I think that the networks, they are fed up with the massive bombs. They don’t want to see things going bang anymore. What troubles me is that – what troubles me most personally, is when I see children hurt – and those are the stories that you really want to get on the air and it really bothers me that we can’t. Allen Pizzey, CBS News, March 2007

Four years ago I was talking to a tired but exuberant David Bloom. He was on the move with the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division, sitting atop a specially adapted M88 Medium Recovery Vehicle with a gyro-stabilized camera that linked back to a mobile satellite truck. It was the future of war coverage. “Leaning back from the fixed camera like a sailboat skipper readying for a turn,” the NBC correspondent communicated tension, exhilaration and boredom – the rush and frustrations of an armoured charge.

Before Baghdad had even been taken, Bloom was dead from a blood clot, aged 39, a casualty of cramped sleeping quarters. The live ride to liberation was over. The ‘Bloom-mobile’ went on to chase hurricanes. Its technology turned out not to be the future of Iraq war coverage after all.

The future belonged instead to altogether more basic equipment, like the Sony FD Mavica camera used by Cpl. Charles A. Graner Jr., a jailer at Abu Ghraib. Graner used it to take 173 of the 279 photographs uncovered by the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. It got him ten years in a prison of his own.

With a cheap video camera, basic editing software and an Internet connection, you could put fear and murder online. With global access, even killing a dozen workers from a country as poor and remote as Nepal was guaranteed to make a headline somewhere. Posting video online became the media weapon of choice for anyone seeking to attract an audience, from Iraqi gangs to U.S. soldiers – Ogrish.com offering a ghoulish pre-cursor to YouTube.

It wasn’t until recently that the mobile phone finally took its newsgathering bow at Saddam Hussein’s execution.

Short of complicity in torture, murder and execution next to any of this user-generated content, the limits of conventional news coverage are all too obvious.

The most dramatic regular footage generated in the conflict looks tame by comparison, but it was probably shot by Kevin Sites. Sites himself was something of a revolutionary oddity – a ‘journalist of the future’ – who had moved his one man blogging, shooting and reporting band from CNN to NBC. On a pool embed with Marines in Fallujah, Sites recorded a soldier casually dispatching a wounded Iraqi as he lay on the floor of a mosque. The half-apologetic telling of that tale on the Nightly News did neither him nor NBC much credit.

Bosnia had Martin Bell. Afghanistan made Lara Logan. Although journalists see wars like bears see honey – worth getting stung for – Iraq is too big a tale for one teller. Too big, too expensive and too dangerous. There are journalists willing to go to Iraq to report, but British news organizations are for the most part unable to afford the expense of a regular presence, and audiences are unable to get excited by the gloomy dispatches they generate.

The BBC remains fully committed to a presence in Iraq. So too do the U.S. media and the agencies. And virtue is its own reward, but it’s an overstretched virtue. Generals may shame ministers with stories of shortages and cuts, but that doesn’t get talked about so much in journalism.

News organizations don’t seek to publicly embarrass their paymasters into upping coverage budgets. Michael Grade’s first promise upon returning to ITV was not to fund a permanent presence in Iraq. BBC Director-General Mark Thompson did not threaten to pull out of Baghdad when the licence fee negotiations didn’t go his way. Still when Sky and Five go there to report in strength, it’s significant enough to generate a press release.

Besides resources and security, the other challenge to Iraq reporting comes from ‘the people formerly known as the audience.’ On one level, that manifests itself in indifference. The British public’s interest has shrunk along with the size of the British auxiliary force, a fact not lost on editors or executives. The new, primetime Panorama run established its populist credentials by kicking off not with an explanation of the biggest ongoing conflict of our time, but with an undercover IVF investigation.

So mass indifference sits side by side with minority zeal. An Associated Press account of mosque burnings led to a campaign by right-wing bloggers questioning – wrongly, as it turned out – the existence of an Iraqi source named in the AP report.

Many people reading Press Gazette will know journalists killed covering Iraq. I’m no different. It’s fashionable to say no story is worth a life. But the question I ask myself is this – what would we know about Iraq without journalists? It might simply be a faceless chamber of video horrors.

Our busy, care-filled lives may not find time for what’s happening in Iraq, a conflict for which, like it or not, Britons shoulder responsibility with the government to which we abrogated executive power.

But if we want to excuse our indifference, then it’s within ourselves and our institutions that we should look, and not without – to those who are engaged in reporting the conflict.

[This is a linked version of a piece written for Britain’s Press Gazette]