It is interesting to note from Yesterday’s lecture what the New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger said about, “how each generation has its own complicated interpretation of the war’s meaning and mysteries, its heroes and villains, and more than 50 years later it retains the power to shock and surprise.”
Firstly, How clear is our
picture of war? If the media’s primary objective when covering
foreign affairs, disasters and conflicts is to communicate complex
issues in a way that can be understood by the general public.
The reading this week puts it as,
essentially the media provide our ‘window to the world.’
Does anyone know
what might be the problem with this metaphor of, ‘looking through a
window?’
Well, I know myself when I look through a window we are limited to what we can see. There may be something obstructing your view.
This is a problem
that many journalists face when reporting on wars and disasters.
To what extent are
we seeing inadequate or distorted media-reports on the complex
issues?
Our reading this
week put it this way as read in Chapter 4. Page 69.
“If two or more journalists are present at the same event, they
will not necessarily report in the same way. The emphasis, manner,
tone and insight which each journalist brings to bear on a given
story are highly dependent upon the personality, experience,
education and location of the journalist.”
To add to this journalists are than
faced with constraints that limit what can be done.
Hence those in control of journalists
in the field reporting on wars and disasters are limited by
three main constraints; time, space and access.
Time
affects how reporting on events has changed since the 80s where news
has become instantaneous such as live coverage of the disaster which
forces journalists to be reporting on non-verified accounts by using
words like, ‘rumours are circulating’ or ‘unconfirmed reports
are speculating.’
So, can you tell
me what some of the Big News Events of this century have been?
Tsunami, London Bombings, Bali Bombings, 9/11, Hurricane Katrina
and the Madrid bombings.
Space also plays a major part in
broadcast media. As TV and Radio packages are generally constrained
to a 3-minute packages forcing complex issues to be compressed or
otherwise known as summarised.
Access to the battlefield has
also changed dramatically since a reporter was first allowed in
battlefields such as William Howard Russell of The Times.
Russell was known
for his coverage of the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ during the
Crimean War 1853-56. Russell when he saw what the British troops were
going through he was appalled and caused a sensation through the UK
with the hard-hitting lead articles reported in The Times.
As a result the idea of ‘censorship’
or what’s commonly known as ‘security review’ now days was born
- Censoring the media was one way of guaranteeing public support of
the conflict.
Censorship
So, the censorship imposed by the
military on the media has limited what they can convey to the public
– or us. The military pushed the idea of censorship as, ‘preventing
valuable information from falling into enemy hands and thereby
jeopardising the safety of the troops.’
Though the constraints of censorship
have worked largely for media the rise of the ‘citizen-journalist’
has meant citizens often gain access to where journalists are not
allowed. Making the military’s job extremely hard.
An Australian Defence
Media Release – To show an example of how the military often
control the way the media portray defence related news this
slide shows a release from the Defence Media Communications Centre
outlining information regarding the death of Captain Bryce Duffy
with a few quotes from his commanding officer.
So we learnt just before about the
rise of the citizen-journalist. But let’s take a look at what this
term actually means.
The Citizen Journalist as
Wikipedia puts it is; Citizen Journalism is the concept of members of
the public "playing an active role in the process of collecting,
reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information."
To put this into perspective how
many citizen journalism avenues or people do you know that exist in
Townsville alone? (Slide Eight)
Just to outline a few from conducting
a simple google search, in Townsville we have TownsvillleNewsOnline
and MySuburbanNews.
Overseas there is even more citizen
journalists, let’s take a look at a story from the Associated Press
that uses amateur vision captured by a citizen who most likely would
have been fighting but pulled out their recording device at just the
right moment to capture Gadhafi’s last moments.
With more and more citizen journalists
being empowered through the availability of video sharing sites,
blogs and social networks just like the little clip we saw are
increasingly being used by media outlets to show snapshots of wars.
Journalists are also limited by what
they can play on their mediums. Running too many stories on war often
can result in what’s called compassion fatigue.
“Show too much and there is a danger
that audiences will either become alienated or desensitised over time
to horrors of real war; there is a danger of ‘compassion fatigue.’
(Moeller, 1999)
Likewise showing too little of war as
Martin Bell suggests – results in audiences not realising the
seriousness of a situation, resulting in public disinterest.
In getting back to our focus question,
“Is it possible for a journalist to convey the enormity of what is
happening in a war zone?”
Based upon the constraints
correspondents face out in the field when reporting on wars and
disasters I think journalists and the media can only portray so much.
As social implications of displaying
too much and too little as Bell suggests can determine how war turns
out.
In getting back to our reading this
week the final part of the reading defines ‘real war’ and ‘media
war.’
“In real wars, real people die. In
media wars, the realities of war such as death and destruction, are
both distant and distanced from a non-participating mass audience by
the very mediating role of the media.
“Real war is about the sounds, sight,
smell, touch and taste of the nasty, brutal business of people
killing other people.
“Media war is literally a mediated
representation of that reality but which is ultimately a third party
or audio-visual ‘snapshot’ of it.
