1. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Greg McLaughlin PaperHive Magazine
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PaperHive Conversations: Greg
McLaughlin
TOPICS: Greg McLaughlin Journalism Media
The War Correspondent
Greg McLaughlin - Writer & Researcher "The War Correspondent"
POSTED BY: MANUEL BLÁUAB MAY 2, 2016
Professor Dr Gregory McLaughlin is a sociologist, an
associate of the Glasgow Media Group at the University of
Glasgow, researcher and writer. This year, his rst
book, The War Correspondent, got its second edition
released with Pluto Press, showing that times can change
but the issue of ideology subjecting the media and the
audience around the world stays intact.
Prior to the publication of the rst edition of your book The War
Correspondent in 2002, the US Army held interventions in Kosovo,
(1999), and the most signi cant in Afghanistan in 2001 as a response
to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that lasted until 2014. Were these two
events an inspiration for your rst book?
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2. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Greg McLaughlin PaperHive Magazine
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events an inspiration for your rst book?
Not really. The rst edition includes a critical look at the
media response to NATO public relations and propaganda
during the Kosovo intervention but it went to press
shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The second edition
includes a new chapter that sets the scene in the
immediate aftermath of 9/11 and examines the ‘war on
terror’ as an interpretative framework for reporting
international con ict from Afghanistan and Iraq up to the
present day.
I suppose the real inspiration for the book goes back to
my time as a student in the 1980s and reading Philip
Knightley’s history of war reporting, ‘The First Casualty’.
It challenged my then rather uncritical and romantic
notion of war reporting as a noble profession. While my
own book aims to question the role of the war
correspondent today, it does not go so far as Knightley
and see war reporting as just another form of propaganda
because there are many independent journalists out there
such as John Pilger and Robert Fisk who resist the
propaganda and censorship that de nes all major wars.
What di erences do you nd in war media coverage between the rst
edition of The War Correspondent in 2002 and the second in 2016?
The two most interesting and signi cant differences
would be the advent of the ‘embedded’ journalist
(Afghanistan and Iraq) and the use of social media as
both tools of and sources for journalists in the war zone.
The mainstream, corporate media greeted the embed
system as a new and revolutionary way of reporting war.
It allowed the reporter to get up close and personal with
the troops and the action; and it lent a new and exciting
immediacy to TV coverage especially. But what they
seemed to forget was that the system was one of military
control – just like the pooling system in the Gulf War
1991 – and that it raises a serious question about the
objectivity of journalists who work within it. Critics have
argued that because embedded reporters cover war
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exclusively through this military lter, they tell us only a
partial and selective version of events. They are also more
likely to censor themselves when reporting dif cult
stories such as civilian casualties and military abuses.
This is exactly what the military want to see.
As for the rise of social media in the last few years, that
has been received in the mainstream with rather more
mixed feelings. For the war correspondent, social media
platforms deliver immediate information and breaking
news that might otherwise be dif cult to get for a variety
of reasons. Good examples of this included the protests
that followed the Greek debt crisis in 2009 and the Arab
Uprisings (or Arab Spring events) that began in Tunisia in
2010. Paul Mason for Channel Four News was probably
one of the rst UK journalists to highlight the role of
Twitter in mobilising grass roots support for fast moving
events like these and he sees it as a very positive
development for news and journalism by and large (see
his book Why it’s still kicking off everywhere, published by
Verso in 2013). Others such as the Guardian’s Peter
Preston worry about the propaganda potential of the
platform, as well as its anonymity. For him, social media
and citizen journalism are no substitutes for the objective
procedures of the professional reporter with their focus
on the production of veri able facts and the importance
of authoritative sources.
My own position on both these developments is rather
nuanced. I used to be very skeptical at rst about citizen
journalism but (with just a few lingering reservations!)
I’ve come to a point where I recognize it as a valid form
that should be taken seriously. As for the claims of the
professional journalist, especially those of truth and
objectivity, the history of journalism is littered with
examples of bias and distortion, as well as uncritical
relationships with sources of power such as the military
and any government at war. As I argue in my book, the
job of the war correspondent is to get the information and
get the story while the job of the military is to control the
information and spin the story. Both make mistakes, of
course. But if we look at the Gulf War in 1991, Kosovo in
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1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003, we
see the military learning from their mistakes ahead of the
next war and the majority of journalists forgetting theirs.
Your work, as depicted in four books, The War Correspondent, (1st
and
2nd
edition), The Propaganda of Peace: The role of media and culture in
the Northern Ireland Peace Process and The British Media and Bloody
Sunday, is mostly about the media role and the media coverage of
signi cant events. In your opinion, what are the main challenges
when presenting these events to the general public? Could the
problem of reliability in news media be xed with more available
information from di erent sources or is that a delusion? How do you
envision the near future of journalism with more open access
information and fast connectivity?
First off, I think you’ve put your nger on something very
important. A lot of ideological work is done in the media
presentation of major events like international wars or
peace treaties. If we asked the media what the challenges
are, they would probably point to issues of logistics,
technology, nancial cost and the obvious risks to
journalists and production staff. But as Slavoj Zizek
would argue, it’s not just about the meaning that is
present in the text and how it’s framed by power but also
the meaning that is absent. For example, the media sold
the Irish peace process as a self-evident story of con ict
resolution. Yet my book with Stephen Baker, The
Propaganda of Peace, proposes that there was another,
implicit narrative there: that a peace agreement between
‘the warring tribes’ would return Northern Ireland to
‘civilisation’ or, to translate from the language of neo-
liberalism, the global free market. There was a similar
use of double-speak in the media’s coverage of America’s
invasion of Iraq. As the US launched operation ‘Shock and
Awe’ on the country in March 2003, the western media
looked on in wonder and declared it the rst step in
‘softening up’ Saddam Hussein’s regime and ‘liberating’
the people of Iraq. With very few exceptions, it never
occurred to reporters and news anchor to consider
‘softening up’ as something of an understatement or
question the liberating potential of this destructive
display of military might.
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Part of the problem here, as you suggest, is the over-
reliance of the corporate media on sources of power,
which is totally re exive and structured into a hierarchy
of assumed ‘authority’ and ‘reliability’. The rolling, live
TV coverage given over to the Gulf War 1991 and Iraq
2003 was de ned by a production line of military experts
who were treated with a reverence usually reserved for
presidents, prime ministers and religious leaders. Even
when the media bother to use alternative sources of
information or to refer to critical voices, the re ex then is
to minimalize these within the story or, in broadcasting,
either question their credibility or shunt them into the
margins of the schedule.
So the corporate media’s lip service to the use of
alternative sources is institutionally structured and
ideological. The responsibility, then, shifts to the reader
or the viewer to seek out their own alternatives, which is
much easier now in this era of social media and high-
speed internet where most people have a tablet or a smart
phone. Of course we need to be judicious about the value
and reliability of these sources but at least we are acting
as citizens rather than passive, uncritical consumers of
of cial statements and propaganda.
As for what this means for the future of journalism we
can only speculate but more and more journalists today
are buying into social media networks. We might be
seeing a revolution in journalism practice there along the
lines of the printing press in the 16th
Century or what
happened during the American Civil War (1861-65) when
the commercial imperatives of the telegraph utterly
changed the nature of war reporting and its presentation
in newspapers. It sounds very exciting and romantic,
doesn’t it? But as Thomas Hobbes once wrote,
‘Knowledge is power’. Citizens lost that power with the
rise of the commercial press in the 19th
Century. Perhaps
the enormous potential of social media and the activities
of Wiki Leaks promise an era when we might just seize it
back?
6. 22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Greg McLaughlin PaperHive Magazine
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PaperHive would like to ask you: If the reader had only 5 minutes,
what speci c pages or sections should they de nitely read to gain
insight into your research?
The concluding chapter is short and concise and asks,
‘What is the ultimate role of the war correspondent? Is it
to tell truth to power?’ It summarises the key issues and
debates that are raised in the book and suggests that
‘telling truth to power’ is a delusion because as Arundhati
Roy has argued, power owns the truth and it probably
knows the truth better than any of us. The very best war
and foreign affairs reporters through history – such as
William Howard Russell, Morgan Philips Price, Martha
Gellhorn, John Pilger and Robert Fisk – have spoken the
truth to us about power in a time of war.
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