Pen and Sword: American War Correspondents, 1898-1975. Mary S. Mander. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010. 188 pp.
Evaluation and Stance in War News: A Linguistic Analysis of American, British, and Italian Television Reporting of the 2003 Iraqi War. Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, eds. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009. 256 pp.
Both these books concern an increasingly vexing contemporary issue: the role of a free press during wartime. They use cultural history and analysis to examine the subject, and this approach will be frustrating to some journalists or historians seeking a treatment that might tell the story of the challenge of war reporting or shed light on its chronological development. Nor are the authors firsthand witnesses, having neither worked as journalists nor served in the military.
Mary Mander is a professor emeritus of communication at Penn State and editor of other cultural studies. Because she does not deal with her subject here as a chronological story, with beginning, middle, and end, her treatment will strike some readers as dizzyingly circular and sometimes repetitive. We go back and forth between the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, and Vietnam, and not necessarily in that order. She does not include the Korean War, “because it was the first war of the United Nations.”
Much has happened to both media and military since the Vietnam War, and by limiting the analysis at that point, the issues remain unresolved. A more straightforward chronology is still needed to tell the evolutionary story of the media-military relationship from the partisan weekly newspapers of the American revolution; to a press divided by Civil War and a president (Lincoln) who wanted to jail editors; to a media mogul (Hearst) who fanned the Spanish-American War into flames for his own profit; to a journalism profession that willingly capitulated to a government fighting two World Wars to end all wars; to news media that could show the atrocities of the Vietnam War in American living rooms in full color and thus were less able to conceal the reality of war; to the new wars of the twenty-first century with new media platforms and a much more sophisticated military public relations apparatus that could embed the press in foxholes with the soldiers. But Mander’s book doesn’t tell this whole story.
Mander calls her work “grounded-theory research” that is “archival research” relying on “certain tools of interpretation” entailing “a constant process of triangulation.” Her concern here is mostly with the process of the formation of an ideology of war and journalism, and to do this she has studied military records, the papers of war correspondents, and articles and books written by journalists.
It isn’t until page 29 that she quotes a statement expressing what journalists and journalism academics would normally regard as the central issue of a free press operating in wartime, and her quote is not from a journalist or journalism scholar but from an Army field regulation issued in 1914: “It is a fact that the press occupies a dual and delicate position, being under the necessity of truthful[ly] disclosing to the people the facts concerning the operations of the Army, and at the same time, of refraining from disclosing those things which, though true, would be disastrous to us if known to the enemy.” Mander obviously does not regard this duality as an adequate description of the issue.
For Mander, the relationship between American military and American journalists is symbiotic, not adversarial. Both parties—journalists and military—are seeking the same goal, she contends: “preservation of the rule of the people, by the people, for the people.” So they conduct their relationship as a kind of dance, “a complex tango where the state and press engage in a highly structured set of steps that are at once formalized and intense.” Many U.S. journalists would reject this characterization, even though Mander finds it enshrined in the documents she studied. Journalists would prefer to think they are engaged in a serious wrestling match in the search to find and disseminate the truth, not a tango of partners who expect to end up in bed. Many journalists who have written about their work in Vietnam have emphasized the adversarial role they tried to play.
The First Amendment and censorship are key issues for Mander, and she brings interesting insights to each. She writes that the First Amendment is often thought of as sacred, a notion she rejects. “A law is not a sacrament,” she writes, “it is a rule governing our public conduct.” Further, she later adds, “The Constitution …. and the Bill of Rights are not calls to worship.”
The idea of censorship is crucial to her entire study. She states the concern a bit oddly at times and confusingly if taken out of context. “If journalists are fish,” she writes, “censorship is the sea. Without water, fish die. Without the possibility of censorship, journalists cease to exist.” What she apparently means by this is that once the military censors a subject, it becomes more newsworthy, a definition that might raise some journalistic eyebrows. She defines censorship as a cultural experience rather than a set of restrictions externally imposed on the press.
She writes that a major shift took place in War World II “in understanding the role of the journalist from one having to do with intelligence to one having to do with public relations.” In other words, whether out of patriotism or laziness (she doesn’t say which) journalists become apologists and thus propagandists for the state. At the same time, she points out that the military increasingly sees its role as one of public relations rather than physical combat on a battlefield. American journalists might agree with the notion that journalism is culture-based, but most would reject the idea that they are propagandists for the state during wartime or unduly influenced by military PR, no matter how much PR the military practices.
Mander’s book is exclusively about the American experience. In the second book, Louann Haarman and Linda Lombardo, both professors of English and linguistics in Italy, have brought together seven essays to dissect four different cultures (British, French, Italian, and American), and their television news coverage of the first month of the Iraq war in 2003. They use “corpus linguistics” with qualitative tools of discourse analysis to understand what they regard as an “extremely complex linguistic phenomenon.”
The studies presented by editors Haarman and Lombardo also represent post-modernist cultural analysis, and offer a further counterpoint to Mander’s thesis—namely that war coverage is nationally and culturally based as well as professionally. The British, French, Italian, and American television journalists all reported the first month of the Iraq war differently, and these authors conclude that this stems not only from variations in national culture, but in journalistic culture as well.
The researchers confirm the “Liberal Anglo-Saxon model” of politically neutral journalism, versus the “Polarized Pluralist model” of southern Europe. In these Mediterranean countries, “facts are not seen as speaking for themselves, commentary is valued, and neutrality appears as inconsistency, naiveté or opportunism.” They examine the mark-up and narrative structure, the news presenter as a socio-cultural construct, the relationship of presenter to audience, the effects of embedding, the role of visual elements, and the techniques and patterns of attribution.
In a comparison of CBS and BBC, author-editor Linda Lombardo of Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome found striking differences. At CBS, she identified a positive association with the war. While apparently objective, at times the CBS anchor “personalizes events and expresses an explicitly patriotic stance,” she finds. “U.S. soldiers are presented in a favorable light, while the Iraqis are most frequently portrayed as beneficiaries of American actions or as acting in unexplainable ways.” The news presenter at BBC, on the other hand, “seems to adopt a style of reporting typical of investigative journalism which tends to challenge official sources and which construes events as problematic.” Her overall impression of the BBC was the reporter as impartial news provider.
Elsewhere in the collection, Laura Ferrarotti of the University of Rome looked at CBS and BBC as well as two Italian broadcasts, RAI Uno and TG5In, a study of the use of we and you. At CBS, she found a low frequency of inclusive we, pointing to a more detached anchor-audience relationship. At the BBC, viewers are constructed as you and not we, and thus aligned with the newscaster in “dialoguing with reporters.” On Italian broadcasts, the “relatively high frequency of inclusive we and you suggests that viewers share similar understandings and goals with the presenter, creating a more personal relationship.”
Patterns of attribution also reveal cultural, language-driven, and structural differences. Roberta Piazza of the University of Sussex found that CBS and BBC journalists show a greater preference for transparent representation of other voices than did the two Italian telecasts. BBC and CBS preferred more neutral reporting verbs than the Italians. The greatest disparity is between TG5 and CBS. “Paradoxically,” Piazza says, “TG5 appears to be more balanced in representing a variety of voices, especially when compared with CBS, which is more focused on putting the Anglo-American forces in the spotlight.”
Piazza’s conclusion seems to fit all the essays here: “This study has shown that the different modalities of reporting within the four cultural models, which can be related to institutional differences between the individual countries, appear to be instrumental in determining diverse construals and interpretations of reality.”
Mander would certainly seem to agree.
RAY E. HIEBERT
University of Maryland