THIRTEEN British soldiers died last month in Helmand province, Afghanistan. Their deaths were reported, for the most part, in small paragraphs on the inside pages of British newspapers. Why? Because journalists find it almost impossible to reach and report from the front line of the conflict.
When the Royal Marines launched a fierce hand-to-hand battle last Christmas in the muddy poppy fields of central Helmand, four soldiers died — but the only news that escaped was a press release from the British Ministry of Defense.
As in so many wars, truth seems to be the first casualty of this conflict. There has been a devastating breakdown of relations between many defense correspondents and officialdom, journalists say. “Dealing with the Ministry of Defense is genuinely more stressful than coming under fire,” says the Telegraph’s defense correspondent, Thomas Harding. “We have been lied to and we have been censored.”
Despite the risk of being blacklisted and refused access to report from the front line, journalists are speaking out about what they say is the British government’s attempt to control the news.
It is “lamentable,” says one Fleet Street foreign editor; the Times correspondent Anthony Loyd describes it as “outrageous”; Christina Lamb of the Sunday Times calls it “indefensible”; it is “redolent of Comical Ali,” says the Sun’s defense editor, Tom Newton Dunn.
Almost all journalists traveling with British forces are ordered to e-mail their copy to the military’s press officers in Helmand before publication. Many fear that negative coverage could mean trips back to the front line are canceled or delayed.
At the root of tensions between media and the MoD is the nature of the conflict in southern Afghanistan. The war in Helmand is so intense, so dangerous and so rural that covering it independently is almost impossible for any white Western journalist. Most reporters travel as “embeds” (there are only four or five slots available a month for national newspaper journalists); the way these trips are allocated, and the conditions imposed, contribute to fraught relations.
“They manipulate the parceling-out of embeds to suit their own ends,” says Harding. “They use it as a form of punishment to journalists who are off-message or critical of strategy or tactics.”
Earlier this year, a trip of Harding’s to Helmand was canceled, he said, because of “helicopter shortages.” He later heard privately from a press officer that it had more to do with his campaign against the army’s continued use of the Snatch Land Rover, and his tough questions to the chief of joint operations. Another reporter had a trip blocked after writing a critical feature about conditions for army soldiers.
The Foreign Office, the Department for International Development and the Cabinet Office — which all have members sitting on a committee called the Media Management Group, which regulates who gets what trips out to the battlegrounds — all “want coverage of (nonexistent) reconstruction and tree-hugging,” according to Newton Dunn. “Downing Street and the Foreign Office are incredibly restrictive about what comes out of Afghanistan,” he adds.
Nick Gurr, the MoD’s director of media and communications, denies there are penalties on journalists who write anything critical. “You only have to look at who we bring out to see how determined we are to engage with everyone,” he says. And he does have something of a point — critics of army tactics including Harding, Loyd and even myself do get asked back.
Al-Jazeera is offered occasional embeds. But when a journalist manages to reach the war zone, many describe their frustration at the low priority given to getting them out to the front line, as well as sometimes relentless control by “minders.”
Lamb was one of the first to report close-up on fighting in Helmand, when she was caught in an ambush in the summer of 2006. She was “effectively blacked” for two years, only returning in September 2008. The new slot she was given meant she saw no front line action. “I was told quite candidly the main priority was Tom Newton Dunn of the Sun, not me.”
The Guardian’s James Meek, embedded in Helmand in 2006, says he was allowed to speak freely, and had no problems with minders. However, he was sent to a relatively quiet zone, and his requests to visit bases where soldiers were engaged in combat were refused. “I was told quite candidly that the priority was the tabloids and television because it was important for recruitment,” he says.
The government’s media strategy seems to be based mainly around “the Sun and an EastEnders actor,” says the Fleet Street foreign editor I interviewed, referring to Ross Kemp, who made two TV series in Helmand. Newton Dunn, however, says he is equally frustrated: “I can get out only once a year, and only through kicking and screaming.”
If reporters do get a story, they are still controlled by the MoD, thanks to the Green Book — a contract drawn up jointly by the ministry and media organizations’ editors designed to give maximum press freedom while preserving operational security (“Opsec”). Its application, however, angers some reporters. In practice, they say, the Green Book is sometimes used to pressure them into removing facts that are merely embarrassing or politically inconvenient.
In Helmand, journalists say embeds are required to e-mail their copy to the ministry’s press information center before sending it on to their own news desks, though Gurr insists there is no Green Book requirement that copy be sent to the center; it could also, he says, be vetted by people in charge on the front line. “There are no hard and fast rules here,” Gurr adds.
Loyd describes filing a piece from the town of Musa Qala, describing British reaction to the appointment of a new police commander — a man known for profiting from the drugs trade and beating a local person to death. Loyd quoted a British officer saying they did not want the commander appointed, but Hamid Karzai, the president of Afghanistan, had insisted. The press information center told Loyd they did not approve of the quote. “They told me I had got to remove what the officer had said,” Loyd says. “Later, they admitted it was a Foreign Office press officer who had seen the copy and did not approve, for political reasons. It was outrageous.”