Media historians on the new role of the media

Mr. Krajewski, you are probably familiar with the quote: “The first casualty of every war is the truth.” Is this right?

Every war is not only a struggle for territory, for ideologies, claims to power and sovereignty of interpretation, but also always a war over and with information. In principle, every announcement, every report to the public must be critically scrutinized.

What is your statement based on?

You will find this formulated quite unequivocally in one of the basic military works, Carl von Clausewitz’s “Vom Kriege” from 1824, where a small chapter is devoted to news during the war. This is still true today, but now includes not only words, but also pictures. Everyone knows how easy it is to digitally manipulate photographs and videos.

Do you specifically mean the Russian reporting?

On the one hand, the Russian population has been presented with an illusory world for some time on state radio and television as well as in the press, which, with the exception of a few courageous exceptions such as Novaya Gazeta, has prohibited any independent reporting. On the other hand, there is of course also an enlightened and media-sovereign part of the Russian population who know how to circumvent state censorship by using software and who use all international channels to obtain information.

Now there could be a danger that the media, in the face of Russian propaganda, will no longer question Ukrainian propaganda. So are we too credulous because we are on the side of Ukraine?

Information itself is an important weapon, for example when it is aimed at the enemy’s morale or at the support of one’s own people. As a result, the reports of war casualties are traditionally subject to distortions, apart from the fact that during battles you can never state precisely how high your own and enemy casualties are anyway. In principle, the following applies: Your own victims are usually discounted, the enemy’s loss numbers are exaggerated. Symptomatic of this cover-up tactic is that in the first week the Russian state leadership did not name any casualty figures or admit any losses at all.

Has that changed now?

Only with the no longer undeniable evidence of the pictures of shot-up tanks with the Z painted on did one feel compelled to name obviously fictional figures for one’s own losses.

Because of social media, war is everywhere. What roles do platforms like Twitter now play?

Smartphones have not only resulted in an omnipresence of eyewitness accounts and their documentation through images and video documents. The big difference to classic war reporting lies in the unfiltered possibility of transmission in real time. Anyone who holds their smartphone over the window sill to show the invaders entering becomes a war reporter who can immediately release these images to the public without censorship. This constant flow of images gives the war events a new truth value, it gains in authenticity that is still only denied by Russian foreign ministers.

The information about the war is thus accessible everywhere. Generally speaking, what role does information play in war?

It is not only the question of information acquisition, but also of the transmission and its speed, which can be decisive in the battle. The historical arc of military reporting extends from running messengers from ancient Marathon to mounted messengers in the Roman Empire up to the end of the 18th century, when technical media such as optical telegraphy made inroads under Napoleon’s conquests. Ironically, the Crimean War between Russia and an alliance of England, France and Turkey in the middle of the 19th century can be considered the first modern media war.

How did this affect war reporting?

First and foremost, it is the electric telegraph with which the tactical conduct of the battle migrates from the local scene, i.e. from the classic commander’s hill, to the warm, far away offices of the general staff. Since then, wars have mostly been remotely controlled. Dictators sacrifice whole armies without looking at the brutality and excesses of violence in battle. This form of reporting enables the military to perceive the war only as an abstract event.

By reporting do you mean army reports and telegrams?

Yes. A telegram or an SMS, in their reduced form, is hardly able to illustrate the concrete suffering caused by the impact of a grenade or a cruise missile. In the dry words of a message in the style of a telegram, the depiction actually consists only of omissions, of blanks that the recipient has to fill in with the power of imagination. Clearer forms are therefore needed. Proximity and immediacy are the criteria that determine how war is presented and understood, not least in order to create empathy for the horror and suffering.

Is there a war writer that deserves a special mention?

The reports by the cold-blooded Curzio Malaparte for the “Corriere della Sera” from the 1940s are impressive. What literature, in particular, used to do with its different genres, from private field post letters to wide-ranging newspaper reports to the epic form in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” from 1867, now takes place in real time with tweets or messages on Telegram – in words , picture and original sound.

So were the reports earlier less promising?

Of course, even in the pre-digital age, war literature was familiar with long-form tweeting. Just think of Walter Kempowski’s “Echolot” project, a collective diary that reflects both the polyphony of wartime events on the eastern and home fronts from January to February 1943 and structurally demonstrates how reality is characterized exclusively by many, even contradictory, ones capture perspective. This pre-digital tweeting from the Stalingrad pocket in the winter of 1943 shows depressing parallels with the present.

You address the gruesome images of war. Who started here?

On the one hand, the tradition of war photography with epochal shots from the trenches of the First World War or Robert Capa’s iconic picture of an anonymous soldier in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 can be cited here. Secondly, the National Socialist war propaganda with the newsreels was unfortunately quite adept at putting their bellicism into the picture in a suggestive way.

And the third?

Perhaps the greatest turning point in the visual tradition of war reporting can be seen in the Gulf Wars, where, on the one hand, direct combat events were reported on live. Who doesn’t remember the CNN footage from Baghdad, when correspondents broadcast the fights directly into the living room with luminous trajectories in front of a greenish night sky? On the other hand, the TV viewers were directly confronted with the projectiles and their terrible missions when the on-board cameras sighted their targets in the desert sand with supposedly surgical precision.

So it’s not just the way wars are portrayed in the media that has changed significantly. The role of the correspondents on site has also changed in the meantime.

There is undoubtedly a power and autonomy of the pictures. The ability to report on what is happening without military censorship, in the style of a tweet, in a short film on Tiktok, in images without words attached to an SMS or in a blog, all this multiplies and distributes the functions of a classic correspondent to an entire population. And it delegates the editorial work to the platform’s set of rules as to what is deleted and what remains.

So the smartphone also plays an important role?

It should not be forgotten that mobile phones do not only serve as eyewitnesses to unjust battles. Above all, the smartphone remains the indispensable escape aid on the way west. It is the individualized, portable general staff office that provides crucial media support with its cards and tap-proof communication channels. The telephone is thus becoming the most important companion, the media lifeline and, with its sheer quantity, also the truth machine in a sea of ​​uncertainties.