By Bill Kovarik
What has journalism ever done for peace?
Today's Kiplings and Hemmingways and Bourke-Whites still flock off to foreign wars with a sense of mission and purpose that would warm the heart-remnants of the most hawkish editors.
These young reporters know that they are following in the footsteps of the great men and women of the press. They know that success means accepting dangerous assignments. They know that when Black Hawk helicopters go down, newpaper circulation and TV ratings go up.
Also see
A review of Peace Journalism for Journalism and Mass Communications Quarterly
Lecture notes for RU's Peace Studies class.
Illustration above: left to right: Hezekiah Niles; Ted Turner; Joseph Pulittzer; William L. Shirer.
They know all this because it has become so much a part of journalism history.
At times of war and confusion we always look to the past for explanations, and it's not surprising to find the heroic war correspondent increasingly depicted in new books and films. New books include War Reporting for Cowards by Chris Ayres (2005); A Fist in the Hornet's Nest: by Richard Engel (2004); Where the Action Was by Penny Coleman (2002); and Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, by Deborah Copaken Kogan (2002).
And there are many more: A book on war photography by Howe (2002) and television by Steinman (2002). An update of the First Casualty by Knightly and Once Upon a Distant War (Vietnam) by Prochnau. The list goes on.
In this context, its not surprising to find an exhibit called "War Stories" being planned as more or less the centerpiece of the new national museum to journalism near the mall in Washington DC. What is surprising, however, is the exclusive and narrow focus on heroic Ernie Pyle type correspondents. There's no argument that Pyle told the very difficult human side of World War II. And its gratifying to also find, in the war correspondent frame, Niel Sheehan and David Halberstam from the Vietnam era.
But where is the larger picture? Where are the journalists telling stories about conflict resolution, about peace, and about civil rights? Who is telling stories like these:
• George Seldes, a Herald Tribune correspondent, interviewed German field Marshall Hindenburg on the day after Armistice Day in1918. He and several other correspondents slipped through the battle lines to ask German Field Marshall Hindenburg why Germany lost the warand what could be done to avert the next war. Hindenburg said it was the presence of fresh American troops that ended the war. Hindenburg never spoke of the war again, and when Hitler was rising to power in the 1920s, he often claimed Germany lost because of a "stab in the back" from Jewish Germans. But Seldes' interview never made it into print. When he and colleagues turned in their interviews to telegraph back to the US, the stories were censored because they had not obtained approval for the interview. The lesson here is that the consequences of censorship may be very serious for the long term.
• William Shirer of the AP was known for coverage of the Nazis and his brilliant post-war history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. But he should also be known for his book on Mahatma Ghandi It was his coverage of Ghandi in the early1930s that helped him find the moral courage to understand and steadfastly report on the Nazis in the late 1930s.
• Baltimore editor Hezekiah Niles is known for covering the War of 1812 and as a "forefunner of objectivity," but he is not well known for his attempt to avert a Civil War in the 1820s by envisioning a "New South" -- a vision which which was eventually adopted, thanks in large part to Henry Grady and Ralph McGill.
• Joseph Pulitzer is remembered for competing with William Randolph Hearst in promoting the Spanish American war -- and newspaper circulation. Yet it's often forgotten that only four years beforehand, in 1894, Pulitzer helped keep America and Britain out of war. The two nations were on the verge of armed conflict over a territorial dispute in South America and the Monroe Doctrine. Pulitzer used every means possible to avert the war and remind Americans of how much they had in common with Great Britain.
Sometimes journalists take huge risks for peace. Ted Turner and CNN spent enormous amounts of time and energy on the US - Russian relationship in the 1980s, working on "Friendship Games" and later, an exemplary history of the Cold War. Peter Arnett and Harrison Salisbury put a human face on the enemy in three major wars -- and got little thanks for the trouble. Wall Street Journali correspondent Daniel Pearl was trying to do the same when he was brutally assassinated by Al Queda in Pakistan in 2002.
Sometimes journalists are just not willing to take risks for peace. Mark Twain's 'War Prayer,' a fierce and bitter jab at the hypocracy of a prayer for victory, was published posthumously. Similar risks are avoided today. How many correspondents approved for "embedding" with troops had ever written with any depth about American anti-war movements or questioned the basic rationale behind the wars in the Middle East oil fields?
For historians, the danger of ignoring or minimizing the news coverage of the roads to peace is that we reinforce the idea of the war correspondent as an intrinsic stage in the career of an ideal journalist. The exclusive historical focus on war correspondents tends to normalize the process of war preparation and detract from the possibilities of peaceful (and less overtly heroic) resolutions to conflicts.
The psychology of conflict resolution
It's interesting to remember what the world's first war correspondent, Thucydides, had to say around 400 BCE:
"If great enmities are ever to be really settled, we think it will be not by the system of revenge and military success, and by forcing an opponent to swear to a treaty to his disadvantage, but when the more fortunate combatant waives his privleges, to be guided by gentler feelings, conquers his rival in generosity and accords peace on more moderate conditions than he expected."
We now understand from the psychology of conflict management that these generous impulses do not have to come at the end of a conflict but rather can be part of the attempt to avoid conflict from the start. We now know that the ability to understand and be generous to others stems from an understanding of ourselves. (Katz, 1992) What do we fear? Is it realistic or is it a projection? Do we have all the facts?
The media are usually part of the dialogue. One of Joseph Pulitzer's tactics in his successful 1894 efforts to keep England and the US at peace during the Guyana crisis was to publish essays by outstanding writers from both sides expressing their admiration for the other nation, and by implication, the very human face that made the other side an unlikely enemy. (Never heard of the Guyana Crisis? That may show how successful Pulitzer was).
The inverse of this position is, of course, what now seems normal.
US government propaganda has been used to demonize a long succession of enemies since World War II -- the Russians, the Chinese, the Cubans, the Libyans, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein. Not a year has gone by when some great threat was not prominently placed on the collective mental horizon. Of course, in some cases the threats were very real. And there are instances, for example the run-up to World War II, where real threats were not well appreciated. In any event, the post-war threats form a pattern of fear that is strikingly similar to Orwell's 1984 vision of the eternal enemy as necessary for psychological conditioning. And in all these cases the threat was exaggerated with the often uncrictal help of American journalists.
Only rarely, in the course of a US propaganda campaign against the terror du jour, does an American journalist attempt to discover the human face of the supposed enemy. Even so, its one thing for Barbara Walters to interview Fidel Castro and quite another for Danny Pearl to try to understand the human side of Al Queda. Clearly, it is futile to claim that peace will come if we just seek understanding. However, peace will never come if we refuse to seek it, as Pearl knew all too well.
Equally important in peace-seeking efforts is the ability to envision positive outcomes and successful negotiations. Baltimore magazine editor Hezekiah Niles didn't merely denouce the looming civil war in the 1820s. On the pages of the era's most pretegious publication, he envisioned a "new South" with diversified agriculture and industry, public works transportation projects and universal education as part of the road leading to peace. Niles was one of a trio of prominent men who worked together trying to promote peace through what they called the "American System." The efforts of the two others -- Henry Clay in politics and Matthew Carey in economics -- are well known. Niles has been forgotten, even in his own profession.
It was, interestingly enough, this exact vision of a rebuilt American South that was articulated by Atlanta's great editor, Henry Grady, in 1888. Grady's "New South" was really the old vision of an alternative South that was perfectly visible to Niles -- and his readers -- 40 years before the guns opened fire on Fort Sumpter.
The lesson was not lost on Grady's successor at the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ralph McGill was quite conscious that the demonization of African Americans was leading towards a second civil war. His essays were carefully balanced attempts to depict the civil rights movement as a sometimes uncomfortable but necessary and even inevitable process-- A process that would help build a South that would be too busy, and too generous, to hate. We may gratefully note that it was the vision we eventually adopted, and so there were never any "war correspondents" from the era. They were "civil rights" correspondents. There are a few new books on the horizon about the Civil Rights movement and journalism, but they are impressive. McWhorter, Nunnelley, Weil, and Teel, among others, have given us a broader perspective on civil conflict and resolution.
On a global scale, the mass media play the crucial role in war and peace. There is no doubt that the media in Rwanda and Serbia deliberately dehumanized the enemy and incited genocide. (Price, 2002, Mertus, 1999, Gourevich, 1999) Investigations have shown how Serbian television and Rwandan Hutu radio stations whipping up nationalist sentiment into fervid hatreds. Whether a force for "information intervention" as envisioned by UN Secretary General Khoffi Annan would be acceptable to the international community as an alternative for small nations remains to be seen. For the US and other major powers, the question is whether humane perspectives and positive outcomes can be depicted in a run-up to war. Very llittle of this happened in the approach to the second Gulf War in 2003.
History is the dressing room of political theater. Journalism historians have, at this moment in American politics, found a character garbed in a kelvar helmet and flak jacket, headed off to cover another inevitable conflict.
But where are her colleagues? Where are the peacemakers?
When we find them in history, we may understand and inspire them in our present.
Links:
Peace Communication
Marshall RosenbergPeace Journalism -- MediaChannel.org
Journalism and Peace Venues by Txema Ramirez de la Piscina
Center for War, Peace and the News Media New York University
Poynter Online -- Bibliography on war correspondents
In researching this article I was interested to learn that "peace journalism" started in the 1970s with some UK activists. I find this idea intriguing. What linguistic prejudice has us considering "war correspondents"as mainstream but "peace journalists" as marginal? Even so, its hard to imagine any real "war correspondent" not having a very definite preference for peace.
_______________
Notes:
Chris Ayres, War Reporting for Cowards Atlantic Monthly Press (2005)
Tad Bartimus, ed. War Torn: Stories of War from the Women Reporters Who Covered Vietnam. New York: Random House, 2002.
Clayborne Carson, Bill Kovach, Carol Polsgrove, Reporting Civil Rights, (two volumes) Library of America (2003)
Penny Colman, Where the Action Was: Women War Correspondents in World War II. New York: Crown Publishers, 2002.
Richard Engel, A Fist in the Hornet's Nest: On the Ground in Baghdad Before, During, and After the War, Hyperion (2004)
Karl Fleming, Son of the Rough South, Public Affairs Press, 2005
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Picador (1999)
Gerd Horten, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War II. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
Peter Howe, Shooting Under Fire: The World of the War Photographer. New York: Artisan, 2002.
Neil Katz and John W. Lawyer, "Communication and Conflict - Management Skills," in Joseph J. Fahey and Richard Armstrong, eds., A Peace Reader: Essential Readings on War, Justice, Non-Violence and World Order (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), pp. 258 - 266.
Martin Luther King, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 1964.
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Kosovo . Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.
Deborah Copaken Kogan Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, Random House (2002)
Bill Kovarik, "To Avoid the Coming Storm: Hezekiah Niles Weekly Register as a Voice of North-South Moderation, 1811 - 1836," American Journalism, Summer, 1992. Also on the web as The Editor who Tried to Stop the Civil War .
Diane McWhorter, Carry Me Home Simon & Schuster (2001)
Jamie F. Metzl, "Information Intervention," Foreign Affairs
November/December 1997 (Abs: Jamming radio and television programs that incite mass violence may be one way, short of military intervention, for the international community to avert genocide.)William A. Nunnelley, The Changing South of Gene Patterson, University Press of Florida, 2002
Monroe Price and Mark Thompson, eds., Forging peace : intervention, human rights, and the management of media space, Bloomington, Ind: University of Indiana Press, 2002
William Prochnau, Once Upon a Distant War (Vietnam)Vintage 1996
Pyle, Richard and Horst Faas. Lost Over Laos. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003.
Andy Rooney, My War, Public Affairs (2000)
George Seldes, Witness to a century : encounters with the noted, the notorious, and the three SOBs New York : Ballantine Books, 1987
Ron Steinman, Inside Television's First War: A Saigon Journal. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
W.A. Swanberg, Pulitzer NY: Scribners, 1967.
Leonard Ray Teel. Ralph Emerson McGill: Voice of the Southern Conscience, University of Tennessee Press (2001)
Susan Weil, In a Madhouse's Din: Civil Rights Coverage by Mississippi's Daily Press, 1948-1968, Greenwood Publishing Group (2002)