Now even the generals sound just like spin-doctors
Published 26 March 1999
Media
By the time you read this, the bombs should be falling upon President Slobodan Milosevic, unless the American-led assault is so "swift and severe" that it is over by the time it takes to distribute the New Statesman.
Although Britain is centrally involved in the Nato action, the drift into a Balkan war has been attended by none of the old uncertainties. No passionate resistance in the House of Commons, no resistance to speak of in the left of centre press. The Independent believes that action is unavoidable, the Guardian that it is necessary. Hugo Young writes agonised columns that ultimately concur. Even the more sceptical voices - such as Robert Fisk in the Independent and Simon Jenkins in the Times - are primarily intent upon mocking absurdity and paradox. It is not easy to be the friend of a Serbian dictator.
In this postwar form of war, where no blood is to be visibly shed, it is entirely appropriate that politicians and newspapers should speak of "strikes" against the Serbs, in the way that football commentators applaud a "magnificent strike" by David Ginola. The most recent "surgical strikes" against Iraq yielded no hard evidence of human casualties, even though Saddam Hussein had allowed western television crews to stay in Baghdad. We were reduced to inspecting evidence supplied by the allied air force, which consisted of videos showing miniature missiles streaking towards miniaturised targets, to be rewarded by miniature puffs of smoke.
One side effect of the remaking of war as surgical arcade game is that it no longer sells newspapers. The Falklands war and the first Gulf war in 1991 both boosted titles across the readership spectrum and delivered huge audiences to television news.
If it goes to plan, this Balkan war will not trouble the scorers, in terms of newspaper sales and TV news viewing figures, because it will lack both drama and human adventure. Today's military commanders sound like spin-doctors and even the pilots, back from bombing raids, are so stiffly trained in how not to say the wrong thing that they seldom say anything. The most indicative television image of the last round of hostilities in Iraq was that of Kate Adie standing, in an allied aircraft base, saying nothing of significance above the sound of the revving jets. This did not stop Downing Street privately objecting that the tone of BBC coverage, especially that of Jeremy Bowen out of Baghdad, was insufficiently committed to the allied war effort.
If even war doesn't sell newspapers, it is hardly surprising that editors and publishers are retreating ever further from sustained prioritisation of foreign news. Within 48 hours of the brink of this war, the "serious" papers were all giving more space to the Oscars than to Balkan politics, showing more concern about the tears of Gwyneth Paltrow than those of Kosovan widows.
We appear to be following the American media into isolationism. In the US, the share of foreign news on network television fell from 45 per cent in the 1970s to 13.5 per cent in 1995. American newspapers have, over a similar period, cut the share of foreign news in their pages from over 10 per cent to 2 per cent.
In the early part of this week, a scan of British newspapers paints a similar picture. On Tuesday, the white broadsheets devoted about 10 per cent of their editorial space to foreign news and features - if we treat the Oscars as a domestic story, as they all did. The Express on that day had a couple of useful pieces on Kosovo, boosting its figure to about 4 per cent, ahead of the Mail's 1.5 per cent. The Sun's foreign coverage was negligible and the Mirror had none at all. Only the FT gave more space to foreign matters than domestic, a fact reflected in the strength of its payroll: today, the FT has 61 full-time, overseas-based correspondents, compared with 20 at the Times and 17 at the Guardian. In terms of foreign correspondents, it even outguns the New York Times. It is deriving all its growth from sales outside Britain.
What is truly extraordinary is how British television news has bucked these trends, presumably because of the way that British television is funded and regulated. Studies show that the proportion of foreign news on both the BBC and ITV in the past decade has gone up, not down. Indeed, there have been substantial periods when the only coverage of the former Yugoslavia in the British media has come from the broadcasters. As Kelvin MacKenzie once said, he learnt everything he ever knew about Bosnia listening to The World Tonight as he drove home from the office.
What this tells us is that we still have choices. We can, as individuals, elect to join the global media elite by subscribing to those organisations that provide the service. In Britain, collectively, we can still decide to fund public service broadcasting in a way which ensures that coverage of the world is available to everyone, even though it cannot be denied that most of the time most people prefer Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. It's a surprisingly clear choice, from which we must hope not to be distracted by a return to the kind of Balkan war that really would sell newspapers.
Ian Hargreaves is professor of journalism at Cardiff University
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