The presence of media affects the behavior of military in Iraq

During a 2007 conference, an Iraq War veteran said the presence of media changed the tactics used by American troops, especially against Iraqi civilians. As the number of American reporters in Iraq slides drastically in favor of the use of wire services, does the journalistic role of holding authority, in this case the military, accountable for their actions also decline?

This video is the testimony of Iraq War veteran Jon Michael Turner during the 2007 Winter Soldier conference featuring veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Turner testifies to his experiences as a soldier in Iraq, which included wanton murder and brutality as standard procedure. It's a part of the war that to this day we've heard little about. In fact, this conference was not heavily reported in the mainstream media. Google News gives only 75 results for all of 2008, and 70 for 2007, mostly coming out of alternative media like Democracy Now.

In his testimony, Turner says that CBS reporter Lara Logan-- who has been highly critical of how her bosses chose to report about Iraq and Afghanistan-- was embedded with his unit, and that her presence altered American troops' tactics and behavior. Turner's example in his own words:

"She wasn't with us, so myself and two other people went ahead and took out some individuals because we were excited about a firefight we had just gone into and we didn't have a cameraman or woman with us. Anytime we did have an embedded reporter with us, our actions would change drastically, we were always on key with everything, did everything by the books."


(Logan on the difficulties of reporting in Iraq)

There's been a lot of talk about the ethics of embedded reporters, there's good arguments on both sides, but I'm aware of no discussion of how the presence of the media, the transparency they provide, changes how troops engage in a conflict.

In a guerrilla conflict, like in Iraq, one neighborhood can be stable while the other side of the city is on fire. There are numerous operations going on at once, any of which could inflame into an incident. According to Turner's testimony, and confirmed by the nods of other veterans on the panel, the presence of reporters keeps soldiers, who are under huge amounts of stress and constant danger, from committing "unamerican" atrocities: beatings, murders, and sacrilege that we rarely, if ever, hear about, not because the media ignores them, but because the media isn't there anymore.

This is not to say that most journalists in Iraq are doing a bad job, obviously it's a very dangerous situation. The Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 179 media workers have been targeted and killed since March 2003. But as companies like the Tribune Company of the LA Times have shifted to hyper-localism to save bucks, they've also cut international reporting in favor of AP and Reuters wire services. It's expensive to fly someone a couple thousand miles away, the equipment is expensive. It makes much more economic sense to cover celebrity news or a flashy crime spree. According to "The Embed," a 2008 program of Wisconsin Public Radio, the war started with over 770 reporters embedded with troops. Currently, there are fewer than 20.

How do you realistically cover a guerrilla conflict when you only have 20 people in the entire country (there are some independent reporters also, but they also account for the majority of casualties and abductions)? How are these cuts in journalists changing how the war is prosecuted, is it by the book, or does it use tactics that Americans would find repugnant if they knew about them? According to Society of Professional Journalists' code of ethics, journalists should "recognize a special obligation to ensure that the public's business is conducted in the open." Does that make it the media's responsibility to hold the military accountable for the tactics they use or tolerate?

Just last week, Neal Justin, TV critic of the Star Tribune, said the National Conference on Media Reform in Minneapolis focused too much on the mainstream media's failure to report the truth in Iraq in 2003. Is it possible that people were so fixated on the media's failure, because the tightfisted media is still failing the public by not providing a full picture of what is really happening in Iraq, how our government's policies are being carried out, and the human costs for both Americans and Iraqis? Journalists shouldn't be with the troops, understanding their trials and observing their actions, so they can condemn specific acts, but so the public itself has the opportunity to hold the government accountable to our expectations that it act humanely, and in line with our ideals.