This page was last updated on 02/03/2016.
Warning: this video contains some upsetting scenes.
Reporting a war is among the toughest assignments for any media organisation or individual - and not just because of the physical dangers. There are enormous difficulties in weighing up patchy and contradictory information, finding out exactly what is happening and presenting an impartial picture, especially when the reporter’s own country is involved.
Although the way the BBC reports on wars changes with each conflict, those changes are often driven more by technology than anything else. The successive development of satellite phones, lightweight satellite dishes, laptop editing and file transfer protocols has made it possible to report live or in packaged form from the most remote and inhospitable theatre of war.
Social media has taken this process into new areas again. But the editorial dilemmas of conflict reporting have not changed to anything like the same degree.
The sort of questions BBC journalists wrestle with today when covering British involvement conflicts are not very different from those that confronted William Howard Russell of the Times - usually thought of as the first war correspondent - as he witnessed the shambolic performance of Lord Raglan’s army in the Crimea War more than 150 years ago. Russell was acutely aware that his devastating reports of inefficiency and incompetence, which caused a sensation when they reached London, were not exactly conducive to the success of the British war effort. "Am I to tell these things," he enquired of his editor, "or hold my tongue?"
Never once was I told you can't say that because it shows us in a bad light
Like all those who were to follow him, Russell faced the problem of trying to find out what was really happening, how to verify what he was being told, and how to draw the line - if such a line existed - between his professional duty as a reporter and his patriotic duty.
And, like all those who were to follow him, the British government and military establishment were torn over how far to co-operate with this new breed of war reporter: how much to tell them; how to keep a grip on the flow of information.
I delved into some of this history as part of a presentation for members of the BBC Trust on how these arguments are now played out, and how the BBC addresses them. With Fran Unsworth, then head of BBC Newsgathering, and Newsnight’s defence and diplomatic editor Mark Urban, I took the Trust through some of the history and discussed the place of due impartiality when you are reporting on a war in which Britain is involved.
One of the aspects of modern war coverage the Trust was most interested in was the practice of embedding journalists with front-line troops. By no means a new phenomenon, it was taken to new levels by Britain and the US in 2003 for the war in Iraq. Between them, they embedded 700 media personnel and, not surprisingly, that had a big impact on the subsequent coverage.
Not only did television in particular now have access to a mass of extraordinary footage, thanks to technical advances journalists also had the means to edit and send back their material from the front-line, and to report live from wherever they were.
And thanks to the growth of 24-hour news channels there was now plenty of airtime to show whatever they were able to offer.
The confluence of these factors made the 2003 war something of a watershed in the history of conflict reporting. I was the BBC’s world news editor at the time and I have vivid memories of our tussles with the Ministry of Defence, and of grappling with the issues thrown up by the embed programme.
This is the video we produced for the BBC Trust.
It is presented by former BBC special correspondent Allan Little.
