The 'truth' of war reporting

By Nick Higham BBC media correspondent

Death is a commonplace on television, but real death is rare.

There are plenty of killings in films and drama, but in Britain, at least, the convention is to spare viewers sight of the moment of death and the bloody aftermath of violence.

The Iraq war dominated the news at the height of the conflict

This coming Sunday on Discovery the taboo is broken, in the first of a three-part series called Reporters at War by the award-winning documentary maker (and one-time war correspondent) Jon Blair.

It's a move that will be welcomed by those, like the former BBC correspondent Martin Bell and the Independent's Robert Fisk, who believe that television sanitises the vicious reality of war.

In Fisk's view, governments and television authorities stop people from seeing images of violence "because if they saw them, they would never again support war".

He adds: "And we want a population that will, when we want, support wars."

Tough viewing

There is no sanitising in Reporters at War.

The first programme, in particular, makes for tough viewing: we see beatings, shootings, ghastly machete wounds, dying infants, bloody body parts in the wake of explosions.

Iraq war reporting War coverage 'was sanitised'

Blair has gone as far as he and Discovery dared to show us the reality of war - knowing that is easier to do in the context of a documentary than in a peak time news bulletin where the viewer may be ambushed by deeply disturbing images.

But the programmes do more than shock and unsettle.

They look at the way battlefield coverage has changed with changing technology.

They tell us about military censorship and news management - culminating in the decision to embed hundreds of reporters with military units during the recent Gulf War.

They ask why war reporters do it.

One honest answer - from Michael Nicholson of ITN and Alan Pizzey of CBS News - is that wars are big stories and covering them is fun.

And they look at the risks reporters run - physical but also psychological.

Most of Blair's interviewees seem remarkably robust and undisturbed - perhaps because reporters are, first and foremost, story-tellers and telling stories about disturbing events helps to exorcise them.

But a few were clearly damaged.

The ITN cameraman Jon Steele speaks movingly of his breakdown after filming the death of a young girl in Sarajevo.

And Gloria Steinem, who covered Vietnam for the New York Times, talks bleakly of what she sees as the futility of her trade.

"I don't think as a journalist you can go on pretending your stories make a difference," she said.

"They were like ice cubes, they melted. Who we saved, who rose from the grave, what was prevented, all that writing, all that typing.

"What happened because of those stories? Very little."

Reporters at War is on the Discovery Channel. on Sunday 23 November, Wednesday 26 November and Wednesday 3 December, all at 2100 GMT.