Media
An unprecedented focus on the wounded
Published 24 April 2008
In Vietnam, it was body bags that mattered, and the damaged survivors were ignored. But today we read a great deal about the soldiers who have been maimed in our wars, and ministers and generals should be worried
After the Vietnam War, the BBC's Robin Day is said to have remarked: "One wonders if in future a democracy which has uninhibited television coverage in every home will ever be able to fight a war, however just." Thirty-odd years on, we know that democracies rose to the challenge, finding ways to fight wars even when their justness was widely doubted. We might reflect that Robin Day need not have worried.
And yet, after seven years of Afghanistan and five of Iraq, there may be grounds to ask his question again, to wonder whether it will be possible for democracies to fight future wars - and, again, the reason why we should wonder comes down to the media.
Vietnam, according to received wisdom, was the "living-room war", in which television brought the reality of conflict home to Americans, and the "body bag war", in which the death toll eventually proved too much for the US public to stomach. Iraq and Afghanistan are not uninhibited living-room wars of the kind Robin Day imagined, and they come nowhere near matching Vietnam's body-bag count. But, in one important respect, they are actually more uncomfortable for the watching and reading public than any previous wars, and that is in the coverage of the wounded.
During and after Vietnam, in a manner later made infamous by films such as Born on the Fourth of July and The Deer Hunter, veterans damaged in body and mind were ignored in the US. Not so in Britain today, where soldiers wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan are the subject of intense press attention, though it is a phenomenon you are more likely to have noticed if you read the popular papers than if you read the quality ones.
The Sun has just won the Cudlipp Award at the British Press Awards for a campaign led by its defence editor, Tom Newton Dunn, to highlight the plight of the returning wounded. Were they adequately treated in the field? Would they receive decent compensation and support from the government? How good were facilities for them at home? Was anybody thinking about their long-term care? Newton Dunn and his colleagues have turned up scandal after scandal.
Most recent was the case of Ben McBean, which led the front page, filled page five and prompted a stinging editorial. McBean lost two limbs in Afghanistan and was flown to hospital in Birmingham on the same plane that brought Prince Harry home. According to the Sun he is now one of 11 wounded soldiers to have contracted MRSA.
The Mirror is hardly less devoted to the story of the wounded, with an "Honour the Brave" slogan to match "Help for Heroes" in the Sun. The News of the World, the Express and the Mail are on the case, too. Hardly a day goes by without some tale of prosthetic limbs or post-traumatic stress disorder.
Much of the coverage is couched in patriotic terms - these are our boys and we are proud of them - but a lot of it is angry. Simon Smith, a reject from The Apprentice who is also a former soldier, spoke in the Sun of the hardships of veterans he knew: "I've seen lads pretty much cast off at 23 after tours in Afghanistan. The government has a lot to answer for."
Piers Morgan, writing in the News of the World about the treatment of American wounded, railed at the poverty of the British response, and the Falklands War veteran Simon Weston lambasted the government in the Sun for making soldiers "grovel" for "paltry" compensation.
The sheer weight of such coverage of wounded veterans, while the conflicts continue, is surely unprecedented, and for all the patriotism it must, as the First World War generals used to say, sap the will to fight. And we have yet to confront the financial implications of long-term care for these veterans, not to mention the price of compensating those sent into battle with poor equipment. As Robin Day might have asked: if the public are prepared to put up with it once, how long before they will do so again?
Objection, your honour
The attempt by Manchester Police to force the New Statesman contributor Shiv Malik to hand over his research material on a former Islamist extremist has been referred to the Lord Chief Justice, who will rule next month.
Martin Bright has rightly pointed out in these pages that by pursuing this affair, the police threaten to undermine genuine efforts to gain understanding of the fundamentalist milieu in this country, but it doesn't end there.
This case also undermines the ability of the news media to report on extremism at all, as talking to journalists will become identical to talking to the police. That in turn leads us towards a position where the government can decide virtually alone what the public is told about the terror threat.
Of course, if that happened, there would probably be fewer pesky objections to such measures as extending the detention limit.
Brian Cathcart is professor of journalism at Kingston University
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