The real first casualty of war

The messengers are being shot again. The Daily Telegraph columnist, Barbara Amiel, has opened fire on war correspondents reporting from Israel, accusing them of bringing bad news. She says they have "abandoned balanced report-ing", "ignored the relatively heavy Israeli casualties", published Palestinian rumours about Israeli "massacres" and adopted a generally anti-Semitic agenda - "many of them have been doing the work of Goebbels without bothering to wear the brown uniform identifying their agenda".

Caught in her sniper sights are Sam Kiley of this paper, Janine di Giovanni of The Times and Orla Guerin of the BBC. Kiley, according to Ms Amiel, had given up balanced reporting in favour of stories documenting "what his preferred informants call Israel's 'staggering brutality'". Janine di Giovanni "seems to see Sharon's efforts to clean out the murderous thugs in Jenin camp as Israel's excuse to attack children with chickenpox". Orla Guerin, writing in the Daily Mail, had concentrated on anecdotes about how frightening it was to be stopped by Israeli soldiers in Manger Square.

Now wait a minute. If Ms Amiel is right, then three distinguished and experienced war correspondents have conspired to create a culture of anti-Israeli reporting in the British media. Isn't it much more likely that they are reporting what they have seen and experienced, and it is the essence of those reports that have upset Ms Amiel and her - no doubt genuinely held - beliefs.

No one, least of all the war correspondents involved, claims that the reporting from war zones is always balanced, accurate and fair. But Ms Amiel's suggestion that anyone wanting to know what is really going on in Israel should log on to the Israel Defence Force's website has got to be a joke. "It is a government source, of course," she writes, "but journalists relied on the American military for information on Afghanistan."

Yes, but there were few alternatives because the American military itself had denied war correspondents access to the fighting. Denying access has not, until now, been the Israeli way. Old-time British correspondents who covered the Israeli-Arab wars from 1967 spoke admiringly of the help and openness they encountered from their Israeli escorting officers.

Today they are kept by force from any area the IDF says is off-limits. They are fired on and harassed. Their press cars are rammed by APCs and bulldozers, their film footage is confiscated, their press cards torn up, they are treated in an arrogant and overbearing manner and they fear for their lives. Is it any wonder that they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Israelis have something to hide, that Sam Kiley's stories of a "brutal conquest" in Jenin are true and that the Israelis have turned the refugee camp into rubble?

Or is such a view unique to the war correspondents? Ms Amiel says yes. She writes: "The media seem to have taken the vocabulary of a 'theatre' of war literally ... and believe this is a production in which they should have a lead role." This is an unfair accusation and ignores the fact that over the past three years the late and greatly-lamented Freedom Forum, an American-sponsored think tank at Marble Arch, spent many hours discussing the role and ethics of war correspondents.

More than 200 editors, producers, reporters, cameramen and media executives looked at ways to improve their performance, to find new and ethical means of informing and enlightening audiences in today's increasingly violent and interdependent world. One of the correspondents singled out by Ms Amiel, Janine di Giovanni, was a regular at these meetings.

Paul Taylor, then diplomatic editor of Reuters, pointed out: "Objec-tivity is not a state, it's a goal, a process, a daily dialectic, and we're constantly debating it, as we should be."

Ms Amiel might like to note that conservative press critics in the United States, who, like her, have berated journalists for their bias, have since 11 September attacked them for their objectivity, demanding that they should be more patriotic instead of neutral.

The practice of shooting the messenger because the message is unpalatable is by no means new. Young American war correspondents in Vietnam turned against the US because of the manner in which it was prosecuting the war - a situation with many parallels to Israel. The Pentagon blamed the messengers and leaned on American media bosses to send out older correspondents who had "been on side" in Korea to balance what they saw as biased reporting. They did their patriotic best. But history shows that the younger reporters were right and the truth triumphed - as it will in Israel.

There is an easy answer. Instead of shooting the messengers, Ms Amiel should persuade a British newspaper to send her to Israel. There she could slip on a flak jacket and head off for the action.