The ability to scrutinize media sources beyond national boundaries and to compare the differences in how stories are handled means that any bias becomes far more transparent and any attempt to manipulate local media becomes more obvious. Governments are forced to adapt their tactics to this new technological landscape.

In the field of war reporting, foreign correspondents covering a military campaign used to be at the mercy of an army’s communications officer. Stories or pictures often had to be transmitted to an editing center via military communications. If an officer did not like what was written, the story might conveniently be forgotten, delayed, or put at the back of a very long queue. Today, as long as the batteries are charged, correspondents in the media pool with the US Marines in Afghanistan can send their dispatches from their own satellite phones, breaking the age-old dependency on the government messenger.

This innovation means that a government or military operation needs to change its approach. One option is to physically block access to news. This is the oldest game in the book, but it can often backfire and result in negative publicity for a government. It can also take on more subtle incarnations, in which media pools are cut back or held away from front-line action and fed a diet of strictly controlled news that cannot be independently confirmed.

Another option is to enlist the support of correspondents themselves in suppressing news by appealing to their sense of patriotism or self-censorship. Shortly after September 11, Bush’s team of top advisers appealed to the US media not to broadcast unedited video of Osama bin Laden. Ostensibly, the concern was that the video might reactivate “sleeper” agents in the United States by sending a coded signal. Most US broadcasters, who have generally supported the war, went along with the request.

The same appeal made to broadcasters in London fell on deaf ears, and bin Laden’s words are freely available on several websites. In this Internet age, there is nothing to stop US citizens from surfing the Internet to watch streaming video and to read what is not available through their own media outlets. The onus is now on journalists to exploit this new freedom and turn their backs on the daily diet of spin served up at news briefings. To parrot the official line back to readers or viewers is to ignore the journalist’s key duty to question everything.

In this ever-changing climate, some governments continue to resort to traditional means of controlling the news, preferring to place tight restrictions on news gathering and dissemination. President Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe has passed a tough new media law that many news organizations believe could seriously stifle their ability to report from the country, a concern that attracted international attention during the presidential elections in March 2002. A once thriving independent press is under attack and many foreign journalists were refused permission to enter the country. China has consistently blocked its citizens’ access to many foreign websites, but it remains to be seen how successful it can ultimately be in preventing millions of online subscribers from freely accessing sites the government does not approve.

Put simply, the barriers are either coming down or being placed under increasing pressure. The ability to report in real time on a breaking news story makes it more and more difficult for government officials to ensure that their interpretation of events is the only version that is disseminated. The immediacy of news in this modern media age is also increasing the impact of journalism and putting pressure on governments to react far more quickly than they have in the past.

After World War II, it took months for stories of Nazi war crimes against Jews to emerge. In the Bosnian conflict of the 1990s, it took just weeks or sometimes days to uncover crimes against civilians. Fast forward to Afghanistan, where the execution of an injured Taliban soldier was shown frame by frame in newspapers the next day. No sooner does the 24-hour news cycle report the news than analysts begin to demand a government reaction. It was arguably the incessant drumbeat of reporting out of Sarajevo during the Balkan crisis of the 1990s that increased pressure on the United States to intervene decisively in that conflict.

Reporting in Real Time

For journalism, both the opportunities and the risks afforded by modern technology are enormous. Ismael Khan, a Northern Alliance commander in Afghanistan, was weighing his military options in a fight with the Taliban outside the city of Herat when his satellite phone rang. The voice on the other end was that of Reuters reporter Andrew Marshall, who, within minutes, had relayed around the world news that the city was under siege. “In the days before handheld satellite phones, Afghanistan would have been a black hole for news,” Marshall said.

But the growing ease of reporting, aided by technology, has also made the work of foreign correspondents more dangerous. The average war criminal does not want to be caught red-handed on 24-hour cable television committing an atrocity. As seen most recently in the case of Daniel Pearl, the intimidation, abduction, and killing of journalists has become the norm in too many countries. As correspondents in Afghanistan have found, however, it is not just the ability to report in real time that makes them vulnerable. Expensive equipment has made them a target for attack; indeed, at the time of this writing nine correspondents—including two from Reuters—have been killed in the current conflict, several with robbery as the apparent motive.

At the same time, the world of instant news places huge responsibilities on media organizations and their journalists. Digital cameras bring two new dilemmas. First, thanks to cheap, lightweight video cameras, a new generation of “backpackers,” or freelance journalists, is going into war zones and taking risks that few major media organizations would sanction. Those freelance journalists know that the closer they get to the front line, the more likely they are to get marketable footage. Are news organizations encouraging journalists to take risks by paying for such videos? This presents a moral dilemma with which the industry must grapple. Secondly, digital images are notoriously easy to manipulate. There is a new burden of responsibility on news organizations to verify that material being offered for purchase is genuine and has not been doctored for propaganda purposes. Yet many news organizations around the world have cut back radically on their own expensive networks for foreign news gathering and are relying more than ever on the work of contractors or freelancers.