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War and media: Constancy and convulsion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2005

Arnaud Mercier
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Abstract

To consider the relationship between war and the media is to look at the way in which the media are involved in conflict, either as targets (war on the media) or as an auxiliary (war thanks to the media). On the basis of this distinction, four major developments may be cited that today combine to make war above all a media spectacle: photography, which opened the door to manipulation through stage-management; live technologies, which raise the question of journalists' critical distance vis-à-vis the material they broadcast and which can facilitate the process of using them; pressure on the media and media globalization, which have led to a change in the way the political and military authorities go about making propaganda; and, finally, the fact that censorship has increasingly come into disrepute, which has prompted the authorities to think of novel ways of controlling journalists.

Type
Communication
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 87 , Issue 860: Communication , December 2005 , pp. 649 - 659
Copyright
Copyright © International Committee of the Red Cross 2005

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References

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2 On 2 April, the Associated Press quoted an anonymous official to the effect that Private Lynch had been shot and The New York Times reported that she had been “shot multiple times.” On 3 April, The Washington Post put the story on its front page and wrote, likewise quoting anonymous officials, that she had been “fighting to the death” and that “she did not want to be taken alive.” Other stories followed. Some journalists went so far as to claim that she had been raped, though Lynch herself said that she had no memory of such an incident. To this day the media and the public continue to believe in and perpetuate the myth of Private Lynch, with books and television drama taking up where the news outlets left off. See <http://www.journalism.org/resources/research/reports/war/postwar/lynch.asp> (last visited on 17 January 2006).

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