Book review: War and the media

BY shubha singh| IN Media Practice | 21/03/2004

Shubha Singh

Two major wars in two years have thrown up a number of questions regarding media and round the clock reporting on conflict situations. Television with its twenty four hour news channels depends on dramatic visuals and short sound bytes that increase the entertainment value of news. The demand for instant news means taking the news from easily available sources without giving time to check the veracity of the information. This makes it easier for the practitioners of news management to influence information dissemination.

War and Media - Reporting Conflict 24/7 edited by Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (Vistaar Publications, New Delhi) is an interesting collection of articles analysing news coverage in the new media environment and new dimensions of news management. Thussu reiterates the view that the competition for ratings and profits is forcing television journalism towards infotainment, projecting war as a bloodless virtual conflict. Satellite imagery has become an important source of visuals for reporting conflicts, for it reduces the need for actual pictures of war. High-tech reporting, using video game format to present combat operations, with complex graphics and satellite imagery provide a sanitised version of war sans the horrors of the battlefield.

The second Iraq war displayed the official convergence of media and the military in the form of `embedded journalists`. The mainstream American media, with the exception of a few quickly silenced critics, accepted the version being put out by the Bush Administration regarding the US led war against Saddam Hussein. Media access to the war zone was restricted and it was left to Al-Jazeera to give space for the Arab viewpoint.

Giving another dimension of infotainment in his article on War and the Entertainment Industries, Jonathan Burston explores the growing compatibility between the entertainment industry and the US military. The US military has often collaborated with the world of entertainment to provide moviemakers with privileged access to aircraft carriers in order to make the right kind of patriotic films. It is the age of "militainment`, according to Burston when the US military provides similar access to military sites in Afghanistan which are closed to journalists to reality TV programmes such as ABC`s Profiles from the Front Lines and MTV`s Military Diaries. The special access and facilities under controlled conditions serve to influence the kind of images that are shown on the television programmes.

The US military funded Institute for Creative Technologies has taken the collaboration even further through the brainstorming sessions the Institute has held with filmmakers and screenwriters for developing future stories and video games. In an NBC television movie, Asteroid, the world is saved from destruction by a US military airborne laser. The laser is incidentally a device that is being developed by the American company, General Electric (GE), which happens to be the parent company of NBC. According to Burston, both the Pentagon and GE got the right kind of exposure for a new component of the controversial `Star Wars` weapons system.

However, the Internet has given another dimension to the new media environment. In recent times, camcorders with high quality digital resolution have changed news images. New mobile phones capable of transmitting images taken with in-built digital cameras can easily send instant pictures. After the September 11 terrorist attacks in America, Internet chatrooms provided Americans a place to air their views, according to Bruce A Williams. Many of the opinions expressed in the chatrooms gave a more critical perspective than what was available in the traditional media. The American government had successfully shut out all critical appraisals in the print and television by branding them unpatriotic, but it was impossible to similarly influence the Internet airwaves.

At a time when the range of political discourse in the media had sharply reduced in the supercharged atmosphere after the terrorist strikes, the chatrooms opened new venues for debate. The interactivity on the Internet allowed synchronous discussions, as well as provided access to a wide variety of articles, through cross-links to a large number of sources. Chatrooms hosted by different websites allowed like-minded groups to discuss specific aspects that interested them. An analysis of the transcripts showed surprising levels of politeness among the participants even at the more conservative chatrooms.

The Glasgow University Media Group conducted a study on how television images cover conflict situations. They monitored the coverage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and then interviewed groups of audience as well as journalists who had reported on the conflict. The interviews showed that a majority of the main audience sample did not understand the origins of the conflict and where the Palestinian refugees came from or how they became refugees. News telecasts used the shorthand of `the future of Jewish settlements and the returning Palestinian refugees` without giving the context of the Palestinian conflict. Palestinian refugees were displaced and driven out of their homes in 1948 when the state of Israel was established. After the 1967 war Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank which brought the Palestinian refugees under Israeli military control. Israel then built settlements across the newly occupied territories, the settlements tended to control the water resources in a severely water starved area.

The group analysed television bulletins for a period of two weeks at the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. In 3000 lines of text only 17 sought to explain the history of the conflict with a very brief mention of the issue of water rights. Though the term occupied was used on occasion, the majority of the audience sample did not understand that it meant that Israel was in military occupation of Palestinian areas. Words such as murder, atrocity, lynching, savage cold-blooded killing were only used to describe Israeli deaths and not Palestinians deaths, even though more than ten times as many Palestinians than Israelis had been killed during that period. The emphasis was on action pictures that made a more dramatic story rather than the issues involved in the conflict, nor the human inequities and the daily humiliations of the Palestinians. It was only pictures of Palestinian youth throwing stones at Israeli tanks that showed the Palestinians as the underdogs in the conflict.

Nik Gowing presents the other side of real-time news reporting in wartime, as journalists become targets of warlords and bandits as well as the opposing sides in the conflict, who do not want their actions to come under scrutiny. The Americans bombed the Al Jazeera office in Kabul and later bombed journalists in Baghdad; individual journalists have been killed in Palestine and in Pakistan. New technologies that allow beaming of live war pictures have made journalists more intrusive, bringing them closer to the action and therefore more vulnerable.

Sophisticated information technology and real-time news coverage have eroded the traditional safeguards of journalism, both professional and personal. The articles in the book are informative and explore several important issues relating to media and conflict situations.