Stephen Farrell has a piece in the Times of London about Israeli infantrymen fighting Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.  It's illustrative of the difference between how a group like Hezbollah deals with the media and how the Israeli (or American) military deals with the media.  It's obvious from reading the story that Farrell is dealing with some restrictions on what he can say; he's explicit about that in the story.  But he pretty much has the freedom to write about anything he sees, and reports the candid comments of the soldiers around him.  I haven't seen western reporting on Hezbollah with this level of detail.  It's possible I've just missed it, but I'm sure it's rare.

Obviously part of this may be that Hezbollah is doing things it doesn't want the media to see—like launching rockets in civilian areas.  But I also think there's just a greater level of paranoia within organizations like Hezbollah than within a well-organized western military (I'm basing this on my experiences in Iraq; I've never covered Hezbollah or the IDF).  It's hard for a group like Hezbollah to really trust its foot-soldiers.  They're a militia, not an army, which means there may not be any kind of reliable standard for who ends up in the militia and who's kept out for being incompetent.  And the chain of command may be murky, meaning guys at the bottom may have no idea what guys at the top expect of them.  So the leadership is probably wary of what individual militiamen are doing, the militiamen are wary of crossing the leadership, and the easiest thing is to just keep the media at a distance.

On the other hand, if the IDF is anything like the US military there's a remarkable confidence throughout the chain of command in the ability of soldiers on the ground to behave responsibly.  The US military doesn't have to micro-manage what it's soldiers and Marines say to the same extent, because it trusts them—whether they're privates or colonels—to keep sensitive information to themselves (or to assess the trustworthiness of a reporter before speaking candidly about things that shouldn't be published).  I'm not naive, I know that soldiers and Marines tell their subordinates not to say anything stupid or inflamatory around reporters.  But that doesn't mean soldiers won't be honest about what they're thinking and what they're doing—Steve's story on the IDF is full of honest details.

There are some other cultural and institutional reasons for that honesty, I think.  Whatever over-heated pundits in the US may say, western reporters aren't spies or traitors or a fifth column and the military knows it.  They may worry about coverage that casts them in a bad light, but they don't worry that the media is actively working to undermine its forces in the field.  Militias aren't so sanguine.  Whether it's Hezbollah or the Mehdi Army or the Irish Republican Army, militias and insurgent groups worry a lot about whether "reporters" are actually spies.  In terms of sheer manpower and firepower militias are weaker than organized national armies.  They rely for survival on their ability to hide.  So, when a foreigner walks up with a notebook and a camera and starts recording all the details he can, a militiaman is likely to freak out.

This is exactly why it's crazy for folks in the US to complain that reporters in Lebanon aren't picking "the right side" as they cover Hezbollah.  I'm not talking about hiding relevant facts about Hezbollah's activities in southern Lebanon.  But there's a difference between reporting what you see and being a partisan for one side or the other.  I've read in a few places, mostly in reference to Iraq, that reporters who cover insurgents or militias have an obligation to rat out those groups to save lives.  Whether deputizing reporters as intelligence operatives would save lives is highly debatable.  What it would do is make it completely impossible for reporters to cover all sides of a conflict, and make reporting in places like Iraq and southern Lebanon even more dangerous than it already is.

 

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