War photographer Robert Capa declared: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” The best journalism is of course produced by those closest to the stories they cover. But physical and psychological proximity is especially crucial to accurate, relevant and timely war reporting.
Both the government and the news media are at critical junctures. President Obama has already committed 21,000 additional troops to the War in Afghanistan to fight the “increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.” Today, White House Spokesperson Robert Gibbs confirmed that the President would not use economic stimulus money to save failing newspapers like the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times: “‘I don’t know what, in all honesty, government can do about it,’ Gibbs told reporters…Gibbs said Obama feels “concern and sadness” over the plight of the print media…”
Both government officials and journalists have long feared the day when a war is waged and there is no one there to cover it. In many ways, Afghanistan has the potential to be an even greater quagmire than Iraq, and yet the traditional news media is calling back their correspondents, boxing up their bureaus and switching off their satellites. Television news has already left its Afghanistan reporting on the cutting room floor–the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press reports that neither the War in Iraq nor the War in Afghanistan were among the top 15 news interest stories of 2008:
From the Pew Research Center for People and the Press
And although 70% of Americans say that television news is their primary source of information about national and international issues, coverage of the War in Afghanistan remains abysmal. A study of local television news coverage in Afghanistan by an independent media watchdog group illustrates how slashed budgets lead to an subpar reporting and an overreliance on official sources:
“Our first study of the local news coverage of the US policy in Afghanistan began the day US warplanes started dropping bombs in October 2001. We conducted a 75-day study of the three Grand Rapids based TV stations’ coverage of what was then exclusively referred to as “The War on Terror…”The type of stories that were presented on the local TV stations either focused on what the US military was doing, the response from the Taliban, or the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. Much of the footage that was used was provided by the Department of Defense…This type of coverage framed the war from the US perspective with limited information on what was happening to the Afghani people. Even more absent than stories on civilian casualties was the lack of any reporting that provided historical context to US policy in that region of the world in recent decades.” -Media Mouse, January 15, 2009
Without the resources or the commitment to covering Afghanistan in a meaningful, contextual and consistent way, the news media will essentially report only what the Department of Defense hands them. Reliance on official sources, failure to ask tough questions and the media’s willingness to stay “on message” led to journalists’ complacency in the run-up to the Iraq War. But Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the first hot spots to be mishandled by the news media. If we, as journalists, choose to ignore or oversimplify our coverage of the War in Afghanistan, we also risk repeating Cold War history.
Tiny El Salvador became the "domino" in Western Hemisphere during the Reagan Administration. The U.S. gave the Salvadoran government $6 billion in military aid to fight a civil war that was killing 3,000 people per month. (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
Before there was the War on Terror, there was the War on Communism. And in a country scarcely larger than Massachusetts, the American public was told that the Fate of the Free World and the security of the Western Hemisphere rested in the hands of a few poor farmers and fourteen rich families. Throughout the Cold War, the mainstream media seemed hesitant to get close enough to proxy conflicts to meaningfully cover them, as Capa said. They framed the debate in the government’s terms, and relied on official sources to produce sporadic, shallow reports that added little to Americans’ understanding of international relations.
In Chile, Cuba, Argentina, China, Taiwan, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Afghanistan and (to a lesser extent), Vietnam, the news media presented complex conflicts as simply part of the zero-sum U.S.-Soviet race. The people, the movements, the motives and the stakes could all be described, it seemed, as conveniently communist versus anticommunist, democratic versus undemocratic, free market versus socialist monsters.
In brief, the media covered Cold War proxy conflicts with a certain front- page containment—rarely did journalists point their lenses outside of the rigid Cold War frame created by the government. The media’s failure to contextualize its Cold War reporting led to a gross oversimplification of both the players and the stakes involved, especially in Latin America and particularly in El Salvador.
More than 70,000 were killed in El Salvador's brutal war (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
Yet El Salvador was truly America’s first “freelance war.” The unprecedented access to both military troops and guerrilla forces that was granted to independent photographers and reporters created a dynamic new relationship between the military and the press. Freer of editors’ constraints and subject to less pressure by the embassy, freelance journalists could in many ways report what the mainstream media knew but did not want to say. El Salvador’s geography and general political chaos allowed accredited but unaffiliated freelance journalists to “drive to the war and be back in the hotel pool in the afternoon,” according to freelance reporter Marc Cooper.
Both the nature of the reporters themselves and of the news media in general contributed to freelancers’ ability to take greater risks and obtain edgier, grittier and more accurate stories. Freelance journalists in El Salvador looked outside of the government’s narrow Cold War lens, rejected oversimplified coverage and contextualized otherwise predictable two-dimensional reporting.
Freelance journalists were also generally more likely to cover ideological conflict in addition to combat missions. You would never have known it from watching network news, but Cold War ideology was actually quite complex. And it became more complex following the release of National Security Council Report-68 (NSC-68), which first defined the Soviet Union’s mission as world domination. The Soviet Union was “‘animated by a new fanatic faith…to impose its absolute authority over the rest of the world,’” and so for the next forty years, the U.S. government embarked on an ambitious and unambiguous containment policy. The media was in turn challenged to cover ambiguous civil conflicts in obscure places. The enemy was now a nuanced geopolitical and economic ideology that could be manifested virtually anywhere.
Covering Cold War proxy conflicts therefore presented unique challenges to news media outlets. Especially in broadcast news, coverage of ambiguous and nuanced domestic political processes in El Salvador didn’t attract viewers the way combat footage did. A lack of understanding of the political process within El Salvador and a general consensus by the American news media that such coverage was less important contributed as well, according to Cooper:
“Prior to the war, El Salvador was invisible. Coverage was neither good nor bad, but invisible. The problem is institutional with the American media. And it becomes accentuated when the place becomes a hot spot like El Salvador did. Then it gets a lot of coverage, but its coverage that is skewed and only focused through that one policy issue.” -Marc Cooper
Access to combat footage itself was heavily controlled by the Pentagon following the Vietnam War on the assumption that negative coverage had lost the war for the American military in Southeast Asia. The lesson learned from Vietnam was that “the government [should] provide its own news, using the media as a direct pipeline to the public, instead of surrendering control to editors and reporters,” according to military scholar Michael Walzer.
In 1984, the Pentagon’s Sidle Commission created a National Media Pool that restricted media access to military operations; the “pipeline” was in place, and mainstream media coverage of proxy conflicts suddenly became only what the Pentagon wanted the public to see.
Freelance journalists peered through the military’s dark veil and into real-time combat operations the way mainstream outlets that were part of the Pool could not, said Cooper:
“Freelancers were willing to take more risks. There was a pushing of the envelope that they were willing to engage in. The big problem in any sort of journalism is the question of access. When you begin to get truculent or conflictive with your sources they tend to cut off your access. If you are working for Newsweek or the New York Times, your editors are going to demand precisely that same policy skew of coverage. They’re going to demand you have open channels to the ambassador. The elite reporters pulled their punches because of that. I can say that the freelancers didn’t give a damn about those folks, so they were much freer to go out and do much more critical stories.” -Marc Cooper
Raymond Bonner of the New York Times was among the first to learn how the Department of Defense dealt with reporters who didn’t stay “on message” and toe the line. Bonner was the first to report on the massacre of at least 794 civilians by U.S.-trained government forces at El Mozote in 1981. Following the publication of Bonner’s story, the Reagan Administration decried it as guerrilla propaganda and pressured the Times to banish Bonner to the business desk.
Inside San Salvador's Cathedral, human rights groups and the Catholic Church kept hundreds of photos of body dumps so that family members could identify the dead (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
Remembers Cooper: “When Bonner wrote those stories, he got pulled by the embassy. The New York Times definitely buckled. There were certain lines you couldn’t cross but freelancers could.” Being outside of the large networks and newspapers proved an advantage for freelancers covering Cold War proxy conflicts.
Freelance journalists in El Salvador were better able to present ambiguities and question powerfully vague rhetoric because of their relative freedom from financial and editorial constraints and their willingness to take greater risks. Mainstream media coverage generally followed the Reagan Administration’s agenda and framed the civil conflict as part of the greater Cold War containment strategy.
Few media outlets openly questioned the necessity of $6 billion in military aid for El Salvador. Even fewer mainstream journalists dared to report on the training of right-wing death squads at the United States’ School of the Americas, even though these tactical battalions committed some of the most heinous human rights abuses during the war. The U.S.-trained Atcatl Battalion was responsible for the murder of six unarmed Jesuit priests and two churchwomen at the University of Central America in 1989, although embassy pressure led most news media outlets to shy away from fully covering it.
Salvadorans visit the site of the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their maid and her daughter (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
Only a decade later would the Los Angeles Times declare: “Our allies, we kept telling ourselves, were members of the Free World…El Salvador’s murdering oligarchy was ‘making progress toward democracy.’”
Freelance journalists were also better able to cover ideological, economic and political conflict because of the length of their stay in-country. Many networks and newspapers sent correspondents only when a major event was taking place, while many freelancers lived and worked in El Salvador for extended periods of time. Network “parachute reporters” landed in the capital and spent a few days covering a rigged election or a massive firefight with a certain ignorant zeal and naïveté. But freelancers often exposed the inherent contradictions in funding the unpopular side of a murky civil conflict in a country most Americans had never heard of.
Aside from presenting ambiguities and questioning the official line, freelancers also contributed some of the grittier stories and images to the coverage of El Salvador. Spencer Hardy was a freelance photographer who sold pieces to Time, Life and Newsweek. Hardy arrived in El Salvador shortly before the 1984 election with a fake press pass he printed and laminated himself. Hardy said he and his partner were willing to take greater risks to sell their photos than some of the network correspondents or staff reporters were:
“In El Salvador, you had journalists just waiting in the hotel for something to happen. When it happened, they would run out and cover it en masse. My partner and I would instead go out in the field, find the army or the guerrillas and stay with them hoping that something would happen. Being El Salvador, it invariably did.” -Spencer Hardy
Archibishop Oscar Romero was assassinated by death squads while saying Mass in 1980. A liberation theologian and advocate for the poor, Romero famously declared: "I do not believe in death without resurrection. If they kill me, I will be resurrected in the Salvadoran people." (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
Freelance journalists seemed to be willing to take greater risks for a number of reasons. Many of them, like Hardy, had flocked to El Salvador because “it was the only thing you could do to go and play with the big boys. I analogized it to always wanting to play football and getting to play for the first time on Superbowl Sunday without ever having been part of the team.” The conflict was generally low intensity and the troops involved were relatively few, Cooper said. And, said Hardy:
“It was cheap if you were trying to make a great adventure. You could get their cheaply, you could live their cheaply, you could go visit the war for two hours and be home for lunch. It leant it self to freelancers…Of course in El Salvador the army was kind of unprofessional and didn’t mind killing a few journalists now and then. But you didn’t have to be embedded and you could go where you wanted.” -Spencer Hardy
Freelancers’ willingness to take risks was also a function of the market. In order to compete with staff photographers, freelancers had to offer newspapers, magazines and networks grittier and more dramatic images that got closer to the action than those of their full-time counterparts. Hardy said his partner was a Vietnam veteran whose combat training allowed them to get closer than other journalists who “played it safe in the hotel.” Although there were several notable exceptions, freelance journalists were generally more willing to take risks, report untold stories and accurately present the ambiguity—and futility—of U.S. involvement in El Salvador.
Freelance reporters were sometimes more willing to invest and involve themselves in the stories they covered, according to Hardy: “If a photographer takes a photo of someone who is being led into a military compound, it might prevent them from being tortured or killed. Because someone saw them, they couldn’t just be ‘disappeared.’ In some ways, journalism prevents atrocities.”
Freelance photographers were far more likely than network correspondents to venture into places like La Puerta del Diablo, or “the Devil’s Door,” for example.
Right-wing death squads used the "Devil's Door" as their killing field (Photo: Kaelyn Forde, 2007)
On a cliff overlooking the capital, paramilitary groups and death squads shot members of the opposition and innocent civilians at the cliff’s edge so that their bodies would fall into the ravine below, eliminating the military’s need to dump them somewhere else. Freelance photographers helped human rights organizations and churches by photographing the dead at body dumps like these so that family members could identify them.
In their coverage of El Salvador, freelance journalists were largely responsible for setting the precedent of solid and accurate reporting that was independent of military and government control:
“By showing these people, you prevent them from dying in vain. We have no idea how many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis or Afghanis have been killed because there’s not much coming back from freelance journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan. The access you had then [in El Salvador] was amazing compared to what you have now.” -Spencer Hardy
It is a precedent that continues and evolves today—in the form of bloggers and online journalists. America’s first freelance war offers valuable lessons for the government and the news media alike. As both the policymakers and journalists embark on an uncertain course in Afghanistan, they would do well to emulate to the freelance reporters in El Salvador who best met Capa’s challenge of getting close enough to truly cover people trapped in the reality of war.
Kaelyn Forde reporting from El Salvador
Kaelyn Forde Eckenrode is a senior earning dual Bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and International Relations from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. She aspires to be a multilingual television correspondent in Latin America.
