Digital War Reporting E-Book

Donald Matheson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: DMS - Digital Media and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 374

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Digital War Reporting examines war reporting in a digital age. It shows how new technologies open up innovative ways for journalists to convey the horrors of warfare while, at the same time, creating opportunities for propaganda, censorship and control. Topics discussed include:

• How is the role of the war reporter evolving as digital technologies become ever more prominent?
• What is the rhetoric of war in digital journalism? How does an emphasis on liveness, immediacy or realness shape public perceptions of the nature of warfare itself?
• Is technology widening the gap between 'us' and 'them', or are new kinds of empathy being established with distant others as time, space and place are effectively compressed?

A key focus is journalists' use of digital imagery, real-time video and audio reports, multimedia databases – as well as satellites, broadband, podcasting, and mobile telephones – in the reporting of a range of wars, conflicts and crises. The examples analysed range from 24-hour television news coverage of the Persian Gulf War, the first 'internet war' in Kosovo, digital photography, from September 11 to Abu Ghraib, and bloggers in Iraq, including journalists, soldiers and ordinary citizens.

Digital War Reporting is required reading for students, researchers and journalists.

Leseprobe

Digital War Reporting

Digital Media and Society Series

New technologies are fundamentally altering the ways in which we communicate. This series from Polity aims to provide a set of books that make available for a broad readership cutting-edge research and thinking on digital media and their social contexts. Taken as a whole, the series will examine questions about the impact of network technology and digital media on society in all its facets, including economics, culture and politics.

Published:

Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube

Mark Deuze, Media Work

Charles Ess, Digital Media Ethics

Alexander Halavais, Search Engine Society

Robert Hassan, The Information Society

Tim Jordan, Hacking

Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner, Mobile Communication

Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan, Digital War Reporting

Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging

Digital War Reporting

DONALD MATHESONAND STUART ALLAN

polity

Copyright © Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan 2009

The right of Donald Matheson and Stuart Allan to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2009 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3950-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.25 on 13 pt FF Scala

by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Printed and bound by MPG Books Group, UK

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Contents

1  New Wars, New Reporting

2  The ‘First Internet War’

3  Conflicted Realities

4  The Citizen Journalist at War

5  Visual Truths: Images in Wartime

6  Making Connections: The Politics of Mediation

References

Index

CHAPTER ONE

New Wars, New Reporting

Introduction

The carpet of the mosque is stained with blood and covered with fragments of concrete. Tank shells and machine-gun rounds have pitted the inside walls. The rotting, sweet smell of death hangs in the morning air. Gunsmoke-laced sunbeams illuminate the bodies of four Iraqi insurgents. A fifth lies next to a column, his entire body covered by a blanket.

I shudder. Something very wrong has happened here.

(Sites, 2007: 5)

These words, written by Kevin Sites, a freelance correspondent for NBC News at the time, open his account of events that transpired in a mosque in Falluja, Iraq, on 13 November 2004. Sites, ‘embedded’ with the United States Third Battalion, First Marine Regiment, proceeds to explain what happened next. One member of the regiment, a lance corporal, observes that one of the Iraqi insurgents, lying motionless on the ground at his feet, is still breathing. Sites, videotaping the scene, continues:

I see him [the lance corporal] in my viewfinder; he is raising his M-16 rifle and pointing it directly at the wounded insurgent’s head. He peers down at him through his laser scope.

I don’t know what he’s going to do, but I hope he’s just going to cover him while other Marines search him for weapons. But in this place, already filled with so much death, somehow, in this moment, I sense there will be more. The lance corporal squeezes the trigger, firing a 5.62 round into the man’s head, which I watch explode on my screen.

His skull and brains splatter against the dirty white wall he was lying against. After the shot, the Marine (whom I have chosen not to name) turns on his heels and walks away. (Ibid.: 13)

Bearing witness to people being killed in combat was nothing new to Sites, a seasoned war reporter, but ‘never like this. Never at point-blank range’, he adds. His camera still rolling, he promptly completes the sequence, stunned by what he has seen. Then, when it looks like a fifth wounded Iraqi is about to be shot dead, he intervenes to confront the Marine who had pulled the trigger.

‘Why did you do that?’ I asked him. ‘What’s going on? These were the same guys that were here yesterday. They were wounded.’

‘I didn’t know, sir,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’ The voice that had seemed so confident just a few moments ago is now filled with unsettling realizations. And then he walks out of the mosque followed by the other Marines. (Ibid.: 14)

Sites left the mosque shortly thereafter – leaving behind the fifth man – to travel back to the battalion field headquarters. He was determined to tell the Lieutenant Colonel in charge what had happened and to show him the videotape. In choosing to leave the wounded man behind, however, Sites was making a decision that he would profoundly regret. Later he learned, from an offi-cial report obtained using the Freedom of Information Act, that the man ‘had been shot twenty-three times after I left. Almost all of the entry wounds were in his back – execution style’ (ibid.: 289). The report’s ballistic evidence would leave little doubt in Sites’s mind that ‘a Marine or Marines killed the only living Iraqi witness to all that had occurred inside that mosque’ (ibid.: 290).

The reason Sites had been in the Falluja mosque that day was due, in part, to his particular skills in making the most of the digital technology available to him. He filed his stories to a computer server in the US using a laptop and a telephone book-sized RBGAN (Regional Broadband Global Area Network) satellite modem. Video was sent via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), which few journalists with rival networks knew how to do. ‘Technology’, he later recalled, ‘had shrunk the world to a much more manageable size just in time for this battle’ in Falluja (Sites, 2007: 13). Moreover, his presence was also attributable to the way he had handled his role as an embedded journalist, having worked hard to establish a good relationship with his unit. The Marines, he felt, respected his self-reliance – that is, the fact that he shot, wrote and transmitted his reports without a crew. They also appreciated his independent weblog (permitted by NBC because of his freelance status) on the internet. In addition to sharing in-depth personal stories of his experiences, Sites had been posting digital photographs of Marines for the benefit of their families back home. Following the broadcast of his videotape of what happened in Falluja that day, however, the messages of gratitude from the families would be replaced by a torrent of hate mail, including death threats.

Embedded with US Marines in Iraq and using lightweight digital video gear, freelance journalist Kevin Sites records the killing of an unarmed wounded man in a Falluja mosque (November 2004). © Rex Features

In dealing with what he described as ‘the most soul-wrenching moral dilemma I have ever faced in my life’, Sites alerted NBC to his videotape and the incident it documented, knowing that its eventual broadcast would be certain to have far-reaching consequences. ‘My professional code of ethics commands me to “seek and report the truth”‘, he maintained, ‘but it also, as few outside the profession know, instructs us to “minimize harm”‘ (Sites, 2007: 15). There was every possibility, he feared, that, once word of the video reached the insurgents, they would be less willing to surrender to US troops. Moreover, its release risked further inflaming the insurgency, leading to even more violence – including with regard to the treatment of coalition prisoners. Consequently, in weighing up his professional responsibility in relation to a consideration of the potential harm the material might engender, he and his NBC News colleagues (among them executive and senior producers, as well as lawyers) agonized over what was the right course of action. In the end, it was decided that two versions of the video would be released. One feed would be the full version, while the second would be an edited treatment, pausing at the moment when the Marine raised his rifle to point at the insurgent’s head. It was this version that was eventually broadcast by NBC, which Sites realized, in retrospect, was a mistake. Although he himself had pushed for this decision – believing that self-censorship could be justified on the basis that the images were too graphic for viewers – it quickly became apparent that it meant audiences would be unable to understand precisely what had happened. ‘Because they didn’t get the whole story’, he explained, ‘viewers filled their lack of understanding with their own conclusions, based on personal perceptions, political beliefs and emotional reactions – almost anything but factual detail. The very thing we held back on’ (ibid.: 18). Not surprisingly, Sites surmised, many viewers concluded that the Marine was justified in what he had done.

During the broadcast, NBC News anchor Brian Williams, in what Sites considered to be ‘an incredibly generous gesture to me and the burgeoning blog movement’, mentioned that Sites maintained an independent war weblog (hereafter blog). ‘He then read the Internet address on air to his ten million viewers’, Sites recalled, ‘inadvertently sending thousands of rabid right-wingers to my electronic front door’ (2007: 19). Connecting his laptop to the satellite modem the next morning in Falluja, he discovered more than 600 e-mails waiting to be read, with more to follow at a staggering rate for the next year (due, in large part, to right-wing bloggers and the conservative Fox News channel fanning the flames of controversy). In realizing that all of the other US news networks had followed NBC’s decision not to show the actual shooting in the video, he recognized that the self-censorship had proven chillingly effective. This stood in marked contrast to newscasts broadcast elsewhere, many of which had shown the incident in its entirety (repeatedly, in the case of Al Jazeera, for example). ‘Everyone in the world had the potential to see one of the most important and controversial stories to come out the war – except the citizens of the nation whose own military was directly involved’, Sites observed (ibid.: 23).

Sites’s response was to turn to his warblog, knowing that it afforded him the only means to place his unedited version of the story on the public record. On 21 November 2004, eight days after the incident, he posted an ‘Open letter to the Devil Dogs of the 3.1’ explaining his actions directly to the Marines concerned. Its final two paragraphs state:

So here, ultimately, is how it plays out: When the Iraqi man in the mosque posed a threat, he was your enemy; when he was subdued, he was your responsibility; when he was killed in front of my eyes and my camera, the story of his death became my responsibility.

The burdens of war, as you so well know, are unforgiving for all of us. (Sites, 2007: 25–6)

The response to the blog posting was astonishing, with excerpts of the letter carried in news reports around the globe. Sites’s readership statistics, having been registering around 37,600 earlier in the month, leapt to more than 2 million the day following the post. Although the hate mail would continue for some time, he quickly became convinced that he was seeing ‘the trend of hate shift either to begrudging understanding of my actions or outright support now that more information is available’ (ibid.: 26). His blog, he believed, had engendered a remarkable impact on the perceptions of the US public.

This example raises a number of important questions about contemporary war journalism that will prove to be central to the discussion unfolding throughout this book. Our emphasis will be on the ways reporters – professionals and ordinary citizens alike – narrativize the exigencies of conflict – that is, how they bear witness to the horrors around them. As this description of Sites’s experience illustrates, emerging technologies have made different kinds of reporting possible and placed those who produce such accounts in new relationships with others, near and distant. Few reporters were present in Falluja during the US assault on the insurgent stronghold in November 2004 for a range of reasons discussed later in the book, and it is likely, although of course impossible to know with any certainty, that this footage would not have emerged without the combination of Sites’s digital equipment, his skills in using it and his commitment to extend the boundaries of reporting. The result was not in any simple sense the independence that many journalists expect to find in new technology (discussed further shortly). For the technology placed him in closer contact with editors, whose response to the video of the shooting of wounded prisoners was inevitably different to his own. It also tightened still further the feedback loop between the production of news and its audiences’ responses, thereby intensifying the purchase of ethical responsibilities on the war correspondent while simultaneously taking away the time to think. Sites’s discovery of the power of personal media – a discovery echoed in a diverse array of contexts in the pages that follow – to carve out a space to tell his story of war outside the confines of ‘traditional’ conventions introduced further complexities. Suddenly, he was free to try to correct the editing decision he saw as wrong; yet he also became vulnerable to personal attack. At the same moment, both the reporter, now distinct from the news organization, and the audience, newly empowered by – and sometimes vociferous in its use of – the interactive media of e-mail and the web, came to the fore, providing an entirely new space of reporting with significant consequences for what was covered, how and why. It is thus readily apparent that emerging digital technologies will not resolve longstanding struggles over the representation of war, but rather will pose them in new, challenging ways.

In tracing the journalistic uses of technology, and the political and ethical tensions which recurrently arise as a consequence, this book re-examines familiar assumptions about war reporting from a unique vantage point. Allan and Zelizer (2004: 4) note that war reporting often functions as a kind of ‘litmus test’ for journalism, as its daunting circumstances throw into sharp relief existing criteria of good journalism, such as impartiality, fairness or even an alignment with a ‘national interest’. Extraordinary demands are placed on journalism, demands which can sometimes elude even the most conscientious of reporters. It is our hope that this book’s exploration of the forms and practices of digital war reporting will engender a fresh perspective into the harsh realities of the reporting process while, at the same time, contributing to current debates about journalism’s role in shaping public perceptions of the nature of warfare itself.

The rapidity of change unfolding across the media landscape is a central theme of the book. In considering the ongoing war in Iraq, for example, one would be forgiven for thinking that the innovations heralded during the first Gulf War in 1990–1 now seem strangely antiquated. ‘The big difference is that in ‘91 everything was analog and now everything is digital’, observed Dick Tauber, vice president of satellites and circuits for CNN, in 2003. ‘Back then, a satellite transponder could send a single video and audio channel to a satellite and back to headquarters. Now we can send half a dozen channels in the same amount of space.’ Moreover, equipment had become smaller, lighter and more robust. Journalists wanting to do a stand-up report to camera, but unable to use a videophone, were able to press mini-portable television stations, called ‘fly-aways’, into service. ‘In the first Gulf War, the fly-away was stowed in 30 cases, the size of luggage, and weighed a ton’, Tauber recalled. ‘Now it’s in 10 or 12 cases the size of a laptop and weighs much less’ (cited in Megna, 2003). Insistent claims that technological progress necessarily improves the quality of journalism circulate widely, many of which revolve around the constant struggle to get the story through. In 1991 in Baghdad, the likes of CNN’s Peter Arnett opened up modes of reporting where journalism appeared to sidestep the censors: he engaged in live, unrehearsed question-and-answer sessions with the news channel’s anchors. Dowell (2005) cites the story of a US reporter imprisoned by the Indonesian government while reporting on the last stages of the independence struggle in Timor Leste in 1999, who was able to continue broadcasting on the complicity of Indonesian troops in the atrocities against Timorese using his video-enabled cell phone.

Still, such descriptions of how emerging technologies can empower journalism with greater freedom require careful quali-fication in light of countervailing pressures. Deibert (2008) is one of many scholars to express disquiet about how quickly powerful political actors seek to recuperate digital media to their field of control. He charts growing surveillance, censorship and legal restrictions in a range of countries on the internet, a trend reinforced – and ostensibly legitimized in the eyes of some – in the wake of the Al Qaeda attacks on September 11, 2001. Similarly, Seib (2004: 47) suggests that the US military actively encouraged journalists such as Sites to ‘embed’ with troops in Iraq as part of their attempts to control the ‘unprecedented independence’ that real-time communication had given journalists. Embedding, with its promise of live coverage from the front line, brought the media within military-devised codes of conduct. At the same time, the internet, while a space where reporters such as Sites could tell their own version of events, was also a place characterized by a reduced respect for journalistic authority.

This book thus strives to offer a critical appraisal of the relative technological affordances and limitations engendered by digital war reporting. It will detail the convergence of media processes that has allowed reporters on the front lines to relay video footage to their editors back in the newsroom and has en abled citizens equipped with a cell or mobile phone to adopt the role of a journalist in the event that they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. It will discuss the compression of the lived dynamics of time, space and place which result from the ever-increasing capacity of digital communications networks to rewrite the geopolitics of information. It will examine the rise of personal media in wartime, produced by individuals from correspondents to soldiers and civilians, challenging the power of major news organizations to set the agenda. At the same time, in order to assess the digital mediation of warfare, technological innovation must be situated in the wider context of journalism’s representational forms, practices and epistemologies. Rather than ‘digital media’ being studied as if they existed outside of wider social contexts, they must be approached in light of the communicative dynamics they engender, transform and resist.

In the remainder of this chapter, we begin this process of contextualization by opening up for exploration pressing questions about the status of digital war reporting and its truth-telling power.

War in a digital age

A common thread in the reflections of many commentators concerned with how war is represented is the recognition that the categories of warfare and mediation are becoming increasingly difficult to separate from one another. While observers such as Knightley (2004) describe a struggle within news journalism to maintain some independence from official versions of war, others have taken the argument a step further to regard the media as an integral part of military and political campaigns to wage war in the first place. Regardless of journalists’ aspirations to give impartial accounts of conflict, Payne (2005) argues, governments need to win the battle for domestic (and, to a lesser extent, international) public opinion. This necessarily revolves around a need to gain international legitimacy for the conduct of war, requiring that they co-opt the media as part of the ‘information’ (or propaganda, in the eyes of some) initiatives that precede hostilities. Others note that military strategy relies increasingly upon control of the information space of war – from surveillance technologies which can pinpoint targets to psychological operations (PSYOP) campaigns intended to demoralize the enemy. As this book was readied for publication in early 2009, Israel’s aerial and ground attack on Hamas in the Palestinian territory of Gaza involved, among its first actions, the bombing of the Gazan television station Al Aqsa and the banning of foreign journalists from entering the territory. While people have for a long time died for a pennant or what was painted on a coat of arms, in Virilio’s (1989: 85) phrase, the status of media technologies as a military target in their own right has somehow pushed the realm of the symbolic into a new prominence in the conduct of war.

Indeed, the capacity of the media to shape public perceptions now figures increasingly prominently in scholarly accounts of the nature of warfare itself. Voices from within the military and strategic communities are heralding the astonishing speed of change in war-fighting tactics, many of which have been ushered in by advances in digital computers and related types of communications hardware. Notions of command and control (C2), coupled with intelligence (C2I), have been extended to encompass first communications (C3) and now computers (C4) when the ability of military commanders to co-ordinate their forces is being assessed. Similarly, bold claims made about ‘cyberwar’ often invoke the military concept of Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) as a means to explain how the character and conduct of military operations are evolving. Singled out for attention are the technological imperatives engendering these changes, especially with regard to globalized security networks, so as better to anticipate how warfare will be waged in future. The capacity of new innovations in ‘info-tech’ to rewrite the rules of strategic doctrine may be widely recognized, but in the meantime contrary scenarios regarding how superiority is to be achieved on the ‘digital battlefield’ continue to multiply.

Central in this endeavour is the increasing sophistication of the tactics of ‘perception management’, a trend which cannot be understood without paying attention to tensions between journalism and the military dating from the early 1990s. At the time of the US-led intervention in Kosovo, the subject of our next chapter, military officials were striving to recast the military–media relationship in light of the lessons learned from the decade’s earlier conflicts, beginning with the Gulf War of 1991. The advent of rolling 24-hour ‘real-time’ global television news services, with CNN leading the way, had helped to transform the conflict into a media spectacle akin to a video game. Largely displaced by this ‘Nintendo effect’, critics pointed out, were the consequences of war – that is, the horrific loss of human life. In the words of veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges: ‘The Gulf War made war fashionable again. It was a cause the nation willingly embraced. It gave us media-manufactured heroes and a heady pride in our military superiority and technology. It made war fun’ (2002: 142–3). The blame for this type of reporting, he argues, rests on the shoulders of the press for co-operating so closely with the military:

Television reporters happily disseminated the spoon-fed images that served the propaganda effort of the military and the state. These images did little to convey the reality of war. Pool reporters, those guided around in groups by the military, wrote about ‘our boys’ eating packaged army food, practicing for chemical weapons attacks, and bathing out of buckets in the desert. It was war as spectacle, war as entertainment. The images and stories were designed to make us feel good about our nation, about ourselves. The Iraqi families and soldiers being blown to bits by huge iron fragmentation bombs just over the border in Iraq were faceless and nameless phantoms. (Ibid.: 143)

There is little doubt that the ensuing ‘sanitized’ news coverage succeeded in profound ways in shaping how media audiences perceived the nature of a ‘clean war’ waged with ‘pinpoint accuracy’. News management in the Gulf War, Knightley concurs, had at its core ‘a deliberate attempt by the authorities to alter public perception of the nature of war itself, particularly the fact that civilians die in war’ (1991: 5; see also Cumings, 1992; Jeffords and Rabinovitz, 1994; Keeble, 1997; Kellner, 2004; Reese, 2004; Taylor, 1992).

Sanitized news coverage, critics pointed out, was certain to produce desensitized audiences, passively observing each development in the ‘video game war’ with little regard to its implications (the contrast with Vietnam, the ‘living room war’, being all too telling). Journalistic efforts to enhance public understanding, to counter this obsession with immediacy with rigorous, in-depth reports offering interpretation and context, were being increasingly frustrated. Throughout the 1990s, Western news organizations were rationalized in the name of cost savings, their budgets for international newsgathering slashed dramatically as economic pressures were brought to bear. The gradual thawing of the Cold War was a further factor, seemingly providing jus-tification for what became a dramatic reallocation of resources away from specialized military reporting (freelancers became the norm as travel budgets were cut and foreign bureaus closed) in favour of more ‘popular’ (and ‘efficient’ – i.e. inexpensive) news stories. Some news executives insisted this was simply giving the public what it wanted, pointing to declining viewing (and newspaper circulation) figures as evidence that international news could not attract the necessary advertising revenues to satisfy ‘bottom-line’ calculations. Less debatable was the fact that owners were increasingly seeing news as a commodity, with some forms of it more profitable than others regardless of accompanying claims made about public service.

Peter Arnett, a household name for his reports for CNN during the Gulf War (he was the only Western television correspondent in Baghdad for much of the conflict), was one of several leading journalists to express his discontent publicly at the time. International news coverage in the mainstream US press, he argued, had ‘almost reached the vanishing point’ since the con-flict in the Gulf earlier in the decade:

Today, a foreign story that doesn’t involve bombs, natural disasters or financial calamity has little chance of entering the American consciousness. This at a time when the United States has become the world’s lone superpower and ‘news’ has so many venues – papers, magazines, broadcast and cable TV, radio, newsletters, the Internet – that it seems inescapable. So how is it that Americans have never been less informed about what’s going on in the rest of the world? Because we, the media, have stopped telling them. (Arnett, 1998)

Far too many editors had simply embraced ‘the canard that readers don’t want foreign news’, he maintained, even though contrary evidence was available, not least public opinion surveys. Meanwhile more upbeat assessments pointed to how CNN, in pioneering the concept of ‘news on demand’, had demonstrated that there was public enthusiasm for such stories so long as they were presented in ways that heightened liveness and immediacy. The trick, advocates of the emergent digital technologies believed, was to make the most of the ‘new generation’ of news-gathering strategies promising to revolutionize war reporting.

For a number of scholars working at the interface of international relations and media technology, further questions need to be posed about the very dynamics of mediation influencing public perceptions. James Der Derian (2001, 2004) contends that the distanced and one-sided representations of war on television have emerged within a political reconceptualization of war to Western publics as bloodless and virtuous. ‘Technology in the service of virtue has given rise to a global form of virtual violence’, he contends, namely ‘virtuous war’ (Der Derian, 2001: xi). In coining this term, which he acknowledges sounds like a ‘felicitous oxymoron’, it is his intention to underscore the tensions between ‘people who believe you can use war to achieve ethical aims – that’s the virtue part of it – and the virtual, how you can fight wars now from a remote distance and have minimal casualties, on your own side’ (Der Derian, 2004). The danger at the heart of this contradiction, it follows, is the implied belief that military violence is the most effective means to resolve seemingly intractable political problems. ‘If you have the technological superiority, and you believe in your ethical superiority, these factors combine to a very nasty effect’, he adds. More likely than not ‘you defer civilian diplomatic action and give the military the opportunity to step into this vacuum and offer up solutions’ (ibid.).

In advancing this thesis, Der Derian is maintaining that virtuous war evolved from the United States’ rationale for deploying battlefield technologies in the first Gulf War and its aerial campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo. Technical capability was aligned with a declared ethical imperative to actualize violence from a distance with minimal casualties to US forces. ‘Using networked information and virtual technologies to bring “there” here in near-real time and with near-verisimilitude’, Der Derian writes, ‘virtuous war exercises a comparative as well as strategic advantage for the digitally advanced’ (2001: xv). To wage virtuous war is to make every effort to remove from sight the victims of the violence perpetrated from afar:

On the surface, virtuous war cleans up the political discourse as well as the battlefield. Fought in the same manner as they are represented, by real-time surveillance and TV ‘live-feeds,’ virtuous wars promote a vision of bloodless, humanitarian, hygienic wars. We can rattle off casualty rates of prototypical virtuous conflicts like the Gulf War (270 Americans lost their lives – more than half in accidents), the Mogadishu raid (eighteen Americans killed), and the Kosovo air campaign (barring accidents, a remarkable zero casualty conflict for the NATO forces). Yet most of us would not know the casualty figures for the other side, of Iraqis, Somalis, and Serbs. Post-Vietnam, the US has made many digital advances; public announcement of enemy body counts is not one of them. (Der Derian, 2001: xv)

Virtuous war, in other words, exploits digital technologies to project an ethos of killing in sharp contrast with previous forms of warfare. Fact blurs with fiction as virtuality collapses reality into computer simulations, thereby obscuring who is responsible – and thus to be held accountable – for killing others (for whom virtuous war is no less devastating in its horrors than any other type of war). ‘One experiences “death” but not the tragic consequences of it’, Der Derian writes. ‘In virtuous war we now face not just the confusion but the pixilation of war and game on the same screen’ (ibid.: xvi).

To suggest that the advent of digital technologies has recast familiar distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ wars is to open up for debate a number of intriguing issues. This distinction has been theorized by Mary Kaldor (2003, 2006), who offers an insightful assessment of its conceptual implications for thinking anew about warfare in a post-Cold War context. Briefly, in discerning what is new about ‘new’ wars, she proceeds to argue that their emergence is contingent upon various – often informal, even inchoate – networks which advocate exclusivist causes (diaspora groups, for example, often come to the fore in this regard). Moreover, new wars typically bring to bear an array of global actors, while tending to be ‘concentrated in areas where the modern state is unravelling and where the distinctions between internal and external, public and private, no longer have the same meaning’ as they did in ‘old’ wars (Kaldor, 2003: 120).

Two dimensions of this kind of warfare are particularly relevant for this book, with its emphasis upon wars directly involving Western governments. On the one hand, Kaldor describes the emergence of a similar conceptualization to that described by Der Derian. ‘Spectacle warfare’, primarily a form of war conducted by the US, first in the Gulf War, is war at a distance, fought through air sorties or proxies such as the Afghanistan Northern Alliance. Like Der Derian, Kaldor notes both the extent to which these wars are projected to audiences as free of (Western) casualties and, indeed, their symbolic nature. This concept ‘emphasizes the function of war as a form of political legitimation, an ideology, in a context where citizens are no longer ready to sacrifice their lives and governments are no longer ready to guarantee the full range of rights’ (2003: 126). On the other hand, she locates new wars in conditions where failed or failing states have lost their claim to legitimacy, usually on account of declining economies (and thereby collapsing investment, production, and taxation) and increased corruption. Structural inequalities, including where unemployment and rural–urban migration are concerned, soon become entrenched in a manner likely to weaken the rule of law. Here, ‘network warfare’ emerges, conducted by armed networks of state and non-state actors, such as units of regular forces (or other security forces), as well as paramilitary groups, charismatic warlords, terrorist cells, religious fundamentalists, organized criminal groups, mercenaries, and so forth. War is, for these actors, a form of political mobilization, Kaldor contends, where ‘the point of violence is not so much directed against the enemy; rather the aim is to expand the networks of extremism’ (ibid.: 121). Techniques of terror, ‘ethnic cleansing’ or genocide become deliberate war strategies in the pursuit of specific political aims and objectives. Outright battles are rare; instead, in these new wars, violence is directed mainly against civilians. ‘Violations of humanitarian and human rights law are not a side effect of war’, she adds, ‘but the central methodology of new wars’ (ibid.). That is to say, the visibility of human suffering in these wars, in which news media play a central role, becomes a weapon itself in the shared narrative of political extremism which holds many of these networks together.

In this way, then, new wars are challenging prevailing perceptions of war itself. What were once distinct local, national and global realms are now seen to be converging, while traditional divisions – not least between war and crime – effectively blur into a particularistic, divisive identity politics. Throughout, media channels are prominent in the organizing logics of the conduct of war. The value of the wider frameworks provided by Der Derian, Kaldor and others is readily apparent at a number of different levels. Scholarly treatments of war reporting tend to gloss over the nature of war itself, preferring to rely upon certain teleological assumptions about how the evolution of war-fighting strategies has unfolded over the years. On those occasions when the familiar tenets of the ‘old’ wars of the twentieth century are challenged, more often than not they are regarded as exceptions to certain longstanding (Clausewitzean, in military parlance) beliefs in modern war as a rational instrument in the service of advancing state interests. And yet, it seems, the growing number of these exceptions – what Manuel Castells (2000) calls ‘instant wars’ – is inviting a radical reconsideration of the familiar assumptions associated with prevailing discourses of war.

This context figures heavily in our account of the endeavours of journalists to record contemporary conflict. The extraordinarily high casualty rate among journalists in Iraq during the peak years of the US invasion and occupation, for example, is attributable partly to the new freedom which portable communications equipment gave them to enter dangerous areas, but it is also related to the collapse of the notion of the journalist as neutral observer which the frameworks discussed above make readily apparent. The distinction between combatant and reporter increasingly makes little sense to those fighting modern war. Kevin Sites, to return to our opening example, emerges as a figure caught between a professional ethics, which requires that the correspondent remain an external observer to events, and the knowledge that reporting an ostensible war crime will be regarded by some military and political authorities as tantamount to supporting the enemy. The always constricted space for independent war reporting tightens still further in the context of new wars.

Pertinent in this regard is Tumber and Webster’s (2006) examination of the journalistic practices of front-line correspondents, which has led them to elaborate a conception of ‘information wars’ to address the ways in which they see the geometry of communicative power being transformed. Efforts to understand the use of ‘virtuoso technologies’ to deliver ‘astonishing pictures and sounds from the theatre of war’ to audiences in distant places, they argue, must not overlook the wider information environment shaping the interpretation of unpredictable events and their significance:

First of all, frontline journalists are not easily controlled or manipulated to act as conduits for combatants and their leaders. They have a strong disposition towards ‘telling it like it is’, they cling to notions of ‘objectivity’ and they have access to versatile equipment that allows them to report quickly and immediately back to their news organizations. Furthermore, the boundaries between fighting forces are often confused and, perhaps more important, journalists are such a diverse group that once-powerful appeals to support ‘our boys’ have weakened. Moreover, while embeds are severely constrained by virtue of their locations, news organizations now receive an enormous volume and variety of information. What gets into a finished programme or news report may be quite at odds with any single journalist’s report. (Tumber and Webster, 2006: 172)

While military weaponry may reflect a massive asymmetry between combatants, it follows, there can be no corresponding assumption that it will engender long-term success in the waging of information war. In the age of the digital camera and the website, Tumber and Webster point out, weaker forces (‘who are acutely conscious that the media are globalized phenomena’) can disrupt, challenge and often counter the imposition of truth claims by the powerful.

We shall be returning to the questions raised by these varied conceptions of war – ‘virtuous war’, ‘new war’ (including ‘network’ and ‘spectacle’ warfare) and ‘information war’ – in the chapters to follow. In the next section, we pause to place journalism within digital culture more widely, another important dimension informing much of this book’s discussion.

Journalism and digital culture

Researchers interested in examining the dynamics of mediation often point out that traditional conceptions of ‘the audience’ lack adequate explanatory power in the age of digital media. Any notion of ‘the audience’ as a homogenous group with passive responses to ‘media effects’ can be safely dispensed with, they contend, once attention turns to the socially contingent ways in which mediation is negotiated in everyday circumstances. In the case of social networking sites, blogs or home videos posted on file-sharing sites, for example, there is ample evidence that the familiar distinction between ‘the media’ and ‘the masses’ cannot be sustained. Jenkins (2006) identifies a shift which he terms ‘convergence culture’, in which ‘old’ and ‘new’ media are colliding in conflicts over ownership of popular culture and control over public debate. Deuze (2005) proposes that it is increasingly apparent that the twentieth-century conception of journalists as professional, public storytellers has been part of a passing historical moment. Citing enthusiasts of participatory media and cyberculture, he notes that media technologies such as cell phones, wireless internet and plug-and-play have made self-mediation by individuals both easier and more public, but also more acceptable in terms of wider Western culture. Deuze links these practices to Bauman’s (2000) notion of the ‘liquidness’ of contemporary Western society, in which traditional, fixed identities and relationships such as those of work, marriage and belonging are more prone to change over an individual’s life, and in which the project of self-construction rises to prominence. The professional journalist’s hold over public storytelling becomes weaker in this context, he argues, as people regard themselves less as audiences for media and more as producers, and as they consider their own media production to be at least as legitimate. ‘It then seems the astounding rise of the mass media throughout the twentieth century owes much of its success to filling a temporary void between the demise of our trust in (as well as reliance on and allegiance to) social institutions – like the state, the church or mosque, the school, our families or our parents – and the emergence of a perhaps over-zealous faith in ourselves’ (Deuze, 2005; see also Hassan, 2008).

Other scholars express caution as to the extent of any actual cultural shift. Some note that economic power over media remains vested largely in large corporations such as News Corporation, which has broadened its media holdings into the likes of MySpace, and that little has changed with the advent of corporate control of the web other than some fresh packaging for existing products and ‘efficiency gains’ as those products are ‘repurposed’ for online users (see Scott, 2005). Others point out that much ‘citizen media’ echoes the cultural norms and values of products found in mainstream media to a large extent, and indeed is typically dependent upon established media for material, and indeed for the social status of its leading practitioners (see Haas, 2005). Relevant here is evidence pertinent to journalism’s evolving relationship with its publics, raising searching questions about authority, trust and even legitimacy. At a time when news organizations find themselves under intense recessionary pressures, with large-scale job losses having detrimental effects on the quality of provision, the very viability of certain leading institutions is open to question. Some commentators envisage the emergence of a post-journalism age as a logical extension of a ‘democratized’ media, while others are content to describe the demise of specific genres of journalism, such as the newspaper, in nostalgic terms. There is nothing new about such predictions, of course. Some years ago researchers such as Bardoel (1996) were suggesting that journalists were no longer indispensable in public communication and therefore must demonstrate anew their value, evolving to meet the changing needs of publics. A steady stream of news executives, editors and journalists have similarly expressed their concern that audiences – especially younger people – now demand news in a less formal style and a more flexible format, that few put faith in the credibility of the masthead as a guarantor of reportorial integrity, and that journalists must descend from their remote, detached position in public life and begin to interact with their audiences much more directly.

The specific responses by news organizations – launching pod-casts of programmes, investing in editors’ blogs, inviting viewers to contribute video, and the like – are better analysed elsewhere (see, for example, Allan, 2006; Boczkowski, 2004; Friend and Singer, 2007; Kawamoto, 2003; Paterson and Domingo, 2008). What concerns us here is the wider context for these developments. Bruns (2008) proposes that a second tier of media of public debate has emerged – as envisioned by Gans (1980) nearly thirty years previously – which comments on, critiques and reinterprets the news media for different communities. Leadbetter and Miller (2004) trace a trend for people to invest time and energy in unpaid work to professional standard, which they argue signals a shift towards bottom-up self-organization and the decline of professional authority in society in general (see also Keen, 2007). On many levels, previously secure and distinct categories of the media producer and consumer have begun to blur. In light of these and similar arguments, there is value in addressing the proliferation of public or citizen digital media, from photo-sharing websites to blogs, precisely as they recast what counts as journalism – and thereby who can be a journalist (see also Allan and Thorsen, 2009; Matheson, 2009). Theories of digital media, while at times prone to sweeping generalizations, make a convincing case that attention should be paid to the epistemological commitments underpinning the very idea of journalism, a position with important implications – as we shall see – for war reporting.

Digital war reporting

Theoretical frameworks such as these provide the impetus for us to move beyond bold pronouncements – both celebratory and condemnatory alike – regarding digitalization and convergence in order to gain a critical purchase on the issues that matter most for socially responsible war reporting. They will emerge throughout the book and inform the choice of material and the arguments proposed here. In this section, we offer a brief overview of this volume’s organizational rationale and the contents of its respective chapters.

First, though, it is worth signposting the large and growing literature on the relationship between journalism and war, where the importance of technology is often acknowledged. Conflicts involving the US and Britain in the post-Cold War era, in particular, have attracted a flurry of academic interest, especially in