Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The Falklands War (2)

Shortly after the Falklands War I made two predictions in this column. One was right and the other was wrong. The first was that the journalists would have large axes to grind and deep grudges to settle over the treatment they had received. The second was that when the reels of film finally came back with the cameramen and reporters the visual record of the war would be transformed, that, finally rid of the MOD minders and government censorship, we’d get to see the pictures that had been denied us. “There should be,” I said, “some fascinating documentaries.”

Well, I was wrong. The Falklands documentaries and videos have established that what we saw at the time — albeit two weeks late — is all we’re going to get. That it was a naive assumption to think otherwise was made clear on Panorama (BBC1) in an excellent and informative programme on the astonishing hamstringing that the media experienced.

The main argument against unrestricted reporting of a war is that any information made available to the public is of value to the enemy. This is manifestly true in the case of military operations. “Eisenhower announces date of D-Day invasion” would not have been the kind of headline calculated to win friends among the armed forces, and no one, not even the most passionate advocate of a free press, would expect this sort of information to be made open. On the Panorama programme various top brass and the editor of the Daily Telegraph made exactly this point. This would have been fair and just if the practice at the time had been even approximate to this ground rule. But the mare’s nest of crossed lines, ambivalences, duplicities, disinformation and plain lying made the excuse of preserving military secrets a ludicrous sham.

The best example of this was the Goose Green leak when the World Service announced that the paratroops were advancing on the settlement, as indeed they were. The understandable wrath of the men on the ground was directed at the quislings of the BBC when in actual fact the information had been provided by a “senior government official” keen to provide some “good news.” Not, in any event, that it would have been difficult for the Argentinians to have drawn the conclusion that Goose Green was a key target. One of the more curious assumptions of the MOD’s case is that the enemy is extremely stupid and can only base his strategic and tactical decisions on what he happens to read in the newspapers.

It was Churchill who coined the phrase “in war the truth is so important that it must be protected by a bodyguard of lies.” The aptness of this saw is very confined. Give it a general frame of reference and its aphoristic certainties conceal a more sinister import. As one of the news editors perceptively remarked, this sort of media manipulation possesses only short-term advantages, but in the longer term its consequences can be far from beneficial for the perpetrators. It’s clear that from now on a deep cynicism and profound suspicion will colour the relationship between the press and the MOD. It won’t be a bad thing if some of that rubs off on the public.

But will it? Most of the truth about the Falklands will emerge eventually. Some books are already telling us facts we didn’t know before, certain reporters are re-filing the “missing” dispatches. But they will be read by only a fraction of those who were tuned in to the news and reading the newspapers at the time.

And the MOD and the government will no doubt claim that this Panorama programme was biased. Of course it was and correctly so. The gags have been removed and the media have made a convincing case against the government’s manipulation of the news to suit its ad hoc political motives and ambitions. The ball is now in its court. But I suspect that the response will be “not available for comment.”

1982