The Media Column: 'More news does not always mean better news'

Is instant coverage of war providing "the first draft of history"? The last Gulf War was the conflict in which CNN came of age. The BBC responded with the launch of a rolling news format on Radio 4. That experiment, known as "Scud FM", formed the skeleton for Radio Five Live. Since then Britain has acquired News 24, the ITV News Channel and a much improved market leader in the form of Sky News. So round-the-clock broadcasting came into being because of Saddam Hussein, and is growing up for the same reason.

Not quite. Most British news consumers learned about the 1991 campaign from conventional television and radio. Rolling news was in its infancy. So was subscription television. The major effort to write that "first draft of history" was made in considered broadcasts shown at appointed viewing hours and in newspaper reporting and analysis.

The mass market did not change fundamentally until the Kosovo campaign. As Ian Hargreaves, the former editor of The Independent, explains in his new book Journalism: Truth or Dare it was in the Balkans that politicians and military leaders recognised that they could profit by "feeding the beast". They realised that reporters charged with providing non-stop coverage had to be fed constantly with nuggets of information. If they were not, the danger existed that they would seek inconvenient exclusives.

Mistakes were made, but Allied commanders have applied the lessons this time. Donald Rumsfeld's comment that "what you are seeing is not the war in Iraq, what you are seeing is slices of the war in Iraq" was satirised by the BBC as the "Donald Rumsfeld soundbite of the week". It was more cynically intelligent than that implies. What we have seen and heard on stations from Five Live to MSNBC is too much carefully regimented martial drama compiled by reporters "embedded" with British and American military units.

As Mr Rumsfeld intended, this has provided anything but the first draft of an authoritative history of war. Language has been distorted so that "taken", when used in reference to towns such as Um Qasr and Basra, has by no means signified complete control by invasion forces. Hours have been filled by reporters broadcasting from positions they are not permitted to identify. Inevitably, they have fallen back on descriptions of the awesome machinery around them.

That makes even the most convinced supporter of the war sceptical about how much truth is being told. So do incidents such as the the BBC's decision on Friday to broadcast the insights of the correspondent Frank Gardiner, who said a British official had told him that "Saddam Hussein may well have been killed outright in the initial strike". Was it true? The BBC did not know. This was psychological warfare, a bid to put a strategically valuable allegation into the public domain while maintaining deniability. Rolling news makes that an easy trick to pull off, because the insatiable demands of non-stop broadcasting guarantee that it will always seek to show more than it knows.

Censorship is no answer. Some instant reporting has been valuable. BBC Radio's Adam Mynott, broadcasting live from Um Qasr on Sunday, had a ringside seat as a Harrier jet destroyed opposition many had believed gone 48 hours earlier. Perhaps Mynott was closer to the action than his military minders wanted him to be.

"Embedding" combined with immediacy can bring dividends, but often it delivers drama without context. Correcting that imbalance demands more of the big picture than rolling news is designed to provide. That comes only through programmes such as Channel 4 News and in the pages of broadsheet newspapers.

The military has grasped that rolling news craves instant excitement. It is to be earnestly hoped that the broadcasters will ponder how vulnerable to exploitation that makes them. More news does not automatically mean better news. Public demand for accuracy and detail may not be huge, but this war is proving how essential such traditional values are to the compilation of authoritative reporting. Rolling news creates different pressures. By behaving more like entertainment, it demonstrates how crucial the considered analysis provided by those with time to think before filing will be to historians.

timlckhrst@aol.com