VITAMEDIAS
Journalism and the rumors of war: A second Gulf War will not be an easy conflict to cover [...]. The distances are huge; no one knows where any Western attack would come from; U.S. Special Forces detest publicity. Conventional forces, however, have allowed journalists to accompany them. He said the coverage of war always raised important issues - such as the manipulation of reporters by governments and military. But his biggest problem would be his workload. "I'll be doing five or six spots in an hour. When will I be able to get out to do any reporting?" [...]
Nick Pollard, head of Sky news at BSkyB, a Murdoch station, says: "I don't accept that television journalists are worker drones who are spoon-fed propaganda. Our journalists are grown-up and independent. A red mist won't descend on us just because there's a war."
Newspapers, increasingly marginalized by television in wars, will dispatch as many reporters as they can afford to the Middle East, though Kim Fletcher, media columnist for the Daily Telegraph, says wars do not boost circulations. He says that, of course, TV is limited in what it can reveal but adds that that has always been the case.
He says that humble hacks with notebooks and an appetite for the truth will break the important stories that governments and militaries on both sides try to hide: "That's what happened in Afghanistan. Rivera and the rest were doing their bit for the cameras, but ordinary reporters were out there finding out what was really going on."