MSNBC's Banfield Slams War Coverage

Ashleigh Banfield. Posted April 29, 2003.

Editor's Note: The following is the text of MSNBC correspondent Ashleigh Banfield's Landon Lecture given at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, on April 24. Her comments sparked a media controversy which reportedly prompted her NBC employers to severely reprimand Banfield. While she has not commented on the issue, an NBC spokeswoman told reporters Monday, "She and we both agreed that she didn't intend to demean the work of her colleagues, and she will choose her words more carefully in the future."

Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. President. That was a very kind introduction. I would love to say that I'm a hero and was able to save this woman, but she was fine. I just gave her a quick checkover and she was just fine. But it was quite an adventure, nonetheless, and Chuck and I have a story to tell for the rest of time.

Thank you so much, by the way, for inviting me to be here. This is a real treat and a real honor. The last time I was in Manhattan, Kansas, there were a lot of other stories that were making top headlines, not the least of which were the anniversary of 9/11, the continued hunt for Osama bin Laden, the whereabouts of Elizabeth Smart, and what was to become of Saddam Hussein; and we have some resolution on very few of these stories, but we certainly know at least what Saddam Hussein is not up to these days, and it's leading Iraq.

So I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and that the war is now over essentially -- the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials -- but there is so much that is left behind. And I'm not just talking about the most important thing, which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But also what Americans find themselves deciding upon when it comes to news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and when it comes to what's appropriate and what's not appropriate any longer.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I'll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we've never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we'd never seen before and were witness to for the first time.

And there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it's fought and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it really looks like when they're firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or across a bridge, or into a building.

There were a lot of journalists who were skeptical of this embedding process before we all embarked on this kind of news coverage before this campaign. Many thought that this was just another element of propaganda from the American government. I suppose you could look at it that way. It certainly did show the American side of things, because that's where we were shooting from. But it also showed what can go wrong.

It also gave journalists, including Al-Jazeera journalists and Arab television journalists and Arab newspaper journalists, who were also embedded, it also gave them the opportunity to see without any kinds of censorship how these fights were being fought, how these soldiers were behaving, what the civil affairs soldiers were doing, and what the humanitarian assistants really looked like. Was it just a line we were being fed, or were they really on the ground with boxes of water and boxes of food?

So for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.

That said, what didn't you see? You didn't see where those bullets landed. You didn't see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you're getting the story, it just means you're getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that's what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn't journalism, because I'm not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn't see what it took to do that.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from AlterNet! Sign up now »