War and Media Network: Commentary








Media, War and Conflict Resolution Conference 20 Years of Propaganda? Mapping the Al Jazeera Phenomenon Muslim Media and the 'War on Terror' Haunting, War and Conflict Communicating War: Strategies, Implications and Ethics.					Conference Report: Communicating war: Strategies, implications and ethics University of Surrey, 13th May 2005 Dina Matar, London School of Economics This one-day conference, hosted by the War and Media Network, brought together distinguished academics, military experts and practitioners to examine inter-related yet diverse perspectives on the reporting of conflict. The programme consisted of a variety of papers interrogating the theory and practice of war reporting including credibility, the ethics and organisation of journalistic practice, and the ethical implications of widely accessible news media. Panels were organised thematically under the topics of media practice and discourses of war, credibility in and through media communication, communication war through history and memory, information war, and terrorism and the media. The speakers covered a wide range of academic and practical perspectives, from discourse and representation in news, to newsgathering practices, and the media spectacle of war. New Wars: Ideology and Practice Richard Keeble from the University of Lincoln opened the proceedings with a provocative presentation about the 2003 Iraq War in which he applied his concept of New Militarism to the UK mainstream press coverage of the war. He argued that the media centricity of New Militarism was one of its defining aspects, which importantly contributed to the need for manufactured and spectacular victories. New Militarist conflicts are thus quick and media-hyped including the demonisation of the enemy, the exaggeration of threat and the manufacture of clean wars. Keeble included in his category of New Militarist wars the Falklands War of 1982, the Grenada invasion of 1983, the first Gulf war in 1991 and the US coups in Chad in both 1982 and 1990. Though he argued that the media colluded in the portrayals and the representations of these new militarist conflicts, he highlighted recent signs of tension evidenced by the reluctance of the mainstream media in the UK to accept the government's version on the weapons of mass destruction during the recent Iraq war. Keeble's opening paper provided a stimulating start to the days events. Questions about, and comments on his talk not only highlighted the diversity of views among delegates but generated discussion and debate around a number of salient themes that were reiterated throughout the remainder of the day. Media Practice and Discourses of War. In the first of the four morning panels, and continuing on the theme of manufacturing news, Lara Pawson of the BBC World Service gave an insiders' view of the difficulties of reporting what she termed 'forgotten wars' in African countries like Angola. She highlighted the dilemmas for mainstream and other journalists, stressing the difficulties of securing coverage due to non-interest within newsrooms. In particular, she pointed to the tendency among mainstream news media, including the BBC, to sanitise wars, thereby altering the reality of the conflict in the reportage. Jerry Palmer from London Metropolitan University and Victoria Fontan from the Centre for International Conflict Resolution at Columbia University discussed notions of ideology and credibility of reportage through an exploration of the use of fixers by journalists in the Iraq war. For them, the use of fixers posed particular questions about how, and by whom, the content of news pieces are decided and the reasons behind such decisions. Emphasising the framing potential of news, Annabel McGoldrick, co-director of Reporting the World, offered innovative ways of re-framing conflict reportage from the practitioners' perspective. She suggested that instead of relying on the conventional frame of conflict as a zero sum game, which accentuates the feeling of desperation and lack of resolution, reporters covering conflict could provide the historical and political context of the conflict while also focusing on the everyday experiences of people living in conflict zones. The panel closed with a discussion by Nico Carpentier from the Free University of Brussels on the difficulties of escaping ideology in making sense of news texts. He demonstrated this through his analysis of Belgian news media, VRT and VTM during the Iraq war in which the excessive use of binary oppositions can lead to particular perceptions of 'us' and 'them'. Notions of ideology and hegemony in making sense of conflict news were touched upon throughout all these presentations providing an interesting common theme despite the varied foci of the papers. Of further interest, and complimenting each of the papers, would have been a study of news production practices and editorial policies and the degree to which these may shift during conflict situations. Credibility, Emotions and Memory The second panel opened with a presentation by Stuart Allan from the University of the West of England on online news and, in particular, the war blog. He highlighted how the war blog is a phenomenon that not only challenges the traditional models of war journalism, but also opens up the debate about whether a 'journalism of attachment' can better explain conflict than the traditional, objective journalism of 'detachment'. By offering different personalised accounts of reality, with raw, subjective, first-hand and conversational material, Allan argued that war blogs tend to invert the traditional forms and norms of polished, objective, second-hand and distanced news journalism. Ozen Odag from the International University of Bremen offered a different perspective of online journalism by detailing the results of a comparative study evaluating how recipients of weblogs and traditional media assess the credibility of news reports. She concluded that recipients were more critical about credibility of news in web logs, arguing that this relates to their media knowledge. Both papers highlighted the need to further question the meaning of news, how we define it. In addition, issues around the practicality of online journalism particularly with regard to who becomes a blogger were important. Odag for instance, highlighted that some news organisations can play a determining role in whether reporters become bloggers - either by denying permission or editorially controlling copy - which may be critical to how the reports and their meanings are constructed. Points like these suggest the more practical questions about news reporting deserve attention in advance of investigating broader philosophical ones. The final morning panel focused on conflict reporting in relation to memory and history, offering a broader ontological and sociological understanding of the relationship between media and memory. Andrew Hoskins from the University of Swansea examined the ways in which media are becoming sites of remembrance through their use of frames and in the revisiting of past events. He argued that television news, in particular, manages to neutralise the past by changing or revising our understanding of past events. Samar Kalakech from the Universite Jean Moulin in France continued this theme with a comparison of the memory of the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s through the narratives of two films. However, her presentation was hampered by a lack of time, poor quality video system and would have benefited from a clearer focus. Nonetheless, both papers presented a different perspective of media accounts that highlighted the need for further examination of how audiences receive and make sense of these perspectives. Images of War, Terrorism and the Mediation of Emotions The afternoon panels shifted the theme to the notion of war as information and the impact of image and presentation on how conflict is understood. Angus Taverner offered an insider's view into the MOD's media management and stressed the importance of images in sending clear signals and messages to the public as a means of influencing their perceptions and behaviour, a strategy that the MOD is acutely aware of in selling the notion of war. Similarly, Neal Curtis' paper emphasised how the image is the new battlefield particularly through the media's role in war via soft entertainment. The last panel adopted a more culturally nuanced perspective of suffering in conflict. Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi from the University of Roehampton argued that increasingly mediated experiences of vulnerability and risk are becoming part of people's everyday lives, in part due to their exposure to images of global terrorism. Drawing on the Ken Bigley case, they argued that these spectacles provide a transitory moment, for instance when the Bigley family were bought onto public stage. Their talk highlighted the broader discourses of representations of media war, bringing into focus the tension between the invisible and the visible, and the powerful and powerless. Andrew Hill from the University of Ulster, using audience research, discussed the impact of images of hostage videos drawing attention to the powerlessness of audiences. Makram Khoury-Machool ended the panel with a talk on the changing power relations in the new media environment and a call for a different theorisation regarding the use of spectacle and image in conflicts. He noted that while the use of videos to broadcast beheadings by different groups served to shatter the US technological supremacy, the ability of these small groups to produce their own videos and to use media cannot be solely addressed through Western sociological and media perspectives. Instead, explanations must also draw on Arab-Islamic philosophy to fully understand the implications for both conflict reporting and audience responses. Conference Summary Richard Keeble, in summing up the conference, elegantly noted that the dominant issues of the day focused on dichotomies: the visible and the underlying concern for the invisible, the powerful and the powerless, the need to sympathise and the need to deal with war at a distance. He noted an absence of focus on audience perspectives, and non-Western theoretical and cultural perspectives. In particular, he stressed the need to expand the study of conflict and reporting ethics to encompass forgotten conflicts, such as in Chad and Colombia. Furthermore, he added that it would be beneficial, particularly in addressing notions of credibility, to investigate the experiences of those audiences who are involved in the conflict and who see themselves reflected in the news. He suggested that an examination of political and economic considerations that play a crucial role in the way conflict is reported would also be fruitful. Finally, he noted that it is important to expand on the notion of media knowledge or media competence particularly when audiences are becoming more critical which, if translated into social movement, can have distinct implications for conflict reporting. Overall, the conference papers provided impetus to think about, and around issues of reporting and confronting war whilst at the same time revisiting traditional debates of ideology and representation. It would have been more beneficial to spread the conference over two days, as time constraints did not allow for the varied debate that each paper deserved. However, as the first War and Media Network conference it was successful in drawing attention to the diversity of work on the meaning of news in times of war.