War & Peace Quote by Ashleigh Banfield

Banfield’s line isn’t a lament about missing footage; it’s an indictment of an entire media ecology that confuses distance with safety and safety with truth. The image she gives us is tellingly minimal: “only the puff of smoke.” That’s the aesthetic of sanitized war coverage - spectacle without consequence, impact without bodies, a visual grammar that lets audiences consume conflict the way they consume weather: dramatic, impersonal, over there.

The rhetorical pivot is the double question: “Was this journalism? Or was this coverage?” She draws a sharp line between a craft with obligations and a product with constraints. “Coverage” is what you get when access is managed, risk is limited, and the narrative is pre-approved by logistics, military briefers, and broadcast sensibilities. “Journalism” is what you’re supposed to get: proximity to reality, including the parts that destabilize official storylines and viewer comfort.

The subtext is professional self-reproach mixed with moral anger. “There were horrors...left out” implies omission that isn’t purely accidental. Some of it is structural: embedded reporting, pooled cameras, restricted movement, and the simple fact that modern war is often fought at a distance, leaving reporters literally too far away to witness aftermath. Some of it is editorial: networks wary of gore, advertisers, patriotism-as-brand management, and the post-9/11 pressure to perform unity rather than scrutiny.

Banfield is asking a question that lands like a verdict: if the audience is only shown smoke, the war becomes abstract - and abstraction is a political favor.