Moseley’s broad and intimate history draws on newly discovered material to offer a comprehensive account both of the war and the abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists. Reporting War captures the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.

Ray Moseley enjoyed a long career as a foreign, diplomatic, and chief European correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, stationed in London, Washington, Berlin, Rome, Cairo, Belgrade, Moscow, and Nairobi. He lives in London.

Martin Woollacott is a former foreign correspondent, foreign editor and commentator on international affairs for the Guardian

This blog has been dormant for a while and the publication of Digital Media and Reporting Conflict: Blogging and the BBC’s Coverage of War and Terrorism is the right time to formally close it.

It’s been an amazing journey over the last five years or so and I’ve really enjoyed working on the project, documenting it on the Frontline Club website, working with people at the BBC and meeting people throughout the media industry.

I’d like to thank all the people who made this book possible – my family, my friends, my PhD supervisor at King’s College London, everybody at the BBC who gave up their time to participate, the Frontline Club and the countless people I interacted with online.

When I decide to do something I put everything into it. I hope the book testifies to the high standards and hard work that I tried to bring to it.

But perhaps more than that I hope the book and the hundreds of blog posts I wrote continue to be a useful resource for students of warfare, media, journalism and the BBC.

I took most pleasure from knowing that other people found my work useful and that it contributed in a small way to public understanding of the changing nature of reporting war and terrorism.

Achievements come at a cost and over the last couple of years in particular I invested a lot of myself, my time, my financial and physical resources into seeing the book through.

I also spent a lot of time banging at academic doors that I found were closed to me or only open if I was willing to work for free which I sustained for far longer than I should have done.

In hindsight, all this effort was too much and I really burnt myself – not giving up is a great strength and a terrible weakness. I think it’s a sacrifice I am only willing to make again in a different context.

A wise man once said that you have to give up your life in order to save it. And it’s time to leave a road which had become intolerably tough and start something new.

I’m not entirely sure what that looks like yet but I have long been involved in Christian ministry and I’m pretty sure it involves achieving a lot less and loving other people a lot more. In the meantime, I need to rest, heal and rebuild my strength.

For those of you who want to remain in touch my current email address is mail-AT-dsbennett.co.uk.

"An extraordinary time to be a journalist"

All the panellists expressed their excitement at covering the Arab Spring. Tom Coghlan began by comparing the limitations on his reporting from Afghanistan over the last four years with the "fabulously unrestricted" nature of his reporting from Libya.

Covering the conflict from the perspective of the rebels, Coghlan noted that it was "completely chaotic" and journalists were welcomed by Libyans who were keen to tell their stories to the world. 

He said it was a "fantastically optimistic" story to cover with "ordinary people" doing "extraordinary things". 

Lindsey Hilsum described 2011 as "the reason" she "went into journalism". She said it was amazing to have access as a journalist to what was happening at Tahrir Square and the aftermath of Gaddafi’s departure from Tripoli.

In Libya, she said journalists benefited from the fact that battles took place on main roads – journalists could drive up, film the story and then retreat from the front line to file.   

Hilsum believed that for all the dangers and risks of reporting the Arab Spring, her generation of reporters have been "very privileged". 

Lyse Doucet agreed: it is "an extraordinary time to be a journalist". But she observed that the story of the Arab Spring, which began with great "excitement and euphoria" was now entering a new stage.

She said that there were parts of the story that were causing "awe and anguish" as the ‘revolutions’ faced opposition and challenges in the aftermath. 

Reporting Syria

In particular, there was concern on the panel for what was happening in Syria.

Tom Coghlan described his six days reporting from there as exceptionally unpleasant and said the risks that Syrians were taking meant he had not been able to report a single name of anyone he had interviewed.

He revealed that The Times would now only send journalists into Syria with bodyguards.

The role of "citizen journalists" and "activists" in accessing the story from Syria was also discussed.

Coghlan was impressed by the innovative and clever use of online tools by activists, while Lindsey Hilsum said news organisations are developing increasingly sophisticated techniques to verify video material coming out of the country.

Interestingly, an example Hilsum gave of trying to verify a video from the Free Syrian Army included an appeal to Twitter users to see what they made of the footage – effectively crowdsourcing part of the verification process to a networked audience. (Although it should be noted that this was just one of several verification strategies.)    

Nevertheless, prompted by a question from the chair Richard Sambrook, the panel emphasised the importance of "objective", independent reporting and "bearing witness".

Lindsey Hilsum said it was difficult for governments outside of Syria to formulate a policy towards the country, but she argued that it would be even harder if journalists were not going there to gather news and information.

Seeing as we’re coming to the end of the year I thought I’d pick out a few of the ‘best’, ‘most interesting’, ‘memorable’ or simply ‘random’ links on various topics from among the 530.

In this post, I’ve selected from those that are also tagged ‘war reporting‘.

1. Sebastian Junger remembers Tim Hetherington

In April, photojournalist Tim Hetherington was killed while reporting from Misrata in Libya. Colleague and friend Sebastian Junger reflects on his life and death:

"That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things."

2. Libya conflict: journalists trapped in Tripoli’s Rixos hotel

"It’s a desperate situation," [the BBC’s Matthew] Price told Radio 4’s Today programme. "The situation deteriorated massively overnight when it became clear we were unable to leave the hotel of our own free will … Gunmen were roaming around the corridors … Snipers were on the roof."

3. War, too close for comfort

Simon Klingert talks to some people on a train about his life as a photojournalist:

““So have you ever seen someone die?” It was about two minutes into our conversation when the question had popped up. The question. Not that I minded though. After all, it seems like a natural question to ask when you tell people you’re trying to make a living as a war correspondent and it dawns on them you actually like what you are doing..”

4. The hazards of war reporting from behind a desk

BBC journalist Alex Murray reflects on reporting the conflict in Libya from his computer screen:

"But the war has been very close to me, too close sometimes. Viewing them [videos from Libya] in a corner of the newsroom on a screen with nobody else sharing the experience at that moment is a dissociative experience. The process of analysing it, effectively repeatedly exposing myself to the same brutal events, does not make it easier."

5. Image of the child of fallen soldier trends on Facebook

I typed ‘Afghanistan’ into the Kurrently search engine one day and noticed that this photo was being passed rapidly around Facebook in the United States. I find the photo jarring and unsettling: the artificial neatness of a homely, yet staged photograph here represents the tragic consequences of a chaotic, complicated and distant battlefield.

The paper is a case study of the BBC’s adoption of live text commentary to report breaking news. Indeed, Mumbai was the first time the BBC had used a ‘live-blogging’ format to cover a major terror attack.

I’ll be giving the talk at Westminster University’s ‘Global Media and the "War on Terror"’ conference on 14th September.

Abstract

The emergence of instant global communication technology has placed pressure on competing media organisations to publish news information at great speed (Gowing, 2009). In the event of an ongoing breaking news crisis, online journalists have begun to adopt live updates or live blogs as a way of disseminating news information quickly from a variety of sources (Newman, 2009).   

The BBC’s use of this format during the Mumbai attacks in 2008 was the first time the organisation had used live updates to cover a major terror attack. The BBC’s coverage won an Online News Association award and appeared popular with the online audience. The live update pages, however, raised a number of editorial questions both within (Herrmann, 2008) and outside the Corporation (Sutcliffe, 2008).

The inclusion of audience material from Twitter was a particular concern. Based on a content analysis of the BBC’s Mumbai live update pages, interviews with journalists who worked on the story and internal documents, this paper considers the impact that ‘live blogging’ a terror attack has on the BBC’s editorial process and journalism. 

The paper demonstrates that the imperative of ‘getting news out there’ meant BBC journalists often published news material on the live update pages on the basis of a single source using attribution to distance the BBC from the accuracy of the information.  

It also argues that the concept of ‘news as conversation’ is limited by the context of a breaking news security story where a serious tone is expected and careless reporting might jeopardise human life. Although the ‘live blog’ format did facilitate the inclusion of audience comment, the extent to which it should be included was contested both on practical and editorial grounds.

Last Thursday, I was at Gaza: Missiles and Messages at the Frontline Club. It was a discussion about the media coverage of Gaza and it was standing room only. (You know an event’s popular at the Club when somebody feels it’s necessary to dust down the wooden church pews to augment the seating.) Below I’ll discuss some of the main points covered, but first a list of the people on the panel.

Jonathan Miller (C4)
Alan Fisher (Al Jazeera)
Harriet Sherwood (The Guardian)
Ruthie Blum Leibowitz (The Jerusalem Post) via Skype (and looking like a Second Life avatar because of the huge screen she was on)
Lior Ben Dor (Israeli affairs specialist)

The talk was chaired by Roy Greenslade.

1. Why were Western Journalists denied access to Gaza?

Lior Ben Dor’s ‘starter for ten‘ was perhaps the most tricky question of the evening. He said he understood the desire for news professionals to cover the conflict, but argued that Israel needed to wage a war against its enemies for the security of the state. In doing so, he claimed it was simply too dangerous for journalists to be in the Strip.

In a later clarification, it became clear that the main concern here was for the safety of Israeli soldiers who might have had to stop firing on a position where journalists were reporting, which in turn would put Israeli soldiers in danger from Hamas fighters.

In the subsequent discussion Ruthie Blum Leibowitz (unsurprisingly) backed up Lior’s point of view, while the journalists began shooting down (not literally) his position. Harriet Sherman said Guardian journalists had made it into Gaza through Egypt but disputed Lior’s implication that this was straightforward. She emphasised that the Israelis control what happens in Gaza and pointed out that the government set up a unit eight months ago to think about media coverage.

Alan Fisher picked up this theme, highlighting that one of the failures of the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006 had been Israel’s defeat in the propaganda war. He and Jonathan Miller agreed that the media policy employed by Israel this time round ‘was a disservice to the people of Israel’, although the latter did recognise that it might have helped Israel achieve her military goals.

Fisher disputed the Israelis concern for the safety of journalists highlighting the case of documentary maker, James Miller, who was killed in Gaza, and the fact that the Reuters building was hit during the recent conflict.

2. How does the media cover Sderot and Israel?

Lior suggested that the media did not cover Sderot sufficiently. He said reporting what is happening in places that are being hit by rockets is an important part of understanding why Israel responded in the way that it did. The journalists replied that Sderot was covered, but that it did not always warrant further coverage. Indeed, a question was raised as to whether Sderot might have received too much coverage.

3. Covering Gaza

Alan Fisher said Al Jazeera’s advantage over other organisations was, of course, the fact they already journalists in Gaza, while Jonathan Miller said that some journalists who tried to get in were arrested by the Israelis.

Leibowitz argued that Israelis did know what was happening in Gaza to the Palestinians and that pictures of the conflict did reach Israel. She says Israelis felt terrible for Palestinians being used as human shields, a comment which was met with some scepticism from the audience in London.

4. What was missing?

Personally, I felt this discussion missed out on several key points. First, there was no real discussion of the differing approaches employed by Arab and Western networks with regards to pictures. Al Jazeera, Al Minar, Press TV et al tended to show far more graphic images than their Western counterparts. This was an interesting feature of Unseen Gaza but didn’t get a mention here.

Second, there was virtually no discussion of online media. Particularly conspicuous by its absence was a take on the Israeli Defence Force’s use of Twitter, Youtube, and blogging to try to get their message across.

Finally, we could have done with a military perspective. Somebody with some experience of running an information operation to really pose some questions to journalists who were rightly intent on defending freedom of speech.

I’ve been writing another chapter of the
PhD over the last month and I find it’s all too easy to get distracted,
so I pursue a ‘close all unnecessary tabs in browser’ policy. This
means there’s less blogging but I do get some ‘real work’ done!

The other day I finally got a chance to watch Channel 4’s Dispatches
programme, ‘Unseen Gaza’. Presented by Jon Snow, it was an excellent
summary of some of the key issues facing the media as they tried to
report Gaza.

You can still watch it
on Channel 4’s Catch Up service for a few more days yet, but I thought
I’d pull out some quotes from various members of the media interviewed
on the programme.

1. Western journalists on not being allowed access to Gaza:

“You can’t cover a war from one hill”

Dominic Waghorn, Sky News, to an Israeli soldier

“I think that the truth of what happening is getting
out. What we’re not getting is some of the detail…For example there was
some incredibly moving pictures that I used at the end of one of my
reports in the last week or so and it was a man who was kissing his
dead son goodbye in the hospital. I mean it was horrific.

“The agency cameramen who are shooting these things. They are very
brave and very enterprising. But if I’d been there I would have found
out who that man was. I’d have gone to his house if it was still
standing. I would have found out his personal story…but we haven’t been
able to do that.”

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East Editor

“The problem is the context, that is what we miss by not being there”

Kevin Flower, CNN

2. On the differing approaches taken by Western media and Arab networks to graphic images:

“I don’t think the coverage of a story is about the
volume of blood and gore that you show, but clearly being able to get
across the effects especially on the civilian population in Gaza of
what’s being happening is very important.

“We’ve had a number of really powerful pieces which are about the
effects on their lives seeing the kinds of injuries that they’ve had.
Those haven’t been about images of blood splattered all over walls.
We’ve had some of that, but we don’t have as much as typically Arab
networks do and some European countries.”

“The human tragedy that is taking place in Gaza is not
being shown properly and authentically on the screens of Western
networks in general. It’s no longer I think convincing to tell me that
you should shy away from live coverage of wars because you’re going to
show some indecent or nightmarish scenes, but war is ugly.

“And if you are honest you have to show the ugly affairs of war.
What is war if not horrible? It is a very important question that we –
I mean journalists, I mean media people – should be talking about
should be deliberating in the future.”

Ahmed Sheikh, Chief Editor, Al Jazeera

“I think people do get a sense of what is going on. I
don’t think you need to see dismembered body parts to have a sense of
what’s happening in Gaza. People know from looking at shots in
hospitals, on hospital trolleys, the aftermath of the air strikes, the
pictures that we do show…

“For example, we showed a very very strong image about a week ago of
a Father who had lost four of his children in an attack air strike and
one of the children was a young infant. Now probably by the strict code
that would be a very very you know near breach for us. But the baby was
not bloodied…it was a tragically awful image that conveyed the horror
but I’m hoping wouldn’t have offended or shocked anyone beyond reason
and through that image we got across the human cost of what’s happened.”

“The view on the Arabic satellite networks is
essentially, if you don’t show it you’re covering it up. Show
everything and show it five times or ten times, because if you don’t do
it then you’re conspiring with Israel to cover up the truth.

“Our point of view is that you have to show the truth, but also
there’s a balance to be drawn in terms of the sensibilities of the
viewers, and also a fact that it might become counterproductive after a
while, if you keep showing a load of bodies…”

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East Editor

I’ll be going to the Frontline Club’s discussion about Gaza and the Media on Thursday. Afraid there are no spaces left, but you can watch the livestream. I’ll get a blog post up about it too.