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Representing Contemporary War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

David Campbell
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Abstract

“… Sontag not only challenges the compassion fatigue thesis; she questions the notion of the CNN effect. With regard to inaction in Bosnia despite the steady stream of images of ethnic cleansing that made their way out of Sarajevo, Sontag argues that people didn't turn off because they were either overwhelmed by their quantity or anaesthetized by their quality. Rather, they switched off because American and European leaders proclaimed it was an intractable and irresolvable situation. The political context into which the pictures were being inserted was already set, with military intervention not an option, and no amount of horrific photographs was going to change that….

… In the Iraq war of 2003 imagery was central to the conflict and often the subject of conflict itself. In this context, the Pentagon's strategy of “embedding” reporters and their camera crews with fighting units, and having them operate at the behest of that unit, continues the long-running tradition of a close relationship between the media and the military…. Given this, Sontag is perhaps surprisingly sanguine about the genuineness of war photography in the contemporary period. While recognizing that many of the now iconic combat images of the pre-Vietnam period were staged, she sees Vietnam as a watershed such that “the practice of inventing dramatic news pictures, staging them for the camera, seems on its way to becoming a lost art.” Insofar as Sontag is referring to the likelihood of individual photographers seeking to deceive, she may be right. There was, however, at least one notable instance in Iraq of digital manipulation. This resulted in the Los Angeles Times sacking award-winning staff photographer Brian Walski, whose altered image of a British soldier in Basra (he had combined two photos into one to improve marginally composition) was used on the paper's front page….

… What is most striking about the embedded journalists' coverage of the Iraq war is the way in which the images of the conflict produced by the allies' media was so relatively clean, being largely devoid of the dead bodies that mark a major conflict. In this outcome, the media is a willing accomplice….”

Type
Review Essays
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , September 2003 , pp. 99 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2003

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References

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10 Ibid., p. 101. For an argument against the CNN effect in relation to images of Bosnian atrocity, see Campbell, DavidAtrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia—The Case of ITN versus Living Marxism, Part II Journal of Human Rights 1 no. 2 (2002) 157–58Google Scholar; see also http://www.virtual-security.net/attrocity/atrocity2.htm.

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34 Ciar Byrne, “US TV networks <kissed ass>, says Wolff,”http://MediaGuardian.co.uk, June 25, 2003; available at http://media.guardian.co.uk/iraqandthemedia/story/0,12823,984899,00.html. Jayson Blair was the New York Times reporter whose fabrications resulted in upheaval at the newspaper.

35 Truscott, Lucian K IVIn This War, News Is A Weapon New York TimesMarch 25, 2003p.A1/Google ScholarThe weaponization of the media also preceded the conflict, especially when it came to the issue of weapons of mass destruction. One of the underreported elements of the Blair crisis at the New York Times was that “the paper's bioterrorism expert, Judith Miller, admitted her main source on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme had been the Pentagon's favored Iraqi, Ahmad Chalabi. That in turn suggested that the Pentagon and Mr. Chalabi had used the paper to help create justification for war.” Suzanne Goldenberg, “US paper gripped by new crisis of ethics,”Guardian, May 30, 2003, p. 19.

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