Meaghan Casey
Global Media
*Extra Credit* Literature Review

Fables of Responsibility by Thomas Keenan and The News Media, Civil War, and Humanitarian Action by Larry Minear, Colin, Scott, and Thomas G. Weiss differ as texts in both prose and function. The profoundly dissimilar agendas of each author force one to teeter on the edge of abstraction (i.e. the theoretical work of Keenan) and concrete practicality (i.e. the grounded case studies of Minear) in order to establish an analytical link between the two texts. Both texts, however, converge in jointly calling for the intellectual to critically address the gaps in current studies of ethics and politics. The following essay comments on the style of each text and proceeds to utilize Keenan’s literary deconstruction of the rights and responsibilities surrounding ethics and politics to investigate Minear’s analysis of the media’s ever increasing role in humanitarian crisis.

Keenan’s text is more about language than application or understanding. Its abstract theoretical nature, although extremely well mapped out and articulated, is inaccessible to the general public. Interestingly, in the text Keenan refers to an instance in which a French publisher advised Marx to release Capital in separate parts to make it more accessible to the public. Marx ardently refused, stating that impatience “leads to change without interpretation” (Keenan 102). Keenan seems to embody this noble approach to his literature, taking pride in revealing the truth in time and only with much deliberation from the reader. He emphasizes that reading, “if it happens at all, happens only in the encounter with difficulty and without guarantees” (Keenan 103). Certainly that is the case in this text. Interpretations are not simply given; the reader must embark on a linguistic journey to discern meaning from the text.

Minear’s text, on the contrary, is extremely accessible to the general public and it situates analysis in context through practical case studies. While the greatest contribution of Keenan’s text may well be its deconstruction of language and eternal questioning, Minear’s greatest contribution is the systematic investigation of the role of media alongside governments and humanitarian agencies in the international system. The authors portray the shifting international stage as a new game of billiards in which states, non-states, and transnational actors- including many components of the media- comprise billiard balls. Minear addresses the gap in research on the important role of media to provide game-winning strategies for success in humanitarian crisis situations, while Keenan’s address provides an intellectual critic of ethics and politics which deconstructs the terms of the game.

Keenan’s book is broken down by theorists Aesop(if he may be named as such), Sade, Marx, and Foucault. Foucault preaches the responsibility of the intellectual to speak for the voiceless, exclaiming, “[T]he chance that misfortune will be left wordless, and not simply the misfortune itself, calls for active and insistent assertion” (Kennan 159). Foucault makes it clear that the individual, and likely in this case the intellectual, has a duty to make complex crisis known to agencies, such as the government or humanitarian organizations. The media has, in many ways, taken up this call to report on humanitarian crisis. A Foucault reading of the increasing role of the media perhaps would view media coverage as a new actor in the international scene, one who uses mediums of the media as strategies and tactics to transgress the prior era of international relations which did not as readily include individuals, non-state actors, the marginalized, or the periphery. But the media is not all the same, as Minear makes clear in a perceptive moment in the text. The authors use media in the plural to stress the variety of entities and interests within the grouping. This crucial component allows for multiple identities within the media.

For one, the media may be used a tool or a force multiplier by states, non-state actors and the media alike. As was mentioned in Grin Without a Cat, French New Leftists burned cars in the quarters of France, but it was the footage that made an impact. They may have burned the same five cars each night and injured no one, but the footage held the message. Likewise, as Major General Lewis MacKenzie, commander of UN-PROFOR in Sarajevo, reported, “‘The media was the only major weapon system I had. Whenever I went into negotiations with the warring parties, it was a tremendous weapon to be able to say: “OK, if you don’t want to do it the UN’s way, I’ll nail your butt on CNN in about 20 minutes.’ That worked, nine times out of ten” (Minear 59). The media has the power to cease human rights violations or exalt or damage image and reputations through photo opportunities.

This power of the media becomes problematic for Minear when it deteriorates public will or finite resources from humanitarian projects in need. As infotainment rules the news, less attention is paid to following through, even on worthy initiatives. Humanitarian agencies, for example, “stand to win greater backing for their actions to provide emergency assistance as they lose support for the more difficult but ultimately more critical tasks of tackling the root causes of distress and of development education in their own societies” (Minear 83). The media’s and the audiences short span of attention can dangerously result in failure to report crisis in dept or oversimplification of complex issues. The media may simply repeat stereotypes rather than analytically question events. These issues demonstrate a lapse in media responsibility, an eithic-policitcal dilemma. Keenan emphasizes that “‘to speak is to do something, to do something other than express what one thinks [or] translate what one knows.’ ‘Discourses are made of signs, but what they do is more than use these signs to designate things’” (Keenan 151). Keenan recognizes that the media does more than simply represent the facts, and that bias may be hard to differentiate. For example, in the case study of Rwanda, media reports reduced the crisis to ancient ethnic hatreds which masked the true nature of the genocide. It is imperative, based on examples such as Rwanda, for future media accounts to research the historical and political context of the events to situate the breaking news.

Minear calls for each pillar to become more responsible, for example by situating news stories in a broader political context, while Keenan questions what responsibility is. Keenan prompts that perhaps, “Responsibility begins in the bad example; one could even say that the only good example, the only one worthy of imitation, interiorization, and identification that the example calls for, is the bad example” (Keenan 45). Theoretically, Keenan’s posited statement holds, but in practice sometimes a lesson learned does not result in increased responsibility. The horrific scenes of dead US Marines dragged through the streets of Mogadishu in Somali, for example, “at the very least hastened- and perhaps also drove- a policy reversal by the administration” (Minear 55). Yet, this example, this bad example, did not necessarily help the US to become more responsible in international intervention, more cautious, but not necessarily more responsible. Although America soaked up a lesson, it might not have been the right lesson. It can be argued that due to the Somalia intervention, the U.S. delayed intervention in Rwanda, an intervention that may have prevented the full scale of the genocide.

It seems that one venue to reach greater responsibility in the media, appropriated by both Keenan and Minear in different forms, is to intellectualize media, perhaps through prevention and post-resolution media coverage surrounding complex emergencies. For example when US troops arrived in Somalia in 1992, the worse part of the famine was over, arguably. Minear reverberates, “A recurring lesson from the crises reviewed in this study is that prevention would have been more effective- and less expensive- than hurry-up responses to existing emergencies” (Minear 81). The best venue for pre and post conflict media attention, if not in infotainment, may be documentaries, researched publications, series, and specials directed at public education. The media should feel a responsibility as an international citizen to ethically research and contextual humanitarian crisis, however daunting this task may seem.

Keenan powerfully states, “‘Humanity’ is this madness, its subjects and its object. It is not simply the ignorance of not knowing what to do; it is rather the terror of still having to do, without knowing. And we have no magic caps, only ghosts and monsters” (Keenan 133). This pessimistic ending to his book leaves the reader ungrounded. Minear’s text helps re-ground the reader to reach for tool to help ensure rights and responsibilities, even if (as Keenan continuously reiterates), “Like rights, responsibilities are unlimited and unguaranteed- if they are anything at all” (Keenan 176). Minear’s tools involve increased cooperation and communication among the media, governments, and humanitarian agencies to reach a deeper understanding and produce better solutions. Although the media, governments, and humanitarian agencies may not know the next step- terrified of the ghosts, monsters, and lack of responsibility in the world- they can collaborate and use information from each other to lesson the fear. This cooperation will, ideally, prove that the international community can better defend rights, establish responsibility, reach security and end humanitarian crisis through increased interaction. Although Keenan’s theories posit that the ethico-political is forever insecure and endless, Minear’s practical manual takes steps to secure ethics and responsibility in humanitarian crisis through increased international transparency and collaboration.