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Berenger, Ralph
D. (ed). Global Media Go to War: The Role of News and Entertainment
Media During the 2003 Iraq War. Spokane WA: Marquette Books,
2004. Paperback. 369 pages. ISBN 0-922993-10-6, $49.95.
Reviewed by
Naomi Sakr, Westminster University
Have journalists,
editors or media owners learned any lessons from their coverage
of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003? Will conflict be covered
any differently in future? To pose these questions is to ask
for detailed assessments of reporting on the invasion and insights
into what might prompt media professionals to reflect on their
working practices. Global Media Go to War is a copious
source of such assessments and insights.
Sandwiched between powerful contributions from two European
veterans of media policy analysis, Cees Hamelink and Kaarle
Nordenstreng, the main body of this book contains an introduction
plus thirty chapters representing the work of some fifty authors.
Their collective expertise encompasses an exhaustive range of
issues and perspectives. An early section analysing framing,
language, and propaganda is followed by others on war reporting
across the globe, from the US, Europe and the Arab world to
Australia, Hong Kong, India, and South Africa. A further section
delves into the "War in Cyberspace," including chapters
on indymedia and Weblogs, while the four final chapters consider
audience responses, including perceptions of credibility.Two
appendices provide a chronology of the invasion and a detailed
list of journalists killed in Iraq between March 2003 and May
2004.
Ralph D. Berenger, in a note about the book's cover, remarks
that the image of a US soldier draping an American flag over
a statue of the fallen Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, evoked
diametrically opposite readings from audiences of different
identities. As editor, Berenger sees this opposition as a compelling
reason for having collected these essays. Many of his contributors
teach courses on journalism. But this does not bring much coincidence
of views. When Howard Schneider, a Washington Post reporter,
bitterly remembers the gratuities extracted from him by Iraqi
civil servants on official salaries worth just $2 per month,
his focus is not Iraq's impoverishment under UN sanctions but
the commitment shown by American reporters who stayed in Baghdad
even as their working conditions went from extremely bad to
even worse. When Abdullah Al-Kindi (one of seven contributors
with Arabic names) documents aggression and harassment affecting
journalists, his focus does not extend to controls imposed by
Arab governments other than the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council
and its ousted predecessor. Instead he focuses on actions by
US television networks and the US military, declaring that US
shelling of the Palestine Hotel on April 8, 2003 confirms that
the "warring sides were deliberate in their attacks against
the mass media and reporters." That judgment in turn appears
incompatible with another in a chapter on the emotional effects
of war coverage, to the effect that the "Bush administration
seemed intent on having the whole world witness what was really
happening" (p.305).
Inevitably perhaps, with such a diversity of authorship, approaches
to source citation range from rigorous to casual. But there
is ample evidence here to support the argument in Cees Hamelink's
preface that ordinary people, wherever they live, will only
be informed properly about matters of public interest if they
proactively insist upon it. One of many examples is Jack Lule's
analysis of recurring metaphors in news. He demonstrates how
the NBC Nightly News failed to provide a site where the decision
to go to war could be debated. Instead, through choice of language
and use of metaphor, it portrayed the US as being on a "seemingly
inevitable path to war" (p.103).
Similarly Abdullah
Schleifer takes issue with those journalists and news anchors
working for Arab satellite channels who, he says, live in a
"parallel ideological dreamworld" (p.228), where they
indulge their emotional commitment to Arab nationalism. No similar
weight of evidence emerges from this volume to suggest that
polarised positions might become less polarised in future.
In their careful
study of weblogs as a source of information about the war, Barbara
Kaye and Thomas Johnson report that nearly three quarters of
their respondents judged weblogs to be more credible than print
or broadcast media. But their findings also show that weblogs,
like other media, attract readers seeking confirmation of their
existing views.
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