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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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