[R-G] One skeptic's report from deep inside the military journalism complex

[Anthony Fenton]

http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2009/01/military_journalism.php

January-February 2009

All disquiet on the Western front
One skeptic's report from deep inside the military journalism complex

Ashley Walters

On the morning of his fifty-second birthday, Bob Bergen, a veteran  
military journalist, sat on his sofa perusing the Globe and Mail when  
a friend called to tell him to turn on his TV. He was dumbfounded by  
what he saw. "I saw the first plane hit the tower and I thought, holy  
crap, oh, my God." For Bergen, it was a sign.

Five days before, Bergen had sat in a boardroom with members of the  
Canadian Defence & Foreign Affairs Institute (CDFAI), a Calgary-based  
think tank that studies Canadian defence and security. On that  
afternoon, Bergen was asked to solve a specific problem: how to  
influence media coverage of the military. "They said, 'We don't think  
Canadian journalists do a very good job covering the Canadian  
Forces,'" he recalls. "They don't do the good job that you do. What  
would you do to fix it?'" Bergen proposed designing and teaching a  
course that would train journalists how to report on the military. But  
it was what he saw on the morning of September 11, 2001, that gave his  
mission a new sense of urgency.

"September 11 happened and I went, 'Holy crap.' You know what?  
September 11 is my birthday, this is almost destiny, that I'm destined  
to do this." Within eight months, CDFAI was awarding scholarships to  
young journalists to fly to Calgary and have Bergen teach them the ins  
and outs of reporting on the armed forces. The Canadian Military  
Journalism Course was born.

Seven years later on a bright morning in May, I sit at a C-Train stop  
in Calgary with several other young women. We're among the dozen  
reporters awarded scholarships to participate in the annual CMJC. The  
conversation strays between boyfriends, travelling, school projects,  
graduation and fashion. One woman giggles as she extends her legs to  
display the brown cowboy boots she's donned in honour of her visit to  
Cowtown. No one talks about the military.

Curiosity, coupled with cynicism, drew me here. For me, the tangled  
relationship between the military and the media raises some important  
questions: What happens to journalists' objectivity when a special  
interest group, like the military, actively trains them? Does that  
"objectivity" really exist to begin with? And when large mainstream  
media companies share a set of special interests with the military,  
doesn't that mean that, to some degree, all journalism is embedded?

The next morning marks the first official day of the course, and my  
fellow students and I have assembled around a makeshift conference  
table at the Centre for Strategic and Military Studies at the  
University of Calgary. The faces around the room look like those at  
many contemporary Canadian newsrooms: mostly female, mostly white,  
mostly young-several of my classmates will be attending their  
undergraduate convocations when the course is over.

At a few minutes past 9 a.m., Bob Bergen enters the room. He is 58  
years old and has a ruddy complexion accentuated by his white dress  
shirt and pink tie.

"I'm here to tell you that the military manages the news media. I'll  
show you so you'll know when you're being managed," he says. Tap tap  
tap-my fingers type out his words: I'm eager to record what a course,  
organized by a think tank with links to the DND, has to say about how  
journalists are managed by the military. The veteran reporter to my  
left places a recorder on the table in front of her. To my right a  
young man slumps in his seat and scans the room, while others stare  
into their coffee. (Later in the week a speaker smiles at me and says,  
"You know, you don't have to write everything down. There's not going  
to be a test later.")

Bergen says we're here to "learn how to learn about the military." He  
hands each of us a four inch white plastic binder with our name in  
bold black font, above a photograph of a tank. Our task: to  
familiarize ourselves with its guts, our guide to the military. The  
binder bulges with documents detailing the language, culture and  
customs of the Canadian Forces. We have access to the Queen's  
Regulations and Orders, the Canadian Forces media embed contract,  
military rank structures, departments, terminology and acronyms, media  
clippings and suggested reading lists.

Journalists and the military have always had a contentious  
relationship, which can be seen in their clearly divergent missions:  
one is to report events; the other to influence them. More than ever  
before, both camps are struggling to achieve their objectives. In 2007  
the U.S. Army's operational security guidelines grouped reporters as  
"non-traditional" national security threats-in the same category with  
warlords, drug cartels and al Qaeda. The International Federation of  
Journalists recently condemned the U.S. military's targeting and  
killing of journalists in Iraq, calling for an independent  
investigation into the incidents. In September 2008 the Canadian Press  
reported that an Afghan freelance journalist, labelled an enemy  
combatant and jailed for 11 months in a U.S. military prison, claimed  
that the Canadian Forces reported him as a security risk and were  
responsible for his arrest. But we don't talk about these events  
during the course. We're here to learn how to work with-not against- 
the military.

The Centre for Military and Strategic Studies receives grants from  
CDFAI to organize and host the journalism course. Bergen explains that  
CDFAI chose to offer the course through the university tolend it  
"credibility, as opposed to being offered by a think tank, though the  
office of the university is supported by the think tank." CDFAI  
President Bob Millar says the content of the Military Journalism  
Course is in no way influenced by the Forces, by government, or by  
CDFAI's private donors (among which are some of the world's largest  
military defence contractors: General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin  
Canada, and Com Dev, to name a few).

The next nine days are divided between classrooms, military bases and  
bars. We talk to DND public affairs officers, recently embedded  
journalists, retired colonels and majors, reservists and retired major  
generals. We visit Canadian Forces Base Wainwright, the only national  
military facility that houses a replica of Kandahar province, where  
journalists and actors are hired to participate in military training  
scenarios. We watch the Calgary Highlanders strip and load their C7  
rifles before joining them in their officers' mess for pints. We climb  
into Leopard computer gunnery trainers and test our skills at missile  
systems simulations.

But most importantly we're encouraged to be critical. "The students  
will be challenged to look at their subject areas in conventional and  
unconventional ways to better offer their reader a diversity of views  
and opinions on military issues," the course description reads.

Our first speaker, DND public affairs officer Lieutenant (Navy)  
Desmond James served as part of the Kandahar Provincial Reconstruction  
Team in 2007, working closely with journalists embedded with the  
Canadian Forces as well as international media in Afghanistan. James  
looks young despite his greying head of hair. He points to a  
PowerPoint slide titled "Myths and Half-truths" about the military.  
The military does not control the media, James says. Public affairs  
officers do not pick and choose which stories are covered or prohibit  
journalists from reporting without their supervision. "We don't  
restrict info for the sake of restricting info," he tells us.

But that doesn't mean journalists are completely free to report  
whatever they want from a war zone. Journalists travelling with the  
Canadian Forces need to know when to shut up: if they're embedded with  
the Forces, their embed agreement places strict limitations on what  
they can report, allowing any subject to be restricted at any time.  
The military provides journalists with access in exchange for  
censorship. In other words, print no evil.

Throughout James' lecture, Bergen sits quietly at the back of the  
room. He is aware of the Canadian Forces' censorship of the media. In  
fact, he has publicly criticized them for it. During a 2007 interview  
on the CBC Radio series Spin Cycles, Bergen compared the current  
limited coverage of Afghanistan to the 1999 Kosovo air war in which  
"the Canadian Forces used the catch-all of operational security to ban  
the Canadian news media from even stepping foot on the base." In  
Bergen's view, that ban meant that the Canadian public had "absolutely  
no idea what the Canadian Forces did there." Bergen told listeners  
"...my fear is that we're seeing this replicated in Afghanistan now."  
But today, as James talks, Bergen is silent.

Bergen also refrains from commenting on what Calgary Herald reporter  
Kelly Cryderman tells us the next day about her first stint as an  
embed with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan. She is earnest and  
smiles frequently during her talk. "Going to Afghanistan has become  
part of the Canadian journalism experience in many ways," she tells  
us. Cryderman later flicks through a slideshow and pauses on a photo  
of her standing beside a local Afghan warlord. "He's like a mafia  
boss," she says. "Of course I had to get my picture with him." Looking  
at the photograph, what I see is an ineffectual journalist staring  
back: free to pose with warlords but not to print their stories.

"A big story that Canadian journalists, even Canadian journalists like  
[Globe and Mail Afghanistan correspondent] Graeme Smith, have a really  
hard time getting at is the characters who the Canadians are working  
with who are pretty unsavoury," she laments, alluding to the  
military's work with Afghan mercenaries and militias, who are often  
paid to guard reconstruction sites and accompany soldiers on missions.  
"I think they could be doing more," she says of the Canadian  
military's work in Afghanistan. "It's very tough because you can't do  
everything the Canadian way there, you can't have exactly the same  
standards, because you're starting from nothing. But that doesn't mean  
you shouldn't have any standards," she tells us. Aside from the  
restrictions outlined in the Canadian Forces embed agreement,  
Cryderman says she never felt limited in what she could report. "I was  
never censored for anything... There's no censorship. They wouldn't  
read your stories," she says.

Not everyone feels that way. A few days later, Bill Graveland, an  
award-winning Canadian Press reporter who has covered the Canadian  
Forces for three years, offered an alternate view of life as an embed  
in Afghanistan. According to Graveland, the Canadian military has  
"these giant satellite dishes everywhere," which among other functions  
allow communications between journalists to be closely monitored.  
"They check emails and eavesdrop on telephone calls. They watch  
everything we do. They know immediately what we've written or what  
we're saying. You've got to be very careful."

In fact, Graveland tells us of times when he's been warned by military  
personnel "that if I didn't start toeing the line that I wouldn't be  
allowed to come back." He describes an environment where journalists  
share tents with military public-relations officials who are like  
"real public-relations people, They can send you home... They don't  
like anything that's perceived to be even moderately critical."

To Graveland, the rights of an embedded journalist have become  
severely limited. "It used to be you could wander around the base,  
interview anybody you wanted, as long as you weren't asking  
operational security questions. And suddenly [there] was this public- 
relations officer [who] had to be sitting there recording you while  
you're doing the interview," Graveland tells us. "They are really,  
seriously trying to manage the media."

"Anybody in the military that thinks they can spin the story or hide  
the facts really has to get into this century," says Mike Capstick, a  
thinlipped retired colonel and former first commander of Canada's  
Strategic Advisory Team - Afghanistan. Capstick is a friend of  
Bergen's and an associate at the CMSS. He has authored articles in the  
Globe and Mail as well as the Ottawa Citizen on Canada's mission in  
Afghanistan. Capstick is here to talk to us about Afghanistan but the  
conversation quickly turns to his definition of irresponsible  
journalism.

"There's been a shitload of irresponsible reporting coming out of  
Afghanistan," he says, citing Graeme Smith's March 2008 Globe and Mail  
series "Talking to the Taliban." According to Capstick, Smith's piece  
lacked context because he failed to procure a "representative sample"  
of the Taliban. "Who are these guys from the Taliban? From my reading  
of things, they were all low-level foot soldiers-they don't understand  
who their allegiances were to. It was presented with no strategic  
context." Capstick argues that because there are "maybe up to 10,000  
insurgents" in Afghanistan, Smith's articles cannot possibly have  
procured a representative sample. Capstick also says that Smith's  
researcher (an Afghan with access to areas too dangerous for Western  
journalists who conducted interviews on Smith's behalf) could have  
swayed the responses according to his own biases.

Listening to Capstick's criticisms leaves me thinking that the only  
alternative to Smith's self-described "unscientific survey" is to  
embed with the military a choice that isn't known to cultivate the  
most innovative forms of reportage. But embedding might notseem like  
such a bad idea, when remaining outside the wire can be so dangerous.  
For instance, CTV's Jawed Ahmad is an example of a non-embedded  
journalist who was held without charge for months on end in a U.S.  
prison for doing his job: Ahmad was deemed a terrorist threat because  
he was carrying Taliban contact numbers and video footage.

For someone who values context, Capstick doesn't seem to mind  
excluding it from his version of the last 30 years in Afghanistan,  
which omits any mention of Western involvement. There is no talk of  
the U.S. funding Islamic fundamentalists to fight the Russian army,  
nor of President Reagan's 1985 speech when he hosted the Afghan  
Mujahiddin at the White House, labelling the group "the moral  
equivalent of America's founding fathers." When I asked Bergen about  
what I thought were glaring omissions, he sighs. "History is a dog's  
breakfast," he says.

In the global war on terror, where is Canada headed if this kind of  
reporting becomes the accepted norm? Having helped its NATO allies  
occupy Afghanistan, the Canadian military and the government rely on  
positive media coverage to shore up public support for the mission.  
Meanwhile, pervasive newsroom cuts and scarce funding for war  
correspondents have resulted in reporters relying on the military for  
safe access to war-torn regions. This symbiotic relationship has  
spawned training courses for journalists supported (either indirectly  
or directly) by the military, and in the last decade these courses  
have become a common way for journalists to prepare for work as embeds  
or to report on military issues. But how are they shaping the way the  
media reports on the military? Are they transforming society's  
watchdogs into military lapdogs? If the media effectively conditions  
the Canadian public to accept more foreign wars as the inevitable  
consequence of preserving our security, how many more wars are we in  
for?

On the morning of the last day of the course we're sitting around an  
oversized conference table that fills our small classroom; people want  
coffee. "Do you think we can leave to get some?" one woman asks.  
Bergen enters the room with a stack of papers under his arm: course- 
evaluation forms. After about 20 minutes of writing, the completed  
forms are piled in the centre of the table. Bergen smiles as he  
proudly hands each of us Centre for Strategic and Military Studies  
coffee mugs and hats. Next, an impromptu graduation ceremony ensues as  
we are called up one by one to the front of the classroom to receive  
our "certificate of achievement" for completing the course. Digital  
cameras flash along with smiles as those seated around the conference  
table clap. A woman dons her new Centre for Military and Strategic  
Studies cap while holding her diploma. She smiles for the camera.

After it's all over, I phone Bergen to talk to him about the course. I  
ask him if he was disappointed that, in a course about reporting on  
the military, made up of mostly young reporters about to embark on  
their careers, very few people actually asked any serious questions  
about, well, reporting on the military. "It was my expectation that  
[the students] would be far more engaged than many of them were," he  
told me. Like history, it seems, war reporting is also at risk of  
becoming a dog's breakfast. T
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