Even in the best of peace times, doing journalism is a difficult activity. In times of war, doing journalism is a thousand times more difficult.
The “difficulty” in question here might refer to the frenzy of activities that follows a breaking story, such as Israel’s out-of-the-blue attacks on Iran on Friday last week, from gathering information about the attacks, writing, producing, and editing, to publishing it in the newspaper, a website or broadcasting it to listeners and viewers wherever they may be. The time and effort put into these activities can be enormous, both physically, intellectually and financially. Yet, few in journalism would complain about these issues since they come along with the job. In other words, the difficulty of time, effort, and money required to put a good story together should not be much of a problem for serious and resourceful media, and they generally aren’t for most media, all things being equal.
Journalism can also be difficult in another sense: that of getting access to quality information about the event being reported in the first place. This difficulty involves dealing with different kinds of sources, such as authorised officials or eye-witnesses, as well as dealing with evidence such as documents and videos, about the story itself. All journalists and media organisations face this difficulty when reporting important events or issues. When reporting war, however, the difficulty becomes even more daunting since, by definition, war is a context where people can be killed, including journalists. Therefore, in war journalism, both the story itself—the event being reported—and the most important people around it, become a lot less accessible to journalists, if at all.
Yet, the difficulty of accessing quality information, serious as it can be in the case of reporting war or other important issues and events, is also not much of a problem for most journalists or media. Journalists as individual staffers and their newsrooms as a collective unit have reliable, though sometimes not-so-reliable sources they can tap into to get quality information about even the most sensitive conflict. This is why it is possible for a BBC correspondent, for example, to sit in Nairobi and still produce a quality report about protests in Kano or Lagos. For a good journalist, evidence of the protests in Lagos or Kano would be publicly available on the internet, and easily verifiable by traditional journalistic means.
Therefore, the most important aspect of journalism, of reporting war or any other issue and event, has to do with the most important thing in journalism: reporting the truth and reporting it to meet particular standards. This is what makes journalism different from all other sources of information, such as your neighbours or Facebook feeds. It is this aspect of journalism that makes the practice a profession, that gives journalism its name and place in society, and is generally underpinned by training and experience, as well as by a whole set of ethics, guidelines and rules governing practice that all journalists know or should.
It is this aspect of journalism that journalism educators teach in the classroom in thousands of journalism schools, and editors help to refine new journalists in even more thousands of newsrooms across the world. We can see the importance of all these, for example in the recent mild debate in Nigeria about who is a journalist and who is not, and why some television presenters are being accused of not being journalists enough, but also why they insist they are.
In other words, the difficulty of reporting, of putting the story together, is the most important of all. For a breaking story like Israel’s attack on Iran, this aspect of journalism deals with what kinds of sources a journalist uses in their reports, whose voices are emphasised or muted, what kinds of questions are asked or overlooked, what kinds of judgements and decisions are made about the information at hand, and about the subject of the report and those involved, what kinds of words are used or not used in headlines and text, what kinds of evidence, photos, images or videos are used, and how these are presented to the audience, what is reported or not reported, and what contexts support the story or not. This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but it more than illustrates the point.
These issues are important for all journalism. But they become supremely important for war journalism particularly, but unfortunately are often the first casualty of the war itself. As a Nigerian journalist and journalism researcher and educator, following coverage of the war in Europe and the Middle East since 2022 from some of the world’s most “reputable” media has been professionally jarring, and intellectually unsettling. I have struggled to match what I know and have been taught about journalism with what I see in daily media reports of these conflicts in real-time, including in the so-called “social media”. Worse than that, I have struggled to balance what journalism education teaches to thousands of students and future journalists around the world with the news reports of these conflicts by leading global media.
This professional dimension of the issue is important because the great Fela once said “teacher don’t teach me nonsense”. But it is now the case that most professionals looking at news coverage of Ukraine, Gaza and now Tel Aviv and Tehran over the past three years would probably feel like all that is taught in journalism schools about journalism is nonsense, after all.
Let me give a few examples. I have read The Guardian (UK) and the New York Times newspapers very regularly for many years now. I have cited stories from both as examples of good journalism to my former students at universities in both Nigeria and Britain or referenced them when having professional discussions about doing journalism in various contexts, including in the newsroom of this newspaper. But a few months after February 2022, I almost stopped reading The Guardian’s news reports about Ukraine and Russia, and focused mainly on its other coverage, especially sports. During the same time, I saw clearly that NYT’s reporting of the Russia-Ukraine war was still more balanced than the Guardian’s even though both toed the same political lines.
Then October 7, 2023 happened and NYT’s reporting on Gaza moved swiftly from journalism to public relations on behalf of Israel, including publishing a substantially fabricated story of Hamas fighters killing Israeli babies. The Guardian, on the other hand, has approached Gaza much less blatantly than the Times in my view, even though, like most western media, you know on whose side its stands. Even as I write this Sunday (yesterday) morning, a news conference by Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, just ended. It was the very first time an official of the Iranian government would appear to speak to diplomats and journalists and take questions from both.
In journalism terms, that is the first time Iran would be telling its side of the story, and therefore, it is the most important news event in a war between Israel and Iran. BBC, CNN, and Sky News all ignored the news conference. Only Al Jazeera covered it, and even then, without showing the question-and-answer session. The implication of hearing an Iranian official tell their side of the story can be far-reaching to many people around the world. But it was blacked out by the media with the widest audience reach. What should I tell my students next? Perhaps I should tell them that these are not just repeated cases of bad journalism in a time of war, but that they show that journalism is actually a weapon of war.
