WAM: Book Review

In Televising War, Andrew Hoskins investigates how the processes of history, or imagining the past “through the prism of the present” (p.xii), have been reconfigured in relation to war and the media. Hoskins’ main assertion is that television is central to the ‘social memory of war’, the practice by which societies and 'social frameworks' manage narratives of the past towards an agreed collective memory. He argues that certain perspectives on the past are reproduced through the repetition of specific images while alternatives get 'forgotten' due to their absence from television screens. The degree to which social memory is reliant on information provided by the media is explained through the concept of ‘new memory’ and he utilises the evolution of reporting in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq war to illustrate how these processes contribute to their existence to the social memory of war.

It is through Hoskins’ consideration of how the processes of reporting in the 2003 Iraq War contribute to the social memory of war - including the role of journalists and the technology of gathering and disseminating 'news' - that some of the book's most stimulating ideas emerge. He states that with the increasing number of rival news channels, news reports are distributed quickly to compete with other television networks leading to the circulation of rumour at the sacrifice of accuracy and thorough verification. Further, Hoskins argues that institutional and technological changes seem to have transformed the idea of news reporting from an act of balanced observation at a critical distance to one of individual perspective. He draws upon the notion of embedding to illustrate this stating that when the proximity of embeds to the zone of conflict is predicated on the security and transportation of Coalition forces, their commentary often comes to identify with those troops. He records the “cheerleading tone” (p.74) that can result from this shrinking of distance between journalists and story and where alignment to the military manoeuvres audiences into line with the priorities of the Coalition forces. Hoskins does not need to draw attention to the symbolism involved when the NBC correspondent Chip Reid lowers his voice to report from the US First Marine Division: “forgive me for speaking very quietly but I am in a field of sleeping marines right now” (p.61) mirroring the self-regulation of many embeds who moderated their reporting so as not to disturb the Coalition's progress.

Drawing upon previous studies of the live reporting from the 1991 Gulf War, in which journalistic rhetoric repeatedly stressed the simultaneity of events unfolding close by and the danger this posed to correspondents, Hoskins provides a sense of how the journalists became the subject of their own reports as ‘people in danger’. He notes that in 2003 this 'liveness' collided with the entertainment genre of reality television, drawing on the genre's tropes of seemingly unscripted action unfolding in real time. Hoskins understands the instantaneous, 'embedded' quality of reporting from the Iraq War in light of this tendency, together with reality television’s “promise” of “instant celebrity”. It would have been interesting if Hoskins had extended this notion of “the requisite celebratization of participants” (p.59) to his analysis of the Iraq War. Whilst Saddam Hussein's demonization has a short chapter of its own, and there are suggestive references to how Rageh Omar and Ali Ismaeel Abbas were transformed into cultural collateral to endorse the status of the BBC and the Daily Mirror respectively, Hoskins’ argument would be strengthened if these 'stars' were comprehended more thoroughly in terms of the culture of instant celebrity that he critiques. Further, the prisoner of war Jessica Lynch and her iconic rescue could have been understood as part of the deeper historical context of imperial discourses, such as the Puritan captivity narratives implicated in the USA's expansion across the North American continent.

It is one of Hoskins' strengths that his conceptualisation of the dominant discourses of news reporting allows space for alternative perspectives. If, for Hoskins, the medium of television sanitizes, edits, and glorifies war, it also retains the promise of delivering direct and unambiguous representations of atrocities. In opposition to the “saturating multi-network world of no-time news” (p.49), Hoskins discusses the reporting from 1991 and 2003 that refused to sanitize war, such as Ken Jarecke’s infamous photograph of a charred Iraqi soldier sat upright in a burnt-out vehicle (given the extensive analysis of this image, it would have been useful to have reproduced it in Televising War itself). This duality is also contained in Hoskins’ notion of “flashframes”. These flashframes are iconic images contributing to the processes of new memory, disseminated and repeated on a mass scale, and prompting recognition of an historical event. Hoskins suggests that when such images are shocking, as in the Jarecke photograph, they serve as a lesson in history through their repetition but their very familiarity can close off alternative interpretations. In addition, flashframes can be re-signified by the news media. The example Hoskins uses is the image of the toppling of Saddam's statue, which had momentary status as symbol of his regime's collapse, but which has “been re-interpreted as a staged and 'false' end to the Iraq War by numerous commentators.” (p.131)

Given that throughout Televising War Hoskins makes reference to the evaporation of the specific historical context behind such images, and their consequent status as 'myth', where journalistic discourses direct one towards a certain shared understanding of social memory, the omission of Roland Barthes' Mythologies stands out. The terms 'social memory', 'new memory' and 'flashframes' are not reducible to Barthes' schematic, but they could have been clarified more precisely in relation to Mythologies. Further, Hoskins' attention to the appropriation of images of war, such as Jarecke's photograph, would have benefited from some reference to Walter Benjamin's writing on the politics and potentialities of visual reproduction.

It is a mark of Televising War's ethical sensibilities that it confronts the horrors and politics of representing the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003, while highlighting the limits of what can be represented from those conflicts. Hoskins is also alive to the absurdities of war, for example, when American forces arriving in Baghdad were forced to use Channel Four News' translator to liaise with the Iraqis having no translator of their own. Hoskins has collected some fascinating, relevant material and incorporated it effectively into his overarching argument while remaining attentive to the details of language used. One finishes Televising War hoping to have its ideas explored further, not least because it seems to have been published before the controversy about human rights abuses of Iraqi POWs, and the questions of authenticity surrounding the photographic evidence. These represent crucial grounds on which to tease out the uses and boundaries of the concepts in Hoskins’ book, and further editions would benefit from extending this research into the continuing events of 2004.

Paul Williams
University of Exeter