MEDIACTIVE editorial |
As we undergo the final edit of this collection, the latest chapter unravels in the seemingly unending and increasingly complex narrative of the Iraqi war and its bloody aftermath. Headlines in the daily press detail a catalogue of claims and counter-claims of troops, ministers and journalists from both sides of the Atlantic in response to mounting media revelation of torture, ritual humiliation and general maltreatment in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Not all of these revelations have gone unchallenged. In mid-May, the defence secretary Geoff Hoon announced to the House of Commons his reservations over the veracity of a series of disturbing photographs published by the Daily Mirror showing officers of the 1st Battalion Queen’s Lancashire Regiment humiliating Iraqi prisoners. The Mirror had implied that even if the photographs were faked, the story was essentially true. The Times meanwhile reported on the ‘killer facts’ deployed by army investigators to disprove the images. The Mirror’s editor, Piers Morgan, (or rather former editor) is expected to face a bullish committee of MPs to explain his actions and there has been extensive coverage of the British Armed Forces Minister Adam Ingram’s warning that the ‘faked’ photographs could put British troops lives at risk. Alongside this story, Roland Watson and Stephen Grey reported from Washington and Basra on the mounting controversy over the murder of two Iraqi prisoners by Americans (admitted in an internal army investigation) and the broader maltreatment and inhumane abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad and at Camp Seven in Basra (The Times 5. 5. 2004:1). These events had already been the subject of Red Cross and Amnesty International reports on various visits made between March and November 2003.
Headlines such as ‘America’s catalogue of "torture"’ have signalled the dramatic impact of such revelations. The past three weeks have seen a catalogue of such accounts of abuse, together with numerous narratives of unrest and civilian opposition to occupying forces manifested in widespread despair and cynicism about military violence. The bodies of the prisoner and of the soldier are at stake in these media narratives and photographs and are central to the unfolding of war and its aftermath. The media here grapple with an underlying disturbing analogy between the deliberate infliction of pain and injury in war, supposedly in our name, and in the less public realm of military imprisonment. They have uncovered, to varying degrees, the ethical consequences of deliberately inflicting pain, through war, torture, interrogation and maltreatment, and in doing so, opened up to debate in the public sphere, how regimes can ‘unmake’ a subject’s political and personal agency in the exercise of ‘righteous’ power.2 Such media coverage foregrounds the juxtaposition of ‘injured bodies’ and increasingly ‘unanchored’ political issues of defence, sovereignty and security in Iraq. This juxtaposition, characterised as intrinsic to the structure of war, now dominates both media coverage and the Bush and Blair governments’ attempts to re-muster their justification for war and for their present dangerous stalemate out in the Gulf. Importantly, such media coverage highlights not only the breakdown of military control in places like Abu Ghraib, but also the violence that subtends, and is the ‘obscene underside’, of the righteous nation-state.3
Influential international journalists such as Robert Fisk and John Pilger have cautioned the political debates about their attendance to the evidentiary status of the news photographs. This focus on the veracity of the news image has, they argue, (like the fallout from the Hutton Report) become a means to side-step wider debates about the role of the journalist, the power of the journalist’s dissenting voice and the needful media dissection of the broader hegemonic discourses of war, security, retribution and ‘rights’ that have girded political statements on the war in Iraq and its aftermath. Such dissenting journalistic voices supplement those previously raised in America and Europe on the indefinite detention of the detainees of Guantanamo Bay and their exemption from the rights to counsel, appeal and repatriation as stipulated by the Geneva Convention. In all cases, one could argue that in the name of ‘security’ and prevention of ‘terror’, the law and ethical behaviour are both compromised.
Academic analyses of Iraq and the post September 11th 2001 regime deconstruct a European and American reticulation of heightened national security, extended surveillance mechanisms, powerful military and political ‘public relations’. The role of journalistic intervention within this network remains of crucial importance for debates about democracy and ethics. Recent analyses have provocatively located the war within debates about the role of violence, ‘terror’ and the political implications of sovereignty in the global community. The cogency and validity of Blair’s defence of military action against Iraq on the grounds of the presence and danger of weapons of mass destruction has given way to more diffuse claims to humanitarian motives in defending Iraqi civilians from the dreadful abuses of Saddam Hussein’s regime and a reiteration of Bush’s call for ‘security’ against terrorism.
Appositely, Giorgio Agamben has provocatively argued that today there are extreme and dangerous developments in the European and American politico-discursive use of ‘security’ as a defining theme of political self-actualisation. He suggests that when politics reduces itself to the role of ‘police’ the distinction between state-sanctioned violence and terrorism threatens to be eroded. He argues that a state that has security as its defining task and source of legitimacy ‘can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic’.4 In the new situation created by the end of the classical form of war between sovereign states, the search for global security can lead to a ‘world civil war which makes all civil coexistence impossible’.5 Bush and his government supporters, in particular, have espoused an uncritical political agenda of reinforcing a new global order which requires a ‘constant reference to a state of exception’.6 Finally, we have reached the stage where a diffused and unfocused fearfulness, and the rhetoric of defence and watchfulness which supports it, recalls the cold war era and all that it entailed.
War by any other name
The war in Iraq then is both a ‘war against terror’ and also a war against an ‘anti-liberal, anti-democratic’ regime. It is also framed as a war of liberation. The concept of ‘humanitarian war’ has been prevalent in the last decade. It has littered the language of Western foreign policy and ranks in obscurantism alongside rhetoric that names soldiers ‘peacekeepers’, occupation of a sovereign state as ‘liberation’ and dead civilians as ‘collateral damage’.7 In this context conflict (rarely called ‘war’) is framed as an extension of diplomacy by other means, the promotion of diplomatic ends through coercion. The first Gulf conflict of 1991 (overtly designated a ‘war’) and the powerful role of the mainstream media in building consensus and in producing a media spectacle of a high-tech ‘precision’ military action has been amply discussed. Despite the fact that tens of thousands of people were killed it was perceived as a bloodless war, viewed by western audiences through the cross-hairs of weapons’ sights framed by television screens. By the time of the Kosovo war commencing in March 1999, the British PM’s press secretary Alastair Campbell went so far as to declare that ‘the modern media has changed the demands of modern conflict’.8 This implied that the media cart was being increasingly placed before the strategic horse in the decision-making processes that inform foreign policy, the practice of diplomacy and even military engagement.
The events of September 11th 2001 brought the vocabulary of war back into sharp relief and re-articulated it when the USA, in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Towers, declared a ‘war’ on terror and on those states that harboured terrorists and promoted their agendas.9 There was a sense, voiced almost immediately, that in the USA, at least, citizens already felt as though they were at war,10 under siege, even if there was little sense of exactly the enemy might be. The possibility of stateless enemies, of enemies motivated by incomprehensible drives, capable of crossing national boundaries and of using poisons, viruses and suicide bombings, inaugurated, in Slavoj Zizek’s words, a ‘new era of paranoiac warfare’ and it seemed that ‘war’ was no longer a dirty word.11
Yet at the same time, people sought to educate and inform themselves of current affairs via the media to an unprecedented extent. Mainstream and alternative Internet news sites, ‘blogs’ and even newsprint sales soared. People actively chose to inform themselves about Islam in an unprecedented manner; books on Islam and Arab culture were reissued and sold in impressive numbers. Alternative sources of news achieved prominence and a sizeable proportion of the world’s population became aware of the Arabic language satellite channel Al-Jazeera providing, for example, exclusive footage from Taliban-held areas of Afghanistan. Even as official pressure and bellicose rhetoric swelled for the waging of war against terror and then against Hussein’s regime in Iraq, so did a popular resistance to war. In Britain the majority of the press were sceptical of Bush’s motives for attacking Iraq and commended caution and the pursuit of the second UN resolution 1441. The Daily Mirror came out strongly against the war and in the process differentiated itself in a crowded market from tabloids such as its main competitor the Sun. The Mirror’s ‘Stop the War’ front page was pasted to many of the banners carried at the landmark anti-war march that descended on Hyde Park. It only paid the penalty for its radicalism when war began and readers shifted towards supporting the Government’s military intervention and the papers that had promoted it.
The apparent groundswell of public opinion, as amplified by the media, that increasingly regarded war with Iraq as illegal, aggressive and rooted in questionable motivations of ‘regime change’ was counteracted in political and military discourse by a return to the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention. On the eve of war, a rallying speech by LT Col Tim Collins to his troops was widely reported. Collins successfully wed bellicosity with a placatory vision of compassion towards the Iraqi people, which was in keeping with the tenor of New Labour’s own rhetoric. He told his troops, ‘the enemy should have no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction…Saddam Hussein and his forces will be destroyed by this coalition for what they have done. Show them no pity’. He also added: ‘We go to liberate not to conquer…Let’s…leave Iraq a better place for us having been there’ (Metro 20.03.2003:3). This uncomfortable and precarious coupling of aggression and amelioration towards the Iraqis was central to the Government’s media message and its battle for the hearts and minds of the electorate. It also suggests the promotion of another odd coupling: ‘coercive diplomacy’, which fudges the point at which diplomacy ends and coercion begins.
It is arguable then that in political discourse, anxiety about the overt usage of the rhetoric and vocabulary of war is both present and obscured and that this anxiety has become part of the organising framework of interactions with the media and with citizenry. What popular resistance to war demonstrated is that citizens living in what John Keane has called ‘democratic zones of peace’ do not perceive themselves as being apart from danger and conflict.12 Rather they are concerned that they could be morally compromised by actions to which they do subscribe (‘not in my name’). Moreover, global communications and round the clock news coverage returns distant acts of violence to the centre stage of ‘peaceful’ nations. Keane notes: ‘The democratic zone of peace feels more violent because within its boundaries images and stories of violence move ever closer to citizens who otherwise live in peace.13
This collection is about the present moment, representing work in progress on issues of representation, journalistic ethics, US imperialism and so on in relation to the war and its consequences. But it also seeks to pursue, from different perspectives, a broader set of related agendas that arise from the present crisis (but were inaugurated in previous crises) and persist beyond the end of the war. It examines the images and stories of war and diplomacy which, while they seem to address events on the geographical periphery of Western lives, are clearly symbolically central. It unpacks the ways in which political and journalistic anxiety about the usage of war rhetoric and imagery has become part of the organising framework of the media’s address to its audiences. And it seeks to identify the future roles of ‘media wars’ – not simply in the literal sense of war as a mediated experience for the majority of citizens but also in the sense of the media at war with itself, a constant site of struggle over issues of interpretation, meaning and representation in the coverage of war, violence and atrocity.
The collection falls into three interrelated areas of interrogation. The first area concerns the discourse and values of democracy, citizenship and human rights and their articulation by politic subjects and the media. Darren O’Byrne discusses the contemporary discourses of human rights and their appropriation by supporters and opponents of the war. He argues that the 1991 Gulf War can be defined as a neo-liberal war, whilst the recent war in Iraq marks a shift to a neo-conservative war. This shift can be partly identified by an agenda that slips from the neo-liberal protection of human rights as the desirable outcome of a campaign intended primarily to protect capital to a neo-conservative protection of capitalist interests as a desirable outcome of a campaign intended to protect western values. Daya Thussu extends the debate about democracy by unpacking the revival and almost robust defence of imperialism as both discourse and practice within the context of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. He analyses this as a geo-political strategic form of governance and a core element of the unilateralist policy propounded by the neo-conservatives, whom he views as being increasingly responsible for shaping US foreign policy. The role of global communications technologies in sustaining this new imperialism is discussed to ascertain the mass media’s function as a ‘soft power’ in the US achievement of imperialist aims. R. Harindranath deconstructs the elision of realist and non-realist tropes and generic formats present in the media coverage of this media spectacle to debate crucial connections between mainstream news and fictional Hollywood narratives, American foreign policy and the ideological potency of images of conflict that are sustained by modes of enjoyment structured in fantasy. Important questions about the relationship and access of the public to ‘truth’ arise from his notion of a skewed balance of relationships between the journalist, the politician and the citizen and the dissemination of information in allegedly democratic societies.
The second area of interrogation is concerned with complicating our reading of representations of women and children and their involvement with the war. Here notions of citizenship and its excluded or invisible subjects come to the fore. Furthermore, as Patricia Holland cogently argues, news representations of war are invariably shot through with gendered politics of representation. Whilst women have conventionally been excluded from dominant political representations of the soldier-hero they have nonetheless been central to discourses of nation, homeland and family. Furthermore, they have been present in iconic form as feminised emblems of liberty and as peace. Holland analyses alternative representations of three women who achieved iconic prominence in the media for their actions in warfare and political protest: Private Jessica Lynch, rescued from the Iraqis by American forces, Rachel Corrie, a peace protestor killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza strip and Hiba Daraghmeh, a Palestinian woman who blew herself up in an Israeli shopping mall. She reveals how notions of femininity, ethnicity and nation weave through three disparate stories, which link the long standing Arab/Israeli conflict to the US-invasion of Iraq. As such the article provides an ideal context for thinking through the recent press fascination with the scandal of female soldier Lyndie England’s involvement in the humiliation of Iraqi prisoners.
Máire Messenger Davies highlights the representation of children in war coverage and, in doing so, unpacks the generic role of children as emblems of pathos and suffering. She then contests this culturally dominant representation of the child by drawing upon audience analysis of primary school children and their responses to traumatic news coverage; illustrating their political sophistication and potential as active citizens. Here, she taps into current debates about the status of the child – as both representation and as agent – within a public sphere from which they have hitherto largely excluded.14 Cynthia Carter locates her analysis of children’s online responses to news about war and conflict within the context of contemporary political and educational debates about the value of citizenship as a concept and as an educational resource. The insertion of citizenship as a core area of study in the National Curriculum foregrounds attempts to counter future voter apathy and disillusionment with political institutions by educating children in the value of themes such as community, individual rights and responsibilities. As with Messenger Davies, Carter highlights the few media spaces available for children to enable their active engagement with news media.
The third area of analysis is concerned with opening up debates about news production in a global, digitalised, market-led environment. The issues signalled here, whilst focused on the war and its aftermath in news production, extend key arguments about power, journalistic objectivity, ethics, control over material in a time-pressured volatile news environment and news professionals’ capacity for critical self-reflexivity. Paul Rixon argues that the web expanded the public sphere in its provision of diverse sources of alternative information on the war, alternative discursive spaces and in its interactive facility. Through the spatial and temporal reach of the web, those with access were offered archival material alongside a diverse range of contemporary sources on the war. Rixon suggests that the volume and range of information carries potentially radical implications for different, less managed readings by global audiences and for the way the information war is inevitably increasingly a key player in the winning of consent for military conflict. Des Freedman examines the Daily Mirror’s adoption of a highly politicised anti-government stance in which its encouragement of active opposition to the war on the part of its readers confounded conventional disparagements of the tabloid paper as a depoliticised vehicle of gossip. He locates this stance within the media market economy in which continuous re-branding of the Mirror has demonstrated the uncertainties of the political and economic environment in which the paper operates. Whilst the paper altered its stance as the war progressed, nonetheless, Freedman argues that the mobilisation of a temporary space of political dissent within a popular tabloid form cannot be underestimated.
The last two contributions to this collection engage with fundamental questions about the role and authority of the journalist as news producer in the accentuated pressure and restricted environment of war reportage. It is now commonplace in media analysis to present a radical critique of journalistic claims to objectivity. Such a critique frequently measures objectivity against analyses of how the news media produce and represent their stories according to sectional interests or the constraints of the production line. From this perspective, news bias is not in the eye of the individual journalist but is structured within the entire process of institutional news production. The last two contributions challenge the axiom that mainstream journalists’ coverage of the war simply reproduced dominant messages without critically examining the hidden agendas and ideological biases of the state, military and multi-media conglomerates. Jake Lynch, is Co-Director of the journalism think-tank Reporting the World, which was conceived as a discussion arena for journalists dealing with the ethics of covering conflicts. He has edited the Reporting the World seminar (15: 07:2003) in which senior journalists, editors and news professionals met to discuss the reporting of the war in Iraq. The result is a fascinating insight into the complex set of demands under which the news producer has to operate whilst trying to meet their professional obligations in the public sphere. The debate reveals the greater level of ‘meta-discussion’ undertaken by news producers than in previous wars and shows the value of asking media professionals to reflect on their work. They foreground the difficulty of filtering information when a propagandist ‘dehumanisation and demonisation’ of the ‘Other’ is a central aspect of war media management. Many of the contributions here signal the ethical and professional dilemmas under which they operated and their frustration with Foreign Office sources, and ambivalence over their possible exploitation as a government ‘conduit’.
Finally, Ros Brunt tackles what she defines as an ‘accusatory’ mode of critique against media coverage of the war, which she argues ultimately, lacks political and analytical efficacy. In contrast, she suggests an analysis that attends to the ‘leaky’ moments in broadcasting coverage where shifts in political perspective or unscripted events signal a caesura in dominant news perspectives. Importantly, she highlights the need for a more considered return to the professional codes and practices in which the journalist operates and acknowledges, through specific examples of news coverage, the way that ‘balance’ as a practice recognises concrete news events as inherently contradictory. Therefore through modifications and qualifications of a news story as it is being produced, often live, news coverage has the potential to fissure hegemonic accounts of conflict. In conclusion she tracks the aftermath of the Hutton Enquiry in Britain and highlights the way in which editorial and journalistic impartiality has been opened up to public as well as media debate.
A.R. Biressi and H.A. Nunn
Notes
1. John Pilger in Greg McLaughlin (2002), The War Correspondent,
London: Pluto, p15.
2. Elaine Scary (1985, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press, chapter 2.
3. Slavovj Žižek (2002), Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, London: Verso.
4. Giorgio Agamben (2001), ‘On Security and Terror’, trans. Soenke Zehle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 20., on http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-on-security-and-terror.html accessed 11th April 2004, p1.
5. Ibid
6. Ibid
7. Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (2000), The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, London: Pluto, p1.
8. Philip Hammond, Phillip (2000), ‘Third way War: New Labour, the British Media and Kosovo’, in Hammond and Herman (Eds) Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, ibid, p123.
9. See Noam Chomsky 2001, 9-11, New York: Seven Stories Press, p15-16.
10. Ibid p20.
11.Slavoj Žižek (2002) ‘Reappropriations: The Lesson of Mullah Omar’, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, pp33-57.
12. John Keane (1996), Reflections on Violence, London, Verso.
13. Ibid, pp4-5.
14. See David Buckingham (2000), After the Death of Childhood: Growing Up in the Age of Electronic Media, Cambridge: Polity, Ch.9.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |