ISSUES OF WAR REPORTING

Issues of War Reporting

Issues of War Reporting

Introduction

The battlefield and the theatre of war are, politically speaking, highly charged spaces to which the granting of access for the media is a problematic issue involving a relationship that can be both fraught with tension and laden with mutual benefits for the reporter, the public and the military. The difficulty of reporting from such a setting in terms of the logistical, personal, political and technological aspects of this media/military relationship clearly must impinge on the success and failure of war reporting. The features internal to the media itself are more critical factors that determine an inability to present accurate and objective reports on modern warfare. In particular the media is tethered to the need to present to an audience and bound to interact with political agendas.

A rather fundamental point at the outset is that, excluding new, digital, social media, traditional media as we conceive of it today in the Western world - newspapers, television and radio principally - are all mass media. Even if we can speak of the political or intellectual leanings and registers of tabloids and broadsheets, and think about the likely listeners of commercial and non-commercial radio, the media remains a product of the industrial age that has brought new information within reach of all the socio-economic classes of modern nations. In doing so, following Anderson, it can be argued that the media has aided the creation of a sense of nationhood through shared reliance on particular sources of information.

Discussion Analysis

The fact that all media products are designed to sell stories to be digested by a mass public means that they are tailored in specific ways that distort their objective validity. The war reporter and, perhaps to an even greater degree, the editor and the media magnate, makes stories for an audience. Wolfsfeld notes four specifics of media output in the area of war which condition the form and content of stories. Of these four, 'immediacy', 'drama' and 'simplicity' are, in a sense, watchwords for the successful sales pitch of any product to a mass market. Carruthers points out that all war reporting, no matter how good, can give the reader or viewer a distorted impression of the society where the war-zone is located because of the need for simple, attention-grabbing, bite-sized pieces of news means that the only (or at least dominant) impression given, for example of life in Palestine, is through the series of violent incidents which make the news. Indeed, as news media has become more instant and more global with the spread of cable and satellite television and the internet in the last decade, these traits, deleterious to the production of detailed and truly representative reporting, have become more ingrained.

The fourth trait which Wolfsfeld highlights concerning media presentation of warfare is ethnocentricity. On a basic level this means that the press focus on the role of their own forces to the exclusion of other parties. Badsey shows that that the ethnocentric media coverage of ...