Self-censorship is a problem too with war correspondents. When journalists are embedded in a unit they do get to see a lot, and the press briefings given by Schwartzkopf and Powell during the last gulf war were detailed and explicit. But the networks will only choose correspondents who can be trusted, and this boils down to, in part, being prepared to "tow the party line" but also in part to recognizing that not everything can be reported while the war is going on, for genuine security reasons. So news directors and editors choose very particular types of correspondents for these jobs -- "responsible" ones -- and it's THEIR filters that obstruct the viewer/reader as much as, and perhaps more than, the military's. Robert Fisk wrote about how, when he wandered off on his own one day, it was the other journalists who had a go at him, not the military, because he risked "spoiling it for everyone". Although in fairness to the correspondents, it's impossible to judge in the heat of a battle whether what you report might harm people, so you can understand why they would err on the side of caution.
I agree with the points made in Chomsky's The Manufacture of Consent - that editors tend to employ people who are like them, which means there's an inherent conservatism in the way news organizations evolve. It applies as much to the left as to the right. Radical departures from a newspaper's ideology in search of truth are rare.
The other problem networks have is access, which is all they care about. If one network or newspaper repeatedly does things the U.S. or British govt don't like, they get cut off or restricted.
The viewers are a problem too because they don't want to see this stuff - when anything explicit i(i.e. warlike) is shown, they complain in droves. Do you remember the bombing of the al-Amiriya bomb shelter in February 1991 that housed the wives and children of Saddam's senior men? The aftermath of that was extensively filmed, but virtually none of it was shown in Britain or North America. Even the left-leaning newspapers in Britain didn't use it -- readers don't have the stomach for it.
I agree completely with the points you made about ownership and the news agenda being controlled by a very small number of people.
Sarah
At 7:27 PM -0500 02/20/2003, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
. . . journalists' and TV reporters' access to what was going on was heavily circumscribed by limits imposed by the military - and I believe that this severely limited what could be accurately reported on. This belief is borne out by the wealth of information that only emerged months or years after the war. As to the squeamishness of the media in depicting the horrors of war, well, why is that exactly?. . .
