(News & Society) Are war correspondents still `heroes` seeking truth, or have they been reduced to `myth makers` serving propaganda purposes?

War correspondents : heroes or propagandists

Whether or not war correspondents are heroes or propagandists is , in some ways , a false choice . War correspondents vary according to their personalities , the publication for whom they report , their country of origin , and so on , so to posit that either one , or the other , is true with no space given for exceptions is almost always false , whenever the subject matter is human behavior . However , there are factors in play which make the statement , War correspondents are propagandists ' far more true than not . Some of these factors

arise from basic human behaviour others are by conscious design

Reporters in wartime operate under the situational tension between two selves their professional self , and their survival self . That is , if a country has been attacked , particularly in the manner in which the United States was attacked on 11 September , in an atmosphere charged and saturated with threat , they will identify themselves as being under attack , and they will position themselves to defeat the attacker

Thus , a war correspondent covering a war in which `they ' have not been attacked , might perceive , and thus report , differently . If a war correspondent is covering a war in which they are positioned to defeat the attacker , then their coverage becomes about that defeat , and is then no longer an objective critique . So that when Britain and the United States believed that they were under imminent threat from Saddam Hussein , the reporting tended to be about the defeat of the enemy

In this way , although there is no intent to propagandize , reporting is certainly not what reporting should be , that is (in the words of the Associated Press ) `bringing truth to the world ' The arena of truth has been a subject of much discussion . The AP further defines `truth ' in a press release on its web page by what is isn 't : inaccuracies carelessness , bias , distortions , false information , conflicts of interest , misrepresentation , payment for interviews , and by what it is source identification , responsibility and fairness . Being a war reporter in a war in which one of the `sides ' is `yours ' could taint the correspondent 's ability to report without bias or distortions , and could be called a conflict of interest . `Kenneth Bacon , a former Pentagon spokesman , wrote in the Wall Street Journal recently that : You couldn 't hire actors to do as good a job as the press has done ' from the Pentagon 's point of view ' And in many cases , this was no doubt unconscious

When the war is a war like the current Iraq war , where there are now legitimate questions being raised as to whether or not this war was engaged upon based on misleading intelligence , possibly purposefully misleading intelligence , then that natural bias begins to look extremely problematic , because then , natural bias has been manipulated . In that case , the reporters themselves are the victims of propaganda , and they become unwitting manufacturers of propaganda because of the survival-bias effect . Some time after it became clear that there was no WMD...