When journalism goes to war and kills storytelling

Time of India

12-05-2025

If Indian politics is a theatre, Tamil Nadu is a multiplex. Where cigarette flicks and dark glasses are the perennial symbols of style and substance, sycophancy does a tandava over psephology. And with the players ensconced in the ministerial thrones in Delhi, it is no longer just a southern delight. Arun Ram, Resident Editor, The Times of India, Tamil Nadu, who alternates between the balcony and the front row, says it incites as much as it excites. During the intervals, he chews on a bit of science and such saner things. LESS ... MORE
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One of my unfulfilled journalistic dreams had been to report from a war zone. The other was interviewing Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Had the greatest writer of the 20th century lived to tell the tale of the recent India-Pakistan conflict, he might have mistaken some of the television anchors for army commanders. Marquez couldn't have been more correct when he said freedom is the first casualty of war. What he, however, wouldn't have anticipated is that news presenters, just short of wearing camouflage, making war cries in studios (the enemies were near the TRP borders). One even shouted: Bring out the BrahMos! But for the grim and gore of an impending military spiral, this could've been entertainment.
War reporting has always been fraught with danger – not just the physical danger the journalist faces, but that of his being forced to present the narrative of the political leadership that commands the war. War reporting, in its primordial form, must have existed when the caveman ran back to give his friends the news of an approaching group from another territory. That 'straight reporting' ended when propaganda started becoming a part of the arsenal.
The International Journalism Handbook says historical accounts of war reporting in its modern form began with William Howard Russell's coverage of the British expeditionary forces during the Crimean War in 1853. A decade later came the American Civil War. 'In both these instances, journalism served as a mobilizing force to drum up patriotic support for a war effort and as a platform for challenging ideas about such efforts and about war itself,' says the handbook. 'This dual role continues to be taken up in war reporting today.'
When his country is at war, a journalist will not have the freedom to tell the whole truth, but he should have the freedom – and courage – to not tell a lie. Tightly Embedded journalism became the norm especially after the Vietnam War during which the US Army allowed some of the reporters to detach themselves from the contingent and talk freely to people. This resulted in some 'damaging' consequences for the US govt as the public mood turned against the war. US military commanders called it the Vietnam Syndrome.
I am not entirely against embedded war journalism, for it gives journalists a little safer (relatively) access to war zones; the trade-off is one should tell the facilitator's story. This willful compromise is OK if the journalist can tell 'other stories' which are not in contradiction to the official narrative. This is where human-interest stories gain relevance in war reporting. World War II correspondents like Ernie Pyle and Martha Gellhorn (one of the first women war correspondents) excelled in telling human tales dripped in blood. Robert Capa, the legendary war photographer, said, 'If your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough.' All that is history as modern warfare and new media have added to the irreversible changes in war reporting.
What has survived are some fine books by authors who have been war correspondents or soldiers. Like 'The Face of War', Martha Gellhorn's accounts of her coverage of the Spanish Civil War in 1937 (not to be confused with the famous painting by surrealist Salvador Dali), and Tim O'Brien's 'The Things They Carried', a collection of linked stories of part-fiction based on his experience as a soldier in the Vietnam War.
Back to Operation Sindoor, most of the print media and some of our TV reporters kept a professional head on their shoulders while much of the chest-thumping happened in the studios. Overall, the coverage killed my ambition to report on war. As for my other dream, I still converse with Gabo whose Colonel Aureliano Buendia, 'alone, abandoned by his premonitions, fleeing the chill that was to accompany him until death, sought a last refuge in Macondo in the warmth of his oldest memories'.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.