Exsandgroper
25-02-10, 03:58 AM
Senator the Hon John Faulkner
Minister for Defence
MIN100224/10
2010 C.E.W. Bean Foundation dinner address
National Press Club, Canberra
Check against delivery
SPEAKER: SENATOR JOHN FAULKNER, MINISTER FOR DEFENCE
Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, and paying my respects to their elders past and present.
Let me also acknowledge the chairman and the other members of the board of the C.E.W. Bean Foundation; my parliamentary colleagues; and very many distinguished guests.
As Alan Ramsey reminded me recently, Australian historian Professor Ken Inglis said of Charles Bean: “Australian by accident of birth, English by education, he made his own discovery of Australia between 1904 and 1914, reported with care and pride the Australian experience of war [at Gallipoli and the Western Front], commemorated the [60,000] men who died in it and worked quietly to enhance the lives of another generation. He is a man to remember.”
His story is inseparable from the story of Gallipoli.
On April 28, 1915, the Sydney Morning Herald published a brief report saying:
“The Admiralty and War Office state that the general attack on the Dardanelles by the fleet and army was resumed yesterday. The disembarkation of the army … began before sunrise at various points along the Gallipoli Peninsula. In spite of serious opposition from the enemy … it was completely successful, and before nightfall a large force was established ashore.”
Compare to that, the report sent by Charles Bean, and published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette 19 days later, on the 17th of May:
“It was eighteen minutes past four on the morning of Sunday, 25th April, when the first boat grounded….. The country rather resembles the Hawkesbury River country in New South Wales … covered with low scrub very similar to a dwarfed gum tree scrub. … Bullets struck fireworks out of the stones along the beach. The men did not wait to be hit, but wherever they landed they simply rushed straight up the steep slopes. …The officers led magnificently, but, of course, nothing like an accurate control of the attack was possible. …. Companies and platoons, little crowds of 50 to 200 men, were landed wherever the boats took them…The consequence was that the Third Brigade reached its advanced line in a medley of small fractions inextricably mixed. … there was a battery in the ranges inland which … From 2 o’clock until sundown … fired continuously a salvo of four shells about twice every minute on to the ridges which our troops were holding, for the most part without any protection. … Hour after hour one watched shrapnel bursting over the flank ridge, along which the infantry were lying. …. During the night our lines were straightened. Men dug themselves in as best they could.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Bean’s vivid, distinctively Australian “voice” took readers – takes us today – into the heart of the battle, with its confusion, dust, noise and blood. What he did not write, and could not have got past military censorship if he had, was that the Australian troops had been landed in the wrong place, had met unexpectedly ferocious resistance from equally brave Turkish troops commanded by 35 year old Lt Colonel Mustapha Kemal – better known today as Ataturk – and had barely avoided being driven back into the sea.
The government and the military of the time, like many before and after, viewed the war correspondent both as a potentially useful tool of public relations, and as an intermittently dangerous critic.
By inspiring readers – later listeners and viewers – with stories of heroism and success, the war correspondent can be a powerful propagandist, helping the government maintain the public support which, in a democracy, is fundamental to a nation’s ability to wage war. However, the journalist with an enquiring mind, keen observation and a nose for a good story will also, inevitably, see and hear things in a war zone the authorities would prefer unpublished.
It is no coincidence that the first real war journalism, in the Crimea, was met with the first official apparatus to restrict and restrain those journalists.
Phillip Knightley addressed this Foundation in 2001, and his book The First Casualty is awash with quotes by and about war correspondents. Indeed, there may be no better source for what war correspondents have said about war and about their own role in it. Knightley describes vividly the unprepared and overwhelmed William Howard Russell and Edward Lawrence Godkin, Crimean War correspondents for The Times and the London Daily News respectively, equally shocked at the slaughter and at the failings of the British command.
Their reports were peppered with words and phrases like: “the management is infamous …the sick have not a bed to lie on” – by Russell – and “folly … ignorance … mistakes …blunders … oversights...” – from Godkin.
These incendiary reports inflamed public opinion.
And the idea that the general public might have an opinion and ought to have a say in the way the nation’s blood and treasure were expended came as a shock to many in the political and military establishments of the day.
Russell and Godkin’s scathing indictments of army organisation and military blunders led to the fall of a government and to major military reforms.
And they also inflamed military opinion, against the correspondents. Hyperbolic suggestions that Russell ought to be lynched were followed by far more serious steps: the first military censorship order, prohibiting the publication of details ‘of value to the enemy’.
The question of precisely what information is of value to the enemy has been contested ever since. Reporting from the war zone is often very difficult and very dangerous. Inevitably, something a journalist wants to report will upset someone. Often everyone, and many of them armed.
A great deal of the information a journalist learns in a warzone will put him or her squarely on the horns of a dilemma. What obligations does a war correspondent owe to the men and women who wear the uniform of their country, and what obligations to the plain unvarnished truth? And I am not speaking here of operational matters, which I believe all journalists would agree are off limits.
I’m thinking more of reporters in the Second World War accused of aiding the enemy for telling readers of the miserable conditions in London’s communal bomb shelters, or who did not report the looting of bombed homes and even the bodies of the dead. I’m thinking of journalists in the first days of the Korean War, who were begged by American G.I.s to tell the people back home just how bad things were, and then were treated as the enemy by those same soldiers’ commanding officers for doing just that.
Similar allegations of lack of patriotism, and even treason, levelled against the Crimean war correspondents, have been resurrected on many occasions since, when governments and the military find themselves publicly embarrassed.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a normal human reaction, when being run through the media’s wringer, to wish the press would turn their attention to something else or just go away.
But however you put it, it’s hardly a democratic response.
In a democracy, power supposedly belongs to the people, and is exercised only on their behalf. Democratic governments like ours can only say we act on behalf of the community when we act with their consent. And that consent, ladies and gentlemen, is not genuine if gained with coercion, or with deception.
Nowhere is this more important than it is when it comes to a nation’s military actions. When the Australian Government commits Australian forces, we put Australian lives at risk, and exercise potentially – often actually – lethal force in the name of the Australian community.
It is essential therefore that the community knows not only the reasons but also the costs of such action.
As Abraham Lincoln said in 1864, as the American Civil War raged, “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”
It might be true, ladies and gentlemen, that as a general rule reporters want to publish more than war-time governments wish them to. In totalitarian states, the answer is censorship; in democracies with the tradition of free speech and the free press, the only option is the negotiation of a balance, often on a case by case basis.
It is not simple, and it is not easy: but it is, by far, preferable.
The question of telling the truth in the national interest is not a simple contest between reckless, feckless war correspondents and secretive, close-mouthed generals and politicians.
On the whole, I would think, most journalists understand that there are fundamental questions of operational security and lives at stake when it comes to certain details and certain stories.
On the whole, I would hope, most politicians and most members of the military accept that the community has the right to know what is being done in their name, done at times at the cost of the lives of their loved ones.
Ladies and gentlemen, if history teaches us anything it is that the only way to secure the public support so critical to a democracy’s military power is to be as transparent and accountable as military exigencies permit.
The recognition of the different but complementary responsibilities of press and politician in our democracy was, I think, nowhere better illustrated than in Canberra in World War Two. Prime Minister John Curtin took Press Gallery journalists into his confidence on the movement of troops across the Indian Ocean from the Middle East, in order to explain to them how genuinely necessary it was they not print or report any rumours on the subject that they might pick up. His trust, as we all know, was not abused.
Relationships between press and politicians are rarely so cordial.
And rarely, too, do we see the mutual willingness to negotiate the balance between transparency and security that Curtin and the Canberra press gallery displayed.
Both governments, and journalists, have, from time to time, spectacularly failed to find that balance. Those failures over the past century have had immediate consequences, and also consequences that have resonated through subsequent wars.
Ladies and gentlemen, British historian Arthur Ponsonby – a Labour MP I might add – in 1928 described the First World War as one of the most discreditable periods in the history of journalism.
Today, we are familiar with Charles Bean’s work and that of later historians, familiar with books and movies about the nightmare of trench warfare in World War I and familiar with the fields on fields of silent graves marking the toll of the dead.
At the time, correspondents filed stories about soldiers straining to be on the attack, even though the reality was 160,000 men in the Allied front line unarmed due to equipment shortages.
No-one mentioned 300,000 French soldiers killed in the Battle of Frontiers, while the London Daily Chronicles’ Philip Gibbs wrote of the first day of the Battle of the Somme: “It is, on balance, a good day for Britain and France.”
Australian readers of the Sydney Morning Herald could read on, the 3rd of July 1916, in the paper’s summary of British coverage: “The British casualties were not heavy.”
They could read, also, of the public rejoicing in London on the night of 1 July at the ‘day of glad news’ culminating in the London papers’ evening placards proclaiming “The day goes well”.
Ladies and gentlemen, twenty thousand British soldiers died that day. By the end of the Somme campaign, Allied losses would exceed 600,000.
But Australian readers could gain a different idea of that day’s bloody work from Charles Bean. Following the course one regiment took in the attack, Bean went from one unburied body to the next, until finally reaching what he described as “a little group of half a dozen men, with the regimental dog, … still lying together where some machine gun had caught them, everyone being dead.”
Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, in late 1917 heard Philip Gibb’s private account of what he had seen at the front, and noted “If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow.”
But accredited correspondents with the British Army were writing ‘our troops have reached their new position’ after a defeat and subsequent retreat. Billeted by the Army, accompanied by officers, driven in army vehicles, and dressed in military uniforms, they were, perhaps, the first ‘embedded’ war correspondents.
As some of their later colleagues would find in subsequent wars, a close and dependent relationship with the military did not necessarily enhance objectivity.
More than just not writing what they knew to be true, many correspondents enthusiastically retailed fake atrocity stories and propaganda demonising the enemy. In some cases they invented them under pressure from their editors.
Captain F W Wilson of the Daily Mail, in Brussels when the war broke out, later recalled: “There was a little town outside Brussels where one went to get dinner. I heard the Hun had been there. I suppose that there must have been a baby there. So I wrote a heart-rending story…”.
The tale that the Germans had begun boiling down the corpses of their dead for glycerine to make munitions was another fabrication, repeated, though not invented, by front line correspondents.
There was one group of people from whom censorship could not conceal, nor propaganda obscure, the truth.
They were in the trenches, and they saw the difference between the war as they experienced it, and the war as it was presented to their friends and families back home. The loss of faith in the newspapers as the conveyors of ‘news’ as opposed to propaganda had far reaching consequences.
Thirty years later, World War Two correspondents trying to convey what they’d seen and felt on reaching the concentration camps of Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald found their accounts discounted by readers trained by the press of the previous World War to discount such atrocities as propaganda.
First World War correspondents were labouring under a military censorship regime designed to keep them as far away from any actual event as possible, their stories cut to shreds before being sent back to Britain.
Strict as this regime was, it was not impossible to evade.
It was not Charles Bean, but it was an Australian, Keith Murdoch, who brought news of the disastrous and deteriorating situation in the Dardanelles into the light of day. First he attempted to smuggle a letter by another reporter, Britain’s Ashmead-Bartlett, past military censors and back to England. Then, when that was confiscated on the orders of the British Commander of the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Hamilton, Murdoch reconstructed as much as he could remember in a letter to Australian Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.
Hamilton learnt a basic lesson in media management. No matter how hard you try to suppress a story, it always gets out. In today’s world of twitter, camera-phones and blogs, trying to suppress a story more likely only guarantees that it will get out.
In the late months of 1915, Murdoch’s letter was circulated to the members of the British Government’s Dardanelles Committee. The allegations in it ended Hamilton’s active career and precipitated the end of the Dardanelles adventure.
As for many other correspondents of that war, Philip Gibbs later admitted : “We identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field. … There was no need of censorship of our despatches. We were our own censors.”
By World War Two, General Eisenhower was stating bluntly that: “Public opinion wins war. I have always considered as quasi-staff officers, correspondents accredited to my headquarters.”
Many correspondents agreed. As John Steinbeck would write after the war ended: “We were all part of the war effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the close and intimate relationship between media and military in the two World Wars served the immediate interests of governments seeking to maintain public support. But after each war, the accounts of returning soldiers and the post-war publication of memoirs and novels exposed as fraudulent many of the media’s wartime images. This ‘credibility gap’ undermined faith both in government arguments for military action, and in the media’s accuracy and impartiality in time of war.
Yet still, the belief that the press ought to be ‘quasi-staff officers’, part of the public relations machine, proved more enduring with the military and politicians than with journalists and their editors.
In Korea, in 1950, the North Korean army swept southwards, bundling opposition ahead of them. Knightley describes how, when correspondents Peter Kalischer, Tom Lambert and Marguerite Higgins wrote of the panic-stricken retreat of many “whipped and frightened” American troops, the army in Korea and at MacArthur’s headquarters in Japan accused them of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”, and Macarthur himself reminded them that they had “an important responsibility in the matter of psychological warfare.”
The correspondents, rather, felt they had an important responsibility to tell the public, especially the American public, of failures in training, supply and preparation.
In early January 1951 correspondents were placed under the jurisdiction of the military, and on pain of punishments including deportation and court-martial, prohibited from writing anything on military security, the effect of enemy fire, or any criticism of the allied conduct of the war or derogatory comments about commanders.
By the time of the peace talks, many journalists regarded official briefing information with deep suspicion. Often, it did not tally with information they found elsewhere – including from the journalists with the North Korean-Chinese delegation, whose access extended to documents, reports and maps used in the negotiations. According to Knightley, they shared their material with the rest of the press pack, despite orders from General Ridgway prohibiting ‘social consorting, including the drinking of alcoholic beverages, with communist journalists’.
This edict was about as successful as you would expect it to be.
There have been times, when journalists set aside critical objectivity to ‘cheerlead’ for their country. But as Macarthur and Ridgway learned, it is a journalist’s job to get the story. If you want them to get your story, trying to stonewall and obstruct them is counterproductive.
Eisenhower might have been right when he argued that public opinion wins wars. It’s certainly a vital component of a democracy’s military strength. But it is neither the responsibility of the media, nor even within its power to create a favourable climate of opinion in support of a government’s decision to fight a war. When government and military officials regard a sceptical, questioning press as hostile, a government’s efforts to put its case for war are hamstrung.
So it proved in Vietnam.
There is, ladies and gentlemen, a speech in itself on war correspondents and Vietnam. It was a conflict in which journalists had unprecedented access and revolutionary technology. They were not subject to the censorship regimes of so many earlier wars. Vietnam was flooded with correspondents from around the world, men and women whose motives, opinions and competency varied widely. The world in turn was flooded with accounts and images of Vietnam, some of the most memorable and searing portraits of war published in any generation.
Robert Siegel, anchor for NPR’s All Things Considered, said in 2002 that he attributed the shift in opinion on America’s role in the Vietnam War to more than “just that people were dying. It was that nobody could demonstrate that the country was achieving what it said it was achieving.”
Seigel went on to say that the (at the time) high levels of support for American involvement in Afghanistan would prove fragile “if there developed a true gap between the statement [that] we have defeated the regime in Afghanistan and the reality of whether we have actually done so.”
That ‘credibility gap’ is the greatest threat to gaining and maintaining public support for military action that the government believes is necessary to national security. It is created not only by falsely optimistic claims of stunning military success – think back to Philip Gibbs reporting from the Somme, the wet and muddy grave of a hundred thousand men, that it has been, on balance, a good day.
A credibility gap is created too by attempts to manipulate the public. War propaganda of atrocities is often successful in mobilising public opinion – in the short term. The Taliban are past masters at this. However, crying wolf often leaves people immune – both to propaganda, and more seriously, to stories of actual human rights abuses that are viewed with the same jaundiced eye.
The relationship between the media and the government and military, and the effort of a democratic government to wage and sustain war, can only be sound if it is based on truth about the reasons for, and the conduct of, that war.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a principle I am determined to live by as Defence Minister.
Australia’s largest, and most contentious, defence commitment today is our engagement in Afghanistan. Public opinion is divided.
I do believe that it is in Australia’s national interest to continue training the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade in Oruzgan Province so they can take responsibility for maintaining security conditions there. It is a difficult, dangerous, sometimes deadly, but very necessary job.
The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan would have the most serious implications for the fight against organised terrorism and the networks that fund and support terrorist organisations.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will continue to argue the case for our military efforts in Afghanistan.
And I hope I have learned the lessons, and I am trying to avoid the mistakes, of earlier governments in earlier wars.
I have begun, and will continue, regular, frank and comprehensive reports to Parliament on progress in Defence’s efforts in Afghanistan. I am committed to ensuring that our efforts, our successes, the challenges, and the risks, are transparent to the Australian people. I welcome scrutiny by the Australian public of our policies and our progress – as well as our setbacks.
Moreover, I have not and I will not use ‘operational security’ to sequester information that can and should be made public. For the first time, the Parliament and the Australian people will be given regular reports about ADF casualties. For the first time, the Parliament and the Australian people will be given regular reports about confirmed or credibly alleged civilian casualties caused by Australian military action. And the CDF, the Secretary, and Defence, stand with me on this.
Ladies and gentlemen, in August last year, the Government trialled the practice of ‘embedding’ journalists with combat troops. Three correspondents spent 21 days with our troops in Tarin Kowt. I won’t tell you it was seamless, but we all learned from the experience. I have approved further tours of embedded media this year, with three planned for this current rotation of the Mentoring Task Force. With good will, and good intentions, I believe these tours will be a way for the Australian public to understand our soldiers’ experiences as never before.
“Embedding” journalists with combat units does provide the media with unprecedented access to the day-to-day reality of soldier’s lives in the war zone. It is a complex juggling act: providing access for the press; ensuring that their safety and the safety of the soldiers they are with is not compromised; and protecting operational security without inappropriate restrictions on correspondents’ copy.
I believe we are on the way to getting it right; I’m confident that journalists on future ‘embed’ tours will let me know if they think we’re getting it wrong.
And, I very much hope Australian journalists do not lose sight of the fact that not all the pitfalls raised by ‘embedding’ are on the military side.
Phillip Knightley described ‘embedding’ as “A radical American plan for managing wartime media … an overwhelming victory for the military and its propagandists … an appearance of openness and truthfulness” .
As Tsuyoshi Nojima, a Japanese journalist embedded with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said “I have asked myself repeatedly whether I can keep a neutral attitude, because I sleep with [U.S] soldiers every night and I am always guarded by them … Yesterday, when a bomb hit Iraqi troops, I unconsciously shouted, ‘Great!’.”
Clive Myrie of the BBC recalled: “We were in a ditch under fire and this guy says, ‘Make yourself useful.’ This guy was throwing flares at me and I’m throwing them at a guy who’s got to light them and who’s sending them into the sky and I’m thinking, what am I doing here?”
Knightley said he was only able to find two instances of embedded correspondents who were critical of the troops they accompanied, or challenged the official account of an incident.
And I have to say I am glad that the coverage from the participants in last year’s ‘embed’ trial proved Knightley to be too pessimistic. I hope Australian journalists involved in future ‘embed’ tours with the ADF will continue to be critical, questioning, and sceptical: in the fine tradition of Charles Bean and his determination to see each trench and battlefield for himself.
And I am sure there will be some stories that will make uncomfortable reading.
But, ladies and gentlemen, neither government ministers nor military officers should expect the heirs to C.E.W. Bean to consider it their job to make us comfortable.
Their responsibility to hold us to account, to tell the truth, and to expose lies, is an indispensible safeguard of the democratic contract between government and citizen. There have been times when governments have failed to recognise the importance of that safeguard, or swept it aside as an inconvenience. There have been times when journalists have not lived up to the responsibility, the heavy responsibility, that rests on their shoulders.
But there have been, ladies and gentlemen, very many brave men and women in the hundred and fifty six years since William Russell and Edward Godkin risked Russian cannons and official censure to tell the public what was really happening to English men and boys on a far away Russian battlefield, who have lived up to that responsibility. Some have been injured, some have been excoriated by their governments, and not a few have lost their lives.
Tonight, as we honour Charles Bean, we also honour his colleagues, past and present, who have bravely and unflinchingly told the truth about war.
Cheers
Minister for Defence
MIN100224/10
2010 C.E.W. Bean Foundation dinner address
National Press Club, Canberra
Check against delivery
SPEAKER: SENATOR JOHN FAULKNER, MINISTER FOR DEFENCE
Ladies and gentlemen, let me begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of this land, and paying my respects to their elders past and present.
Let me also acknowledge the chairman and the other members of the board of the C.E.W. Bean Foundation; my parliamentary colleagues; and very many distinguished guests.
As Alan Ramsey reminded me recently, Australian historian Professor Ken Inglis said of Charles Bean: “Australian by accident of birth, English by education, he made his own discovery of Australia between 1904 and 1914, reported with care and pride the Australian experience of war [at Gallipoli and the Western Front], commemorated the [60,000] men who died in it and worked quietly to enhance the lives of another generation. He is a man to remember.”
His story is inseparable from the story of Gallipoli.
On April 28, 1915, the Sydney Morning Herald published a brief report saying:
“The Admiralty and War Office state that the general attack on the Dardanelles by the fleet and army was resumed yesterday. The disembarkation of the army … began before sunrise at various points along the Gallipoli Peninsula. In spite of serious opposition from the enemy … it was completely successful, and before nightfall a large force was established ashore.”
Compare to that, the report sent by Charles Bean, and published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette 19 days later, on the 17th of May:
“It was eighteen minutes past four on the morning of Sunday, 25th April, when the first boat grounded….. The country rather resembles the Hawkesbury River country in New South Wales … covered with low scrub very similar to a dwarfed gum tree scrub. … Bullets struck fireworks out of the stones along the beach. The men did not wait to be hit, but wherever they landed they simply rushed straight up the steep slopes. …The officers led magnificently, but, of course, nothing like an accurate control of the attack was possible. …. Companies and platoons, little crowds of 50 to 200 men, were landed wherever the boats took them…The consequence was that the Third Brigade reached its advanced line in a medley of small fractions inextricably mixed. … there was a battery in the ranges inland which … From 2 o’clock until sundown … fired continuously a salvo of four shells about twice every minute on to the ridges which our troops were holding, for the most part without any protection. … Hour after hour one watched shrapnel bursting over the flank ridge, along which the infantry were lying. …. During the night our lines were straightened. Men dug themselves in as best they could.”
Ladies and gentlemen, Bean’s vivid, distinctively Australian “voice” took readers – takes us today – into the heart of the battle, with its confusion, dust, noise and blood. What he did not write, and could not have got past military censorship if he had, was that the Australian troops had been landed in the wrong place, had met unexpectedly ferocious resistance from equally brave Turkish troops commanded by 35 year old Lt Colonel Mustapha Kemal – better known today as Ataturk – and had barely avoided being driven back into the sea.
The government and the military of the time, like many before and after, viewed the war correspondent both as a potentially useful tool of public relations, and as an intermittently dangerous critic.
By inspiring readers – later listeners and viewers – with stories of heroism and success, the war correspondent can be a powerful propagandist, helping the government maintain the public support which, in a democracy, is fundamental to a nation’s ability to wage war. However, the journalist with an enquiring mind, keen observation and a nose for a good story will also, inevitably, see and hear things in a war zone the authorities would prefer unpublished.
It is no coincidence that the first real war journalism, in the Crimea, was met with the first official apparatus to restrict and restrain those journalists.
Phillip Knightley addressed this Foundation in 2001, and his book The First Casualty is awash with quotes by and about war correspondents. Indeed, there may be no better source for what war correspondents have said about war and about their own role in it. Knightley describes vividly the unprepared and overwhelmed William Howard Russell and Edward Lawrence Godkin, Crimean War correspondents for The Times and the London Daily News respectively, equally shocked at the slaughter and at the failings of the British command.
Their reports were peppered with words and phrases like: “the management is infamous …the sick have not a bed to lie on” – by Russell – and “folly … ignorance … mistakes …blunders … oversights...” – from Godkin.
These incendiary reports inflamed public opinion.
And the idea that the general public might have an opinion and ought to have a say in the way the nation’s blood and treasure were expended came as a shock to many in the political and military establishments of the day.
Russell and Godkin’s scathing indictments of army organisation and military blunders led to the fall of a government and to major military reforms.
And they also inflamed military opinion, against the correspondents. Hyperbolic suggestions that Russell ought to be lynched were followed by far more serious steps: the first military censorship order, prohibiting the publication of details ‘of value to the enemy’.
The question of precisely what information is of value to the enemy has been contested ever since. Reporting from the war zone is often very difficult and very dangerous. Inevitably, something a journalist wants to report will upset someone. Often everyone, and many of them armed.
A great deal of the information a journalist learns in a warzone will put him or her squarely on the horns of a dilemma. What obligations does a war correspondent owe to the men and women who wear the uniform of their country, and what obligations to the plain unvarnished truth? And I am not speaking here of operational matters, which I believe all journalists would agree are off limits.
I’m thinking more of reporters in the Second World War accused of aiding the enemy for telling readers of the miserable conditions in London’s communal bomb shelters, or who did not report the looting of bombed homes and even the bodies of the dead. I’m thinking of journalists in the first days of the Korean War, who were begged by American G.I.s to tell the people back home just how bad things were, and then were treated as the enemy by those same soldiers’ commanding officers for doing just that.
Similar allegations of lack of patriotism, and even treason, levelled against the Crimean war correspondents, have been resurrected on many occasions since, when governments and the military find themselves publicly embarrassed.
Ladies and gentlemen, it is a normal human reaction, when being run through the media’s wringer, to wish the press would turn their attention to something else or just go away.
But however you put it, it’s hardly a democratic response.
In a democracy, power supposedly belongs to the people, and is exercised only on their behalf. Democratic governments like ours can only say we act on behalf of the community when we act with their consent. And that consent, ladies and gentlemen, is not genuine if gained with coercion, or with deception.
Nowhere is this more important than it is when it comes to a nation’s military actions. When the Australian Government commits Australian forces, we put Australian lives at risk, and exercise potentially – often actually – lethal force in the name of the Australian community.
It is essential therefore that the community knows not only the reasons but also the costs of such action.
As Abraham Lincoln said in 1864, as the American Civil War raged, “Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.”
It might be true, ladies and gentlemen, that as a general rule reporters want to publish more than war-time governments wish them to. In totalitarian states, the answer is censorship; in democracies with the tradition of free speech and the free press, the only option is the negotiation of a balance, often on a case by case basis.
It is not simple, and it is not easy: but it is, by far, preferable.
The question of telling the truth in the national interest is not a simple contest between reckless, feckless war correspondents and secretive, close-mouthed generals and politicians.
On the whole, I would think, most journalists understand that there are fundamental questions of operational security and lives at stake when it comes to certain details and certain stories.
On the whole, I would hope, most politicians and most members of the military accept that the community has the right to know what is being done in their name, done at times at the cost of the lives of their loved ones.
Ladies and gentlemen, if history teaches us anything it is that the only way to secure the public support so critical to a democracy’s military power is to be as transparent and accountable as military exigencies permit.
The recognition of the different but complementary responsibilities of press and politician in our democracy was, I think, nowhere better illustrated than in Canberra in World War Two. Prime Minister John Curtin took Press Gallery journalists into his confidence on the movement of troops across the Indian Ocean from the Middle East, in order to explain to them how genuinely necessary it was they not print or report any rumours on the subject that they might pick up. His trust, as we all know, was not abused.
Relationships between press and politicians are rarely so cordial.
And rarely, too, do we see the mutual willingness to negotiate the balance between transparency and security that Curtin and the Canberra press gallery displayed.
Both governments, and journalists, have, from time to time, spectacularly failed to find that balance. Those failures over the past century have had immediate consequences, and also consequences that have resonated through subsequent wars.
Ladies and gentlemen, British historian Arthur Ponsonby – a Labour MP I might add – in 1928 described the First World War as one of the most discreditable periods in the history of journalism.
Today, we are familiar with Charles Bean’s work and that of later historians, familiar with books and movies about the nightmare of trench warfare in World War I and familiar with the fields on fields of silent graves marking the toll of the dead.
At the time, correspondents filed stories about soldiers straining to be on the attack, even though the reality was 160,000 men in the Allied front line unarmed due to equipment shortages.
No-one mentioned 300,000 French soldiers killed in the Battle of Frontiers, while the London Daily Chronicles’ Philip Gibbs wrote of the first day of the Battle of the Somme: “It is, on balance, a good day for Britain and France.”
Australian readers of the Sydney Morning Herald could read on, the 3rd of July 1916, in the paper’s summary of British coverage: “The British casualties were not heavy.”
They could read, also, of the public rejoicing in London on the night of 1 July at the ‘day of glad news’ culminating in the London papers’ evening placards proclaiming “The day goes well”.
Ladies and gentlemen, twenty thousand British soldiers died that day. By the end of the Somme campaign, Allied losses would exceed 600,000.
But Australian readers could gain a different idea of that day’s bloody work from Charles Bean. Following the course one regiment took in the attack, Bean went from one unburied body to the next, until finally reaching what he described as “a little group of half a dozen men, with the regimental dog, … still lying together where some machine gun had caught them, everyone being dead.”
Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, in late 1917 heard Philip Gibb’s private account of what he had seen at the front, and noted “If people really knew, the war would be stopped tomorrow.”
But accredited correspondents with the British Army were writing ‘our troops have reached their new position’ after a defeat and subsequent retreat. Billeted by the Army, accompanied by officers, driven in army vehicles, and dressed in military uniforms, they were, perhaps, the first ‘embedded’ war correspondents.
As some of their later colleagues would find in subsequent wars, a close and dependent relationship with the military did not necessarily enhance objectivity.
More than just not writing what they knew to be true, many correspondents enthusiastically retailed fake atrocity stories and propaganda demonising the enemy. In some cases they invented them under pressure from their editors.
Captain F W Wilson of the Daily Mail, in Brussels when the war broke out, later recalled: “There was a little town outside Brussels where one went to get dinner. I heard the Hun had been there. I suppose that there must have been a baby there. So I wrote a heart-rending story…”.
The tale that the Germans had begun boiling down the corpses of their dead for glycerine to make munitions was another fabrication, repeated, though not invented, by front line correspondents.
There was one group of people from whom censorship could not conceal, nor propaganda obscure, the truth.
They were in the trenches, and they saw the difference between the war as they experienced it, and the war as it was presented to their friends and families back home. The loss of faith in the newspapers as the conveyors of ‘news’ as opposed to propaganda had far reaching consequences.
Thirty years later, World War Two correspondents trying to convey what they’d seen and felt on reaching the concentration camps of Dachau, Belsen, Buchenwald found their accounts discounted by readers trained by the press of the previous World War to discount such atrocities as propaganda.
First World War correspondents were labouring under a military censorship regime designed to keep them as far away from any actual event as possible, their stories cut to shreds before being sent back to Britain.
Strict as this regime was, it was not impossible to evade.
It was not Charles Bean, but it was an Australian, Keith Murdoch, who brought news of the disastrous and deteriorating situation in the Dardanelles into the light of day. First he attempted to smuggle a letter by another reporter, Britain’s Ashmead-Bartlett, past military censors and back to England. Then, when that was confiscated on the orders of the British Commander of the Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, General Hamilton, Murdoch reconstructed as much as he could remember in a letter to Australian Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher.
Hamilton learnt a basic lesson in media management. No matter how hard you try to suppress a story, it always gets out. In today’s world of twitter, camera-phones and blogs, trying to suppress a story more likely only guarantees that it will get out.
In the late months of 1915, Murdoch’s letter was circulated to the members of the British Government’s Dardanelles Committee. The allegations in it ended Hamilton’s active career and precipitated the end of the Dardanelles adventure.
As for many other correspondents of that war, Philip Gibbs later admitted : “We identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field. … There was no need of censorship of our despatches. We were our own censors.”
By World War Two, General Eisenhower was stating bluntly that: “Public opinion wins war. I have always considered as quasi-staff officers, correspondents accredited to my headquarters.”
Many correspondents agreed. As John Steinbeck would write after the war ended: “We were all part of the war effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it.”
Ladies and gentlemen, the close and intimate relationship between media and military in the two World Wars served the immediate interests of governments seeking to maintain public support. But after each war, the accounts of returning soldiers and the post-war publication of memoirs and novels exposed as fraudulent many of the media’s wartime images. This ‘credibility gap’ undermined faith both in government arguments for military action, and in the media’s accuracy and impartiality in time of war.
Yet still, the belief that the press ought to be ‘quasi-staff officers’, part of the public relations machine, proved more enduring with the military and politicians than with journalists and their editors.
In Korea, in 1950, the North Korean army swept southwards, bundling opposition ahead of them. Knightley describes how, when correspondents Peter Kalischer, Tom Lambert and Marguerite Higgins wrote of the panic-stricken retreat of many “whipped and frightened” American troops, the army in Korea and at MacArthur’s headquarters in Japan accused them of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy”, and Macarthur himself reminded them that they had “an important responsibility in the matter of psychological warfare.”
The correspondents, rather, felt they had an important responsibility to tell the public, especially the American public, of failures in training, supply and preparation.
In early January 1951 correspondents were placed under the jurisdiction of the military, and on pain of punishments including deportation and court-martial, prohibited from writing anything on military security, the effect of enemy fire, or any criticism of the allied conduct of the war or derogatory comments about commanders.
By the time of the peace talks, many journalists regarded official briefing information with deep suspicion. Often, it did not tally with information they found elsewhere – including from the journalists with the North Korean-Chinese delegation, whose access extended to documents, reports and maps used in the negotiations. According to Knightley, they shared their material with the rest of the press pack, despite orders from General Ridgway prohibiting ‘social consorting, including the drinking of alcoholic beverages, with communist journalists’.
This edict was about as successful as you would expect it to be.
There have been times, when journalists set aside critical objectivity to ‘cheerlead’ for their country. But as Macarthur and Ridgway learned, it is a journalist’s job to get the story. If you want them to get your story, trying to stonewall and obstruct them is counterproductive.
Eisenhower might have been right when he argued that public opinion wins wars. It’s certainly a vital component of a democracy’s military strength. But it is neither the responsibility of the media, nor even within its power to create a favourable climate of opinion in support of a government’s decision to fight a war. When government and military officials regard a sceptical, questioning press as hostile, a government’s efforts to put its case for war are hamstrung.
So it proved in Vietnam.
There is, ladies and gentlemen, a speech in itself on war correspondents and Vietnam. It was a conflict in which journalists had unprecedented access and revolutionary technology. They were not subject to the censorship regimes of so many earlier wars. Vietnam was flooded with correspondents from around the world, men and women whose motives, opinions and competency varied widely. The world in turn was flooded with accounts and images of Vietnam, some of the most memorable and searing portraits of war published in any generation.
Robert Siegel, anchor for NPR’s All Things Considered, said in 2002 that he attributed the shift in opinion on America’s role in the Vietnam War to more than “just that people were dying. It was that nobody could demonstrate that the country was achieving what it said it was achieving.”
Seigel went on to say that the (at the time) high levels of support for American involvement in Afghanistan would prove fragile “if there developed a true gap between the statement [that] we have defeated the regime in Afghanistan and the reality of whether we have actually done so.”
That ‘credibility gap’ is the greatest threat to gaining and maintaining public support for military action that the government believes is necessary to national security. It is created not only by falsely optimistic claims of stunning military success – think back to Philip Gibbs reporting from the Somme, the wet and muddy grave of a hundred thousand men, that it has been, on balance, a good day.
A credibility gap is created too by attempts to manipulate the public. War propaganda of atrocities is often successful in mobilising public opinion – in the short term. The Taliban are past masters at this. However, crying wolf often leaves people immune – both to propaganda, and more seriously, to stories of actual human rights abuses that are viewed with the same jaundiced eye.
The relationship between the media and the government and military, and the effort of a democratic government to wage and sustain war, can only be sound if it is based on truth about the reasons for, and the conduct of, that war.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is a principle I am determined to live by as Defence Minister.
Australia’s largest, and most contentious, defence commitment today is our engagement in Afghanistan. Public opinion is divided.
I do believe that it is in Australia’s national interest to continue training the Afghan National Army 4th Brigade in Oruzgan Province so they can take responsibility for maintaining security conditions there. It is a difficult, dangerous, sometimes deadly, but very necessary job.
The return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan would have the most serious implications for the fight against organised terrorism and the networks that fund and support terrorist organisations.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will continue to argue the case for our military efforts in Afghanistan.
And I hope I have learned the lessons, and I am trying to avoid the mistakes, of earlier governments in earlier wars.
I have begun, and will continue, regular, frank and comprehensive reports to Parliament on progress in Defence’s efforts in Afghanistan. I am committed to ensuring that our efforts, our successes, the challenges, and the risks, are transparent to the Australian people. I welcome scrutiny by the Australian public of our policies and our progress – as well as our setbacks.
Moreover, I have not and I will not use ‘operational security’ to sequester information that can and should be made public. For the first time, the Parliament and the Australian people will be given regular reports about ADF casualties. For the first time, the Parliament and the Australian people will be given regular reports about confirmed or credibly alleged civilian casualties caused by Australian military action. And the CDF, the Secretary, and Defence, stand with me on this.
Ladies and gentlemen, in August last year, the Government trialled the practice of ‘embedding’ journalists with combat troops. Three correspondents spent 21 days with our troops in Tarin Kowt. I won’t tell you it was seamless, but we all learned from the experience. I have approved further tours of embedded media this year, with three planned for this current rotation of the Mentoring Task Force. With good will, and good intentions, I believe these tours will be a way for the Australian public to understand our soldiers’ experiences as never before.
“Embedding” journalists with combat units does provide the media with unprecedented access to the day-to-day reality of soldier’s lives in the war zone. It is a complex juggling act: providing access for the press; ensuring that their safety and the safety of the soldiers they are with is not compromised; and protecting operational security without inappropriate restrictions on correspondents’ copy.
I believe we are on the way to getting it right; I’m confident that journalists on future ‘embed’ tours will let me know if they think we’re getting it wrong.
And, I very much hope Australian journalists do not lose sight of the fact that not all the pitfalls raised by ‘embedding’ are on the military side.
Phillip Knightley described ‘embedding’ as “A radical American plan for managing wartime media … an overwhelming victory for the military and its propagandists … an appearance of openness and truthfulness” .
As Tsuyoshi Nojima, a Japanese journalist embedded with the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force in Iraq, said “I have asked myself repeatedly whether I can keep a neutral attitude, because I sleep with [U.S] soldiers every night and I am always guarded by them … Yesterday, when a bomb hit Iraqi troops, I unconsciously shouted, ‘Great!’.”
Clive Myrie of the BBC recalled: “We were in a ditch under fire and this guy says, ‘Make yourself useful.’ This guy was throwing flares at me and I’m throwing them at a guy who’s got to light them and who’s sending them into the sky and I’m thinking, what am I doing here?”
Knightley said he was only able to find two instances of embedded correspondents who were critical of the troops they accompanied, or challenged the official account of an incident.
And I have to say I am glad that the coverage from the participants in last year’s ‘embed’ trial proved Knightley to be too pessimistic. I hope Australian journalists involved in future ‘embed’ tours with the ADF will continue to be critical, questioning, and sceptical: in the fine tradition of Charles Bean and his determination to see each trench and battlefield for himself.
And I am sure there will be some stories that will make uncomfortable reading.
But, ladies and gentlemen, neither government ministers nor military officers should expect the heirs to C.E.W. Bean to consider it their job to make us comfortable.
Their responsibility to hold us to account, to tell the truth, and to expose lies, is an indispensible safeguard of the democratic contract between government and citizen. There have been times when governments have failed to recognise the importance of that safeguard, or swept it aside as an inconvenience. There have been times when journalists have not lived up to the responsibility, the heavy responsibility, that rests on their shoulders.
But there have been, ladies and gentlemen, very many brave men and women in the hundred and fifty six years since William Russell and Edward Godkin risked Russian cannons and official censure to tell the public what was really happening to English men and boys on a far away Russian battlefield, who have lived up to that responsibility. Some have been injured, some have been excoriated by their governments, and not a few have lost their lives.
Tonight, as we honour Charles Bean, we also honour his colleagues, past and present, who have bravely and unflinchingly told the truth about war.
Cheers