War and Media Network: Commentary

Communicating War: Memory, Media & Military:
Sarah Maltby & Richard Keeble (eds)

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Arima Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
Wars are now mediated in unprecedented ways and through a variety of communicative forms. Correspondingly, there is an increasing awareness among those involved in war of the need to gauge and manage what is communicated. Communicating War: Media, Memory and Military contextualises these developments by locating the emergence of recent wars and terrorist activity in a wider frame of global socio-political change, highlighting the social, political and historical aspects of 'communicating war'. This includes: . the remembering and forgetting of wars through cultures of collective memory and media selectivity; . the organization, practice and culture of media institutions in the mediation of war information; . and the strategic use of information by military institutions and terrorist organizations in the execution of war and terrorist acts. Remaining sensitive to the complexities of conflict, the book moves beyond a focus on UK and US interventions and reflects upon the communication of war in relation to all forms of conflict, particularly terrorism and under reported civil conflicts. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, Communicating War: Memory, Media, Military will be of interest to students in journalism, media, war and peace studies, international relations and international politics.

Television and Terror: Conflicting Time and the Crisis of
News Discourse
Andrew Hoskins & Ben O'Loughlin

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Palgrave Macmillian Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
The advent of the twenty-first century was marked by a succession of conflicts and catastrophes that demanded unrestrained journalism. Yet, the principle mass news medium of television has become torn between strategies of containment and the amplification of security threats. Hoskins and O'Loughlin demonstrate that television, tarnished by its economy of liveness and its default impositions of immediacy, brevity and simultaneity, fails to deliver a critical and consistent exposition adequate to our conflicting times.

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Routledge Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
Examines how image affects war and whether image affects our understanding of war. Providing examples from fiction and factual film and television news, as well as digital media, this book introduces the notion of moving images as weapons in armed conflict. It is useful to students of war and security studies; and media and communication studies.

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Palgrave Macmillan Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
This lucid and original work argues for a new style of political leadership, one which pays deliberate and sophisticated attention to the emotional dynamics of the public. In exploring this basic idea of 'emotional governance', Barry Richards also examines the often unhelpful contributions of the news media to the 'emotional public sphere'. A case study of terrorism, as a highly emotional topic and as a key political issue in many liberal democracies, grounds the book's ideas in today’s political landscape.

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Routledge Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
This book analyzes the methods, effects, and mechanisms by which international relations reach the US citizen. Deftly dissecting the interrelationships of national identity formation, corporate ‘news and opinion’ dissemination, and the quasi-academic apparatus of war justification - focusing on the Bush administration's exploitation of the fear and insecurity caused by 9/11 and how this has manifested itself in the US media (especially the tabloid populist media). Debrix explains how all serve to defend and produce state power and develops a model of tabloidized international relations, where responses are both organized by, and supportive of, a strong centralized US government. The field of International Relations sorely needs such analytics, in so far as it explains how people in their everyday lives relate to transnational issues.

War and Media Operations: The US Military and the press
from Vietnam to Iraq: Thomas Rid

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Routledge Publishing
wam review forthcoming

Description:
This is the first academic analysis of the role of embedded media in the 2003 Iraq War, providing a concise history of US military public affairs management since Vietnam. This new book tests this assumption, introducing a model of organizational learning and redraws the US military’s cumbersome learning curve in public affairs from Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, Somalia, the Balkans to Afghanistan, examining whether past lessons were implemented in Iraq in 2003. Thomas Rid argues that while the US armed forces have improved their press operations, America’s military is still one step behind fast-learning and media-savvy global terrorist organizations.

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Routledge
wam review forthcoming

Description:
Media, War and Postmodernity" investigates how conflict and international intervention have changed since the end of the Cold War, asking why Western military operations are now conducted as high-tech media spectacles, apparently more important for their propaganda value than for any strategic aims. Discussing the humanitarian interventions of the 1990s and the War on Terror, the book analyzes the rise of a postmodern sensibility in domestic and international politics, and explores how the projection of power abroad is undermined by a lack of cohesion and purpose at home. Drawing together debates from a variety of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, Phil Hammond argues that contemporary warfare may be understood as 'postmodern' in that it is driven by the collapse of grand narratives in Western societies and constitutes an attempt to recapture a sense of purpose and meaning

Publication date: 2007
click here to order from Blackwell Publishing
wam review

Description:
In this intellectually and politically potent new book, Martin Shaw proposes a way through the confusion surrounding the idea of genocide. He considers the origins and development of the concept, and its relationships to other forms of political violence. Offering a radical critique of the existing literature on genocide, Shaw argues that what distinguishes genocide from more legitimate warfare is that the 'enemies' targeted are groups and individuals of a civilian character. He vividly illustrates his argument from a wide range of historical episodes, and shows how the question lsquo;what is genocide?rsquo; matters politically whenever populations are threatened by violence. This compelling book will undoubtedly open up vigorous debate, appealing to students and scholars across the social sciences, and in law. His arguments will be of lasting importance.

Publication date: 2006
click here to order from Peter Lang Publishing
wam review

Description:
Forged over the course of a century, the connections between war and media run long and deep. As this book reveals, the history of war and its telling has been a battle over public perception. The selection of which stories are told and which are ignored helps justify past battles and ensure future wars. Narratives of protest and pain, defeat and suffering, guilt and abuse struggle to be heard amid the empowering myths of war and heroism. As Robin Andersen argues, the history of struggle between war and its representation has changed the way war is fought and the way we tell the stories of war. Information management, once called censorship and propaganda, has developed in tandem with new media technologies. Now, digital imaging creates virtual battlefields as computer-based technologies transform the weapons of war. Along the way, images on the nightly news, on movie screens, and in video games have turned war into entertainment. In the grip of virtual war, it is difficult to realize the loss of compassion or the consequences for democracy.

Publication date: 2005
click here to order from Routledge
wam review

Description:
The book demonstrates the existence of five propaganda themes that are consistently produced to justify armed intervention by the British government. The book utilizes the British press to demonstrate the existence of these themes and the argument is strengthened through a comparative analysis of both five newspapers and two conflicts. In addition, the book discusses general issues regarding propaganda which have become increasingly relevant to both recent academic debate and popular culture. The manuscript also tackles the role of the journalist in war coverage and the place for the written press in a news market dominated by 'instant', visual media.

Journalists Under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices: Howard Tumber & Frank Webster

Publication date: May 2006
click here to order from Sage
wam review

Description:
Journalists Under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices is the first book to combine a conceptually audacious analysis of the changing nature of war with an empirically rich critical analysis of journalists who cover conflict. In this book, authors Howard Tumber and Frank Webster explore questions about Information War and journalistic practices.

Frontline correspondents play a key role in Information War, but their position is considerably more ambiguous and ambivalent than in the epoch of Industrial War. They play a central role in the presentation of what is often spectacle to audiences around the world whose actual experience of war is far removed from combat.

In the era of multi-national journalism, of the Internet and satellite videophone, the book highlights central features of media reporting in contemporary conflict. Drawing on over fifty lengthy interviews with frontline correspondents, the authors shed light on the motivations, fears and practices of those who work under conditions of Journalism under fire.

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War and Social Theory : World, Value and Identity
Neal Curtis

Publication date: February 2006
click here to order from Palgrave
wam review

Description:
The persistence of war as a feature of modern life is examined through issues of identity and difference, that is, the construction of 'self' and 'other' as individual or community. Key texts relating specifically to identity and war are addressed, including those by Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, Honneth, Bataille, Simmel, Elshtain, Ruddick, Schmitt, Delanda, Hardt and Negri, Baudrillard, Virilio, Beck and Joas. Its theoretical approach sets this study apart from the traditional political science and IR approaches to the subject and makes a significant contribution within this area of social theory, cultural studies and communication studies.

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Cultural Chaos: Journalism, News and Power in a Globalised World: Brian McNair

Publication date: May 2006
wam review forthcoming

Description:
Cultural Chaos explores the changing relationship between journalism and power in an increasingly globalised news culture. It examines the processes of cultural, geographic and political dissolution which are a feature of the post-cold war era, in the context of global ideological realignment, rapid evolution in information and communication technologies, and an increasingly anarchic cultural marketplace. It investigates the impact of these trends on domestic and international journalism, and on political processes in democratic and authoritarian societies across the world. It also assesses the implications of these trends for media scholarship.

Written in a lively and accessible style, Cultural Chaos is essential reading for all those interested in the emerging globalised news culture of the twenty-first century.

Publication date: Spring 2006
wam review forthcoming

Description:
Based on extensive original research, Shoot First and Ask Questions Later provides a comprehensive analysis of media coverage of the war in Iraq in 2003. The authors look closely at the main actors involved through a broad range of interviews with journalists (both embedded and non-embedded), news editors, news heads, and with key planners at the Pentagon and the UK Ministry of Defence. This book also investigates how the war was represented on television, employing both a systematic content analysis of the broadcast news coverage of the war and a series of case studies that unravel key moments of good and bad reporting during the war. Finally, it examines how people responded to and interpreted the information they received from the media, drawing upon both large-scale surveys and focus groups. What emerges, for all its blemishes, is a picture of a sophisticated, military public-relations campaign*one that had less to do with censorship than with promoting certain kinds of coverage. At the heart of this was the embedded journalists program, which has clearly changed the way war is reported. In future, the authors argue, journalists need to understand their role in this public relations effort, and to ask questions not only when access is denied, but also when it is granted.

Description:
Peace Journalism explains how most coverage of conflict unwittingly fuels further violence, and proposes workable options to give peace a chance. Topical case studies including Iraq and the 'war on terrorism' are supported by theory, analysis, archive material and photographs to:

Contrast War Journalism and Peace Journalism;
Show how the reporting of war, violence and terror can be made more accurate and more useful;
Offer practical tools and exercises for analysing and reporting the most important stories of our time.

Description:
In this seminal new work, Martin Shaw, a leading expert on the sociology of war, argues that the new Western way of war is in crisis. He charts the development of a new warfare, after Vietnam, through the Falklands, the Gulf, Kosovo and Afghanistan. He argues that in the Iraq (mis)adventure (of which he provides a detailed analysis) and the War on Terror, the US has consistently flouted the key rules that enabled Western states to fight these earlier wars successfully. The results are not only political failure and a disaster in Iraq, but also a loss of credibility for the very idea of Western warfare.

For Shaw, the new way of war focuses on containing risks to the lives of Western soldiers in order to minimise political and electoral risk to governments. Risk is transferred to innocent civilians, whose killing is explained away as 'accidental'. Yet the idea of managing risk is fundamentally at odds with the brutal, unpredictable nature of war. Ultimately, attempts to manage, govern and rule over the risks of war produce greater risks for those in power.

The New Western Way of War is a moral and political statement as well as a major contribution to sociology and international relations. It will make compelling reading not only for students and scholars of these disciplines, but for anyone concerned about Western political and military power, and the future for global justice.

Reporting War
Edited by:
Stuart Allan & Barbie Zelizer
Publication date: Aug 2004

Description:
Reporting War explores the social responsibilities of the journalist during times of military conflict. News media treatments of international crises, especially the one underway in Iraq, are increasingly becoming the subject of public controversy, and discussion is urgently needed.

Each of this book's contributors challenges familiar assumptions about war reporting from a distinctive perspective. An array of pressing issues associated with conflicts over recent years are identified and critiqued, always with an eye to what they can tell us about improving journalism today. Issues discussed include: the influence of censorship and propaganda, 'us' and 'them' news narratives, access to sources, '24/7 rolling news' and the 'CNN effect', military jargon (such as 'friendly fire' and 'collateral damage'), 'embedded' and 'unilateral' reporters, and tensions between objectivity and patriotism, amongst others. Special attention is devoted to recent changes in journalistic forms and practices, and the ways in which they are shaping the visual culture of war.

The book raises important questions about the very future of journalism during wartime, questions which demand public dialogue and debate, and is essential reading for students taking courses in news and news journalism, as well as for researchers, teachers and practitioners in the field.

Full Contributors:
Stuart Allan, Patricia Aufderheide, Michael Bromley, Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Susan L. Carruthers, Nick Couldry, John Downey, Adel Iskandar, Mohammed el-Nawawy, Philip Hammond, Richard Keeble, Douglas Kellner, Justin Lewis, Tamar Liebes, Zohar Kampf, Susan D. Moeller, Terhi Rantanen, Stephen D. Reese, Piers Robinson, Prasun Sonwalkar, Howard Tumber, Barbie Zelizer

Description:
International media coverage of the war in Iraq provoked public scrutiny as well debate amongst journalists themselves. Media at War offers a critical overview of the coverage in the context of other preceding wars, including the first Gulf War, and opens up the debate on the key questions that emerged during the crisis. For example:

Tumber and Palmer's analysis covers both the pre-war and post war phase, as well as public reaction to these events, and as such provides an invaluable framework for understanding how the media and news organisations operated during the Iraq Crisis.

Description:
This is the first book to provide a comparative historical account of the changing media coverage of conflict from the 1960s to 2003 implicating cultural, technological, and political shifts that have transformed war reporting over this period. It demonstrates how television in particular employs often simplistic representations of past warfare to frame and persuasively shape interpretations of unfolding events. In doing so, the media not only help to legitimize the going to war amongst news publics but also powerfully and often instantly document a history of those events, increasingly constituting the basis of modern Western society’s ‘social memory’.

When immediacy and ‘liveness’ have become the dominant news values in our twenty-four hour intensively mediated world, has ‘breaking news’ given way to ‘breaking rumour’? The real-time pressures of modern news coverage are particularly consequential when television in our global age is increasingly used as an instrument of war, and when media events seem increasingly to shape modern history.
Hoskins provides a critical account of the unique relationship between the media and conflict, and the forging of new contested histories of warfare by television. He reveals the influence the media has on the public’s perception of war, from the televisual ‘losing’ of the Vietnam War, to the satellite-driven footage from the Gulf in 1991, and finally to the continuous presence of journalists during the recent Iraq War.

Dr. Andrew Hoskins is Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at Swansea University and a member of The War and Media Network. He has written widely on the relationship between media and memory and the reporting of modern warfare.
Email: a.d.hoskins@swan.ac.uk

This book critically examines the changing contours of media coverage of war and considers the complexity of the relationship between mass media and governments in wartime.

Assessing how far the political, cultural and professional contexts of media coverage have been affected by 9/11 and its aftermath, the volume also explores media representations of the `War on Terrorism' from regional and international perspectives, including new actors such as the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera - the pan-Arabic television network.

One key theme of the book is how new information and communication technologies are influencing the production, distribution and reception of media messages. In an age of instant global communication and round-the-clock news, powerful governments have refined their public relations machinery, particularly in the way warfare is covered on television, to market their version of events effectively to their domestic as well as international viewing public.

Transnational in its intellectual scope and in perspectives, War and the Media includes essays from internationally known academics along with contributions from media professionals working for leading broadcasters such as BBC World and CNN.