Representation of war in the media

Representation of war in the media

by Horváth Gyula

Almost every time we watch the daily news or read a newspaper, we find reports about some sort of war or conflict that is currently happening. But how faithfully do these news reports represent the war that is their topic? That is the topic of this paper, and it will examine two examples after first giving a brief history of war photography.

While war was most likely always mentioned in the media, the custom of bringing reporters and photographers to the battlefield is fairly new. Griffin (2010) says that according to Brothers (1997) it is “…the Spanish Civil War […] in which photographs of conflict, destruction and death first became a routine part of modern journalism coverage” (p. 4), with the work of Robert Capa and David Seymour. When the media discovered how popular this new genre of photography was, it became one of the most prestigious genres, with war photographers being “daring and heroic figures” (Griffin, 2010, p. 4). By World War Two, the presence of photographers was taken for granted.

In the United States, Vietnam is often cited as the war where the media had total freedom over what they published as a story, a war that had no censorship. Cyrus (2004) brings the Vietnam war as a counterexample when she discusses how the reporting of the Iraqi war was censored. Griffin (2010), however, disagrees with this and provides several examples when the photos of photographers were either not published at all, or only several months after the event they depicted, and even then reluctantly. An example he brings up is the My Lai massacre in the March of 1968, of which a few pictures were tentatively published on 20 November, 1969. Even after that they “received limited exposure” (Griffin, 2010, p. 7). As he says, “...it was not until US troop withdrawals were already under way after 1970 that most Americans learned about such scandals as the My Lai massacre, with large segments of the population remaining untroubled by the news” (Griffin, 2010, p. 8). Thus, it seems that the belief that the Vietnam War was an uncensored one and thus damaged the support of the public is largely false.

That does not mean that the military and the government did not believe it. In the following wars, they took measures to limit the freedom of the reporters and photographers. Griffin (2010) points out that the US took inspiration from the British, who during the Falkland War only allowed a specially picked group of reporters into the war zone, and monitored what photos they sent back, often delaying them. In essence, the government decided what the war would look like.

Cyrus (2004) brings up examples of how sterile the Iraqi war looked on photos, at least from the aspect of casualties, as there were rarely any pictures of destruction, and if there were, then dead bodies were noticeably absent. Typical representations of this are an image of a soldier taking aim from a window at the city below, or of a soldier carrying a girl away from a burning car. Another image shown (one that, according to Griffin (2010), was rare) is a collapsed house surrounded by Iraqis. However, there are no dead shown, as if no one was in the house when it was bombed. Griffin (2010) agrees with Cyrus (2004) that the images released were almost completely void of the aspect of death, and mostly just showed weapons as they were launched, or even straight out of a weapon catalogue.

As we have seen, while the Vietnam War seems uncensored in hindsight, the news which was allowed in front of the public was in fact carefully measured and selected to avoid angering it. When this method seemingly failed, the pictures and recordings became even more generic and noncommittal, often reduced to images that could have come straight out of a weapons' magazine. In conclusion, we can safely assume that the media image of war is very much influenced by the government, which tries to make the war as distant and disconnected from death as possible to lessen the chance of the loss of public support.

References

Griffin, M. (2010) . Media images of war. Media, War & Conflict, 3(1), 7-41.

Cyrus, K. D. (2004) Media Representation of the Iraqui Conflict. Retrieved from http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297a/Media%20Representation%20of%20the%20Iraqui%20Conflict.doc.