Reporting The Fallen - How Do You Cover Operational Fatalities Appropriately?

On Wednesday 11 March a rocket attack hit a military base in Taji, Iraq. The attack killed three people, two US and one UK service person. News of the attack was swiftly reported by US media outlets, including the news that a UK service person had been killed. This was picked up on and broadcast in the UK in some areas, generating a strong reaction from the veteran community.

The subject of reporting on UK military deaths is highly sensitive and one that generates a lot of emotion. This specific incident though perhaps highlights the real challenges at the heart of the relationship between Defence and the Media, and the different drivers that both organisations have to consider.

For many years during Iraq and Afghanistan, the MOD had developed an extremely effective and well-honed process of notifying about casualties. In the event of an incident involving deaths, all UK forces in theatre would go onto what was called ‘OP MINIMISE’ switching off internet and telephone access.

This silence would buy time for the MOD casualty notification teams to swing into action, getting a designated individual to meet the Next of Kin and provide the news that would irrevocably change their lives forever. It was deliberately designed to work this way to prevent a parent or partner hearing on BBC news that someone had been killed before the system had a chance to tell them in person.

After the kinforming had been completed, OP MINIMISE would be lifted and the MOD would then publicly confirm that an individual had been killed. A further announcement would follow, usually 24-48hrs later with a standard structure around the biography, statements from Ministers and senior officers and more personal tributes from military friends as well as family. 

The process was designed to allow the family time to get in touch with wider family and friends and break the news in person, and to prepare them for it, rather than turning on the news to see that their nephew or cousin had been killed.

It is also important to note that the system (at least when Humphrey was involved in kinforming) treated the name of the deceased with huge discretion. Although the fact that a fatality had ocurred was usually known, and those directly involved may have known, people outside the direct incident did not get told the name. Humphrey has had to make phone calls in the small hours of the morning to Private Secratatries of Ministers and No10, asking them to notify their principal of a fatality. At no point in these calls was a name provided - the family of the relative knew before the Prime Minister was formally told the name. 

By and large the process worked extremely well, with the media respectfully observing the importance of giving the Kinforming process time to work, but in turn the MOD provided press releases that gave a lot of valuable information and quotes that would help journalists and broadcasters cover it from a variety of angles.The statement from MOD on Thu 12 Mar provided multiple quotes that were woven into different stories in different ways.

What happened on the 11^th was a significant departure from the way that these events normally happen. The announcement via an international press office about a UK fatality meant that the UK had lost control of the ability to control the narrative. It also meant that within minutes international media organisations were broadcasting the news, within hours of the attack. This meant that journalists were providing the information in near real time in the UK via social media and other channels but were doing so in an information vacuum from official sources.

While news works at a fast pace, even with the best will in the world in the aftermath of an incident there is chaos and confusion. People are trying to work out what is going on, communications need to be established and a common picture emerge of the situation. This then needs to be communicated back to HQs and in turn to capitals. Once communicated, the kinforming process is initiated, which means activating the Joint Casualty and Compassionate Centre (JCCC) in Innsworth to begin the call out process and kinforming can begin.

This takes time, and unfortunately these timings rarely work to the convenience of the print or broadcast media. It is an almost certain bet that at the point when this story had broken, the kinforming process had not been completed – it was barely a couple of hours between the incident and it hitting the news. Even with the fastest will in the world, to go from someone being killed to the family being found and told takes more than two hours.

It also takes time to confirm the facts of the situation and provide honest, objective statement for the press to use. It was clear from the short statement issued by the MOD, referring to an ongoing incident, that the particular details were not clear. While it may be easy from the comfort of a living room to wonder what the MOD is playing at, the reality is that in the bloody aftermath of a chaotic incident, it can take time to work out what is going on.

It would be completely inappropriate for a Govt department to issue an incorrect or misleading statement about the incident. It would also be wrong to push too quickly for details when it may be the case that the incident is ongoing. If you have been under fire, and have wounded people needing help, the last thing you need to deal with is a press officer in London who needs precise information in order to issue a media statement.

The problem from a coverage perspective is what to do when coalition partners handle the process differently. In an international military operation the MOD doesn’t have the same control of the situation as it would in other cases. Consequently things can happen that it needs to react differently to. This challenge will only get worse as the UK increasingly works as part of international HQ’s and operations where very different approaches to handling the press occur.

In this case, the question for the UK media is how to respond? If you are a media outlet seeing your colleagues transmitting stories that will make headlines, do you hold off, or do you assume that once it is out there, then the story is fair game? Or do you hold off out of respect for the family, but in doing so are you perhaps calling into question your objectivity as a reporter to report the news without bias or favouritism?

This is a really difficult call to make – is it appropriate to expect UK journalists to not report news that a British service person has been killed when other media outlets are reporting it? Or, is it appropriate to ask that they hold off broadcasting till the MOD gets an official confirmation together, even if that can take hours in a world where the news cycle can change in seconds? If a story is out then it is public knowledge – what difference does it make if it comes from a UK or foreign reporter? 

One is reminded of the scene in the ‘The Crown’ where the news of the Kings death is reported globally while the BBC holds off and the realisation sinks in that the Princess Elizabeth did not know that she had become Queen, even after it was publicly reported.

There is no suggestion that anyone who tweeted the commentary about the event did so out of spite, or for shock value. It is entirely understandable to see how if you follow events, or you are a reporter, covering what is news is absolutely the done thing. While people may disagree with these actions, they should not see them as an attack or attempt to undermine, but an attempt to provide information in an emerging situation.

The challenge here though is one of impact. By reporting the death of a UK service person, and naming the location, the media coverage quickly narrowed down the target group. Because the story came from breaking news and not kinforming, it meant that every family with relatives on the base would have been almost certainly panicked, not knowing if their relative was alive or dead.

Speaking as a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, Humphrey can say that every time an incident was reported on his bases, even though kinforming was complete, his family and friends still worried. We have to understand that what may sound as breaking news and a story to some people is, to others, the harbinger of terror.

Until you have lived through the experience of having a friend or loved one deployed abroad in a location which is taking incoming fire, it is hard to explain the impact stories like this have on people. To hear someone has been injured or killed and not know if it is someone very dear to you places an astounding amount of mental pressure on people. The human mental welfare cost is very high both for the deployed personnel, and their families too.

What is more important here – is it to broadcast the breaking news, even if this potentially traumatises people, or is it to pause and let kinforming do its job? Many people would doubtless prefer a tactical pause – after all, reporting someone killed will not materially alter the facts if it happens today or tomorrow – the poor individual will still be dead.

But, in circumstances like this where a UK person has been caught up in an attack on a mostly US facility, what happens if the Americans responded with overwhelming force, potentially attacking Iran by way of retaliation? The ongoing proxy war in the Middle East between the two nations feels at times as if it is ready to become significantly more overt – should the media hold off reporting an event involving UK service fatalities, even if this means potentially not reporting on the trigger for a conflict between the US and Iran?

30 or 40 years ago, controlling the narrative and buying time was easy. The print and broadcast media had predictable times and it was genuinely possible to have time to pause. In the information age this is no longer possible – a reporter cannot sit on a breaking story for the next edition – they need to run it now if it is to be credible.

In the intensely competitive and immensely cutthroat media world, where by-lines mean success, and where failure to report the news means a likely failure to have a job, missing a story, regardless of the human impact is an easy way to end up as an irrelevance. The pressures reporters are under to deliver news on a news cycle that changes multiple times a day is huge – and while some may mock this, the reality is that we are all avid consumers of news that changes quickly – when the media fail to keep up, we as consumers take our browsing, reading and viewing elsewhere.

At the same time though there is a human issue here. No one should have to find out from the media that someone they love has been killed in the armed forces. The kinforming process exists to provide trained specialists to provide the critical help, support and welfare needed in what will be the darkest hours of peoples lives. It is utterly critical to ensure that life-changing news like this is delivered in a manner that does not cause more harm as a result.

The armed forces are a family, they live together, serve together and all too many have died together. Their extended families are brought into this group too, and at these desperate times, it is vital that the news is heard first via the right channels, and not via a news headline or tweet.

Trying to find the right balance to strike here between the need to know and the need to share is extremely difficult. But it feels like some of the strong understanding and way of working that grew up during the Iraq and Afghan years has perhaps fallen by the wayside a little.

Is there more that could have been done in a hurry? Arguably not – as noted, the timelines during a crisis like this are difficult and getting factually correct information back for the press office is not a priority.

On a purely human level, Humphrey found the coverage here upsetting, as did many of his veteran friends. No matter how urgent the news, there is something that feels instinctively wrong about broadcasting reports from a third party about casualties without getting official confirmation from the MOD first – because this would have ensured that the next of kin already knew.

It felt wrong to suggest that a UK service person had been killed just a couple of hours after the incident, before the family would have known. No family should have the world told about their loss before they learn of it themselves.

At a more basic level, even though he fully understands the views that this shapes the debate, Humphrey felt strongly that there was an almost unseemly rush to get the information out there – even though at 9pm at night it would have made practically no difference to anyone in the UK as to whether they found out at 9pm or 9am the next morning.

While keeping with the story is seen as being important, there is also surely a point where a quick pause to call the press office and go ‘has the MOD confirmed this, do the family know’ would be a good move. Instead it felt deeply uncomfortable and, frankly, upsetting, to watch news break in an unverified manner and knowing that the family almost certainly didn’t know. It just felt wrong.

No doubt some will say that Humphrey doesn’t understand how the media work – and you know what, they’re right. On a base level he doesn’t get how at times the desire to push news out overtakes the moment to pause and ask if saying something right now is the right thing, or if a short pause may be better to get the facts of the situation confirmed.

But this is the world we live in – a world of instant news and coverage that has to be updated in a nano-second because if we miss covering it now, then within minutes we’ll be onto the next big thing and the moment will have passed.

Trying to work out how Defence can communicate in the information era a manner which provides information, doesn’t hide information and ensures that the media get the truth is vital. But equally so is the need to find a way to strike a relationship with the media that ensures that they can both carry the news, but remember too about the very real human cost of their actions.