Chapter 3: The role of the media

"America at War!' the airwaves cry
Blind to the consequence of what that means
When far away, the corpses bleeding lie
And media withholds the limb-strewn scenes."
Ian Reed [1]

For governments, the media is an integral part of a war effort both in mobilising public opinion in favour of military action and in maintaining support for a war that may last months or years.

Many wars have been fought based on an agenda of combating human rights abuses or diffusing a threat to global peace and security. Meanwhile sub-agendas such as business interests, political alliances and the protection or development of world power, are hidden from view by officials.

The ICHRP (2002) has expressed concern over the misuse of human rights concerns in war propaganda, stating: "Governments and other authorities have often used human rights to manipulate or inflame public opinion, particularly when they are involved in wars."[2]

A function of war propaganda is therefore to deflect attention from hidden agendas to maximise support for government actions. The ICHRP (2002) provides an example: "A 1991 report on governmental restrictions in the United States after the Second Gulf War concluded that 'information was restricted or manipulated not for national security purposes, but for political purposes - to protect the image and priorities of the Department of Defence and its civilian leaders, including the President' "[3]

This role is in conflict with the rights and needs of citizens who depend on the media to inform them accurately about the rationale for war and its progress, so that they can make educated decisions about backing their government in its actions or lobbying for change.

The media therefore has a crucial role in refusing to simply parrot the government line and in uncovering hidden facts. Article 1 of the 1978 Declaration on Fundamental Principles concerning the Contribution of the Mass Media to Strengthening Peace and International Understanding, to the Promotion of Human Rights and to Countering Racialism, Apartheid and Incitement to War (Declaration on Mass Media) reinforces this point:

"The strengthening of peace and international understanding, the promotion of human rights and the countering of racialism, apartheid and incitement to war demand a free flow and a wider and better balanced dissemination of information. To this end, the mass media have a leading contribution to make."[4]

This role is not only a function of working toward a peaceful world, but also of democracy itself to which all parties to the United Nations subscribe.[5] As part of a democratic society, voters need to judge a government's policies and practices not just through governmental reports and statements but via material provided via third parties. As Denis McQuail (1997) summarises: ".democratic political process . require the services of public channels of communication; the full concept of citizenship presupposes an informed and participant body of citizen."[6]

This process is clearly undermined by the use of propaganda. According to Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell in their analysis of propagandic techniques and definitions (1992) we "have witnessed the increasing use of professional 'manipulators' of public opinion, especially in the political arena. Unchecked, this trend threatens . to subvert the very foundations of our democratic society."[7]

3.1 Media responsibility

The media therefore has responsibilities within democratic society, including to report the truth. The degree to which this is possible is hotly debated in the field of media ethics and communications theory. David Gordon (1999) for example, believes that "truth telling is a first principle in journalism, to the point where if choices must be made, truth must be given primacy over any other ethical concerns."[8]

But what does telling 'the truth' involve and whose truth is it? In order to avoid subjectivity and the presentation of a narrow viewpoint, the media it could be argued, should provide context and analysis over and above simple news briefings.

However, there are problems with such a demand:

• Firstly, historical context is unattractive for news outlets because history, even a few weeks old, is not news and is therefore superfluous to news output.
• Secondly, detailed analysis and contextual data are too lengthy for the bite-sized formats of contemporary news output.
• Finally, studies have shown that the public does not necessarily have an appetite for the broader truth it claims to have a right to (see section 3.5 below).

Meanwhile there are other barriers to the media's ability to report fully and objectively which include Government and commercial censorship and the concept of objectivity itself.

For example, by virtue of his or her upbringing and life experiences, a journalist will subconsciously filter material they consider to be valid for inclusion in a media piece. As David Gordon (1999) explains: "Often, reporters are unaware of their own perceptual biases or motivations (and) may unconsciously seek to interview only those who are well-dressed, seem rational, appear to be articulate - or who are conveniently located."[9]

While the concept of objectivity may be unrealistic, some think it is actually undesirable. David Detmer (1995) for example, argues an interesting point, saying that the unrealistic 'clamour for objectivity' actually prevents reporting which may offer an alternative, subjective view and challenge the status quo. Detmer argues that objectivity is in fact simply the majority view proposing that "conclusions which conform to a social consensus are seen as 'objective' because they do not stand out as requiring scrutiny".[10]

3.2 Context

Contextualising news is an important but often missing part of contemporary news reporting. In terms of reporting around a war, this could include reminding viewers and readers of how power balances have shifted over the years so that once allied regimes are now branded as enemies. Likewise, valuable political context, about what a State has to gain from war, over and above the righteousness of the moral high-ground would provide valuable background.

John MacArthur (2001) publisher of Harper's Magazine identifies this as a particular problem for the United States. He explains: "Americans live in a perpetual present. This is the country with the shortest attention span in the civil world, and it is a cultural problem. We don't know anything that happened 6 months ago much less 20 years ago when we supported the Afghan resistance and Bin Laden against the Soviet Union. No one remembers that we were Saddam´s ally and supporter during the Iran-Iraq war. Nobody remembers."[11]

The continual flow of short news pieces, although big in quantity can be short on quality and are unable to relay deeper meaning and context. As Philip Taylor (2003) comments on TV coverage of the Iraq war: "Discerning the truth is complicated, if anything, by the incessant television coverage from Iraq; news comes in so fast that we barely have time to evaluate its wider meaning before the next images fire in."[12]

Noam Chomsky in Necessary Illusions (1989) argues that the very structure of the media is designed to induce conformity to established doctrine. Chomsky says: "In a three-minute stretch between commercials, or in seven hundred words, it is impossible to present unfamiliar thoughts or surprising conclusions with the argument and evidence required to afford them some credibility. Regurgitation of welcome pieties faces no such problem."[13]

These welcome pieties, form what Chomsky calls "the basic presuppositions of discourse". In the case of the US, these include the assumption that foreign policy is guided by a benevolent "yearning for democracy" in the face of aggressors.[14] These presuppositions allow the media to gloss over uncomfortable facts and to paint out grey areas. Grey areas which would require deeper explanations and would risk boring or unsettling viewers who are seeking an instant news summary and confirmation of their belief system.

News segments are designed to be short, sharp and sexy and to educate the audience instantaneously. To help meet this objective, news reporting may be sensationalised so that its messages are more obvious and immediately digestible. In any number of news items, consumers are given a black and white version of grey reality where selected facts paint an impactful, morally simplistic picture.

The two sides of the story are given extreme positions and pitched against each other to leave the audience associated with the positive stereotype feeling righteous. This applies whether it is a celebrity divorce, where one partner is depicted as the saint and one the sinner, or a war.

3.3 Media Bias

Context, or lack of it, is therefore a key factor in media bias. However, it is important to stress that bias and distortion in media reports, is not just about the presence of false information, it is also about their absence.

A 2001 report by media watchdog, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting[15], found that the evening newscasts of the three commercial broadcast networks in the US (ABC, CBS and NBC) had deliberately avoided discussing the effects of bombings of civilians in the 2001 Afghanistan war. The study claimed that network journalists failed to inquire about the numbers of casualties, nor did they discuss the legal implications of these bombings. Instead, they communicated the civilian casualties as a regrettable but justifiable consequence of America's military retaliation or as unverifiable Afghan propaganda.

The report concludes: "When media portray reports of civilian casualties as an attack on America, it's hardly surprising that serious reporting on the issue is scarce. It is crucial that news outlets independently investigate civilian casualties in Afghanistan - not only how many there have been, but how and why they happened."

David Detmer (1995) provides a further example of information absence in the form of US media coverage of Iran. Detmer says: "Pro-US government bias running through mass media coverage of Iran is manifested not so much in the presence of false information - that is in lies and erroneous misstatements of fact, though both of these undoubtedly do occur - as in the absence of essential information needed to make (accurate) sense of the subject at hand. The problem, in short, is primarily one of omission, rather than commission."[16]

The absence of relevant facts is harder to address than the presence of falsehoods. The latter at least carries the promise of legal recourse for aggrieved parties, for example via domestic legislation for libel or slander.

The media's attribution of the source of stories is also problematic because as long as the media attribute their story to a source and quote that source accurately, they are being 'truthful'. It could be argued that a journalist or media outlet does not have the resources or time to cross-check every single report or quote given to them by an official spokesperson and that to do so would hinder the news-making process so much as to make it commercially uncompetitive.

According to David Gordon (1999), attribution is not an acceptable media practise without verification of the facts, says Gordon, "the media . have the responsibility to assess the validity or truth of the information they disseminate . (to) allow readers, listeners and viewers to reach their own conclusions."[17]

The implications of such one-sided, albeit 'honest' reporting, can be significant. An example of this is the 1988 shooting of an Iranian civilian airliner by an American warship, the USS Vincennes. All of the claims made at the time by the US government and therefore by the US media which reported their statements, are now known to be false.[18] Detmer comments:

"The most objectionable feature of the mass media's coverage of the Vincennes incident is not inaccuracy, for, as a result of the mass media's use of attribution, the great bulk of that coverage was, in the strictest sense, accurate. The biggest problem was the failure to present any information that would undermine the government's story or at least to suggest that it was dubitable."[19]

However, this is an area of media ethics about which there is debate. Daniel Hallin (1994) for example, sees attribution not as a violation of duty, but as a positive norm of media ethics. Talking of the Vietnam war he says: "It was not simply the use of official sources which gave officials so much influence over news content. It was the fact that the norms of objective journalism required the journalist to pass on official information without comment on its accuracy or relevance."[20]

3.4 News branding

Media's role as government inquisitor applies not just to the substance of facts but also to the descriptive terms used in describing factual incidents.

The September 11 attacks were immediately described by the President of the United States, the British Prime Minister and many other government officials as an attack 'on civilisation' or 'the civilized world'. This metaphor was immediately reiterated by the world's media, not as an attributable quote, but as a factual piece of information.[21] Representatives of Hollywood's major studios and television networks met with a White House delegation in November 2001 and agreed on six themes they could address in future productions including "the September 11 attacks were an attack against civilization and require a global response"[22].

The bare facts however, were that it was an attack on New York and Washington. The term 'civilisation', used as a metaphor for the Western world, was used emotively and inaccurately.

The word civilisation is used in a legal context in the ICCPR, but not as a dividing line between cultures, rather as an inclusive acknowledgement of different cultural systems to which the 152 State parties to the ICCPR belong. Article 31 of the ICCPR states: "In the election of the Committee, consideration shall be given to equitable geographical distribution of membership and to the representation of the different forms of civilization and of the principal legal systems."

The same applies to the 'war on terrorism' descriptor adopted by the US administration. This led to the branding of related news coverage using similar terms including 'Operation Iraqi Freedom' and 'War Against Terror', used by the three major US networks[23]. An example of such packaging is CNN's use of a 'war against terror' logo in the weeks running up to the Iraq war[24].

The use of the logo during news segments relating to the then-impending Iraq war, suggested firstly that this was a war with assumed legitimacy (how could anyone not be against terror?) and secondly that there were established links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, the terrorist group responsible for the September 11 attacks. All before any content of the news items was presented or analysed.

The ICHRP (2002) has expressed concern over such usage saying: "Many media adopted without question the tag 'war against terrorism' in relation to the 2001 US attacks on Afghanistan. Yet a moment's reflection shows that the phrase is so imprecise as to be meaningless.For journalists to use such terminology is an abdication of their professional responsibility to report and explain."[25]

This branding of news and the use of logos to aid public understanding and marketing of the news media, blurs the lines between entertainment programming and traditional news reporting. Danny Schechter (2003) comments: "Sensation-driven cable news limits analytical journalism and in-depth issue-oriented coverage."[26]

Where it may be commercially acceptable to offer this style of news reporting, you could argue that a caveat to the programmes should be produced saying that a full presentation of facts is not realistic in such news reporting and that some of the stories may be therefore be misrepresented. Just as the BBC prefixes some broadcasts with 'our reporter is subject to reporting restrictions' when a journalists is embedded with troops (see section 3.6 below).

Claude Moisy, quoted in the ICHRP's Challenge of Human Rights Reporting (2002), stresses the importance of differentiating between advocacy journalism, information journalism, entertainment journalism and promotional journalism in this way, saying that "nothing is more dangerous for freedom of information in the world, than to assign to the news media any other responsibility than to report the facts as well as possible."[27]

3.5 Public right versus public appetite

While the result of such news presentation may be a public which is misinformed and ignorant, there is much evidence to show that while the public have a theoretical right to information, they do not necessarily have an appetite for it.

Civil society on the one hand cries out in defiance of censorship and demands the truth, but on the other hand rejects that truth when it is told. Section 1.2 above provides one example, three more follow:

• Phillip Knightly in his book "The First Casualty" (2000) tells of an incident in the Vietnam War when in August 1965, CBS showed a harrowing documentary depicting US Marines turning their flamethrowers on a village. The footage included Vietnamese children and elderly couples pleading for their homes to be spared. Commenting on the result of the broadcast, Knightly says: "CBS's switchboard was jammed with calls from viewers attacking the film as a piece of Communist propaganda abetting the enemy's cause, a viewer reaction that must have made CBS think twice about using films of a similar sort again."[28]

• Knightly provides another example, this time from the first Gulf war: "The military and American and British governments realised from their polls that the public knew that the news from the Gulf was being censored - and almost eighty percent thought that this was a good idea. In fact, nearly sixty percent thought that the authorities should exert more control over the coverage of the war."[29]

• Finally, Morrison and Tumber provide an example from the Falklands War concerning an early evening news bulletin which had reported the funeral of Argentine seamen killed in British attacks: "The BBC switchboard received many calls from the public criticising the 'undue reverence' of the report."[30]

A sizeable part of the public are perhaps unwilling to take responsibility for what their governments' are doing in their name. As Knightly concludes: "Images of civilian death and destruction violated this silent agreement between the government and their public - go to war as long as its quick, neat and with no blood."

This is reinforced by Garth Jowett and Victoria O'Donnell's (1992) propaganda theory. This holds that there are two kinds of propaganda. In the first, the audience believes a propagandist regarding their spoken intent, and is unaware of hidden messages. However in the second case, mutual reciprocity occurs when the propagandist exploits an audience's beliefs or values to fan the fires of prejudice or self interest. "The audience's needs - the reinforcement of prejudicial or self-serving attitudes - get fulfilled and spoken, but the persuader's needs - the attainment of a selfish end through the audience's compliance - get fulfilled but not spoken."[31]

It is this latter form of propaganda which gives rise to the 'silent agreement', which allows the audience to take comfort from media representations of good forces against evil and which absolves them from looking at the implications of a war they are supporting. 

But does the public have a right to be protected from such images? Kevin Williams (1992) notes that wars prosecuted in a democratic society are done so in the name of the citizens of that democracy and those citizens are therefore responsible for the consequences of that war. "Surely one of the responsibilities in wartime is to see - or at least be provided with the opportunity to see - the price being paid to prosecute the war, whether this is the body of your neighbour's son or innocent civilians killed in the crossfire"[32].

Furthermore, international human rights standards require the public to be educated about the universality of human rights norms, allowing them to see all of humanity as deserving of a common minimum standard of rights and to realise the implications when those rights are not respected[33]. Thus in human rights terms, ignorance is not bliss. As Pastor Martin Niemöller, imprisoned by the Nazis, famously said[34]:

"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Next they came for the Catholics, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Catholic.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me."

The implication of these words is that international human rights standards require a common responsibility, which is embodied by the basic principles of human rights education.

3.6 Role of government

Under the various UN Human Rights treaties, States carry the responsibility for ensuring freedom of the press. This has a legal basis in for example Article 19 of the ICCPR on freedom of opinion and expression and article 15 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR)[35] which concerns the right to take part in cultural life including steps necessary for "the diffusion of science and culture".

Meanwhile article 2 of the CIRC requires freedom of the press in its acknowledgement that:

"The professional responsibility of correspondents and information agencies requires them to report facts without discrimination and in their proper context and thereby to promote respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, to further international understanding and co-operation and to contribute to the maintenance of international peace and security."

However, supporting the right to freedom of the press is often in conflict with the aims of the state, which may wish to dominate media output to protect state power. Government control is of paramount importance in time of war when continued support for the war concerned, and ultimately therefore victory, can depend on media and public opinion. However, it is at exactly this time when the media can be dependent on government for access to information about the said war.

The dilemma facing media who want this access is played out in the roles of unilateral versus embedded reporters, whereby the embedded reporters exchange their independence for access to information and army protection, while unilateral reporters enjoy both the benefits and disadvantages of going it alone.

One of the most famous unilateral reporters, Robert Fisk, has been criticised by embedded journalists for jeopardising media access through disobeying army instructions. For example in the first Gulf war, Fisk discovered that fighting remained in the Iraqi town of Khafji long after the allies claimed it was liberated. He was harshly criticised by an NBC-TV pool reporter of whom Fisk said: "For the NBC reporter, however, the privileges of the pool and the military rules attached to it were more important than the right of journalists to do their job."[36]

The alleged control of embedded reporters by government officials also offers them protection from less favourable treatment metered out to unilateral reporters. The International Press Institute (2003) claims that it was "alarmed at the vast number of press freedom violations in cases where non-embedded journalists were harassed, detained, had their equipment confiscated, were fired upon, and in many cases deported."[37]

For some journalists, being on side with government troops is revealed through use of the word "we" when reporting troop activity, as has been widely reported in relation to embedded journalists[38]. Other journalists are explicit in their support for the government. In the Iraq war 2003 for example, Fox news took an openly pro-war stance in its new output, despite its seemingly ironic strapline of  "We report, You decide"[39]. During the conflict, Oliver North an embedded commentator for Fox News said: "You're an American before you're a journalist."[40]

For media reporters who do not comply, governmental pressure can encourage their cooperation. Paul McMasters of the Freedom Forum comments: "Federal officials, after all, have what journalists need: the news. A journalist's usefulness to her news organization flames out if she burns a source by complaining about the ground rules, let alone resists abiding by them: Sources dry up, phone calls go unreturned, questions go unrecognised, and requests for interviews rot in the in-box."[41]

This pressure can also be more severe such as extreme criticism of journalists by government officials. For example during the Falklands conflict in 1982, Conservative MP John Page accused BBC2's Newsnight journalist Peter Snow of making comments which 'verged on treason', after Snow weighed up Argentinean and British official statements to establish which were more credible.[42] During the same period, Morrison and Tumber (1988) report that BBC's Chairman and Director General designate were 'roughed up' and 'roasted alive' by more than 100 Conservative members at a meeting of the backbench Conservative Party Media Group.[43]

What is clear, is that governments rely on a combination of tactics to relay their side of the story through the media. These include:

• Criticism of the media
  
  
• The use of embedded reporters and media pools, which Paul Lagasse of the Digital Freedom Network (2002) says "reflects the administration's determination to provide citizens with a centrally controlled, carefully crafted image"[44]
  
  
• The use of stage-managed press conferences and photo opportunities.

With the prevalence of television, such imagery can be hugely impactful but, by nature of the bite-sized news briefs discussed above, can often mask the true reality of the events they report. During the Iraq war 2003, the US administration applied itself to the stage managing of images for television, from the $250,000 set at the United States Central Command forward headquarters in Doha, Qatar[45] to the dramatic PR images of April 9th 2003 when US troops pulled down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Fardus Square, Baghdad.

The BBC's six o clock news programme described the falling of the statue as a "momentous event"[46], British newspapers were filled with pictures and reports of "the jubilation in Baghdad"[47] and BBC News Online reported "jubilant scenes in Baghdad's main square as crowds of Iraqis gathered to celebrate" and "an unprecedented show of disdain for Saddam Hussein". BBC News Online reported emotively that "as the image of the Iraqi leader tumbled to the ground the decades of pain and anger welled up and the crowd surged forward to jump on the statue to smash it to pieces."[48]

April 9th 2003: Close-up image of Saddam Hussein's statue which accompanied stories of jubilant Iraqis. Photo from BBC News Online

April 9th 2003: Long shot photograph shows Fardus Square, Baghdad as US troops pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein. “Hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling but more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras.” Photo and annotation from Independent Media Centre

According to the Independent Media Centre (2003) the close-up action video of the statue being destroyed was broadcast around the world as proof of a massive uprising. However still photos revealed a long-shot view of Fardus Square:

"It's empty save for the U.S. Marines, the International Press, and a small handful of Iraqis. There are no more than 200 people in the square at best. The Marines have the square sealed off and guarded by tanks. A US mechanized vehicle is used to pull the statue of Saddam from its base.

"The entire event is being hailed as an equivalent of the Berlin Wall falling... but even a quick glance of the long-shot photo shows something more akin to a carefully constructed media event tailored for the television cameras."[49]

According to Laura Miller of PR Watch (2002), as well as stage managed photo calls like the one above, the Bush administration has also used outright disinformation to bolster the case for war. In December 2001 for example, CBS 60 Minutes interviewed a former CIA agent who refuted the allegation that September 11 airplane hijacker Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official several months before the deadly attacks on September 11.

However, according to the CBS report, "despite a lack of evidence that the meeting took place the item was cited by administration officials as high as Vice President Dick Cheney and ended up being reported so widely that two-thirds of Americans polled by the Council on Foreign Relations believe Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks of 9/11."[50]

Thus misinformation and war propaganda can influence the attitudes and misperceptions of a whole nation.

Although the above example indicates that the mass media is able to influence the general public, it is worth noting that the effect that good, bad or indifferent reporting has on its consumers is an area of ongoing debate.

Media Effects author, Sonia Livingstone, (1997) comments: "Despite the volume of research, the debate about media effects - whether it can be shown empirically that specific mass media messages, typically those transmitted by television, have specific, often detrimental effects on the audiences who are exposed to them - remains unresolved."[51]

Similarly the power of television in wartime has been hotly debated. The Vietnam war for example is renowned as the war in which media caused a backlash of public opinion as a result of graphic news coverage. However, there is a different side to this story as Phillip Knightly (2000) explains:  ".a survey conducted for Newsweek in 1967 suggested a remarkably different conclusion: that television had encouraged a majority of viewers to support the war."[52]

However, if substantiable, the media effects implications of war propaganda are significant, leading to an audience mindset, at the foundation of which is fear. George Gerbner (1995) claims for example that "images of conflict, violence, and terror, presented without historical perspective and balance, evoke irrational fears and fuel fires of vengeance and repression, further exacerbating the invisible crises upon us."[53]

3.7 Censorship of media by media

Who carries the responsibility for fair and accurate reporting? Is it the journalists themselves, their editors or media owners and what is the impact of stakeholders such as consumers and advertisers? The different motivations and pressures applied to the media in censorship of wartime news is therefore a complex one, involving different actors and ethical frameworks.

The interplay between all these groups means that the final media output has been influenced by a manifold of different sources, and therefore holding the individual author to moral or legal account for an act of omission or commission may not be realistic.

John MacArthur (2003) believes the Iraq War 2003 was "the most self-censored war in history", saying: "95% of the war coverage was beside the point. It had nothing to do with the war. It was trucks rolling down the highway . boxes being loaded and unloaded, GIs talking about feeling lonely."[54]

Journalists may opt for self-censorship for a variety of reasons including personal loyalty as an embedded reporter, patriotism, to best-ensure promotion, or simply from a weight of official pressure. CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, commented on the Iraq war that "my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."[55]

Many media proprietors are guilty of censoring their journalist's work and opinions. For example in the Iraq war 2003, MSNBC's Ashleigh Banfield was openly critical of the war's sanitised media coverage. The "Hollywood Reporter" noted that NBC News president Neal Shapiro "has taken correspondent Ashleigh Banfield to the woodshed" for a speech in which she criticized the networks for portraying the Iraq war as "glorious and wonderful". An official NBC spokesperson later told the press, "She and we both agreed that she didn't intend to demean the work of her colleagues, and she will choose her words more carefully in the future."[56]

Meanwhile pro-government media apply pressure by rallying against media which display rebel tendencies. For example The Sun newspaper in the UK turned on the BBC, Guardian and Mirror during the Falklands conflict, accusing the Mirror and BBC of treason because of their war reporting.[57] Speaking also of the Falklands, Phillip Knightly (2000), comments: "Some newspapers contributed as a matter of policy. They supported the government all the way, even to the extent of attacking other newspapers or television programmes that expressed the slightest reservation about Britain's actions. This helped create a climate in which to dissent was little short of treason."[58]

The flip side to the resistance of censorship is the desire for censorship, with some journalists preferring explicit censorship rather than self-censorship at their own discretion. Kevin Williams (1992) discusses the Vietnam war, in which it is widely believed there was less formal censorship than in other wars. An increase in self-censorship during the war, he says, proved that many journalists preferred censorship being "uncomfortable with taking the responsibility for what they wrote."[59]

An added factor in the desire for censorship is that ironically censorship can increase access to information for media workers. As Drew Middleton, military correspondent of the New York Times, wrote in 1972: "As long as all copy was submitted to censors before transmission, people in the field, from generals down, felt free to discuss top secret materials with reporters. On three trips to Vietnam, I found generals and everyone else far more wary of talking to reporters precisely because there was no censorship."[60]

3.8 Commercial concerns

The unattractiveness of 'un-newsworthy' information and the short, sharp format of news coverage, both prohibit the contextualising of news output and are largely governed by commercial concerns. The need to satisfy an audience with a short attention span and to maximise audience numbers and advertising revenue can therefore be barriers to accurate reporting.

With commercial factors taking prevalence, Kevin Williams (1992) comments that in a competitive mass media market "truth must take second place to the swift production of copy"[61].

The ICHRP (2002) has expressed its concern over the influence of commercial factors in journalism, saying: "Driven by new technologies and the lure of lucrative mass markets, media owners are themselves guilty of upsetting the balance of interest between journalism as an instrument of democracy and its exploitation as a tradable commodity."[62]

Commercial censorship also threatens freedom of the media, whereby the means of communication are controlled by a handful of multi-billion dollar organisations, leaving information output in the overall control of a small number of individuals.

Cable television in the United States has consolidated dramatically, with just a few companies controlling most of the industry, dominated by Comcast and Time Warner. According to the Centre for Digital Democracy US government agency the FCC stands accused of weakening cable ownership safeguards and planning measures, which will permit further control by even fewer companies.[63]

A further example of this media monopolisation is lobbying by media giants in the US to take control of the electromagnetic spectrum. This means that a selected number of companies would have complete control over which media are able to broadcast, rather than the electromagnetic system being owned by governments on behalf of their citizens.[64]

With exactly this kind of situation in mind, the Vienna Declaration on Public Broadcasting 1993, outlined a range of measures to ensure media freedom, including in paragraph 10: ". the abolition of monopolies and . of all forms of discrimination in broadcasting and frequency allocation, as well as the abolition of all barriers to the launching of new private media outlets."

Danny Schechter (2003) draws a parallel between the benefits media businesses are likely to gain from new FCC rules and media support for government policies. Schechter comments: "Is it unthinkable to suggest that big media companies who stand to make windfall profits once . FCC chief Michael Powell, engineers rules that permit more media mergers and concentration . would . want to appease and please (the) administration?"[65]

Whatever the sources of censorship and distortion and whomever is culpable, war propaganda and its tools of censorship and misinformation undoubtedly distort factual reporting. The effect is the potential violation and undermining of a range of human rights which will be discussed in the next chapter.

 

References

[1] Ian Reed Fool's Paradise Sonnet http://www.reedandwrite.com/