Michael Yon, readers might know, has been embedded with British army units in Helmand for the last month – producing some of the most vivid reporting I’ve seen. But now, he’s not. And he’s not happy about it either.
Greetings, The British Ministry of Defence canceled my embed after today’s dispatch. Please Read “Bad Medicine“.
Bad Medicine is Yon’s last full post, and describes in considerable detail, British efforts to improve security along a short section of road linking two British bases. As with his earlier stuff, this is compelling reporting – great photos and lots of detail. So much detail, in fact that on reading it, I thought I could see why the Brits might be peeved.
But apparently not. As far as the MoD is concerned, his embed wasn’t cancelled – in fact it was extended. It just ran out, is all. Here’s their statement (h/t Dan Bennett)
Michael Yon’s embed with British forces has not been cancelled and we are disappointed that he has chosen to characterise it as such. We have hosted Michael with British forces for five weeks, some two weeks longer than originally planned.
We welcome Michael’s thorough reporting of the work of British forces and we have no objection to his recent piece entitled “Bad Medicine”. All journalists embedding with the UK military are given access to troops without censorship. However all materials coming out of theatre is checked to ensure that key tactical details that would aid the enemy are not being made public. Michael’s dispatch was subject to these checks and was given the go-ahead.
That sounds fair enough: there are other journalists to accomodate, after all. Back to Yon then – does he still believe the MoD gave him the boot? If not, he ought to clarify. In his latest update, he writes simply that ‘My embed with British forces has ended.’ ‘Ended’ is somewhat different from ‘cancelled’, of course.
This is a tough war for journalists. It’s expensive to cover (Yon’s readers step up to help meet his costs) and dangerous to do so outside an embed. At the same time, the business model for newspapers is in meltdown, and the public (and editorial) appetite for this sort of news is limited. As a consumer of news from Afghanistan, my feeling is that embedding broadly works – we get reportage like Yon’s where we mightn’t otherwise. Reporters, in turn, have the latitude to say broadly what they like – without compromising opsec. The MoD, meanwhile, gets to say who comes out to theatre. It might not perfect, but it’s better than no embedding. What do you think?
Meanwhile, if you’re in London next week – there’s an event at the Frontline Club with an excellent panel that might interest you, and which will certainly reflect on these issues:
Access Denied: “Fighting in Gaza and Sri Lanka and the recent unrest in Iran all raised questions about how journalists can do their job when governments deny access.The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have also provoked concern that the Ministry of Defence is aided in the task of managing the flow of information by the fact that it is frequently impossible for journalists to reach and report from the frontline of the conflict.”
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I like this part:
“All journalists embedding with the UK military are given access to troops without censorship. However all materials coming out of theatre is checked to ensure that key tactical details that would aid the enemy are not being made public.”
Unless I’m missing something, that is censorship of a sort. Isn’t it? Justifiable, but censorship none the less.
If I was the MOD looking at this, I’m not sure I’d be terribly chuffed with the level of detail, maps, pictures, names being published. It’s all good intelligence, if only for background. But they approved it, so I guess they know best….
http://twitter.com/Michael_Yon/status/3532585917
I’d have thought this would have burnt the bridge.
Thanks very much for that Berserker – I’m yet to embrace Twitter, maybe I will now! This still doesn’t nail it though: the Tweet comes after he’s ‘shut down’, so doesn’t demonstrate MoD foreknowledge of his intentions. Let’s see what he reports on this next, I guess.
On Patrick’s point – it certainly is censorship, but understandable, perhaps, and not – if conducted properly – terribly severe. Censorship by excluding reporters would seem to be more pernicious. On that, I see that David Axe has posted at Danger Room on the Rendon Group’s involvement in screening reporters for the Pentagon:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/08/pentagon-reconsiders-war-reporter-screening/
That would be pretty damaging if it turned out to be accurate.
Well, doesn’t look like much love left between Yon and the MoD…
That’s the first report of his I’ve read. He seems creepily obsessed with bits of kit-sort of like slightly dim, unimaginative military porn. A bit like Seth Jones, whose latest (rather underwhelming) book on Afghanistan is completely ruined by totally pointless asides about how great Apache helicopters are, and what a Hellfire missile can do in an enclosed space. And ‘smashing the Taliban’? Give me a break. This obsession with winning a war kinetically is part of the problem-the other is what we define as ‘win’. I haven’t read Yon’s other stuff as I said, but this piece did not impress. The maps were interesting.
P – the pictures are better than the prose, for sure. He’s no Norman Lewis (on which more anon). And yes, it’s all very tactically focused.
Nonetheless, I think there’s much of interest there that you don’t get space for in mainstream media reporting. The morale of the soldiers, their interaction (or rather lack of interaction) with the local community, the sheer scale of effort that goes into just moving around, rather than anything more productive. As for the weapons – I gather he’s ex-Green Beret, so perhaps that helps explain it. Still, there’s much of interest there too – the insight into the EOD team in this report is certainly interesting. The photos show, for example, that we seem to be using converted civilian JCBs — a potential vulnerability (h/t Richard North). They also showed the home-made dye job on the sand coloured shirts, undertaken in order to better blend into the green zone (clue in the name): a procurement whoopsie picked up later in the Sun.
So it may not be at the strategic level, but then, I reckon it’s no less interesting for that.
Norman Lewis is just great. My favourite snapshot of his (pretty sure it’s him) is of a British officer interrogating an Italian counterpart in 1944 by beating him up with a tableleg. Not getting anything out of him, the Brit then asked a nearby sergeant to take the Italian outside and shoot him, which he promptly did. Lewis described it as the most sickening scene he had seen in the whole war.
Alienate perhaps the only respected US Mil-blogger who presents a positive view of British forces. Whatever the reason, was it a smart thing to do?
“Alienate perhaps the only respected US Mil-blogger who presents a positive view of British forces. Whatever the reason, was it a smart thing to do?”
The only thing that’s so far been suggested that they did was give him a 5 week embed instead of 3.
Sounds like some BS from Yon.
Here’s what’s on the front page of his blog from 3 articles ago……
” The Kopp-Etchells Effect, Part II
E-mail Print
27 August 2009
My embed with British forces has ended.”
So to say “the British have cancelled my embed after I published a story” some 2 weeks later would seem to either be a lie or…… what else ?
The more I read and reflect about this guy, the more he sounds like just another rather amoral adrenalin-addicted combat tourist (the fact that he takes multiple photographs of a sniper shooting people, and then feels the necessity to annotate them ‘BAM!’ says it all really). Not sure that having such people around really helps the ‘strategic narrative’ an awful lot…if we even had one that is. Gordon Brown is now defending the conflict in Afghanistan because the Sun newspaper told him to. Yes, really.
Keep an eye (or two, if you dare) out for the girl with big tits on page three next time doubtlessly opining about the Afghan elections. ‘Heather thinks that President Karzai should invite Mr. Abdullah Abdullah into a coalition government, and that NATO should pursue a networked fully comprehensive stabilisation strategy around Kabul and Kandahar.’