War and Pandemic Journalism: The Truth Can Disappear Fast
By Patrick Cockburn, TomDispatch
06 August 20
In the midst of the pandemic from hell, with a president who seems incapable
of grasping the reality of, no less dealing with, the spreading virus, as
deaths mount and cases cascade, in a land where a Covid-19 "second wave" in
the fall isn't conceivable because the first will never have ended, it's
easy to forget about pandemics past. In fact, I did.
But I did live through one in my childhood. As Patrick Cockburn reminds us
in his piece today, the last century had repeated moments when the polio
virus struck before Jonas Salk perfected a vaccine for it in 1955. One of my
close friends in college had a bad limp thanks to a case he caught in the
early 1950s and my father-in-law, who, I believe, got it in the 1920s, had a
similar limp, as does Patrick Cockburn, the journalist who, for my money,
has been perhaps our best reporter on this country's disastrous conflicts in
the Greater Middle East.
I've followed Cockburn's work in the British paper the Independent for years
now, as he produced a body of work about our forever wars and their
consequences that is both chilling and superb. He begins his just-published
book, War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds,
the Confrontation with Iran, with typical Cockburnian insight. Our
president's unprecedented drone assassination of Iranian Major General Qasem
Soleimani in January as he was leaving Baghdad International Airport for a
meeting with the Iraqi prime minister may actually have saved his reputation
and that of the Iranian leadership, too. "At the time of his assassination,"
Cockburn writes, General Soleimani's "strategy in Iraq and in other Middle
Eastern countries with large Shia populations had become counterproductive.
He is now guaranteed the status of an Iranian and Shia warrior-martyr, in
spite of the mistakes he made in the last years of his life, the effects of
which may, to some extent, have been reversed by President Donald Trump's
decision to kill him."
Congrats to The Donald for bungling things yet again! You'll find no such
grasp of our president's Iranian blunder in the American media, but it's
typical of what you will find in Cockburn's must-buy, must-read book. Make
sure to check it out and, in the meantime, consider his thoughts on ways in
which war reporting and pandemic reporting eerily mirror each other in this
strange moment of ours. Tom
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
War and Pandemic Journalism
The Truth Can Disappear Fast
The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war.
Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle
against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting
and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases,
journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death.
Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an
epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from
military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those
closest to the battlefield.
The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak
of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point
of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because
failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People
seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that
fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The
powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps
even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing
their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.
My First Pandemic
I first experienced a pandemic in the summer of 1956 when, at the age of
six, I caught polio in Cork, Ireland. The epidemic there began soon after
virologist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for it in the United States, but
before it was available in Europe. Polio epidemics were at their height in
the first half of the twentieth century and, in a number of respects,
closely resembled the Covid-19 experience: many people caught the disease
but only a minority were permanently disabled by or died of it. In contrast
with Covid-19, however, it was young children, not the old, who were most at
risk. The terror caused by poliomyelitis, to use its full name, was even
higher than during the present epidemic exactly because it targeted the very
young and its victims did not generally disappear into the cemetery but were
highly visible on crutches and in wheelchairs, or prone in iron lungs.
Parents were mystified by the source of the illness because it was spread by
great numbers of asymptomatic carriers who did not know they had it. The
worst outbreaks were in the better-off parts of modern cities like Boston,
Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York, and Stockholm. People living there
enjoyed a good supply of clean water and had effective sewage disposal, but
did not realize that all of this robbed them of their natural immunity to
the polio virus. The pattern in Cork was the same: most of the sick came
from the more affluent parts of the city, while people living in the slums
were largely unaffected. Everywhere, there was a frantic search to identify
those, like foreign immigrants, who might be responsible for spreading the
disease. In the New York epidemic of 1916, even animals were suspected of
doing so and 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs were hunted down and killed.
The illness weakened my legs permanently and I have a severe limp so, even
reporting in dangerous circumstances in the Middle East, I could only walk,
not run. I was very conscious of my disabilities from the first, but did not
think much about how I had acquired them or the epidemic itself until
perhaps four decades later. It was the 1990s and I was then visiting
ill-supplied hospitals in Iraq as that country's health system was
collapsing under the weight of U.N. sanctions. As a child, I had once been a
patient in an almost equally grim hospital in Ireland and it occurred to me
then, as I saw children in those desperate circumstances in Iraq, that I
ought to know more about what had happened to me. At that time, my ignorance
was remarkably complete. I did not even know the year when the polio
epidemic had happened in Ireland, nor could I say if it was caused by a
virus or a bacterium.
So I read up on the outbreak in newspapers of the time and Irish Health
Ministry files, while interviewing surviving doctors, nurses, and patients.
Kathleen O'Callaghan, a doctor at St. Finbarr's hospital, where I had been
brought from my home when first diagnosed, said that people in the city were
so frightened "they would cross the road rather than walk past the walls of
the fever hospital." My father recalled that the police had to deliver food
to infected homes because no one else would go near them. A Red Cross nurse,
Maureen O'Sullivan, who drove an ambulance at the time, told me that, even
after the epidemic was over, people would quail at the sight of her
ambulance, claiming "the polio is back again" and dragging their children
into their houses or they might even fall to their knees to pray.
The local authorities in a poor little city like Cork where I grew up
understood better than national governments today that fear is a main
feature of epidemics. They tried then to steer public opinion between panic
and complacency by keeping control of the news of the outbreak. When British
newspapers like the Times reported that polio was rampant in Cork, they
called this typical British slander and exaggeration. But their efforts to
suppress the news never worked as well as they hoped. Instead, they dented
their own credibility by trying to play down what was happening. In that
pre-television era, the main source of information in my hometown was the
Cork Examiner, which, after the first polio infections were announced at the
beginning of July 1956, accurately reported on the number of cases, but
systematically underrated their seriousness.
Headlines about polio like "Panic Reaction Without Justification" and
"Outbreak Not Yet Dangerous" regularly ran below the fold on its front page.
Above it were the screaming ones about the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian
uprising of that year. In the end, this treatment only served to spread
alarm in Cork where many people were convinced that the death toll was much
higher than the officially announced one and that bodies were being secretly
carried out of the hospitals at night.
My father said that, in the end, a delegation of local businessmen, the
owners of the biggest shops, approached the owners of the Cork Examiner,
threatening to withdraw their advertising unless it stopped reporting the
epidemic. I was dubious about this story, but when I checked the newspaper
files many years later, I found that he was correct and the paper had almost
entirely stopped reporting on the epidemic just as sick children were
pouring into St. Finbarr's hospital.
The Misreporting of Wars and Epidemics
By the time I started to research a book about the Cork polio epidemic that
would be titled Broken Boy, I had been reporting wars for 25 years, starting
with the Northern Irish Troubles in the 1970s, then the Lebanese civil war,
the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the war that followed Washington's post-9/11
takeover of Afghanistan, and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. After
publication of the book, I went on covering these endless conflicts for the
British paper the Independent as well as new conflicts sparked in 2011 by
the Arab Spring in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
As the coronavirus pandemic began this January, I was finishing a book (just
published), War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the
Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran. Almost immediately, I noticed strong
parallels between the Covid-19 pandemic and the polio epidemic 64 years
earlier. Pervasive fear was perhaps the common factor, though little grasped
by governments of this moment. Boris Johnson's in Great Britain, where I was
living, was typical in believing that people had to be frightened into
lockdown, when, in fact, so many were already terrified and needed to be
reassured.
I also noticed ominous similarities between the ways in which epidemics and
wars are misreported. Those in positions of responsibility -- Donald Trump
represents an extreme version of this -- invariably claim victories and
successes even as they fail and suffer defeats. The words of the Confederate
general "Stonewall" Jackson came to mind. On surveying ground that had only
recently been a battlefield, he asked an aide: "Did you ever think, sir,
what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?"
This has certainly been true of wars, but no less so, it seemed to me, of
epidemics, as President Trump was indeed soon to demonstrate (over and over
and over again). At least in retrospect, disinformation campaigns in wars
tend to get bad press and be the subject of much finger wagging. But think
about it a moment: it stands to reason that people trying to kill each other
will not hesitate to lie about each other as well. While the glib saying
that "truth is the first casualty of war" has often proven a dangerous
escape hatch for poor reporting or unthinking acceptance of a self-serving
version of battlefield realities (spoon-fed by the powers-that-be to a
credulous media), it could equally be said that truth is the first casualty
of pandemics. The inevitable chaos that follows in the wake of the swift
spread of a deadly disease and the desperation of those in power to avoid
being held responsible for the soaring loss of life lead in the same
direction.
There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the suppression of truth when
it comes to wars, epidemics, or anything else for that matter. Journalists,
individually and collectively, will always be engaged in a struggle with
propagandists and PR men, one in which victory for either side is never
inevitable.
Unfortunately, wars and epidemics are melodramatic events and melodrama
militates against real understanding. "If it bleeds, it leads" is true of
news priorities when it comes to an intensive care unit in Texas or a
missile strike in Afghanistan. Such scenes are shocking but do not
necessarily tell us much about what is actually going on.
The recent history of war reporting is not encouraging. Journalists will
always have to fight propagandists working for the powers-that-be. Sadly, I
have had the depressing feeling since Washington's first Gulf War against
Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1991 that the propagandists are increasingly
winning the news battle and that accurate journalism, actual eyewitness
reporting, is in retreat.
Disappearing News
By its nature, reporting wars is always going to be difficult and dangerous
work, but it has become more so in these years. Coverage of Washington's
Afghan and Iraqi wars was often inadequate, but not as bad as the more
recent reporting from war-torn Libya and Syria or its near total absence
from the disaster that is Yemen. This lack fostered misconceptions even when
it came to fundamental questions like who is actually fighting whom, for
what reasons, and just who are the real prospective winners and losers.
Of course, there is little new about propaganda, controlling the news, or
spreading "false facts." Ancient Egyptian pharaohs inscribed self-glorifying
and mendacious accounts of their battles on monuments, now thousands of
years old, in which their defeats are lauded as heroic victories. What is
new about war reporting in recent decades is the far greater sophistication
and resources that governments can deploy in shaping the news. With
opponents like longtime Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, demonization was never
too difficult a task because he was a genuinely demonic autocrat.
Yet the most influential news story about the Iraqi invasion of neighboring
Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led counter-invasion proved to be a fake. This
was a report that, in August 1990, invading Iraqi soldiers had tipped babies
out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die on the floor. A
Kuwaiti girl reported to have been working as a volunteer in the hospital
swore before a U.S. congressional committee that she had witnessed that very
atrocity. Her story was hugely influential in mobilizing international
support for the war effort of the administration of President George H.W.
Bush and the U.S. allies he teamed up with.
In reality it proved purely fictional. The supposed hospital volunteer
turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington.
Several journalists and human rights specialists expressed skepticism at the
time, but their voices were drowned out by the outrage the tale provoked. It
was a classic example of a successful propaganda coup: instantly newsworthy,
not easy to disprove, and when it was -- long after the war -- it had
already had the necessary impact, creating support for the U.S.-led
coalition going to war with Iraq.
In a similar fashion, I reported on the American war in Afghanistan in
2001-2002 at a time when coverage in the international media had left the
impression that the Taliban had been decisively defeated by the U.S.
military and its Afghan allies. Television showed dramatic shots of bombs
and missiles exploding on the Taliban front lines and Northern Alliance
opposition forces advancing unopposed to "liberate" the Afghan capital,
Kabul.
When, however, I followed the Taliban retreating south to Kandahar Province,
it became clear to me that they were not by any normal definition a beaten
force, that their units were simply under orders to disperse and go home.
Their leaders had clearly grasped that they were over-matched and that it
would be better to wait until conditions changed in their favor, something
that had distinctly happened by 2006, when they went back to war in a big
way. They then continued to fight in a determined fashion to the present
day. By 2009, it was already dangerous to drive beyond the southernmost
police station in Kabul due to the risk that Taliban patrols might create
pop-up checkpoints anywhere along the road.
None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened,
however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing,
from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19
isn't found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with
the coronavirus pandemic as well. Given the way news about it now dominates,
even overwhelms, the present news agenda, this may seem unlikely, but there
are precedents. In 1918, with World War I in progress, governments dealt
with what came to be called the Spanish Flu by simply suppressing
information about it. Spain, as a non-combatant in that war, did not censor
the news of the outbreak in the same fashion and so the disease was most
unfairly named "the Spanish Flu," though it probably began in the United
States.
The polio epidemic in Cork supposedly ended abruptly in mid-September 1956
when the local press stopped reporting on it, but that was at least two
weeks before many children like me caught it. In a similar fashion, right
now, wars in the Middle East and north Africa like the ongoing disasters in
Libya and Syria that once got significant coverage now barely get a mention
much of the time.
In the years to come, the same thing could happen to the coronavirus.
