The Role of Global Media during War and Conflict - Term Paper Example

Communication and Culture The Role of Global Media during War and Conflict Q. Investigate the role that global media played in the response to a recent war or conflict that can be considered a ‘great news event’. Critically assess the potential impact media coverage had on the political, humanitarian, or social policy response to the event. 1. Introduction Media are important sources of national and international information and global news may have a deep and lasting effect on international affairs. As information technologies and cultural values integrate around the world, the face of international news is likely to be reshaping by these ongoing forces. Our research will investigate the role that global media played in the response to a recent war or conflict that can be considered a great news event. It will assess critically the potential impact media coverage had on the political, humanitarian, or social policy response to such event. 2. The Role of Global Media It is a widespread belief that media helps to generate a universal culture and system of values, behaviour and ways of looking at the world. The media also at times service minorities and subcultures within big communities, providing them with local news and entertainment and allowing them to see themselves and the world through their own lenses. At the political plane, the media play an essential role in the functioning of democracies. Traditionally, a significant characteristic of interest group toward democracy has been the formation of public sphere, representing all the places and forums where matters of significance to a political community are talked about and deliberated, and where information is offered that is indispensable to citizen involvement in community life. 2.1. Global Media and the Public Sphere The idea is important since a democratic society depends on an informed public making political choices. In big and multifaceted societies, public involvement in political progression is already restricted mainly to sporadic expressions of opinion and objection and the intermittent selection of representatives. For this feeble participation to be austerely effective, the public has to know what is going on and the options that they should weigh, debate, and act upon. Nonetheless, the veracity and value of the public sphere may be endangered by government control, the favouritism, and self-censorship of private systems of control, or by external interference into media systems that form them in unity with ends required by influential foreign interest. There may also be blend of these forms of threat, with governments and powerful private interests functioning in tandem, or foreign agencies joining forces with local government and or private media groups. Government control and censorship are well understood to be threats to the public sphere, not only in dictatorial states but also in those with parliamentary institutions. According to Herman and McChesney (1997), Great Britain government has frequently suppressed by withholding information and threatening suit under the Official Secrete Act. It has legislated and bullied public and private media to include investigative reporting, censored news on the struggle in Northern Ireland and engaged in extremely misleading and costly misinformation campaigns to realize its public relations objectives that are frequently with mainstream media corporation (p.3). In the U.S., the government has also recurrently used ‘national security’ as a excuse for withholding significant information on public matters like radiation experiments on civilians, the threat of radiation wastes, and foreign policy actions. Immense secret police and synchronized information policy campaigns have been deployed by the state to fight civil rights activist like Martin Luther King Jr. and oppositional movements to foreign interventions and wars. Increase of the Soviet military threat by means of invented evidence in the Cold War years was standard operating procedure. More significantly, U.S. government agencies like the CIA have also signed up mainstream and foreign journalist to plant stories that were often fallacious. In numerous countries, physical threats to journalist and widespread use of inducement have helped make the media servants of government misinformation. For instance, in Guatemala, forty-eight journalists were murdered in the years 1978-85, and media dissent has been understandably modest. In Mexico, dozens of journalist were murdered and have been affected by widespread corruption (Herman and McChesney 1997:3). 2.2. Global Media and War With the growth of other mass and communication media, radio, film, television, the Internet, the media have played an ever more contentious role during war. Attention was given to mass media, predominantly television, during the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, as efforts were made to give details of the American defeat in the Southeast Asian conflict. The BBC broadcaster Robin Day as stated by Gorman and McLean (2002) expressed a predominantly influential view when he observed, “One wonders if in future a democracy which has uninhibited television coverage in every home will ever be able to fight a war”. In succeeding limited wars and in peacekeeping operations in the final decades of the 20th century, particularly global media surfaced the relationship between the military and the media has received increasing attention. An examination of the role of media in war in this period highlights the nature of the relationship between media and state, media and public opinion. Consequently, the term ‘media war’ is now commonplace, but it is of relatively recent origin, having come into common usage during the Gulf War in 1991 (p.173). Media theorist have often note that there were very few images in the 1991 Gulf War coverage either of soldiers in action on the ground or of the dead who were killed in the conflict. Bignell (2003) explains that it significant to the analysis of the Gulf War coverage that the dominant sources of television images were those provided by Western journalist, and those images provided to them by the commanders of the alliance of nations fighting against Saddam Hussein, the Western allies’ opponent. The predominant military forces in the conflict were those of the United States, assisted by British troops and allies closer to the scene of the conflict such as Saudi Arabia. The stated reason for the conflict was the invasion of Kuwait by the Iraqi armed forces commanded by the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. The Western allies aimed to eject Iraqi troops from Kuwait, and to safeguard the relationships between Western nations and countries in the Gulf area such as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, which supply oil to the developed world (p.247). Although the conflict was portrayed largely as a way of protecting Kuwait and other neighbouring nations from the aggression of Iraq, commentators both at the time and since have argued that the war was instead about the maintenance of Western influence over oil supplies. Moreover, to show the international authority of the United States as the world’s only remaining superpower after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1989. The ways that television coverage focused on particular aspects of this complex situation and excluded others became the focus of widespread debate about the power and influence of television in the contemporary global media landscape. For critics, the function of television was not primarily to provide knowledge or information about the day-to-day events of the war or the experience of those who fought in it. Instead, television was manipulated as a largely passive instrument to reinforce the hegemony of the United States and to promote the effectiveness of its military technology. The Gulf War can described as a ‘television war’ not only because television coverage in national broadcasting and in the international television sources such as CNN was so significant to the public’s understanding of it. The war was also a television war because television technology was a component of the weapons used in the war itself (Bignell 2003:247). In the Iraq conflict according to Hackett and Zhao (2005), war and occupation can be interpreted as a tragic illustration of an essential absurdity of our times. Democracies fight wars allegedly to promote democracy but end up undermining it both at home and abroad. In the process, they frustrate the citizenry and undermine the very idea and enabling environment of independent media. War and democracy Hacket and Zhao (2005) added do not go well together as when democracies go to war, noble motives are usually brought forward, but the conduct of the war itself, which always serves certain interest, unavoidably puts the democratic ethos at risk. War force citizens in democracies to accept that a smaller group of people make decisions with larger consequences than in any other situation. In times of war, media freedom is reduced, through either censorship or self-censorship. However, the war on Iraq was different in several ways. Even before it started, the largest-ever pre-war antiwar movement had been initiated but most governments in Western democracies chose to ignore it. Indeed, it seems that this was the fist war in which actual reality was not only influenced or overshadowed by a manipulated virtual reality but in which the bonds between the two were deliberately cut. Neither the decision makers behind the war nor media-consuming Western citizens in general had a decent understanding of the real Iraq. Iraq was an information black hole where the Iraqi people, society, and culture were mad invisible. Iraqi media, as well as mainstream Western media, mistook their leaders for rational players. While that can be expected in authoritarian regimes, free media could be expected to practice investigative journalism and break through to some empirical reality. Regrettably, they remained uncritically inside what could appropriately be termed the military-industrial-media complex, one that is known for transparency or for inviting in investigative reporters. (p.185). The extent to which many Western armed forces professionalized their approach towards media operation, Price and Thompson (2002) explains, has received considerable attention since the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Because conflicts like Desert Storm have high media profiles, the scholarly community interested in communications issues likewise tends to focus upon them as examples of analyzing government propaganda and official censorship, disinformation, and other so-called ‘dirty tricks’ like psychological warfare. In this respect, the manipulation of information in support of military or political objectives is framed in a somewhat negative sense, as a threat to democratic freedom of thought and expression. During the Gulf War, the allied coalition waged what is widely believed to have been a highly successful media war. This media war was made successful by allied domination of the global media agenda. This is because the notion of ‘information as a weapon’ has evolved into one of ‘information as a tool’ in the conflicts other than war that characterised the 1990s. Essentially, there two reasons for this, the first was that international interventions, as they succeeded the peacekeeping operations of the Cold War, no longer involved merely keeping opposing warring factions apart. Soldiers were traditionally trained to fight soldiers but now they had increasingly to interact with civilians. The second factor was that the traditional battlefields of the past, where soldiers knew the rules of engagement and the limits of their ability to behave in certain ways, transformed into a new kind of environment where new skills were necessary to achieve the objectives of the intervention. In other words, in operations like the ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Kosovo or Bosnia before it, the real work began after the battle. This has tended to receive inadequate media coverage and thus scant scholarly attention (p.314) 2.3. Information Warfare The theoretical and descriptive aspects of the shift to information warfare by the military have, by contrast, been extensively covered. However, the control of information as part of military strategy was always present. The potential for information mastery and information dependence displayed during the Gulf War led, together with other factors, to continuing changes in military strategy and office training and large-scale differences in patterns of defence expenditures in what was to be a be ‘knowledge-based’ military (Price and Thompson 2002:314). Faced with ‘a battle for the hearts and minds’ and the need to tell moderate Muslims that the U.S. is now waging a war against Islam, in 2001, the U.S. considered advertising on Al-Jazeera TV. According to Thussu and Freedman (2003), Charlotte Beers, the State Department’s chief of public diplomacy, said the State Department was investigating new ways to reach out to Arab audiences (p.158). Moreover, the US government even planned to launch a TV station to rival Al-Jazeera. Initiative 9/11 put half a billion dollars into a channel that would compete in the region with Al-Jazeera, and that would be aimed specifically at younger Muslims who are seen as anti-American. Fierce competition to reach out for Arab audiences through the net also led CNN officially to launch its Arabic website in January 2002, operated from Dubai by Arab journalist. The content of the site is complementary to CNN international. The Arabic service of the Voice of America has also been suffering from a poor audience share in the Arab world (Thussu and Freedman 2003:159). The events of September 11, 2001 and their aftermath posed new challenges to the mainstream Western and Arab state-run media. Al Jazeera’s coverage of the war in Afghanistan and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict turned out to be more than the American government could bear without fighting back. The battle to win over Arab and Muslim public opinion led to the launch of a new media strategy. If its plans to broadcast in English become a reality, Al-Jazeera could be seen to a pose a challenge to traditional global media players. However, given the economics of satellite television there are several imponderables. Al-Jazeera became internationally known because it was covering a war where the Western cameras were not present, at least initially. Nevertheless, if Al-Jazeera will continue to provide a fresh perspective on international issues, especially reporting the ‘war on terrorism’, it could create a niche for itself in international broadcasting and thus enrich global media discourse. In a significant role reversal, it may even be able to influence Western public opinion. The question that remains to be answered is whether the world’s only superpower would put up with a daring and different television satellite channel like Al-Jazeera, making its programmes accessible to a global public and helping to shape its opinion (Thussu and Freedman 2003:159). 2.4. Impacts of Global Media The United States fails to explain the complex range of economic and national issues that confront the world today. Norris et. al. (2003) explains that if news organizations take advantage of global resources they will be able to counter the gun-barrel vision produced by political, military, and cultural frames at home. The way news about terrorism is frame is both contentious and consequential. In a society that is consensual around acts of terrorism, the domestic news frames of terrorism, the domestic news frames of terrorism can go unchallenged. Government elites and journalists will usually largely concur in their perceptions about the conflict and the most appropriate steps necessary to contain the threat (p.248). Even if politicians and journalist have doubts or disagreements, they will probably suppress explicit criticism out of concern for damaging public morale or fear of public backlash. The U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 is a case in point. The consensual or one-sided news frames leaves little room for democratic debate. In divided societies, opposing sides can frame news about conflict differently, such as by Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. The competing frames provide the possibility of debate, to the extent that they penetrate the warring communities, although this process will probably not lead to the kind of deliberation bridging social divides that helps to resolve conflict (Norris et. al. 2003:298). In the age of global media, the reach of competing frames may be enhanced. Information about 9/11 that had been withheld from the U.S. public, penetrated the media via reports of debates in the British House of Commons. CNN reported information about U.S. operations in Afghanistan that had been similarly withheld from U.S. audiences, by utilizing news coverage from Al-Jazeera. Official hostility to media inclusion of competing global frames was exemplified when the U.S. called on American network television executives to refrain from broadcasting statements by Osama bin Laden. This incident illustrates the extent to which global media is a recognized threat to official frames, even in an open and democratic society (Norris et. al. 2003:298). In their work on the global media, Herman and McChesney (1997) according to Giddens and Griffiths (2006) explore the effects of international media on the workings of democratic states. On the one hand, the spread of global media source can successfully put pressure on authoritarian governments to loosen their hold over state-controlled broadcasting outlets. As it becomes increasingly difficult to contain media products within national borders, many ‘closed’ societies are discovering that the media can become a powerful force in support of democracy. Even in a multiparty political system like that of India, we saw the commercialization of television allowed more prominence for the views of opposition politicians. The global media have allowed for the widespread dissemination of viewpoints such individualism, the respect for human rights and promoting the rights of minorities. However, the dangers of the global media order the threat it poses to the healthy functioning of democracy are also stressed. As the global media become increasingly concentrated and commercialised, they encroach on the functioning of the important ‘public sphere’ like we mentioned earlier. Commercialised media, they claim, are beholden to the power of advertising revenue and are compelled to favour content that guarantees high ratings and sales. Consequently, entertainment will necessarily triumph over controversy and debate. This form of self-censorship by media weakens citizen participation in public affairs and undermines people’s understandings of public issues. The global media are little more than the ‘new missionaries of global capitalism’. Non-commercial media space is steadily taken over by those who are eager to put it to the best economic use. In their eyes, the culture of entertainment promoted by media institutions is steadily shrinking the public sphere and undermining the workings of democracy (p.618). The Internet is one of main contributors and manifestation of current processes of globalization. Nevertheless, globalization is also transforming the international reach and impact of other forms of media as well. Although the media have always had international dimensions such the gathering of news stories and the distribution of films overseas, most media companies operated within specific domestic markets in accordance with regulation form national governments. The media industry was also differentiated in to distinct sectors, which for the most part, cinema, print media, radio, and television broadcasting all operated independently of one another. However, in the past few decades profound transformation have taken place within the media industry. National markets have given way to a fluid global market, while new technologies have led to the fusion of forms of media that were once distinct. By the start of the 21st century, the global media market was dominated by a group of various multinational corporations whose role in the production, distribution, and marketing of news and entertainment could be felt in almost every country in the world. In a recent study on globalization according to Giddens and Griffiths (2006) reveals that a small number of powerful corporations now dominate the global media. The small-scale independent media companies have gradually been incorporated into highly centralized media conglomerates. There was a noticeable shift of ownership from public to private. Traditionally, media and telecommunications companies in almost all countries were partially or owned fully by the state. In the past few decades, the liberalization of the business environment and the relaxing of regulation have led to the privatization of media companies in many countries. Media companies no longer operate strictly within national boundaries. Likewise, media ownership rules have been loosened to allow cross-border investment and acquisition. The media industry has diversified and is much less segmented than in previous times. Enormous media conglomerates such as AOL Time Warner produce and distribute a mix of media content, including music, news, print media, and television programming. Moreover, there has been a distinctive trend towards alliances between companies in different segments of the media industry. Telecommunication firms, computer hardware and software manufacturers, and media ‘content’ producers are increasingly involved in corporate mergers as media forms become increasingly integrated. The globalization of the media has thrust horizontal forms of communications to centre stage. If traditional media forms ensured that communication occurred within the boundaries of nation-states in a vertical fashion, globalization is leading the horizontal integration of communication (p.619). Commercial media concentrate on war news as drama and entertainment, the goodies against the baddies. Public media often attempt to appeal to a more sophisticated audience, but their coverage of war news is subject to their sources of funding. Community media often respond to the perspectives of their own constituency and sources of funding. However, the first casualty of every war according to Kamalipour and Snow (2004) is the truth. There is of course no single truth but the truths of the various contending parties are often turned into blatant propaganda. Ideally, journalists are supposed to be in charge as they see them. However, journalists are fundamentally no different from other observers. They are hostage to the socioeconomic and political structures of which they are a part. They can try to be dispassionate in a passionate situation. Nevertheless, they can do so often at the risk of being labelled a traitor and losing their jobs. Courageous journalists are often conspicuous by their absence (p.238). In the present global situation, the commercial media empires generally see their interest as closely tied to an emerging American empire. In framing their international news, they often follow the prevailing ideology of the U.S. government. This could be clearly seen during the second Iraq War, in 2003, where in both news and analysis, FOX News in the United States blatantly supported the Anglo-American invasion. In contrast, Al-Jazeera’s BBC style of independence, has gained itself an enviable place in the formation of Arab public opinion. By reaching out to a wide spectrum of opinion, Al –Jazeera thus functioned as a corrective to the U.S. government and commercial media coverage (Kamalipour and Snow 2004:238). 3. Conclusion Global media undoubtedly played a very important role during war and other conflicts. It plays an essential role in the functioning of democracies and with the advent of new technologies; media played an ever more controversial role during war. The role of global media in war highlights the nature of the relationship between media and the state, media and public opinion. During the Gulf War, the ways that television coverage focused only on one specific aspects of this complicated condition while ignoring the others show the influence of television in the contemporary global media landscape. In times of war, media freedom is reduced and the actual reality manipulated. The manipulation of information in support of military or political objectives is framed negatively that is becoming a threat to democratic freedom of thought and expression. The Allied coalition domination of the global media during the Gulf War illustrates a highly successful media war. In the age of global media, the reach of competing frames is enhanced. Information that are being withheld in events like the 9/11 or interviews with Osama Bin Laden are revealed through the global media. This shows the extent to which global media is a recognized threat to official frames even in an open and democratic society. We can therefore conclude that the global media has an enormous impact on political, humanitarian, and social policy of nations at war. 4. 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