gulf of incomprehension, The

Spectator, The, Mar 29, 2003 by Shipman, Tim

To be fair to the British spinners, Fleet Street's finest have been treated like royalty compared with other journalists. At one stage Japanese hacks were reduced to interviewing British scribes about why other journalists were going around interviewing other journalists.

The Americans have hardly helped the cause of openness by asking supine questions that would have shamed even the 1950s BBC. It is not unusual to hear something along the lines of, `Would the general like to tell us some more about how vile the enemy are today?' The tricky pertinence of the British questions prompted one disgruntled Pentagon bigwig to ask an MoD counterpart, `Do you guys have to put up with this all the time?'

Keeping a tight grip on information is not the only means of control. There have been suggestions from senior officers that it would not benefit the career of journalists to find themselves `out of the loop' -- news to many who have still to spot the outer edges of this mythical circle, let alone its innards. And rumours abound that some newspapers were encouraged to send certain journalists to Qatar.

But the most telling episode of the war so far has been the official attitude to journalists who do not subject themselves to official control, like ITN's Terry Lloyd, killed as he was 'freelancing' on the road to Basra by what his employers claim was a coalition shell. Tommy Franks boasted on Monday, `I'm not aware of a single embedded journalist who's been harmed on the battlefield,' contrasting them with `people who will go in harm's way'.

There is now talk that the Kuwaiti government has been leant on to revoke the visas of journalists who insist on travelling around Iraq. Also singled out for the cold shoulder is the al-Jazeera Arab news channel, which showed the pictures of killed and captured US servicemen.

The gulf of incomprehension between the press and their uniformed handlers does have its lighter side. One morning, when a colleague was called about a briefing at the base, he informed the handler, `We will all be along,' which the bewildered serviceman took to mean that the paper in question had an army of correspondents in town. `No, I'm just here with my valet,' the reporter joked. Accepting this at face value, the reply came, `Very good, sir. Well, I'd better let you two get on with it.'

The episode might have walked straight out of the pages of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, were it not for the fact that William Boot never had to deal with the spin doctors. He returned from war an unlikely hero. By the time you read this, I will probably have been taken out and shot.

Tim Shipman is deputy political editor of the Sunday Express. He is also covering the war for the Daily Express.