Mark Laity

Mark F. Laity is a former BBC defence correspondent who is NATO's Chief of Strategic Communications at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE). Prior to this he was Deputy Spokesman and Personal Adviser to the then Secretary General of NATO, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen for nearly four years.

Biography

From NATO's website:

Laity worked as a former BBC Defence Analyst/Specialist and later became NATO spokesman. From January 2004 Laity he was 'Special Adviser on Strategic Communications to NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe(SACEUR), and a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Defence Studies at King's College London.'

• From May 2000 until April 2001 he spent almost a year as acting NATO spokesman.
• In May 2001 he was sent by the Secretary General to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Initially, he worked as an adviser to President Trajkovski - a mark of the close personal co-operation and friendship between the Secretary General and the President.
• Then in September, as the deployment of Task Force Harvest raised NATO's media profile, he became the civilian spokesman... Operation Essential Harvest.
• He was also media adviser to Major General Gunnar Lange, the operational commander and Senior Military Representative.
• He remained spokesman for the handover to Task Force Fox, before returning to his normal duties in Brussels, where he has oversight of NATO's media operations in the Balkans
• Laity joined NATO after 11 years as the BBC's Defence Correspondent from 1989, covering all aspects of British and international defence, including extensive experience of frontline reporting, notably in the Balkans. He covered most major conflicts of the nineties, but particularly the break-up of Yugoslavia. Between 1992 and 1998 he regularly reported from the frontline in Bosnia and Croatia, during much of the worst of the fighting. He also reported from Albania and Kosovo. In 1999 he covered the air campaign from Nato HQ in Brussels, before reporting from Kosovo itself after KFOR entered.
• Laity was born in Truro, Cornwall, and has a BA(hons) and MA from the University of York.

Criticism

During his evidence to the Hutton Inquiry, former BBC Director of News Richard Sambrook stated that part of the rationale for recruiting Andrew Gilligan to the Today programme in 1999 was that ‘for many years the BBC defence correspondent had simply reflected the Ministry of Defence’s point of view.’ Mark Laity subsequently complained to the BBC, protesting that in his 11 years as Defence Correspondent no one from BBC News or management had ever complained. He had, he said, simply followed the ‘traditional BBC approach’.

Sambrook published an apology, describing Laity as a "highly regarded" BBC defence correspondent.

"There was never any suggestion that you did not meet the high standards of impartiality and editorial rigour that the BBC expects," he said in a letter to Laity. "Not only were you highly regarded but I also want to make it clear BBC management never doubted you fully met the high standards required - I know those views were widely shared in the BBC and elsewhere."

Laity's move from journalism in 1999 to become Jamie Shea's spokesperson at NATO was criticised by The Independent's Robert Fisk who wrote:

Who could possibly be surprised by reports that Mark Laity, the BBC's defence correspondent, has been offered the job of second-in-command to Nato's spokesman James Shea? "I did not feel that Jamie Shea lied to me at all," Laity announced. This is said after a war in which Nato told fibs about its attacks on refugee convoys, bombing the centre of Pristina, hitting a hospital in Surdulica, the number of Serb tanks destroyed and – awesomely – refused to answer a UN commission's questions about the use of depleted uranium munitions in the Kosovo bombardment.

But what is it about defence correspondents that they so often come across as mouthpieces for the crudest military propaganda? It is certainly nothing new. Back in the First World War, correspondents dutifully reported on the German crucifixion of babies on church doors and the cheerful Tommy taking the slaughter on the Somme in his stride.

Jamie Shea, in fact, wrote his PhD on British propaganda in the First World War. It shows. Nato ran its propaganda campaign out of Brussels as a populist bandwagon in which Shea quoted Shakespeare – "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" – to illustrate Slobodan Milosevic's problems, and then called the Serbian leader Al Capone. As this cheerful theatre was staged, the defence correspondents who gathered for the daily briefings were putty in his hands. The Serbs were committing war crimes, atrocities – and indeed they were – so who would dare to criticise Nato?

Laity is, in fact, a personable sort of chap, his constant and confident appearances from Brussels a soothing balm to the BBC's viewers who wondered – reading their more critical newspapers – if something might just be amiss in a Nato bombing campaign that began with barracks and then spread promiscuously to bridges, a train, railway lines, factories, refugee convoys, hospitals, and even the occasional Serb tank. So, when Nato slaughtered dozens of Albanian refugees in the first of its massive "mistakes", Laity knew where his judgement lay.

Shea urged journalists to hold their fire, not to accuse Nato of killing the refugees until he could produce an explanation. He had no problems with Laity. "I took, right from early on, that there was a propaganda war here," Laity was to admit later. "And my judgement was that the Serbs were quite capable of deliberately misleading; we knew – and subsequent events proved beyond doubt – that the Serbs were killing a lot of Albanians. Deliberately. So if they killed Albanians deliberately and could blame it on Nato as well, it's a kind of 'double whammy'. So what I wanted people to do was pause."

Only after journalists taken by the Serbs down to Kosovo, and the evidence they unearthed – The Independent carried the computer codings from bomb parts at the scene – proved that Nato was responsible, did Shea produce the commander of the US jets that bombed the convoy. For the most part, our colleagues in Brussels were fed the Nato line and parroted it over the air. "They [Nato] are very confident that they attacked a military convoy," Laity initially reported. Note the language. He didn't report that Nato "say" they are confident. Their confidence was treated as fact – exactly Shea's line.

We can understand the problems of defence correspondents, especially if they work for the BBC. They don't want to lose their contacts. "These were good people I was speaking to, not PRs," Laity would later say about his sources. If journalists became unduly sceptical, they might be regarded as off-side, cynical, even unpatriotic. Nothing new here. I can still recall how a plethora of defence corrs attempted to justify the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in 1972 by repeating the British Army's lies. In the 1992 Gulf War, it was the same.

The BBC World Service gradually bleached out any critical comment from its coverage of the Gulf. I recall coming across a British Army medical convoy, sent off to the Kuwaiti border without maps, about to cross into occupied Iraqi territory. A bunch of US special forces, a French photographer and myself came across them as they actually tried to negotiate their way through the Saudi frontier station at Khafji, their commander – from Armagh in Northern Ireland – pleading to use my map because he had none.

When I reported this, the BBC chose not to interview me. Instead, two reporters went on air to disparage the report. "Anecdotal", they called it. One of them was Mark Laity. Maybe that's a defence correspondent's job: to put the army's point of view. Which is why – cruelly, I'm afraid, but truthfully – I referred in this newspaper to Laity's Kosovo performance as that of "a sheep in sheep's clothing". I haven't changed my view. The defence correspondents failed to challenge Shea about the use of depleted uranium shells, the civilians killed at Surdulica hospital in which Serb soldiers were hiding, the eyewitness reports that the Nato pilot who rocketed the Yugoslav train at Gurdulice returned for a second attack, and Nato's critical demand to the Serbs to allow alliance troops to move throughout Yugoslavia – which was simply abandoned at the end of the Kosovo war. No Brussels reporter asked what protection Nato intended to give the Serb minority in Kosovo, post-war. In the event, most were "cleansed" by the Albanians before the eyes of Nato.

ITV reporters showed far more gumption. Anyone who watched Jonathan Dimbleby's superb LWT dispatch last night – Inside Kosovo – can see what TV reporting should be about. His coverage of the Serb evictions, the KLA intimidation of their own people, and the inability of Nato to impose order was a model.

Dimbleby, along with Keith Graves of Sky and others, may be wolves in wolves clothing, but they are doing their job. Not so others among our colleagues during the war. Take that train, seen speeding into the bomber's sights at Gurdulice, too late for him to abort the strike. Going a bit fast wasn't it, for an electric train rumbling across a viaduct over a river gorge? It looked like it was moving – on the video Shea showed the defence boys – at Eurostar velocity. Now, it turns out, Nato notched the film up to three times the real speed. The Brussels reporters didn't spot it. They trusted Nato. They thought Nato never lied.

On 30 August last year, scarcely two months after the Kosovo war ended, television journalists met in Edinburgh to debate their coverage. There were a few "mea culpas" and a lot of back-slapping – the TV boys are not made of modesty – and when I suggested that the Nato coverage had been on the level of a boy's military magazine, there was much shaking of heads. Laity referred to my criticism as "ranting" – I had repeated the "sheep" description – and tried to justify Nato's war by comparing the number of "mistakes" to "successful" strikes – a ratio, I recall, that supposedly came out as around one in a thousand. At one point, Laity revealed that in the later stages of the war, Nato had made a tactical decision to stop apologising for its killing of civilians in Yugoslavia. It was the first I had heard of this. Why were we not told this at the time?

But it's not Laity I'm against. It's the culture of the defence correspondents' profession – as if their raison d'etre is to give the military side of the argument rather than challenge the powerful generals on a subject on which they, the correspondents, are supposed to be experts. Defence correspondents work hard. Laity, I recall, said he'd made more than 800 broadcasts from Nato headquarters during the bombardment – he probably made far more in Brussels, and at little cost, of course, to his employers. But then, with a big smile, Laity added humorously: "I was easy – I was cheap."

Reports of Laity's job offer from Nato say that he's still negotiating a higher figure than the £100,000 thought to be on offer. Easy perhaps. But certainly not cheap.

Mark Laity's right of reply to The Independent for what he described as "an attack on me and other defence correspondents" criticised Fisk's article as containing "more rhetoric than accuracy". Rather than being "the mouthpieces for crude military propaganda", Laity argued that he and other defence correspondents were:

the antithesis of his kind of opinionated, personalised journalism. Mr Fisk's world is black and white, usually conspiracy-laden, with the establishment at fault, its motives suspect, the truth obvious. To defence correspondents, and indeed other specialists, the world is usually greyer, filled with least-bad options as people of varying abilities mostly do their best with mixed results. Mistakes are not always assumed to be deliberate lies. Scepticism certainly, cynicism no. If specialists do develop some sympathy with those they report on, it's because they see the real problems and the consequences of wrong decisions. Our knowledge makes us wary of over-generalisations and of being too judgmental. It's often less entertaining, but it more accurately reflects the real world. Opinionated columnists find this intensely irritating, often brushing it aside along with detail and context before moving on to put the world to rights elsewhere - with equally incomplete knowledge. No wonder Mr Fisk wants to undermine defence correspondents. Their fairer, more expert approach helps to expose his superficiality. His approach is made easier because journalists don't have to be right; today's opinion, tomorrow's chip paper, and no one dies. Mistakes can be forgotten, camouflaged by 20-20 hindsight. I do not have the space to address Mr Fisk's many errors, so one must typify the rest.

With regard to his reputed £100,000 salary Laity rebuked Fisk for not checking "this easily checked fact" with him, saying "sadly no one's offering such sums."

Contact, References and Resources

Resources

• Battling the media by Mark Laity http://www.nato.int/docu/review/2002/issue4/english/art3.html Mark Laity describes and analyses the media policy that has underpinned NATO's conflict-resolution work in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. From NATO Review, Winter 2002