Three birds, one rock

Vue Weekly bills itself as "Edmonton's 100% Independent News & Entertainment Weekly" - not your typical source for Canadian military affairs. But one of the correspondents there, a Grant MacEwan College J-school student, took part a couple of months ago in Exercise Maple Guardian at CFB Wainwright playing the part of an embedded journalist as part of CF troops' training preparatory to deploying to southern Afghanistan. His piece gives a useful glimpse into the mindset of a typical young journalist who has little familiarity with the military (ht:MediaRight):

There’s nothing like trying to get a little closer to get some great footage because you know your competitor is already getting it when a soldier barks at you to get in the belly of the light armoured vehicle (LAV) because you’re in danger. Then you have to start yelling that it’s your ass on the line to get the story. Game on.

Obviously, the main purpose of such an exercise is exactly as our student journalist surmises:

There were days that I felt like a bit of a pawn. And rightly so—ultimately the whole purpose of us being there was to help prepare the soldiers for the media. Scenario referees would be strolling through the scene ghost-like and would come up and tell us to try and do something to get a desired response from a soldier or whoever was in command at the time, but the problem was that they didn’t have to answer for it. We did.
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In a sense, we were embedded in more ways than one. The fact that we were staying on base, eating and hanging out with the soldiers meant that if you challenged or criticized the army, you would make things much more difficult for yourself. I heard several times that, for some soldiers, the media is the enemy.

What he doesn't tell you is that the students get paid for this work, since the stated aim of the exercise is training the troops. So he wasn't really a pawn, but rather a paid contractor.

I listened to a CBC Radio piece on The Current a few months back, I think, where another journalism student embedded on an exercise (it might have even been the same one). One of the points he discussed with Anna Maria Tremonti was the ethical issue inherent in training soldiers to manage his own trade more effectively. The assumption in such a supposed ethical quandary is that media and the military are in conflict, and helping them do their jobs better is akin to aiding the enemy. It seems to me that both soldiers and reporters fall into those predictable combative relationships all too easily.

I wonder, though, if the CF doesn't have a secondary purpose in all of this. Because an aspiring reporter can't possibly interact with good soldiers in an intense environment for the better part of a month without gaining some appreciation of what they do, and likely some admiration for their character too. Even if it's not intentional, the CF is training potential journalists as an unintended consequence:

For me, the most dramatic change is seeing a massive grey area I hadn’t seen before, and gaining even just a limited sense of how complicated the situation is. Growing up, I found it easy to believe that war is wrong—no matter what—and now I think it’s not as simple as that.
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I found it hard to feel justified in taking an entirely negative view of the military after talking with even just a few soldiers about how they truly believe that they will make a difference in Afghanistan. Yet I heard from one that he felt he had no choice, no power to change his life. Some soldiers’ fatalism runs deep.

So with this program, the CF kills three birds with one stone: it trains the troops to deal with media in real-life, it trains up-and-coming journalists to deal with the CF by familiarizing them with the military culture; and in many cases it breaks down preconceived biases against the military that are endemic among those attracted to the profession of journalist. Not bad shooting, that. Congratulations are apparently due to a Capt St-Denis:

The media cell was the brainchild of Captain Tom St.-Denis. It struck him that no matter where the Canadian Forces go they need to deal with media, and since media is part of the environment, why not make them part of the training? Students take turns playing Canadian, international and Afghan reporters, and their newscasts are geared to reflect these different perspectives. Soldiers watch the newscasts at the end of the day, just as they would CNN, CBC or any local news while in Afghanistan.

The only problem with the program from the CF's standpoint, I've been told, is that sometimes the J-school students haven't got the experience to play their parts as accurately as the trainers would like. Where a student reporter might accept being kept back half a klick from an engagement, an experienced reporter whose job is on the line if she doesn't get the story simply wouldn't stay put. Nor would a seasoned photographer have to be prompted to start snapping shots of simulated casualties for a story.

Still, Maple Guardian is intended to be a confirming, demonstrating exercise - the training has been done, and this final test is intended to certify the troops as ready to deploy. Theoretically, the only training should be tweaking details.

A closer examination of training and familiarization efforts between the media and the military finds that exercises like Maple Guardian are only one aspect of an outreach by the CF:

The Canadian Military Journalism Course is one of a number of education and training options now on offer to help students and full-time journalists gain practical and theoretical information on the military. Others include the Journalist (Media) Familiarization Course and the Canadian Manoeuvre Training Centre’s Maple Guardian exercise. Some journalists report on the military and work as war correspondents without officially training, but others are required, for insurance and legal reasons, by their news organizations to attend a course. This requirement is reflected in the increased dangers of Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, where 42 soldiers have been killed since 2002 — 34 within the last year.

The Canadian Military Journalism Course — offered as a scholarship by the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies and the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute — began to take shape a few days before September 11, 2001, when former Calgary Herald reporter Bob Bergen met with representatives from the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute. There was a growing concern that few journalists were covering the military. Bergen, who has written about the Canadian Forces for more than 30 years, first as a reporter and then as an academic, suggested a program for students. “Most journalists I know would rather have a root canal than cover the Canadian Forces because of the culture, the language,” says Bergen. “It’s very foreign, very different to them.”

This is exactly the sort of strategic, layered approach to media relations that the CF needs to employ more consistently if it is to win the 'hearts and minds, domestic and abroad' war that seems to come part and parcel with any operation these days. Well done to those involved.

Note: For anyone interested in the Afghan conflict and its portrayal in the media, I cannot recommend MediaRight.ca highly enough. The proprietor draws upon worldwide press and presents views both pro and con. Normally I can find at least a couple of fascinating articles a day that I wouldn't have seen otherwise. Bookmark it and visit daily.