Censorship in wartime

On Monday, in the evening edition of Telediario on La 1, the correspondent in Jerusalem, Marc Campdelacreu, explained how the warlike conflict was affecting how journalists reported: “Israel and Iran have been monitoring what we film and what we report from day one. And not only for the impact on public opinion or their populations, but also to avoid showing their weaknesses to rivals”. In a subsequent report, he explained how this battle for the narrative affected the press: he revealed that on February 28, international journalists in the area received mobile messages from the Israeli military censorship department, detailing the limits of what they could report. Campdelacreu explained how those conditions affected, for example, what the camera could show at that exact moment. He then specified some of these limitations, which had to do with the impact of missiles, the buildings that could be shown, and the identification of anti-aircraft batteries. The correspondent explained that there is even an official department that could review their footage, and pointed out the consequences of not respecting the rules: the army could withdraw their accreditation to work, cancel their visas, and even expel them from the country. Furthermore, he explained that in Iran they always had to work accompanied by a professional, a fixer, authorized by the Iranian regime. And this implied a loss of freedom when moving around, the impossibility of broadcasting live from the street, and the requirement to only show demonstrations that supported the regime.This journalistic context is relevant for understanding the working conditions of correspondents and, above all, to remind us that this situation forces us, as spectators, to read the reports that reach us from there more attentively and between the lines.Last week, however, we noted that sometimes information control can be exercised in another way. In the regrettable program Horizonte, on Cuatro, hosted by Iker Jiménez, they connected with Mediaset correspondent Laura de Chiclana, who explained how in some neighborhoods of Haifa not all the population had access to shelters, especially Arab citizens. It was not the first time a media outlet had reported on this reality, but nevertheless, something unusual happened. The co-presenter, Carmen Porter, discredited the correspondent live and corrected her, saying she had just received a correction on her mobile “from the Jewish community” denying what the journalist had explained and calling her report rumor and disinformation. The program even removed Laura de Chiclana's report from its digital platform. It is one thing to want to guarantee the veracity of information or to verify it, and another is to appeal on the fly to anonymous and very undefined sources to belittle the version of a journalist who was working on the ground and relying on testimonies.