Not getting the full picture

Osama bin Laden has spent the past few days, according to media reports, digging his own grave (The Sun), planning his live suicide on al-Jazeera TV (The Mirror), directing his fighters on horseback (CNN), and, as a Times graphic helpfully explained, sitting in his sevenfloor mountain cave with a family saloon car parked at the entrance. It's amazing what journalists can report when they're not there.

The Afghan battlefront may be shrouded in confusion and secrecy, but newspaper deadlines and 24-hour TV channels will not wait. War reporters, working under threats to their safety and obstruction from military controllers, find their newsdesks demanding copy when they have few new facts to report. The result, say some seasoned war correspondents, is a speculative fever that can at times misinform.

"It's an extremely complex situation in Afghanistan, a far more fluid war than people are used to, and there has been a fundamental lack of understanding of this in the reporting," says Robert Fox, this paper's correspondent, among others. "Unlike D-Day, Barbarossa or Desert Storm, you cannot have a comprehensive operational plan. Yet none of the journalists has picked up on this. Military knowledge has gone out of fashion." As a result, Fox says, the "Sunday Times style of journalism" has become the norm - "they get a headline and then write to it".

Sir John Keegan, The Daily Telegraph's defence editor and a noted military historian, echoes the view that "speculation is inevitable in such circumstances - the truth tends to emerge later". There may be few reporters actually on the front lines, but he believes that "a roughly accurate picture of events" is none the less emerging. "The whole point about front lines is that if you put your head above the parapet, you tend to get shot. That's the limit of accurate reporting."

With special forces operating around Tora Bora, Sir John suggests, the media should focus less on "nosy-parkering" that could endanger lives and should leave the military to perform its task. "What's happening there is none of the media's business, frankly. It's their duty to report the number of dead and wounded, but anything else is media prurience."

Yet even the casualty figures are proving hard to establish, not least because military planners have sought to control the information flow. Both the press agency UPI and the independent Institute for War and Peace Reporting have contradicted US Defense Department figures for special-forces deaths. Last week, tension erupted between America's press and the US military commanders when "pool" reporters were blocked from covering a "friendly-fire" bombing near Kandahar, where three Marines were killed. Sandy Johnson, Washington bureau chief of the Associated Press, condemned the lack of access as "outrageous", and complained: "What's the point of having reporters over there if they can't cover the news?" The New York Times protested at "a gross abuse of the ground rules for the press pool", and the Washington Post condemned the military for "locking those reporters up". Eventually the Pentagon admitted that "errors were made" and promised greater access in future.

In the meantime, a certain amount of guesswork appears inevitable. "There's something called responsible speculation," says Michael Evans, defence editor at The Times. "If you've got three facts and 800 words to write, it's perfectly possible to file a good story, but it will need some informed speculation. No one in Afghanistan is getting the full picture."

So what of The Times's own extraordinary graphic of November 29, which showed in great detail the (so far unexplored) contents of Bin Laden's Tora Bora caves? " Obviously no one's been inside the whole complex, but I don't think it's misleading," Evans says. "Readers will be aware that someone hasn't just walked in and drawn it on the spot."