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Chapter 10: How do we find out what's going on in the world?

How do we find out what is going on in the world? This chapter offers three responses. First, it explores the fundamental issue of bias with respect to historical news media representations of war and tracks the contradictory role of the news media. Second, it examines wider questions about the media’s role in democratic societies. Does the media – especially social media – offer a genuine plurality of viewpoints, or does it pretend to do so while actually offering us a singular viewpoint that reflects and protects elites in positions of power? And finally, this chapter reflects on the production and circulation of an iconic news-media image from the Syrian War (2011 to present) to explore how we might read media representations of conflict more critically.

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Chapter Abstract

How do we find out what is going on in the world? This chapter offers three responses. First, it explores the fundamental issue of bias with respect to historical news media representations of war and tracks the contradictory role of the news media. Second, it examines wider questions about the media’s role in democratic societies. Does the media – especially social media – offer a genuine plurality of viewpoints, or does it pretend to do so while actually offering us a singular viewpoint that reflects and protects elites in positions of power? And finally, this chapter reflects on the production and circulation of an iconic news-media image from the Syrian War (2011 to present) to explore how we might read media representations of conflict more critically.

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Additional web content and audio-visual materials

  1. Reporters Without Borders ‘World Press Freedom Index’ https://rsf.org/en/world-press-freedom-index is a useful annual study of global levels of press freedom; Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, http://www.fair.org/index.php is a media watch group that is committed to ‘challenging bias’.
  2. The War and Media Network, http://www.warandmedia.org;  and the journal Media, War and Conflict, http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mwcare both useful websites that showcase interdisciplinary research on the role of the media during war.
  3. David Campbell’s website http://www.davidcampbell.org offers excellent in-depth analysis and reflection on the role of visual documents in the media, with specific reference to global politics.
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Additional reading

James Watson (2016) Media Communication: An Introduction to Theory and Process (4th Edition), London: Palgrave, is a comprehensive and useful introduction to the basic ideas of media communication, and provides a good account of the power relations that develop between the media and society.
Des Freedman’s (2014) article ‘Paradigms of Media Power’, Communication, Culture & Critique, 8, 2: 273-289 considers the established debate between Pluralism and Marxism in a more contemporary context.
Susan Carruthers (2011) The Media at War (2nd Edition), London: Palgrave; and Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin (2010) War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Cambridge: Polity, provide good introductions to the complex relationships between the media and war. There are numerous books recently published about the media’s role in specific conflicts, especially the ‘war on terror’; see for example Francois Debrix (2007) Tabloid Terror: War, Culture and Geopolitics, London: Routledge; and Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin (2009) Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, Basingstoke: Palgrave. The role of traditional media, social media and citizen journalism in Syria is still being researched and debated, but as Shawn Powers and Ben O’Loughlin (2015) argue in ‘The Syrian data glut: Rethinking the role of information in conflict’, Media, War and Conflict, 8, 2: 172-180, this particular conflict poses challenging questions to those of us trying to develop a critical approach to the media and war.