Reporting on Fratricide

Abstract

The primary source of military and defence-related information for most Canadians is not parliament, academic journals, specialized university courses, or personal experience (e.g., service in the military or defence administration), but the popular media. Consequently, the media's central role in shaping public attitudes raises an interesting question: how effective is the media in providing accurate and meaningful information?This article will attempt to shed some light on this issue by analyzing coverage of the 2002 fratricide incident at in the pages of the Globe and Mail and the National Post. This case study involves a time-series comparison: initial reports are compared with subsequent ones. As well, reports based on multiple and-preferably-named sources are compared with reports that relied on fewer and/or unnamed sources. Finally, media accounts are compared with information made available from official sources-including the coalition (joint American-Canadian) and Canadian investigative boards as well as the US air force's article 32 hearings (the military grand jury).1 Given this significant data set, it is now possible to review and evaluate the media's response to these events in a broad and comparative context. Overall, it is clear Canada's two national papers got some things right, but they also got a lot of things wrong.THE INCIDENT AT TARNAK FARM AND THE MEDIA'S REACTIONThe basic facts of this case study were as follows. On the night of 19 April 2002, four Canadian soldiers were killed and eight others wounded at a training facility known as Tarnak farm in Afghanistan.2 The soldiers, members of the 3rd battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, had gone to farm-a former al Qaeda training facility a few miles south of Kandahar-to practice close assault tactics and a stalk (an exercise designed to simulate an assault on an armoured vehicle).Over the course of the exercise, the PPCLI soldiers fired a variety of weapons, including light and heavy machine guns, an M-72 light antitank weapon (a single-use recoilless anti-tank projectile), and a Carl Gustav (an 84mm antitank weapon). Partway through the exercise, the muzzle flashes, the tracer ammunition, and the ricochets from the Canadians' weapons attracted the attention of two American F-i6 pilots. The US pilots were returning to their base in Kuwait after a lengthy patrol over Afghanistan, when one of the two pilots-Major Harry Schmidt of the 170th Fighter Squadron (Illinois Air National Guard)-interpreted the flashes as the actions of an enemy force attacking his flight. Shortly thereafter, Schmidt dropped a 500-lb. laser-guided bomb. The bomb killed Sergeant Marc Leger, second in command of the exercise and the range safety officer, Corporal Ainsworth Dyer and Private Nathan Smith, the C-6 7.62mm machine gun detachment firing in support of the tank stalk, and Private Richard Green who operated both a C-9 5.56mm light machine gun and an M-72 during the tank stalk.The four soldiers killed at were the first Canadian soldiers to die as a result of fratricide since the Korean War, and their deaths unleashed a firestorm of media coverage. Over the course of the first week, the initial coverage in both the Globe and Mail and the National Post amounted to a staggering 86 reports, commentaries, and editorials (an average of more than seven items per paper per day). During this initial one-week period, coverage was split almost evenly between the two papers (41 items in the Globe versus 45 in the Post) and the story received pageone coverage for five consecutive days in the Globe and four in the Post. As of October 2006, a total of 315 items had been published (130 in the Globe and 185 in the Post), and the story had received front-page coverage 24 times in the Globe and 29 times in the Post.1Canada's national newspapers responded to events in Afghanistan with a considerable volume of coverage. …