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Post by Ginnie on Mar 27, 2008 15:03:12 GMT -4
This topic piqued my curiosity so much that I just had to start a thread addressing the issue what a reporters duty is during war. That is, what he should report, should not report or delay reporting etc. Or not going into detail or even reporting false facts to confuse the enemy. Should a reporter just report the truth? Or does he have a responsibility as citizen of a country to not report things that might help the enemy? I think they are good questions and as always, don't have any black and white answers.
Reporters were stationed with Allied troops in Britain on June 5, 1944. I'm not sure how much they knew of the D-Day landings, but would we all agree that whatever information they had should definitely NOT be communicated to the public? And what would be a similar example during the Iraq invasion?
Please be polite... ;D
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 27, 2008 15:12:32 GMT -4
Well we can start with the simplest idea - reporters should not reveal details about a planned attack. Revealing when, where, or with what forces an attack will take place aids the enemy and endangers the lives of the soldiers who will be carrying out an attack.
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Post by gillianren on Mar 27, 2008 15:14:15 GMT -4
The first thing to remember is that a reporter need not be with the troops to do serious reporting on the war. Many of the important decisions are made at home, and keeping track of a lot of those is an important job as well. Not just the obvious "this is why they say we went to war; here's the evidence about why we actually went." Reporting on Eleanor Roosevelt's visit to the Tuskegee Airmen was pretty important, too, I think; it's part of the long journalistic tradition of showing uneven conditions. (Journalism did its part for the Civil Rights Movement, even by just showing what really happened. Ditto Murrow and McCarthy.)
There are some things that don't need to show up in current newspapers, though I do think it's a reporter's duty to keep note of them anyway, in case they're important in the future. The job involves taking a lot of notes, after all. Exactly where any given unit is? That doesn't need to be reported. The exact force of that unit. Secret missions, ye Gods. If the reporter has access to that information, keep it but don't share it until after it no longer matters.
I'm unusual in that I think that the principle job of journalism is as much education as anything. What you're learning is current events, true, but it's about learning. So the reporter has an obligation to tell you what it's really like. It is one thing not to give information because there's a reason to keep it. It is another to accept that the information you've been given is correct without checking it. Reporters who do the former are doing their jobs. Reporters who do the latter are not.
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Post by Ginnie on Mar 27, 2008 15:19:17 GMT -4
Well we can start with the simplest idea - reporters should not reveal details about a planned attack. Revealing when, where, or with what forces an attack will take place aids the enemy and endangers the lives of the soldiers who will be carrying out an attack. I agree for the most part. However Jason, can you think of a situation where the reporter would have a moral responsibility to expose the truth? For instance, what if a reporter knew the day before that the atrocities at Mai Lai were going to happen. I know this is very hypothetical and maybe is not a good example. The actions at Mai Lai was a spontaneous event, not planned as far as I know. Maybe you can come up with a better example...
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 27, 2008 16:07:44 GMT -4
I agree for the most part. However Jason, can you think of a situation where the reporter would have a moral responsibility to expose the truth? A tricky question. I would say yes, a reporter has a moral responsibility to expose crimes committed by forces of his own nation, but he cannot do so in a way that further endangers lives, even if they are the lives of soldiers committing atrocities. If he can also avoid giving encouragement to the enemy he should. If a reporter knew that an atrocity was about to be committed, his best option would be to report it to the superiors of those involved - to work within the military's own disciplinary system. If the atrocity is stopped and the officer who gave the illegal orders disciplined then we have a better story for all concerned. If he somehow can't report to the military officials but can report it along civilian channels, he can always ask his editor, etc. to get the military brass' attention. If even that doesn't work, then he could try reporting it publicly without including details that will further endanger people's lives, but I very much doubt that this scenario would occur, at least not with U.S. troops.
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Post by lionking on Mar 28, 2008 3:24:00 GMT -4
sometimes it is not if he says anything or not, but the way e says it and if he/she gives it emphasis or not. In Naher Al Bared camp war that took place last year between the Lebanese Army and the terrorists, there were some civilian casualties. Al Jazeera TV that is against the government emphasized a lot on the civilians to say that the Army is being criminal against them, while the deaths were minimal accroding to the Lebanese media and then the civilians were allowed to leave the camp. The Army put its soldiers in danger elongating the war to try to hit only the terrorists who hid next to civilians. On the other side, the Lebanese media pro-government didn't emphasize on this but on the deaths of the terrorists. There were many times that I thought they shouldn't have showed the place of the army and how they were shooting bombs. Lots of soldiers died in that war.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 30, 2008 12:15:35 GMT -4
Here's a hypothetical situation:
If a country went to war on the basis of faulty information and wrong-headed decision-making-- and the country's leadership beat down dissent with claims of anti-patriotism in the run-up to the war -- and while the country's military performed magnificently during the war, it began to become apparent in the months and years after the war that the occupation was being botched and that thousands of soldiers' lives were being lost as the situation deteriorated -- but the home government continued to claim that the situation was peachy -- and the invaded country slid toward civil war --
-- would journalists' reports on the deteriorating situation give support to the "enemy" or would such reporting put pressure on the home government to change its tactics? Would such a change in tactics not save lives?
Hasn't it? Journalists have been reporting for years that many in the military thought that the troop levels in Iraq were grossly insufficient to prevent the chaos we began seeing in the months and years after the invasion. The "surge" happened because of domestic pressure put on the administration -- and fueled by reports of disaster and death in Iraq. Pretending that the situation was improving, as the administration pretended, could very well have resulted in US deaths reaching 4,000 months ago -- rather than just in the last week.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 30, 2008 18:19:11 GMT -4
You're overstating your case, but granting your premise for the sake of argument, the question then is: would there have been too few boots on the ground if the journalists of the nation weren't idealogically against the administration even before any shots were fired, and more than willing to declare disaster at the slightest evidence things weren't going entirely to plan, giving the encouragement to the terrorists to enable them to recruit and fund attacks? Would it have been neccessary to put more troops there if the political leadership of the opposition party hadn't hitched their wagon to the idea of failure? The Harvard study proves that the terrorists understand that the way to win is to convince the American media that the war cannot be won, just as was done in Vietnam. A bunch of insurgents in Iraq can't win a war against the US on a strictly material basis, they can only attempt to convince us that the effort is not worth what it will cost to win.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 30, 2008 18:21:16 GMT -4
By the way, are you agreeing with me that the Surge is working, wdmundt?
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 30, 2008 20:24:28 GMT -4
I said some months ago that greater numbers of soldiers = better security, so I have already agreed in some respects that the surge is working. I am doubtful that greater security can be achieved with a reduction in troops at any point in the near future, however.
To suggest that the media was dug in and dead-set against the war in the first place does not stand up to scrutiny of those events, in my humble opinion. The media went along with it all too willingly -- leaving the hard questions to be asked later, after it had turned out that the whole endeavor was a mistake. If journalists should do anything, they should demand hard, firm and complete answers of their own government as war approaches. This did not happen.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 30, 2008 20:50:10 GMT -4
The media was neither as much for the war as you seem to paint, nor as much against it as you might think from my descriptions. But it certainly hates President Bush and has since he got into office, and that bias has done harm.
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Post by wdmundt on Mar 30, 2008 20:52:27 GMT -4
I don't agree. I think the media gave him a free ride during his first year and then paid for his ride after 9/11. Once they realized what a buffoon we had elected, it was undoubtedly hard to keep the press under control.
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Jason
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Post by Jason on Mar 31, 2008 11:07:55 GMT -4
I don't agree. I think the media gave him a free ride during his first year and then paid for his ride after 9/11. Once they realized what a buffoon we had elected, it was undoubtedly hard to keep the press under control. So I take it you missed the coverage of the 2000 election and Al Gore's attempt to steal it? The majority of the press was certainly on Gore's side for that one.
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Post by wdmundt on Apr 1, 2008 16:41:14 GMT -4
Al Gore tried to steal the election? Gosh, I did miss that part. I hope they arrested him. What did he do -- go to the Supreme Court and get a recount stopped? Oh, wait -- that was the other guy.
And as to the media being on Gore's side, that is pretty much laughable. After misquoting him time after time, the media pretty much destroyed his campaign.
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Post by wdmundt on Apr 1, 2008 16:55:44 GMT -4
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