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INTERNATIONAL NEWS COVERAGE OF INSECURITY
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The civil war between the Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces (UPDF) and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rages on in Northern Uganda, leaving behind a trail of kidnappings, death and destruction despite measures to protect civilians. Ultimate security for the Acholi and others who live in the North will only come about with an end to the12-year-old conflict, which would be accomplished by negotiations between the two sides. Unfortunately, misinformation -- and a noticeable lack of information, especially from the LRA--are major impediments to determining the war's root causes and who is responsible for the instability. This paper argues that, for a successful end to the war, the government must cease its propaganda war, which is mainly being played out in an uncritical and biased media, and the LRA must be clear about its message. Honest discussion and analytical reporting will greatly facilitate the negotiation process.
A sizable portion of our everyday knowledge about Sub-Saharan Africa comes from the work of international news reporters. Even though these news actors play a critical role in the communication of the distant Other, frequently criticized for its representational deficits, scholar empirical research on the work of foreign correspondents has been considerably neglected: it is now decades old, it lacks a systematic examination of the on the ground realities of journalism in Africa and of the evolving work of professionals and Pro-Ams supported by networked digital media. This article analyses the evolving professional cultures and newswork of those individuals (micro). It inspects long-term trajectories in international journalism combined with short-term developments based on transformations on microelectronics and digitization. We conduct the first recorded Pan-African online survey on the work of international news reporters, collecting answers from 124 participants in 41 countries. These findings are complemented by semi-structured interviews with 43 professionals based in Nairobi, Dakar and Johannesburg. Our findings challenge the narrative of international news reporting as a dying breed. Instead, they support a nuanced view towards localized conti-nuities and localized ruptures in contemporary post-industrial mediascape: its socio-demographics express a considerably precarious new economy of foreign correspondence-particularly, in the case of freelance workers-while the use of network-based digital media is driving the field towards the rising of a multilayered confederacy of distinct correspondences.
Gruesome images of Muammar Gaddafi's assassination were broadcast on international news networks. The display of such images raises significant questions about the way the media cover an individual's death; in this case, an individual who was the leader of a United Nations member country and, at the same time, considered by many to be an enemy and a terrorist. The study examined 1,380 images of Gaddafi's last days, from five international news networks, and found that the Israeli channel displayed the highest number of gruesome images. The article argues that when news networks have a clear political agenda, political considerations may trump adherence to professional ethics.
Sontag discusses war and atrocity imagry. "The understanding of war among people who have not experienced war is now chiefly a product of the impact of these images". Meaning and response to a photo depends on words. Photos are useful against an unpopular war but "absent such a protest, the same antiwar photograph may be read as showing pathos, or heroism." Photos help us remember, but not understand. "Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us." "Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content. Image-flow precludes a privileged image". Images are meant to invite reflection and consideration but "cannot dictate a course of action".
Ideally, a media system suitable for a democracy ought to provide its readers with some coherent sense of the broader social forces that affect the conditions of their everyday lives. It is difficult to find anyone who would claim that media discourse in the United States even remotely approaches this ideal. The overwhelming conclusion is that the media generally operate in ways that promote apathy, cynicism, and quiescence, rather than active citizenship and participation. Furthermore, all the trends seem to be in the wrong direction—toward more and more messages, from fewer and bigger producers, saying less and less. That’s the bad news.The good news is that the messages provide a many-voiced, open text that can and often is read oppositionally, at least in part. Television imagery is a site of struggle where the powers that be are often forced to compete and defend what they would prefer to have taken for granted. The underdetermined nature of media discourse allows plenty of room for challengers such as social movements to offer competing constructions of reality and to find support for them from readers whose daily lives may lead them to construct meaning in ways that go beyond media imagery
Have the media contributed to exacerbating the political, cultural and religious divides within Western societies and the world at large? How can media be deployed to enrich, not inhibit, dialogue? To what extent has the media, in all its forms, questioned, celebrated or simply accepted the unleashing of a ‘war on terror’? Media and Terrorism brings together leading scholars to explore how the world's media have influenced, and in turn, been influenced by terrorism and the war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11. Accessible and user-friendly with lively and current case studies, it is a perfect student text and is an essential handbook on the dynamics of war and the media in a global context.
This path-breaking book explores how solidarity towards vulnerable others is performed in our media environment. It argues that stories where famine is described through our own experience of dieting or or where solidarity with Africa translates into wearing a cool armband tell us about much more than the cause that they attempt to communicate. They tell us something about the ways in which we imagine the world outside ourselves. By showing historical change in Amnesty International and Oxfam appeals, in the Live Aid and Live 8 concerts, in the advocacy of Audrey Hepburn and Angelina Jolie as well as in earthquake news on the BBC, this far-reaching book shows how solidarity has today come to be not about conviction but choice, not vision but lifestyle, not others but ourselves – turning us into the ironic spectators of other people’s suffering.
Technological developments over recent years have ensured that the mainstream mass media will play a growing role in social and political processes, and in shaping perceptions and policies relating to domestic as well as international conflicts. Keeping in perspective the potential capability of the news media in situations of conflict and conflict resolution, this article maps the underlying trends in the role of the mainstream international news media in contemporary conflicts, and the issues and challenges that characterise media coverage of such issues. Identifying some of these trends to be—the reflection of the dominant discourse, framing of news along official lines, dehumanising language of war, media management by governments, selective reporting, demonisation of enemies, and so on—the article throws light on the concept of ‘peace journalism’ as an alternative to conventional news coverage of conflict.
While humanitarian communication has been scrutinized by practitioners and academics, the role and meanings of intimacy at a distance in this communication have been largely overlooked. Based on analysis of 17 in-depth interviews with professionals in 10 UK-based international NGOs engaged in planning, designing and producing humanitarian communications, this article explores how intimacy figures in NGOs’ thinking about and practice of humanitarian communication. Drawing on discussions of ‘intimacy at a distance’ and the ‘intimization’ of the mediated public sphere, the analysis explores three metaphors of intimacy used by interviewees to articulate the relationships they seek to develop with and between their beneficiaries and UK audiences: (1) sitting together underneath a tree; (2) being there; and (3) going on a journey. The article situates the governance of intimacy of practitioners’ thinking and practice as NGOs’ attempt to respond to criticisms from the humanitarian and international development sector, policymakers and scholars. It concludes by calling for a revisiting of the centrality of intimacy in humanitarian communication and the logic of emotional capitalism within which it is embedded, outlining its implications for both academic scholarship and practice.
A global discourse on cosmopolitan humanism can become tragically disconnected from how it plays out locally. By analyzing Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign, this article examines how and why the “new war” discourse presented in Kony 2012 does not correspond to how an array of local actors frame the violence that took place in Uganda. It also highlights how the Kony 2012 narrative and the interventions it advocates are translating into “perverse consequences”: a militarization of the central African region and a decline in awareness and in funding for more complex security issues on the ground. Finally, insight is provided into why the development of cosmopolitan norms and laws favors strong states and institutions, while civilians on the receiving end of “humanitarian interventions” lack the power to define what rights should be protected, by whom and how, and have no way of holding the intervening “humanitarian” actors accountable for their actions.