation. Though Wallace, belatedly Jennings, and Jenkins may refer to loyalty to the story or to history before we give this line of rhetoric credence we need to critically examine it.

John Burns, foreign correspondent for the New York Times, was interviewed in a book entitled Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History.

So in the three or four days that followed, I got a call from the Times saying that they had certain indications from the Pentagon that in twenty-four hours the information ministry would be gone. So I got up at 2:00 a.m., and I said to people downstairs, "Get Mr. Al-Tayyib here." He arrived at 5:00 a.m and I said to him, "Listen to me and listen carefully. I'm not going to cause a panic among journalists. I remember what you did to CNN the last time. I don't want to be accused of spreading alarm and despondency, but you've got to close that ministry down, because anybody who's in that building tomorrow night will be killed. We have friends in Washington. People who are concerned about my welfare and that of other American correspondents. That's how we know it."

For twenty-four hours he said he'd see what he could do. They did nothing. That night at 8:00 p.m, I went to every floor of the ministry. I told everybody. "Get off! Get off this building. It's going to be attacked this night."

Loyalty to the story and history? Or loyalty to caste?

One would think that in keeping with the sentiments of Wallace (I would regard it simply as another story I was there to tell.) or Jenkins ( I don't represent the government. I represent history, information, what happened.) that the ethical course of action for Burns to follow would be to cover the story of an errant US bomb wiping out the foreign press corps in Baghdad. But he didn't. Instead he used confidential information supplied by his employer to save other correspondents. Indeed, his actions were nothing less than human and humane.

This is not a shot at Burns, who I consider to be one of the best war correspondents on the scene today, but merely to juxtapose Burns' actions against the words mouthed by a couple of blowhards who were either unable or unwilling to come to grips the true justification for the course of action they proposed. Would Wallace or Jennings or Jenkins have sat on this information an allowed several dozen of their friends, colleagues, rivals, and competitors to be vaporized for the sake of the news? Perhaps. But hardly likely.

If this is the case, then why would Wallace let American troops be ambushed and killed? Why would Jenkins betray the location of American commandos? Why would a photographer receive a Pulitzer Prize for photographing a toddler slowly dying under the watchful gaze of a vulture? Because the people were not members of the caste.

And because they were not members of the caste they deserved no more consideration than that received by the peasantry when an army led by men adhering to a similar code sacked a village.