New technologies and old dangers” “

A hundred years ago Luigi Barzini travelled forty hours on horseback to ensure that his dispatches on the Russo-Japanese war would get through the censorship and arrive safe and sound at the Corriere della Sera . Today the correspondents posted to Afghanistan only have to lift their satellite phones and in a few minutes the sound of their voice and the images of war arrive in the West. We asked Anton La Guardia – his father is Italian, his mother Philippino, chief foreign news editor of the Daily Telegraph , Britain’s highest circulation broadsheet daily – to explain to us how the profession of the war correspondent has changed in the light of what is happening in Afghanistan. For journalists, is the war in Afghanistan different from those of the past? “The most significant novelty of the last ten years is the development of a sophisticated technology that permits the journalist to transmit his eye-witness report of what is happening without having to use the media placed at the disposal of the press by an army or a government”. Does that mean that war dispatches are more faithful to the reality on the ground? “The objectivity of journalism, as we know, is only hypothetical. Journalists may try to be honest and get as close as possible to the reality, to produce a report on what has happened by taking into account all the aspects, and by placing what is happening in a wider perspective. But that’s not always possible: We know nothing, for example, of what is happening to the Taleban; we can only rely on the viewpoint of the allied forces”. Is there a risk that with the growth of the quantity of information it is becoming more difficult to understand what is really happening? “There is not always any clarity about what’s going on, and in fact in English we use the expression the ‘fog of war’ to express the fact that in war it is always difficult to understand what’s happening. I think that, all things considered, the more information there is, the better it is for the journalist. The new technologies, Internet for example, help a good deal in this sense”. Nine journalists have already been killed in Afghanistan. Are the dangers of the war correspondent growing? “The Gulf War was undoubtedly safer for journalists, because it was a war mainly conducted by bombardment. The conflict in the former Yugoslavia, especially at the beginning, caused the death of several journalists. Afghanistan is even more dangerous, because journalists are not just accidental victims of the fighting but are deliberately targeted by snipers, if only to rob them of money and equipment”. Do some journalists take excessive risks? “I don’t think so, because the vocation of journalist is that of seeking news, being on the spot, being an eye-witness of what is happening. When the front of a war is static, and the enemy positions are fixed, the journalist is in a much safer position. But when everything is mobile, as it is in Afghanistan, the situation is far more dangerous. Journalists do not seek danger, they seek news and often they only realize later that the particular road they travelled along, or the bridge they crossed, was dangerous. I too have had the experience of surviving an ambush and understanding only later that it was too risky to be in that particular place at that particular time. But I had not realized it beforehand”. Bin Laden has used the media for propaganda purposes. Do you think that Western newspapers and television stations have been exploited? “It’s interesting that Bin Laden has used Al-Jazeera, a television network that is a kind of Arab CNN, independent of government control. In this case too we may note the declining importance of political power. Something like this would have been inconceivable in the time of Khomeini. The propaganda war has been understood by the Americans who have hastened to find an ambassador who could speak Arabic, and each day they get their Minister of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to give an update on the situation that is in turn a kind of propaganda exercise. In short, the media, on both sides of the war, are more free and the political power tries to exploit them for its own ends, as always happens”.