In The Future of Media, a collection of authors from varied backgrounds (the majority as activists) argue against increased media consolidation at the hands of the Federal Communications Commission, promoting grassroots activism to halt a trend that flies in the face of our democratic principles. This trend toward monopoly is nothing new to American business; but it picked up speed in 1996 when Congress passed the Telecommunications Act, drastically relaxing ownership regulations in the media sector and paving the way for corporate hegemonies like Clear Channel’s dominance of the radio waves. In the name of free market competition, deregulation allowed most of the images and sounds seen and heard on a daily basis, all over the world, to fall into the hands of only five major corporations: General Electric, Viacom, News Corporation, Time Warner and Disney. Instead of fostering competition, the act shrank the media industry into an even smaller group of self-interested parties that Robert McChesney, an academic media critic and one of the book’s editors, likens to Hyman Roth’s Havana patio in The Godfather Part II [12]. In 2003, the F.C.C. approved another set of deregulatory measures that would have allowed the media pool to shrink even further, has it not provoked a firestorm of citizen outrage and grassroots activism on both ends of the political spectrum. Several of the essays in The Future of Media describe the democratic fervor whipped up by the F.C.C.’s rule changes, culminating in a series of hearings before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which struck down the changes in 2004.
Each of the authors takes up the mantle of media reform forged in 2003, urging readers to get involved in the “fight to limit conglomerate swallowing of media outlets by sensible limits on multiple and cross-ownership of TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, and other information sources,” as Bill Moyers puts it in the book’s introduction [xxi]. The cause of media reform stems from the principle that the media are supposed to balance their financial interests with a concern for their audience, the public, whom they are obligated to inform as well as entertain. As F.C.C. Commissioner Michael J. Copps points out in his essay, “Where is the Public Interest in Media Consolidation?”, broadcast media companies receive their free licenses to use the publicly-owned electromagnetic spectrum in exchange for a pledge to serve the public interest (this system is known as the public-trustee framework, or the public interest standard) [120]. As those media companies join bigger, vertically-integrated corporations, where they are only one of many profit-seeking operations, the public interest loses out to the bottom line.
The problem is not a vast and insidious corporate conspiracy to control the hearts and minds of average Americans—it’s more subtle than that. Corporate emphasis on profit forces out programming that genuinely reflects the makeup and interests of the public in local markets, because selling more ad time means targeting the most commercially coveted demographics and promotes a “lowest common denominator” approach. Funding for informative and locally-geared programming gets cut as corporations consolidate their resources in order to maximize the ratio of revenue to production costs. Corporate honchos are also likely to hire and put on the air people who look and think like them, at the expense of voices of dissent. In the essay “Media Bias: How to Spot It—And How to Fight It,” Peter Hart cites a study conducted by his organization, the media watchdog FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), which found that 92% of U.S. sources interviewed on network newscasts in 2001 were white and 85% were male [52]. Not surprisingly, corporate representatives were interviewed on the air 35 times more often than representatives of organized labor. FAIR’s study illustrates how the consolidation of media production and distribution runs directly counter to the Supreme Court’s opinion that “the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public” (quoted by Schwartzman, et al. in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership,” 153). Furthermore, the media’s conglomeration means that the people in control are increasingly elite, detached by class and culture from the majority of the public they are supposed to serve. If the elites in corporate media join forces with the elites in government, whose interests more closely resemble their own, then the media’s role as the “fourth estate,” a muckraking check on official power, will go out the window.
All of this is particularly scary in our postmodern age, which is so saturated with images and sound bites that there is no escape from mediation. If global media is a crucial node in the current heteropolar political landscape, as this course has argued, then the question of who controls the media is a direly urgent one. If media has the power to compete with governments in mobilizing political action and influencing our values and principles, then what happens when the media falls into the hands of an elite few, driven solely by the interests of free market capital?
Advocates for deregulation insist that the Internet and cable television will make up for the diversity lost in the consolidation of the newspaper and broadcast industries. But in “The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership” in The Future of Media, Andrew Jay Schwartzman, Cheryl A. Leanza and Harold Feld (lawyers who argued the case against the F.C.C. for the Media Access Project in 2003) maintain that the internet is still just a red herring. “Because of the economics of news production, only a handful of websites control the bulk of news generation and distribution over the Internet,” they write. “Although anyone remains free to set up a website and post or send information to the rest of the world, this freedom does not equate with an ability to effectively compete with existing media companies. The question is not whether news is somehow discoverable, but whether it enters into the public’s awareness” [155]. On the surface, this argument seems a little outdated. Political blogs like Talking Points Memo and the Drudge Report existed when the book was published in 2005, but they have only recently risen to prominence as the potential messiahs of 21st century news, especially since TPM received a Polk Award this year for its coverage of the US Attorney scandal. So maybe the Internet already plays a more important role as an alternative news source than it did three years ago. But the authors’ point about public awareness is well taken. Although online news has certainly become more important, it still pales when compared to mainstream news in terms of viewership and cultural permeation. Everyone knows what CNN is (we even have an effect named after it), but it’s unlikely that anybody outside politically well-informed circles has ever heard of TPM. And although the right people might be reading the blogs, allowing the info they dig up to circulate more widely—the US Attorneys scandal is a case in point—they still fail to reach an audience anywhere near as large as those of the network news shows or the 24-hour cable news channels. The other crucial distinction between online news aggregates and the mainstream news is money: no blog has the finances to bankroll the kind of investigative reporting that the media’s fourth estate role entails. Although the aggregation model is gaining traction as a valuable way to compile and distribute good information, the blogs have yet to figure out a reliable means of sustaining themselves financially while expanding their operations. All of which goes to show, yet again, the defects of a media system that depends on the capitalist model.
If traditional television news is still the average American’s main source of information, then who controls the media is just as important today as it was a few years ago. Indeed, as very recent events have proven, the question of media consolidation is not off the table despite reformers’ victory in 2004. In December, the F.C.C. relaxed a ban on ownership of different media in the same market, allowing companies to own one newspaper and one TV station in one city in the top twenty markets, provided that the station is not in the top four and there are at least eight other news sources. The Senate Commerce Committee passed a “resolution of disapproval” on April 24 to invalidate the new policy; but President Bush has threatened to veto the resolution if it passes in the Legislature, and several media titans have already filed a lawsuit against it on the grounds that it violates their First Amendment rights. Cross-media ownership is an especially pressing issue in light of current controversy over one of the world’s biggest media markets, New York City, where Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is on its way to controlling several of the biggest media outlets. Thanks to F.C.C.-granted waivers of the pre-existing cross-media ownership ban, News Corp already owns The New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and two television stations, and is in talks to purchase Newsday from the Tribune Company. The sale would put Murdoch’s corporation in control of three of the country’s ten largest papers.
The authors of The Future of Media clearly anticipated in 2005 that the fight for media reform was far from over; the book is presented not as a commemoration of the successes of 2003 but as a primer for concerned citizens and future activists. The back of the book features a 70-page media reform action guide, with step-by-step guides to filing complaints with the F.C.C., monitoring local media outlets, organizing like-minded individuals, and other levels of activism. This call to action echoes what many see as the key strength of alternative news gathering on the internet: putting authority over information into the hands of the people that that information is supposed to serve. In our era of media conglomerates, we need individuals and local groups to keep an eye on policy and production/distribution institutions in the same way that blogs monitor the mainstream news. In order to preserve the fourth estate, we need a grassroots fifth estate to mediate the media.

Sources:
“Murdoch Taking on F.C.C. Media Rule.” Stephen Labaton. The New York Times, April 23 2008.
“Murdoch Closes in on Newsday and Reshapes Journal.” Richard Perez-Pena and Tim Arango. The New York Times, April 22 2008.
“Senate Committee Votes to Overturn F.C.C. Cross-Media Ownership Rules.” Katherine Skiba. US News & World Report, April 24 2008.

Posted by Jessica Kerry at 06:27 PM | Permalink

Errol Morris Lit Review
New York Times "Zoom" blog, 3/3/08 and 3/10/08

“If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves – because regardless of what it is – we are likely to uncritically believe it.” – Errol Morris, Zoom, New York Times Online, April 3, 2008.

Three years ago, I found myself, heavily bandaged and bruised, sitting at the desk of a clinical psychologist. He took a miniature Hot Wheels car and a plastic toy cow and asked me to share my account of what had landed me in the office that day. With this information, he sped the toy car across the surface, swerved to avoid hitting the cow (deer), and over-corrected, sending the tiny vehicle rolling four times before falling off the edge of desk, crashing to the ground. “Yeah, I guess that’s about right,” I thought aloud. The experience of witnessing the reconstruction from the outside was quite eerie.

The April 3rd and 10th posts on “Zoom,” Errol Morris’ blog on the New York Times Online, address cinematic re-enactments and the justifications for using them in documentaries. Both discuss Morris’ film, The Thin Blue Line (1988), the ultimate effect of which involved the exoneration of a man from Texas who had been convicted of murder. Morris uses the attention to detail present in his investigation of the Randall Dale Adams case, as well as the tendency of the human brain to miss these often vital clues in the discovery of truth to argue for the validity of re-enactments in documentary films.

At any given time, our field of vision can include an enormous variety of objects, such as Chihuahuas, zombies, etc. Unless they are addressed specifically, however, the narrative remains unchanged. Through re-enactments, Morris aims to call attention to previously overlooked objects in order to show how their incorporation may result in drastically different narratives, as seen in The Thin Blue Line.

To fully understand Morris’ reasoning, a brief introduction to The Thin Blue Line is beneficial. In 1976, Randal Dale Adams accepted a ride outside of Dallas from a stranger driving a stolen car, David Harris. Shortly thereafter, the two were pulled over by Dallas police officers, Robert Wood and Teresa Turko, on a routine traffic stop. Wood approached the stolen vehicle and was shot to death. Originally, police investigators believed Turko’s statement that she had positioned herself at the rear of the vehicle as demanded by protocol. To Morris, however, this scenario appeared suspect. A milkshake, belonging to Turko, was found thrown 14 feet from the door of the police car. If she had in fact been standing at the rear of the vehicle when Wood was shot, she most likely would have A) not carried the milkshake with her or B) dropped it at the position where she was standing. The position of the milkshake suggests that Turko had in fact remained in the police cruiser until after the attack had been made on her partner and then threw the beverage out of the car. Consequently, her ability to identify the suspect(s) would have been greatly diminished. Nevertheless, she maintained there was only one person in the stolen vehicle, Adams, resulting in an inevitable conviction.

In Morris’ view, the milkshake is symbolic of the often critical details we fail to notice when attempting to make sense of the world around us. Through the use of re-enactments, we are allowed “to see things that would otherwise be invisible.”[1] For me, the very crude re-enactment in the therapist’s office based on the highway patrol report allowed me to contribute to my own knowledge of “what really happened,” and thus begin coming to terms with a very traumatic event.

Continue reading "Blind Spots and Re-enactments" »

Posted by Anne T Krapu at 03:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Errol Morris – Literature Review

This literature review of Errol Morris's New York Time blog, Zoom, is one of three. I will be looking at entries from July 2007 through October 2007.

In his first blog entry with the New York Times, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” Errol Morris opens with a line of skepticism running throughout Zoom: “Pictures are supposed to be worth a thousand words.”[1] It is the first instance in which Morris takes up an everyday cliché and brings the reader to pause upon it. The technique resonates with the act of photography itself—a methodical dissection of an environment to make what appears, at first, banal, challenging and provocative.

In the following entries, Morris engages the reader not with a crash-course in the aesthetics of the photograph—its framing or lighting of a scene—but rather, calls into question the implications of relying upon aesthetics. The frame may capture an engrossing image, but what truth does it leave out in the act of framing? The contrast between black cannonballs and a sun-bleached road may be strikingly beautiful, but isn't there truth in the strategic posing of that scene as well? What about the content that the image excludes—in focusing on this slice of time, are we focusing on a truth or looking right past one? The context in which artistic expression takes hold is critical for gleaning meaning from a photograph; context creates truth in photography. This is not an entirely surprising position for Morris, who is in “the business” of moving pictures, to take:

In discussing truth and photography, we are asking whether a caption or a belief - whether a statement about a photograph — is true or false about (the things depicted in) the photograph. [...] The issue of the truth or falsity of a photograph is only meaningful with respect to statements about the photograph. Truth or falsity “adheres” not to the photograph itself but to the statements we make about a photograph. Depending on the statements, our answers change. All alone — shorn of context, without captions — a photograph is neither true nor false.[2]

The truths Morris takes from photographs of his youth relate directly back to memories he has—the context out of which his present arises, perhaps. He may remember, as a child, playing a game against the wall upon which he is seated in one of the photographs; he may remember the day on which he received the bicycle which sneaks into the frame on another picture. These memories verify the meaning behind the photographs: they are photographs of Errol Morris the filmmaker, and Errol Morris was a boy at a time in the past. Additionally, the context in which Morris received the photographs is indicative of the truth behind them; they hold value, as they are shots taken by his father, fifty years after the man's death. With the multiplicity of contexts surrounding the image, numerous truths emerge, as the photographs are equally Errol Morris and the relationship between father and son.

To better understand why a photograph without context does not have meaning, we may consider Morris's consideration of photographs as data: “Photographs preserve information. They record data. They present evidence.”[3] In this instance, the filmmaker has stripped the photograph of all aesthetic sensibility and reduced it to a means to an end (that end being the truth(s) which the photograph lends itself to). The photograph of Errol Morris sitting on a brick wall as a boy has no inherent truth, it is simply evidence of a statement or question which has been formulated through contextualization in the viewer's mind (e.g. Morris contextualized the image relative to his past; the reader will contextualize it differently). The reader absorbs the language of the article on the website to contextualize the photograph before him (e.g. I, the reader, am reading an article written by Errol Morris, and so I contextualize the image as the boy, Errol Morris). The relationship between language and the world holds the truth Morris notes,[4] and the image is merely present to corroborate the language (unless the image is intentionally deceptive—this is the concern of Sontag and others in their consideration of Fenton's “Valley of the Shadow of Death.”)

The example of multiple truths can be extended to the images that Morris includes in his entries. The Lusitania, a ship which predates the first World War, has a historical context written into our texts. It is dry and factual—more data. For those of us who were not alive when the Lusitania sunk, this historical context is largely all we have in pursuing the truth of the image of the Lusitania. My guess would be that many of us view the truth of the photograph similarly: that was the ship that brought the United States into WWI; it was a large ship and could hold 1,000 people (per the caption). The context for the event is provided in writing and in other images which Morris provides for us, all of which are meant to make the initial image of the ocean-liner more truthful. To an extent, the filmmaker and the photographs succeed. After viewing the New York Times image of the coffins, conceptualizing the loss of life in viewing the original photograph becomes easier. The role of sequence becomes critical in contextualization, as the coffins only hold resonance in so far as they correlate to the original image (the ship); naturally, this correlation is dependent upon the coffin image dating after the photograph of the Lusitania chugging along.

As we find out in Morris's later entries, the filmmaker obsesses over the sequence of images. He does so because the sequence lends itself to the truth behind that data (the photographs). Roger Fenton's photos of “Valley of the Shadow of Death” speak to the photographer's personality, and Morris's project determining which comes first—OFF or ON—has little to do with the aestheticism of the photographs and everything to do with assessing the truth of who Roger Fenton was. The “Which Came First” entries depict one image producer trying to understand another, and the truth of Fenton's photographs revolve around the ethical implications of posing, for Morris. The caption under the photographs is not simply: “Valley of the Shadow of Death,” but also “Roger Fenton poses the ON Scene.” Both are “truths” which the photographs verify.

This distinction between a photograph as the truth and a photograph as evidence of the truth is emphasized in Morris's description of the photograph as a simulacrum: “[...] photographs are nothing more than coarse-grained screens laid over reality, revealing nothing more (about what is photographed) than a certain size. They provide an imperfect simulacrum of the surface of things.”[5] If one takes Morris's point to be valid, the sequence of images forms its own language which can complement the images themselves. Perhaps many imperfect simulacra find coherence in an order that lends itself to truth. The possibility arguably makes film, if not a more truthful medium, a medium providing more pathways to the truth. As Morris notes, “In every photograph something is absent. Someone has made a decision about what time-slice to expose on the emulsion, what space-slice to expose on the emulsion.” That being the case, the same can be said for film—something is always out of the frame, always missed just before the lens opens and after it shutters closed.

Moving forward, one might apply Morris's observations regarding the context in which representations emerge to our production efforts. In particular, I wonder what the filmmaker's insights offer in the realm of documentation. Documentation suggests that the medium acts to represent a truth evolving before us; theoretically, we are not producing that truth, we are capturing the data to corroborate it. Clearly, this is not the case.

How can the act of gathering (photographic) data be possible? When Morris suggests that “believing is seeing,” he notes the difficulty, if not impossibility, of objectivity. This should not be considered only in the realm of consumption, but in production as well. The photographer begins a communication with the subject of his photograph, and the photograph itself is data produced not as a documentation of what is as it is, but of the truth as it is found by the producer (It is interesting to note that only when Errol Morris and Dennis Purcell look outside the truth which Fenton sought to capture do they derive meaning (some semblance of truth) from the movement of the seemingly inconsequential rocks slipping down the slope of the valley).

A possible solution to this predicament may be found in Part II of Morris's “Which Came First” series. He closes the entry with an abrupt transition: “One last thought. I imagine a counterpart to Fenton.”[6] Morris offers no explanation for the shift, but it is instructive. Another producer is introduced. Tolstoy's truth enters the dialogue. Perhaps where Fenton's and Tolstoy's truths overlap, and where we the readers too find the truths we have been looking for—perhaps that is where meaning resides. If that is the case, we need as many images of the Valley of the Shadow of Death as we can produce, and we need them from as many contexts as possible.

Notes
[1] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[2] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[3] Errol Morris, “Which Came First? (Part Three): Can George, Lionel and Marmaduke Help Us Order the Fenton Photographs?” New York Times 23 Oct. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/which-came-first-part-three-can-george-lionel-and-marmaduke-help-us-order-the-fenton-photographs/
[4] Errol Morris, “Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire,” New York Times 10 Jul. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/pictures-are-supposed-to-be-worth-a-thousand-words/
[5] Errol Morris, “Will the Real Hooded Man Please Stand Up” New York Times 15 Aug. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/will-the-real-hooded-man-please-stand-up/
[6] Errol Morris, “Which Came First? (Part Two)” New York Times 4 Oct. 2007. http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/which-came-first-part-two/

Posted by Michael Dupuis Jr. at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The First Casualty – Ch. 21
Literature Review
April 15, 2008
Julia Stern

"Despite scouring two national newspapers every day, listening to the radio, surfing the web and watching the TV news, I have absolutely no idea how the war is going" (527).

Phillip Knightley begins the final chapter of his book, The First Casualty, with this sentiment of irony and dissatisfaction regarding media coverage of the current war in Iraq, as expressed by a British reader in a 2003 Letter to the Editor of The Guardian. In an age when the media has assumed such a ubiquitous presence in viewers’ daily lives, the issue of assessing the truth and accuracy of news coverage becomes ever more crucial – and perhaps less easily discernible – as we are consistently inundated with compelling images, live footage, and “expert” commentary on the latest wartime events. In the case of the current war in Iraq – the U.S. now entering its fifth year of engagement – and the Pentagon’s broader concept of the “War on Terror,” Knightley points to the media’s unprecedented efforts to make this “the most thoroughly reported war of modern times” (528),equipped with the technological capacity to deliver 24-hour coverage, and inclined to embed reporters within military units so that the news we see would (in theory) come “directly from amidst the troops in the field: ‘the best representatives to convey America’s intentions and capabilities’” (528, 531). Yet, as is illustrated in this chapter with a critical assessment of news coverage since the onset of the war in 2003, Knightley sets out to prove – successfully, it seems – that often, and sometimes intentionally so, “the first casualty when war comes, is [the] truth.”

As we learned from our recent discussion with the Eisenhower Series generals describing their varied interactions with the military and the media, there are many different (often conflicting) interests – political, corporate, humanitarian, and individual – involved in determining what is ultimately reported to the public during wartime. In Chapter 21 of The First Casualty, Knightly focuses specifically on the Pentagon and its recent policies in Iraq concerning media coverage, seriously calling into question the morality of several calculated actions employed by the U.S. government to control the content of information ultimately disseminated. He describes the series of events which drove Bryan Whitman, Deputy Secretary of Defense, to construct the current “American media plan,” originating in 1999 with U.S. involvement in NATO’s campaign against Yugoslavia, and continuing into 2002 with the U.S. bombing of several targets in Afghanistan (529). Because there were remarkably few deaths on which to report from the American side, the western media, by default, turned toward “the enemy” to portray the civilian casualties and widespread devastation inflicted by American bombs abroad. So as to avoid another situation in which America risked losing public support for its military campaigns – especially in light of the impending decision to declare war on Iraq – Whitman devised a plan to portray the U.S. military in a just and humane light.

Thus began the system of “embedding” journalists within a military unit, infusing them with the spirit of solidarity (offering them food, shelter, uniforms, even honorary officer’s rank), and providing them pre-censored, pre-scripted, “‘ready-for-air’ package[s]” of “sanitized” news to report to the rest of the world (534, 541). New York Magazine writer Michael Wolff reveals that while reporting on the war, "I realised that every day you got to know less and less so that by the end of your stay you'd know absolutely nothing" (535). When he finally put his briefing officer on the spot and questioned the purpose of the U.S. occupation, and the instructional value of “this multi-million dollar press center,” Wolff claims to have been denounced as a “traitor,” and told to go home (534).

For many of those “unilateral” correspondents that chose not comply with the stringent protocol of the Pentagon and Ministry of Defense – instead reporting independently from the Iraqi side – Knightley cites the dramatic responses elicited against them by U.S. officials, including the barring of certain networks from broadcasting their reports, and actually firing missiles and killing suspected “enemy” journalists (whose reports might “fuel anti-American sentiment”) (538). While he does not specify the time span for these figures, Knightley notes that within a short period, fifteen international correspondents were killed by the American military and two wounded (although this has not been confirmed as a deliberate act of the U.S. government).

“Welcome to the new and highly dangerous world of the war correspondent in the twenty-first century,” Knightley declares, calling attention to the reality that unless reporters deliver the stories pre-approved by the administration, they potentially put at risk their jobs, and even their lives (537). He likens President Bush’s foreign policy mantra, "You're either with us or against us," to the administration’s attitude toward managing the activity of war correspondents (537). One thing I found particularly disturbing, was the cavalier, "who cares" attitude of the U.S. military toward the wellbeing of unilateral reporters, simply stating “they’ve been warned,” in reference to those who perished in the 2002 bombing of the al-Jazeera compound in Kabul—a move which U.S. officials deemed justified, as they believed the compound to be “the location of significant al-Qaeda activity” (which was only, in actuality, standard interviews with select Taliban leaders) (538).

In addition to highlighting the efforts of the U.S. government to conceal from the public any piece of potentially unfavorable publicity – or, as one al-Jazeera cameraman observed, to perpetuate a “war without witnesses” (539) – Knightley also describes America’s desire to convey its “awe-inspiring military might” to the rest of the world, and in so doing garner public support for current or future military campaigns (527). Knightley suggests that the portrayal of events is often manipulated by propagandists, so as to quite literally “sell” the war to the American public and their allies abroad. He cites the example of Private Jessica Lynch as a particularly egregious commercialization and distortion of facts, as the story of her rescue inspired a whole collection of “America Loves Jessica” paraphernalia, music, and a book deal. As observed by the BBC’s Simon Wren, instead of covering the events actually transpiring on the battlefield, the American news media was completely devoted to profiling this “fallen hero,” whose experience as an “abused” prisoner of war (which was later revealed to be embellished by the Pentagon) served only to strengthen the U.S. cause in continuing its mission in Iraq (545). It is Knightley’s intention to blow the whistle on this manipulation of the facts, calling on war correspondents to accept some responsibility in concealing the true story. Yet I wonder how even the reporters involved could have known the extent to which the government was spinning these events.

Perhaps this is a naive assumption, but conventional wisdom suggests that the more information you have, the more informed (of the truth) you will be. In an age when war correspondents have in some cases “developed the status of a pop star” from appearing on camera so often – T-shirts and taglines to boot – it is easy to get swept up in the media machine and believe everything they report, especially when they play to the human emotions of patriotism, comradeship, and love of a hero (as with the story of Private Jessica Lynch). Yet if this reporting is completely pre-calculated and one-sided, the increase in its ubiquity means nothing in the way of truth.

At times I found myself questioning the objectivity of some of Knightley’s claims regarding the U.S. government, simply because such dishonest, evasive policies seemed too unbelievable to be true. Yet in addition to his own opinions, Knightley’s inclusion of the testimonials and firsthand experiences of several war correspondents (i.e. the common feeling of being told by the military, “You can write what you like—but if we don’t like it we’ll shoot you” (537)), lent validity to his claims against the Pentagon’s meticulous “hand-outs” and “sound-bites” to manage the way the war would unfold before our eyes (542).

Kinghtley states in the Preface to this edition of his book, his intention "to challenge journalists to examine their own role in the promotion of war and urge them to consider the burden they bear...for what happens next" (xiii). Having read The First Casualty for myself, I believe that the onus of thoughtful criticism must also be extended to the public – the actual consumers of news media – who can choose to either accept or reject which truth, which "version of history" is in fact reported to us (544).

References
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to Iraq. 3rd ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Eisenhower Series College Program. Class Presentation. Watson Institute, Brown University. Providence, RI. 2 Apr. 2008.

Posted by Julia Stern at 06:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Literature review – Kristian Walther

Borradori, Giovanna: Philosophy in a Time of Terror – Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida

“[A]nd this is why I’m asking you to forget September 11. It certainly seems to me to be a better idea than forgetting ourselves in the name of the memory of the dead”
Maja Zehfuss – After 911

This book, or rather interviews, brings for the first time two of the most important European philosophers in the 20th century together. The theme, as the title of the book indicates is the question of philosophy in the wake of the ”event” 9.11.

Habermas and Derrida come from two different philosophical traditions. Habermas is usually described as the clearest inheritor of critical theory tradition/Frankfurter School – originally initiated around Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt and which counted among its most prominent members Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Benjamin.

Derrida on the other hand belong to “French” tradition, but looking at the ancestors of this “school” the distinction becomes somewhat blurred (at least if we understand ancestors as someone who is located in a particular space – in terra). Derrida’s general philosophical project (Deconstruction) owes a great debt to German philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. What distinguishes Derrida and Habermas is among other things, as Borradori highlights in her introduction, their style. The interview with Habermas comprises 20 pages and is one tempts to say, unusually clear. Derrida’s on the other hand is 52 pages and rather difficult. Derrida’s first major works is centered on philosophy of language. In this vein it makes sense when Borradori says, [H]is extreme sensitivity for subtle facts of language makes Derrida’s thought virtually inseparable from the words in which it is expressed (xll).

In the introduction Giovanna Borradori locates both Habermas and Derrida in the legacy of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, although a rather heterogeneous tradition, shares the common theme, that reason is the light that leads human out of their “self-incured immaturity”. Clearly Habermas and Derrida shares this tradition but in different ways. In his major political “Theorie des Kommunikativen Handlens (the Theory of Communicative Action) Habermas is clearly building on the idea the reason and rationality is a necessary component, if we want to realize the universals that is inherent in the Enlightenment tradition. Modernity as an overall term for the contemporary historical epoch is to Habermas still an “Unfulfilled Project” Therefore, and this is where his connection to the critical theory becomes most clear, it is the task of the philosopher to criticize the different forms of pathologies, that characterizes the Modern. This task of the philosopher is closely connected the idea of communicative action. Building on the “Anglo-Saxon” trend in philosophy of language Habermas argues that communicative rationality (not instrumental!) is the means to which we will be able to fulfill this project. Language is in its very nature oriented to reciprocal understanding but this requires that people, when using the public space for discussion, meets the basic requirements (validity claims) of language such as telling the truth and further, that language as such always is oriented to different kinds of perspective always in the search for “the forceless force of the better argument”.

Derrida, on the other hand is usually located as a post-modern philosopher implying an anti-Enlightenment stance. But as Borradori points out this not the case. Although deconstruction in its very nature leads our attention to the unconscious blind spots, that has been handed down and reproduced through generations, this does not imply that the Enlightenment as such should be refused. Rather the emphasis in deconstruction is on deconstruction. Nietzsche famously said that “We can only destroy as creators” and this is pretty much what Derrida does.

In his conversation with Borradori, Habermas tries to locate the “event” that we call 9.11 within his overall philosophical scheme. Pointing to the fact the September 11 was the first “historical world event” in the sense that the live coverage was unfiltered and broadcasted throughout the world, Habermas turns to the question of techno-media structure and how it affect our possibilities for fulfilling the demand for communicative rationality. The development of media technology has on the one hand improved the possibility for participation in the public sphere, but on the other hand increased the amount of “bad” information. The classic distinction between information and knowledge becomes obvious and this is central to Habermas. As pointed out earlier the use of language requires that we take precaution and further that always reflect upon using it. But the discourse on “war on terror” is problematic because it simplifies the actual “event” and because it unintended gives legitimacy to the terrorist. As such “the war on terror” leads to a distortion in communication. This is due to the lack of “semantic sensibility” regarding the distinction between the concepts of war, state and terror. Traditionally war is something that states wage against each other, but by declaring war is against a network that does fulfill the criteria of a state, the Bush administration has given legitimacy to terror as a mean to achieve political goal – although it is difficult to see the political content of the specific act. As such terror or violence can have political legitimacy if it used to overthrow a suppressing political regime, but this is clearly what “al-Qaeda” is lacking. The only clearly stated goal is to destabilize the US/The West. Second, Habermas points to the fact that by dividing world into a Manichean “good-evil” dichotomy (with its clear religious connotations) we fail to see through the veil of immediacy. The globalization and the spread of western values lead to a disintegration of traditional ways of life in many non-western societies, something that causes disturbance and reaction. Further, the idea that globalization is only beneficial is an idea that western societies impose on others, but the fact is that there is huge economic inequality, lack of respect for basic human rights and democracy.

For Habermas then the philosopher in a time of terror needs to reconstruct the foundation from which we are to proceed. The dysfunction in language and understanding needs be cured if we want to approach a more just and cosmopolitan order

Whereas Habermas through the entire interview – and in continuation of his general philosophical project maintains that rationality is a universal concept, Derrida on the other hand – through the use of deconstruction, points to the fact that rationality and other seemingly neutral concepts (e.g. tolerance) has a specific genealogy which is closely tied to a Christian tradition and nomenclature. This fact leads Derrida to embrace an ethic, where we become more sensible to the view of the other.

Starting out with some critical reflection on 9.11 as a “major event” Derrida points out that a truly new “event” forces us to develop a new language, new word that can express the significant in its own particularity. But using an old vocabulary we fail to see the “perhaps” true significance of 9.11. This is not to say that Derrida refuses that the killing in the attack on World Trade Center and Pentagon was a new thing, but he point to the fact that terror has a long history and as such is not something entirely new. The media and their uncritical use of language lead to a linguistic vulnerability by not reflecting what language does. Unlike Habermas, Derrida sees language as performative. Language is not just something that we can use without critical reflection. Language as such participates in the construction of the very world we are living in.

The collective trauma caused by the 9.11 attack is reproduced media and the entertainment industry. By using the same linguistic vocabulary as the Bush administration, the media gives us the sense of “metaphysical comfort” – that we can fight the terrorist and win if we take necessary precautionary measures. This is where Derrida introduces the concept of autoimmunity, which he describes as: [T]hat strange behavior where a living being, in quasi-suicidal fashion, “itself” works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its “own” immunity (p. 94). Autoimmunity relates first to the fact that “the Bin-Ladens” initially was trained and “sponsored” by the US. When the different Muslim groups fought against the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan, they had the status of “freedom-fighter”. The distinction between terrorist and freedom fighter is then not as clear-cut as it seems. As an attempt to cure the system from the “communist decease” the US created the very means that could destabilize its own system. Further, Derrida distinguish between symbolic and real suicide. The symbolic castration by the collapse of the Twin Towers is clearly very real in its manifestation, but the real suicide is the denial of law as mean to solve the conflict. The refusal to acknowledge that the terrorist falls under the Geneva Convention provides the clearest example. Further, and again in relation to our need for “metaphysical comfort” the extraordinary means that has been taken – increased surveillance is not what is needed. Rather, and this is where Derrida and Habermas agree, the solution is not to decrease our civic liberties in the name of a “was against terror”, but to look at the roots of the “conflict”. Returning to the “event” of 9.11 Derrida says that one of the problems is, that we are constantly reminded of the “event”. The media is reproducing the images, but if we are to proceed, we have to cope with the collective trauma in “traditional” psychological manner.. We have to accept that we cannot raise the dead and then move on – not being haunted by the specters of yesterday.

One further argument in the interview is Derrida’s reflection on 9.11 as the perhaps last large scale terrorist attack, that is tied to a specific territory (terror – territory = terrortory). Our dependency on the techno-info system makes it likely that future terrorist attack will take place in cyberspace where the first hand casualty will be minimal, but the long term effect enormous. This of course is a central point. Just a small disturbance into the techno-highway can lead to significant consequences. As an example Michael Chertoff said last week that: “We take threats to the cyber world as seriously as we take threats to the material world” , thereby underscoring the significant consequences that a destabilizing of the cyper-system can have.

Returning to the possible solution to the solution to the problem of terrorism both Habermas and Derrida agree that we should avoid being terrorized by our own means. Further, both consider the possibility of cosmopolitanism as the long-term solution, and this is where Kant unites. In his plea of a “democracy to come” what Derrida urge us to consider is more or less an echo Walter Benjamin’s statement in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” “[T]here is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim”. The consideration of cosmopolitanism leads Derrida to claim that what is needed is a cosmopolitan world government that transcend the nation-state. But when and how this is going to take place, is not something that Derrida tells us. One could say that this is a weakness in his argument, but the impression that I get is, that Derrida is trying to avoid the classic “logic-of-necessity” that has haunted much of the Marxist and critical theory.

Philosophy in a Time of Terror is a tour de force into two different philosophical universes. Although much is still to be said, this book shows the relevance of philosophy and critical thinking, when “major event” takes place. The introductory chapter locates nicely Habermas and Derrida within a larger context and the commentary that follows each conversation provides a good reflection of the major themes touched upon. In overall this book is a “must read” for everyone interested in critical reflection not only in relation to the “event” of 9.11 but also more general in the human conditions in late-/post-modernity.

Thomassen, Lasse (2004): De/Reconstructing Terrorism, in: Theory & Event, Vol.7, # 4 - http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v007/7.4thomassen.html

Michael Chertoff
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7335930.stm

Posted by Kristian Rune Walther at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag asks the reader to think about how our engagement with a photograph affects our understanding of suffering and war. In this insightful essay, Sontag evaluates the use of images and the role of photography in representing atrocity, how the interpretation of images is heavily influenced by context, and the effect that these representations have on us - the privileged that live removed from the Other’s pain. In doing so, Sontag addresses three major questions concerning photography and atrocity: What is unique about photography and representation? Why do we look at pictures of atrocities? And how does the act of seeing those images influence us? Sontag offers important thoughts on these questions and challenges how the reader interprets his or her own relationship to images, while at the same time challenging the postmodernist perspective on representation and reality and her earlier work on the anesthetizing effect of images.

According to Sontag, photography, which came into its own capturing images of World War I, possesses an inherent tension between objectivity and subjectivity. The problem with this tension is that it is not always acknowledged. Photographs are more easily accepted as fact, even though truth cannot be established without context or an understanding of the perspective of the photographer and interpretation lies so much with the identity of the viewer. As Sontag writes, “it is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude” (Sontag 46). She remarks: “A photograph is supposed not to evoke but to show. That is why photographs, unlike handmade images, can count as evidence. But evidence of what?” (47). In the case of the Crimean War, for instance, in 1885 Roger Fenton was sent by the British government to counteract the written reports which portrayed the war in a negative way. Fenton brought back images that made the war seem as if it were a “dignified all-male group outing” by including posed pictures of soldiers in the Crimea, making sure not to photograph the dead, maimed, or ill (50). The “evidence” Fenton created was clearly not representative of the situation in the Crimea.

Photographs also inhabit the space between art and documentation, further adding to the tension between objectivity and subjectivity in photography. Documentation is perceived as objective, whereas art is allowed subjectivity and may include the perspective of the artist. When something appears to have the look of the photographer’s involvement, as is the case when the photograph is particularly beautiful, the veracity of the picture is compromised in the viewer’s eyes. When the images look less artistic they are thought to be less manipulative, and “less likely to arouse facile compassion or identification” (27). Therefore, there has been a trend developing in war photography to make shots look more amateur, gritty, real. Sontag notes: “Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems ‘aesthetic’; that is, too much like art” (76). This sense of the inauthenticity of the beautiful speaks to our expectations of the photography of atrocity. According to Sontag, when people view atrocity they want the weight of witnessing without artistry, which is considered to be disingenuous.

Taking a step back from the process of photography to the interpretation of the image adds another layer to the relationship between the evidentiary guise of the photograph and the subjective interpretation of its meaning. Sontag discusses the importance of context for viewing a photograph by first focusing on the identity of the viewer, then the added narrative of writers or editors, and finally the space in which the photograph is presented. In order to clarify the importance of the identity of the viewer, Sontag focuses on Virginia Woolf’s response to a letter sent by a male lawyer inquiring as to how “we” should prevent war. In Woolf’s reply, she places much emphasis in identifying who “we” is, highlighting the fact that every experience of the world is filtered by the lens of identity. Sontag builds on this by describing interpretations of various pictures of murdered children. She notes that the picture of a dead child, mutilated by a tank round in Gaza, for instance, would be to a Palestinian first of all a picture of a Palestinian child murdered by Israeli ordnance. She remarks that “to the militant, identity is everything,” explaining how one’s identity greatly influences the meaning derived from an image (10). The intention of the photographer becomes irrelevant to determining the meaning of the photograph, since it “will have its own career, blown by the whims and loyalties of the diverse communities that have use for it” (39).

That which frames and showcases a picture, captions and physical space, also shapes the interpretation of it. Captions create context for a photograph, without which it is difficult to determine what the photograph is about, especially if it is a snapshot from something in the distant past. An interesting example of this is the controversy surrounding the pictures taken of the pogrom in Tarnopol during WWII, described by Mark Weber in "Fraud Exposed in Defamatory German Exhibition." These photographs were shown in a German exhibit as evidence that German Wehrmacht troops, not just SS soldiers, perpetrated murder against Jews and others. Many of the pictures, however, came from Soviet-era Russian sources, and after further analysis by historians the images were found to have been mislabeled. The photographs actually showed the victims of Soviet and non-German forces. As Sontag notes, “all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions” (10).

The understanding of photographs is also influenced by where the image is displayed. A picture in a newspaper surrounded by text reads very differently than one placed next to a Diet Coke add in the glossy pages of a magazine. Additionally, Sontag thinks that in contemporary society, there are few contemplative spaces where the gravity of images of atrocity can be felt, if it could ever be truly felt. When these photographs are hung in a gallery they become art, merely stations along a stroll in a social setting. In a book they hold the attention of the viewer longer, but eventually the book is closed and the emotion elicited by the photograph disappears. On television, “image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content” (106). Sontag leaves the reader contemplating the fleetingness of feeling derived from someone else’s pain, offering no apparent solution to the problem other than suggesting narrative should accompany all photographs.

In addition to examining how atrocity is interpreted through photographs, Sontag addresses the question of why people continue to be fascinated by pictures of atrocity. She comes up with two possibilities – one is that photographs are used to remember atrocity and the other is that there is a side of human nature that derives pleasure from seeing other’s pain. To return to the example of the German exhibition of war crimes, supporters of the exhibit claimed that it gave voice to the victims of the Nazi regime and would allow the German people to confront their past in order that none forget it. Photographs are essential for remembering past events, since “to remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture” (89). The scarcity of photographs of the genocide of the Herero or the Rape of Nanking, for example, may have contributed to the relative lack of attention they receive in comparison to the Jewish Holocaust or the Vietnam War. “The problem,” however, “is not that people remember through photographs, but that they remember only the photographs” (89). Sontag’s conviction that there is amnesia regarding events without pictures is not entirely convincing at this point, since certain important speeches or events that occurred before photography was invented are still remembered. However, the importance of photographs cannot be denied, especially as society moves ever further away from having significant un-photographed events as a result of the diffusion and affordability of technology. As noted by Walter Benjamin, history decays into images, not stories.

It is not just a few iconic images of atrocity, however, that make it into the mainstream. Instead, especially if one has access to the Internet, one has the opportunity to look at endless pictures of suffering. The proliferation of images of pain and the reality that people are drawn to them have to do with the less savory side of why we continue to look at photographs of atrocities – the fascination with the suffering of others. Edmund Burke, political theorists, may have been correct when he stated, “I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others” (97). Viewing contemporary pictures of violence could be justified by the fact that they could shock someone into taking action to stop the abuse. For example, even though journalist and Darfur expert Nicholas Kristof has suggested images of victims of genocide are “genocide porn,” an idea shared by Sontag, he still uses them in presentations because he feels they are powerful enough to cause people to act. He also adds the important element of context and narrative, justifying the use of the photographs.

Photographs of past events don’t carry that same obligation. Sontag posits that the only people that should look at photographs are those who could learn from them or stop the atrocity. “The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be” (42). This voyeuristic element is especially prominent in old photographs of victims of genocide. In the case of the Cambodian genocide, for instance, many of the victims were photographed before they were killed. The identity of the photographer is known, but the subjects are nameless, and they live on always as anonymous victims. In a way, viewing these pictures without attempting to identify the victims or do anything proactive with the impressions derived from the viewing could be considered to be re-victimizing those who suffered at the hands of the genocidaires.

After considering possible explanations of how and why we view photographs depicting suffering, the inevitable question is, what effect does this have on us? Sontag addresses two main ideas about the proliferation of images of suffering – othering and compassion fatigue. Sontag introduces the idea of the Other immediately, the title of her work is, after all, Regarding the Pain of Others. It is not our own pain we witness through photography, but the pain of someone else in another place, far removed from our safe space. We, as in “everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through,” cannot understand the pain of the Other (125). Even though the intention of the photographer was probably to humanize the victims, the extreme nature of the atrocity prohibits the viewers from identifying themselves in the subjects of the picture. If we identify too much, perhaps we would open up the frightful possibility that it could happen to us.

The legacy of colonialism and its history of othering also live on in the photography of atrocity.

The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and dying…. These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world. (70-71)

The sense of distance from the victims relates to the second idea about the effect of the plentitude of images of atrocity – numbness and compassion fatigue. In Sontag’s earlier book On Photography, she made the argument that the images of violence had the effect of anesthetizing the conscience to violence, leading to inaction and torpor. In a drastically different take on the matter, Sontag critiques the postmodernists view on reality and grapples with the idea of compassion fatigue. Sontag primarily targets Guy Debord and Jean Beaudrillard in her criticism of the intellectual’s position on photography and representation. She writes:

Reports of the death of reality – like the death of reason, the death of the intellectual, the death of serious literature – seem to have been accepted without much reflection by many who are attempting to understand what feels wrong, or empty, or idiotically triumphant in contemporary politics and culture. (110)

Sontag further takes up issue with the idea that the diffusion of violence has desensitized the viewing audience to the point of indifference. Instead of numbness leading to inaction, Sontag posits that lack of action could be the result of fear or of the frustration of being unable to affect change. The viewer has not lost his or her sense of humanity. People don’t “turn off” because of indifference resulting from the hypersaturation of images of violence. They disengage because “war, any war, doesn’t seem as if it can be stopped [which makes]…people … less responsive to the horrors” (101). Compassion fatigue, according to Sontag, does not exist; it is the frustration with helplessness that causes fatigue.

The final notes Sontag leaves the reader with is that we, those removed from the suffering, just don’t get it. This simple idea is a fitting conclusion to her essay, which focuses so much on the viewer’s diminished ability to connect with the subject of a photograph – the result of the nature of interpretation and photography and the inability to respond to what we see in a picture. We can only regard the pain of others; we cannot understand it. Nevertheless, the photograph of atrocity still has an important role to play in promoting action. The fact that a picture can evoke strong emotions in individuals is important. The elicited emotions can only be maintained by effective action, however, and this requires the cooperation and compassion of individuals with power. This action is crucial in deriving something positive from these images. As Sontag states so eloquently: “Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers” (101).

Works Cited/Consulted
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003.

Weber, Mark. "Fraud Exposed in Defamatory German Exhibition," The Journal of Historical Review, volume 18 no. 5/6 (September/December 1999), 6-11.

Posted by Amy M. L. Tan at 05:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Virtuous War Chapter 5-9
Literature Review by Josh Sargent
Virtuous war combines two almost opposite aims. The first, or the virtue, is to use a just war for ethical reasons or to accomplish an ethical end and the second or the virtual is to accomplish these ends from a remote distance with a minimum of casualties. These two aims combine to form virtuous war, the model that the United States government and military has adopted as official policy.
The definition of virtue in war comes from just war theory in the Christian tradition, most well defined by Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. According to Thomas Aquinas, a Christian soldier shows virtue in war through charity. “Justice is the key cardinal virtue…but the virtue of charity is what gives the impetus for Christian participation.” Justice and charity lay the grounds for carrying out a just war both in the reasons for going to war and in the conduct during war.
Virtual war is the ability to choose a spot on a map and effect damage upon it or the people residing there, whether through a smart bomb, or cruise missile or UAV or any other method with no or minimal human casualties. It is networked war, where the enemy lacks a face or defining human characteristics. It is war in the Internet era and it is constantly being made faster, smarter, more accurate and less human to the point where someday America may not even field troops on the battlefield; only unmanned vehicles and aircraft.
Chapters 5-9 of Der Derian’s book discuss different points along his travels through virtuality. They serve as waypoints along his journey; though some may seem dated, as conditions have changed since the book was printed.
Chapter 5 attempts to define the virtuous enemy. When the book was written the American government refuses to identify any particular country as the enemy in their exercises and the list of rogue states has been replaced by a list of “states of concern.” Now America clearly defines its enemies, as President Bush outlined the infamous axis of evil in March 2003 and the terrorist organization Al Quaeda is considered the greatest threat to American security. Then enemy still is faceless, shown only on night-vision scopes where they look less real than figures in a video game. Videos of Afghanistan and Iraq being bombed look surgical and neat, and there are no formal declarations of war, only extended military engagements. As the physical violence and bloodshed are downplayed, war is easier to justify and bloodshed is only real when it happens on American soil.
War is not a game, except for when it is held in San Francisco. The war game in San Francisco could not happen today. The army does not have the personnel to do so and the protests against the war would have a focal point that could create another WTO riot, only magnified immensely. The war games have given way to the main event. And Waco reminds me that John Yoo, in his recently released memo on torture, argued that the 4th Amendment did not apply to the United States military, when acting against American citizens within the United States. The military is ever present and could in the event of a major terrorist attack be used as a policing force not bound legally by the same restrictions as conventional police.
The National Convention seems anti-climactic knowing the end result. The Cold Warriors won out over Hollywood stardom and so did on a platform that rejected the virtue in virtuous war and proclaimed that nation-building and humanitarian interventions were not in America’s best interest. America should operate on a platform of strict realism and only use military force for our own ends. The Drawbridge to Fortress America was raised. 9//11 followed and virtuous war returned as the use of war for ethical purposes, to create freedom and democracy, seemed to be in America and the world’s best interest.
To Wesley Clark, the American intervention in Kosovo was not a war; it was coercive diplomacy conducted with no self-interest. Any escalation the NATO forces took was intended to send a diplomatic message, not to force Serbia to surrender. Victory was having Milosevic back down and stop the violence in Kosovo. Bombing was a message, sending in ground troops was a message and all these messages Holbrooke used for diplomatic ends. Invading Serbia was a last resort neither side wanted. Yet to the Kosova being ethnically cleansed and to the Serbs being “bombed for peace”, it was war. Kosovo was war with the best of intentions yet Der Derian after spending all this time on war shies away from it as he tries to explain his new theory of virtuality.
Der Derian at his most ambitious is trying to replace both classical and post-modern theories of international relations with a virtual theory of war and peace. This theory seeks to understand how the way reality is seen affects the conceptuality and the actuality of an event or a representative, and thus what is represented. The interwar is seen as “eternally returning” yet if Der Derian’s virtual theory is fully realized not inevitable as global politics can change from being-between wars and arrive at becoming-different from war. This is Der Derian at his most utopian, seeing in virtuality the hope for a brave new world, one in which differences represent a “challenge of connectivity, creativity and responsibility”. Yet even as he grasps at this hope, he realizes when seeing a gruesome picture that all his theory and training and education pale when compared to an undeserved death.
A virtuous war is a war that combines virtue with virtual, using war to achieve an ethical end while realizing force from a distance. Virtuous war raises ethical and strategic questions, some of which Der Derian examines: Does the digitization of war make the enemy less real, less human and make civilian casualties easy to ignore? Does it make war too easy to fight as it requires no American sacrifice? Others he ignores: Is it better to demonize our enemies, as we have done historically, or is it better to dehumanize them? Is virtuous war a response to the Cold War and not appropriate to America’s current challenges? Is using a Christian framework of just war useful against non-Western enemies? Can and should America use military force to confront intractable political problems? These ethical and strategic questions demand answers, yet Der Derian answers none of them, giving us only the theoretical framework of the virtuous war and a vague utopian hope for the future.
Cole, Darrell. (1999). Thomas Aquinas on Virtuous Warfare. Journal of Religious Ethics 27 (1) 57-80.

Posted by Joshua Sargent at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by Meaghan Casey at 07:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception
By Paul Virilio
Translated by Patrick Camiller

“War is the art of embellishing death” (-Japense Maxim).
This ominous quote begins and highlights the main themes of the book “War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception”. Author Paul Virilio, born in 1932 Paris, is a cultural theorist. He is best known for his writing about technology as it has developed alongside the arts, urban life and the military. In his own words, Virilio describes that, “this essay investigates the systematic use of cinema techniques in the conflicts of the twentieth century” (1). As readers, Virilio’s work allows us to explore several questions through the concept of the art of war. Is war imaginative like art is? Can violence be aesthetic? Is combat valorized? While the answers to these questions are debatable, it is clear from this book that war lives in its own ironies. War is both a highly studied and executed art form, as well as a horrifically, unexplainable tragedy. Virilio challenges the reader to see that both the tragic and artistic side of war can be tied to its strong media component, and more specifically to war’s relation with cinema. Virilio's interests in war, cinema and the logistics of perception are rooted at his thesis that military perception in warfare is similar to a civilian’s perception through the art of filmmaking. Thus, according to Virilio, the manipulation of images through human imagination and technological power is a process that is directly linked to both cinema and war. The author labels this parallel connection as the “war of images”, and depending on the perception we see that war like art may be “one man’s trash and another man’s treasure”.

The representation of war inspires new forms of reality. Virilio begins his examination of war by stating that there is no war without a strong component of representation. This representation can manifest itself in several ways and highlights the multifaceted components and capacities of combat. While war is scientific and premeditated, it is all the while ignited by its representative notions of exhibition and delusion. This paradox can be understood when we consider, for example, the representative positioning and camouflaging qualities of a battlefield. In addition, the intimidation factor of war is largely based on depictions of loud sounds and menacing explosions. Virilio believes so much in the representative forces of war that he goes on to say that in industrialized warfare, the representation of events outweigh the presentation of facts (1). Similarly, the author examines cinema as a method of symbolism. Virilio places great emphasis on technology and production and believes that what defines cinema is the exploitation of the projected images. Virilio connects the representation of war to cinema when he writes, “A war of pictures and sounds is replacing the war of objects” (4). Thus, the depiction of the examined fields inspires new forms of reality based on strategy and perception.

With the representation of war at the foreground of his essay, it is no surprise that Virilio relates political propaganda to the dependency between war and cinema. His exploration of propaganda is based in the context of the 1920s, with the rise of popular cinema. Subsequently, the technology and illusions employed by this growing art form became the foundation for the expansion of national governments and the emphasis placed on patriotism. In the case of Germany, the manipulation of reality was an essential aspect of the growth and sustainability of Nazi “culture”. With the anticipation of World War II, a new breed of both military and revolutionary leader arose. These leaders understood that real power was now shared between both war cabinets and propaganda departments (53). Through their direction, the employment of sounds and images was beginning to hold similar if not greater value to the logistics of weaponry. Impart, Hitler rose to power so quickly and was able completely alter the social order because of his manipulation of the projected reality. As historical witnesses, the possibility of such genocide that occurred during WWII can only begin to be understood if we take into consideration Hitler’s daunting violation of everyday reality through his “extraordinary technical knowledge of stage-direction” (53). Virilio suggests that Hitler’s plan for a new German empire required a “transformation of Europe into a cinema screen” (3). Thus, a pivotal piece of Nazi propaganda was Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. This film featured, among other things, several speeches giving by Hitler in order to emphasize the overall theme of Germany as a great power. Undoubtedly, Hitler was presented as natural born German leader who could bring back strength and purification to his country. In the context of war and cinema, the powerful and ever shocking dictators were no longer simply rulers but were themselves directors (53).

Virilio’s insight into the creation of the “other” through war and media presents some striking parallels with the current War on Terror. Ironically, Virilio’s book was published at the end of the Cold War. Now, almost 20 years later this essay seems to highlight some of the exact paradoxes of what has been coined as the “9/11 Generation”. The hate of communism during the Cold War became in a sense what terrorism is today. It was the common enemy that evolved into having an ambiguous identity. Elements of fear from different sides created a totalitarian way of looking at the “evils” of the world, and the causes of tension lost their meaning overtime. Virilio writes that terrorism, “insidiously reminds us that war is a symptom of delirium” (5). War cannot be separated from its demonstrative qualities because its main drive is to “produce spectacle”. In the case of terrorism, its very purpose is to instill the fear of death before actual harm occurs. For example, even when weapons are not employed there are “active elements of ideological conquest” (6). This point could arguably be compared to the controversial search of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the succeeding war that continues today.

Virilio ends his unique insight into war and cinema with the words, “Scan. Freeze frame”. After being taken on a historical and critical journey of the evolution of technology and the development of psychological conquest, it is as if we the readers have been manipulated into a new dimension of reality. As a writer and critic, Virilio’s reflections seem very ahead of their time. Many of his historical examples of the strong component of media in war can still be applied today. Although the author erases all doubt of the connection between war and media, he does not place an enduring emphasis on cinema. Instead, he encourages us to reflect upon what types of media currently change our own realities and what methods of perception and conquest will be executed in the future. It seems that as society develops a greater media conscience there is a growing distrust for the stage on which war is performed. Our familiarity with media will of course not eliminate the possibility war, but it should challenge us to redefine what war is and how it may occur.

Posted by Alejandra Piers-Torres at 02:16 PM | Permalink

“All are struggling with the uncertainties of the post-cold war era.” (xxii)

“Dreams have started wars, and wars, from the very earliest times, have determined the propriety and impropriety – indeed, the range – of dreams.”
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin could not have predicted the state of war today, but his words ring true for our current state of affairs. The two opening chapters of James Der Derian’s book, Virtuous War, describes just this present state of war and how its has come to the point of not just being virtual, but virtuous. Der Derian’s travelogue through his investigation of Fort Irwin to the Salisbury Plan and Andrew Marshall brings in theorists Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin to understand the virtuosity of war. These theories applied to concrete examples in reality expose the dream we live in today, where “realism has become virtual” (37). Virtuous war is a technological running of war from a distance that displaces both viewers and fighters. It is Der Derian’s project to investigate this dangerous, current state of war and its implications in our interwar period through critically questioning this new space of technologies and war.

The fifth dimension is now upon us in the form of virtuality. This higher level is defined from the post-Ford, postmodern, post-cold war state of affairs. Here we are in flux. All ethical change is influenced by technology. Der Derian’s definition of virtuous war: “diplomatic and military policies are increasingly based on technological and representational forms of discipline, deterrence, and compulsion” (xv). Taken away from previously understood ways of war, virtuous war works to threaten violence at a distance. This network of fear and terror is brought to us, the viewer, through virtual technologies and we are left detached from war. For the fighters of such pixilated wars, they learn to kill, but not take responsibility for their actions. They too have become displaced and detached actors. The military now aided by computer games and other virtual technologies has created warriors in “cyberspace,” to use William Gibson’s 1987 term. Here is the “edge of globalization” (xviii) where the virtual has collapses all distance and left a dangerous space for war to inhabit.

“New technologies of imitation and simulation as well as surveillance and speed had collapsed the geographical distance, chronological duration, the gap itself between the reality and virtuality of war. As the confusion of one for the other grows, we face the danger of a new kind of trauma without sight, drama without tragedy, where television wars and video games blur together.” (11)

Der Derian’s first stop is Fort Irwin where the virtual war trainings first began in 1981 with Operation Desert Hammer VI. This simulation of war was created with the belief that such practice would enhance combat, especially the efficiency and speed of war. The question to be asked then is if war can be scripted from a distance, tested out like a mathematical equation? Carl von Clausewitz, a 18th century Prussian strategist, warned of the dangers of scripted war and the sheer arrogance of any leader to believe in such predictions of war. Today, we have a cyberdeterrent that proves these old theories wrong. The cyberdeterrent is the digitized superior who enacts war from a distance. It is the replacement to the cold-war nuclear balance of terror. The danger of the cyberdeterrent lies in the danger of all media – it is not readily apparent or visible. Digitization is a force multiplier of war, making it faster, more efficient, and smarter; however never without consequences.

“Deterrence precludes war – the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy – it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra

Der Derian’s near death experience out in the field proves this theater of war and the consequences of deterrence. As a viewer of the simulated, practice battle, there is much confusion to the untrained eye. For instance, Der Derian stayed too long to catch a photograph of an oncoming tank. In his epiphanic moment of traumatic voyeurism, Der Derian experienced what few will ever. The collision of reality and simulation, a reality of death twice displaced. This 5th dimension battlefield that is there, but not there. The effect on both warrior-gamer-soldier and viewer is the splitting of the self, a fragmentation between simulation and experience that blurs reality. This dangerous situation trains soldiers to kill, but not feel for their killings. It trains viewers to watch, but not connect with the representations shown. War becomes a copy of a copy of a game played in Fort Irwin.

“What is qualitatively new is the power of the MIMENET to seamlessly merge the production, representation, and execution of war. The result is not merely the copy of a copy, or the creation of something new: It represents a convergence of the means by which we distinguish the original and the new, the real from the reproduced.” (xx)

The new virtual alliance, the military-industrial-media-entertainment network, in this hyperreality created Third Wave Warfare. This warfare is defined like a video game or cyberpunk novel. For example, Bruce Sterling, a writer for Wired magazine, was assigned to write the press packet for the Office of the Secretary of the Army. Invoking these rhetorics of science fiction and gaming the twenty-first century army reads well. However, their vision speaks to the hyper-postmodern condition of relative safety and dynamic instabilities. The cyberdeterrent is the twenty-first century army because it is a simulation, a spectacle, and a sheer technology. As a hybrid being, like a Borg on Star Trek, it is in the order of metaphysical signs.

“The pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war and peace, is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent.”
Jean Baudrillard, The Precession of Simulacra

Next, Der Derian brings us to venture a look into the Salisbury Plan. From August 1927-1931 in Britain, the Salisbury Plan acted out “battles” like a laboratory testing a new form of warfare. The event was a huge success in performative spectacle. The first report, “Tidworth Tattoo – Modern War Staged,” explained the positive response from the audience on trains viewing the fight. It also brought to light how the modern machines of man worked in the realm of exhibition. Around the same time the concept of television was beginning to form. The idea of “seeing by wireless” was tempting and intriguing. The first broadcast was a missile attack onto New York City. These two examples of the desire to watch from a distance were not unknown to the American army.

Coming back to the interwar period, Der Derian sought out Andrew Marshall, officially the director of the Office of Net Assessment. This man’s work brought about a revolution in military affairs as he set up the first systems to measure how the military was performing during the Nixon era. What Der Derian’s interview brought out was that the interwar can be considered a revolution in technology, like the 1920s. In the period of the 1920s, as mentioned above, a “military technical revolution” occurred. The outcome was not clear, the factors had changed, and the forces multiplied. It was also a period of illusion, self-consciously thinking about what the world was going to look like after such technologies. In our similar period, it too must be our effort to self-consciously think about the revolutionary implications of technology on warfare.

With this turn of events, Der Derian turns to theory to look at such implications. Beginning with the work of Friedrich Nietzsche on understanding virtual powers through his theories of security and sovereignty. With life’s uncertainties, power rules through a virtual security in debt to the death of our ancestors. Fear becomes death and the repressed. The “good life” is security from those fears given to use by the sovereign power that prevents all struggle. Thus, a sovereign state is unnatural. Realism is built into this system as a means of check, a claim to world order. However, realism is virtual – it is “a perverse mimesis of the living other” (37). Nietzsche writes: “Life is a consequence of war, society itself a means to war.” War is the ultimate ratio between realism and sovereignty because it is an expression of those two illusory powers. Herein Nietzsche we find the core of the sovereign problem.

Moving onto Walter Benjamin opens up the power of mimesis or representation in interwar period. Mimesis, for Benjamin, is “imitation and repetition as a fundamental force in human development” (41). As in development of language and children, mimesis involves an important function of play. This play is the play of signs, called semiotics. The mimetic has a paradoxical danger for political problems because of this play and shirting “phase transition” between order and disorder. To quote Benjamin: “I am speaking here of an identity that manifests itself solely in the paradoxical reversal of the one into the other (in whichever direction).” There is a problem of identity with mimesis because, as seen in questions of violence, reality is dreamlike. Modes of knowing and ways of being are thrown into the air.

“I came to realize that the interwar was as much an invocation of a dream, conveyed in the guise of the virtual and inevitable reality, as it was a demarcation of past history.” (46)

Benjamin asks his readers to find a critical consciousness to battle this mimetic allure, and Der Derian takes up this mission for the interwar period. As subjects of mimesis we have unstable and fragmented identities. The methods of sovereignty and realism are to soothe us through deterrence of realism. Follow Der Derian’s travels through the rest of the book for a deeper look into such critical questioning of this virtual dream reality.

Posted by Megan Goetsch at 11:01 PM | Permalink

In The First Casualty, Phillip Knightley traces the extensive history of war correspondents. Beginning with the Crimean War, he shows how these reporters gradually ingrained themselves in the fight at hand, bringing truthful, unfiltered coverage to their readers or viewers at home. Yet sometime around the Falkland War, the tables turned, and the military realized the strategic importance of manipulating the media. The role of the correspondents suddenly became more ambiguous, and, forced to work on the military’s terms, these reporters found themselves at a “crisis point in their short history” (525). In chapters 19 and 20, which cover the Gulf War and the NATO bombing of Serbia, Knightley shows us the questionable tactics with which the U.S. and Allied militaries manipulated war coverage. By severely limiting access to information these officers managed to turn the reporters against one another, and with carefully spun propaganda, to turn the home front against the more resistant reporters. At points in these chapters, The First Casualty reads less like a history text and more like a Dan Brown novel; such is the level of the government’s conspiracies. In other places Knightley uses cold hard statistics to make startling revelations about the wars. While the writing sounds one-sided, even preachy at times, it never strays far from the question at hand: is war coverage in today’s age a right or a privilege?

Much of chapters 19 and 20 are dedicated to revealing government fabrications, news stories that have little or no basis in true events. However, as Knightley points out, such tactics are now part of standard military procedure. Press officers are even instructed to “lie directly only when certain that the lie will not be found out during the course of war” (484). Time after time, Knightley claims, the United States did just that during the Gulf War – it lied. The justification was usually that winning the war trumps less immediate ethical issues (the same argument has been made regarding domestic wiretapping).

But how does one justify lying to begin a war in the first place? In 1991, seeking to influence an American invasion of Iraq, the Citizens for a Free Kuwait signed a $10 million contract with Hill and Knowlton, a well-known American public relations company. Together they found a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl and coached her to give a moving speech in front of Congress about how Iraqis had murdered “incubator babies” before her eyes. Two years later, it was revealed that the story “was a total invention” (488), long after the U.S. had fought and won. The distraught girl was actually the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The president of Hill and Knowlton, Craig Fuller, had actually been Vice President Bush’s chief of staff during the Reagan years. When I read about this elaborate scheme, Jay Rosen’s facetious advice came to mind: if you want to outsmart the media, create something huge - conspiracy huge. This corporate branding of the Gulf War seemed to come right out of Wag the Dog, especially the scene where the “Albanian” girl runs screaming across a Hollywood soundstage. Given the relative success of the Gulf War, few people later questioned the terms of its inception, but with the less successful and more prolonged Iraq II it is easy to see how this model of dishonesty can turn against itself.

Knightley reminds us that “propaganda works best not with arguments but images” (507), and the Gulf War, the “deadly videogame,” is full of such images. Unfortunately, much of this consists of stock footage, videos of flying missiles and building explosions drawn from official press packets. Occasionally, a maverick reporter like Peter Arnett of CNN would broadcast from across enemy lines much to the chagrin of press officers. The general public had a similar attitude: if anything gruesome or “unpatriotic” made it to broadcasting, their response was somewhere between apathy and outrage. For these viewers the Gulf War was clean, quick, and surgically precise; anything that contradicted this storyline was considered a threat to U.S. moral. By the time the Kosovo conflict rolled around, NATO had developed a system of pools whereby a small group of selected journalists, led by military personnel, could report back to the larger group waiting at base. Members of the press were made to wear uniforms and threatened with detainment if they did not comply by the rules. As a result, almost no one took risks, so starved were these reporters for even the slightest bit of news. In vying for the few spots closer to the front line, journalists turned on one another, so that a correspondent’s “worst enemy turned out to be his colleagues in the pools” (492). Sadly, the days of collaborating in the name of some common, higher standard had come to an end.

In narrating the fall of the idealistic war correspondent, Knightley often comes across as one-sided. The history of media in the Gulf War and NATO bombings is still quite recent, and I would have appreciated a more objective viewpoint. Born in 1985, I am too young to remember these conflicts as current events and too old to have studied them in my history books. I therefore read The First Casualty with some hesitancy, aware that Knightley may be less objective than he had been in earlier chapters. There were some lines where he even sounded accusatory. “Why did the war end when it did?” he asks, “If you believe Nato or any of the alliance governments it ended because the bombing campaign had succeeded” (517). Such phrasing reminded me (not so pleasantly) of Michael Moore’s style. There’s even a point where Saddam Hussein starts to look like a down-on-his-luck, victimized saint. Later, Knightley gives a string of key words relating to journalism in Kosovo: “lies, manipulation, news management, propaganda, spin, distortion, omission, slant, and gullibility” (525). I’m not saying that I disagree with this attitude or dispute his claims; only that, in my opinion, the author loses some credibility by resorting to such emotionally charged word choice.

Most of the time, however, I found Knightley incredibly informative and convincing. His use of numbers, especially, was both straightforward and resonating. Commenting on the trend from field to tactical warfare, for instance, he notes that “at the beginning of the century, ninety per cent of casualties in war were soldiers; at the end of the century ninety per cent of casualties in war were civilians” (505). These types of statistics put the radical changes into a broader perspective. I also trusted Knightley’s insider status as a journalist. Throughout the book he managed to bring the history to an individual level, but in these later chapters those individuals sounded less like research subjects and more like personal colleagues. Moreover, I trusted his status as a non-American. In criticizing the leadership behind what were essentially two America led conflicts, he could afford to come across as critical without sounding unpatriotic (a dilemma for American journalists at the time). Overall, Knightley managed to focus on the media’s role without losing site of the broader political issues.

I put down The First Casualty feeling wholly informed and terribly disturbed. My trust of war correspondence, even recent history itself, is at an all time low. And, while I pity the loss of that idealistic war reportage that seemed to have peaked with Vietnam, I am also awestruck (and a bit horrified) by the grand scale and careful genius with which the Pentagon has managed to manipulate the media for its own good. With the current war in Iraq, I like to hope that correspondents have regained some of the edge they lost in the nineties. Either way, Knightley has taught me to look at the news with a much more critical eye.

Reference:
Knightley, Phillip. The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimean War to Iraq. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Posted by Michael Schub at 10:01 PM | Permalink

Tube Of Plenty, The Evolution of American Television
by Erik Barnouw

“Historians saw in the trend a peril to American democracy. And it was one in which television and its progeny had a dangerous complicity.” (p 543)

Much has happened since Guglielmo Marconi set sail for the United States in 1899, precipitating the “wireless mania” that ultimately gave rise to television as we know it. This epic journey saw boundless ambition meet American corporate determinism. It saw dreams realized and hopes shattered. It brought about suicide and it portrayed murder. It battled communism and it inhibited freedom. It elected presidents, and ensured their downfall. It told stories and it revealed lies. For, as Erik Barnouw reminds us in his masterly account of the evolution of television in America, the journey was about far more than the innovative use of a vacuum tube—it was about the birth of modern-day America. But what of the plenty?

Barnouw divides his account into six stages, giving a detailed and near encyclopaedic account of American broadcast media’s evolution. In Forbears, the dreams of those who imagined a world with television are recounted, with French artist Albert Robida making surprisingly accurate predictions about the portrayal of wars in the living room. We learn of the discovery of radio, and the assent Congress gave in 1918 to an oligopoly of corporate stakeholders who founded Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

In Toddler, we learn of the development of the new technology, as wireless mania develops. Radio sets become the must-have possession of all households. The airwaves are commercialized, as then Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover allows “ether advertising.” The National Broadcasting Company was founded as a subsidiary of RCA to populate the radio waves.

And then, television. With the formation of RCA came the early realization that television may soon be possible. Barnouw engages the reader as he describes the earliest programs to populate both mediums as the technology was put in place. The boom in American media was well underway.

Plastic Years sees the effervescent consumption of televisions ensue, where through the late 40’s and early 50’s, the nation heralds its new plaything. Entertainment forms the primary focus for the emerging audience. The Hollywood studios, initially up in arms at the perceived threat to movie theaters, began to work with the emerging television networks. The race was on: Barnouw’s account is no longer confined to the slow development of the new invention and corporate struggles to bring it to market. Rather, with the growth of television, we learn of the rich changes in American culture that followed as the lens was turned on society. The growing audience created a new collective consciousness; as America’s attention shifted to the small screen, the then three major networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, found themselves at the center of a new cultural dominance. And with this, television quickly became a major part of the establishment, with its funding entirely derived from commercial interests. And all this facilitated the exponential growth of a new phenomenon—consumerism.

Thus, in Prime, we see how, from the 1950’s onwards, television became core not just to the culture of the United States, but also to the key developments, debates and controversies. For example, the witch-hunt against ‘communists’ started by Sen. Joseph McCarthy found a particular focus in television, where key personalities were forced off air for their perceived dangerous influence. This trend tended to gravitate against brave and independent journalism, the networks favoring a safe, established line.

Yet despite these problems, the growth of network television gave rise to certain key individuals who resisted the cautious, pandering trend. For example, CBS’s Edward R. Murrow used his position as host for current affairs show See It Now to levy an attack on the rise of McCarthyism in America, illustrating the inconsistencies and ruinous effect it was having on society. Many, including Barnouw, attributed McCarthy’s demise to Murrow’s courageous attack.

But journalism such as this was, throughout the 50’s and 60’s, was not favored by the key decision-makers in America’s corporate media. See It Now lost its primetime slot after CBS executives realized the far more lucrative potential of shows like The $64,000 Question. American telefilms boomed, and soon the television entertainment industry became a major export. To Barnouw, the mid-1950’s became the new missionary expedition, where (at page 233) it “seemed to serve as an advance herald of empire.” Americans and their allies abroad had assumed these exports, be they telefilms, radio transmitters, consumer goods or military bases, would facilitate global peace. But not the Russians.

In an intelligent twist of events, Russia’s then leader, Nikita Khruschev, negotiated an interview with CBS, which both paved the way for a new kind of televised journalism, where it was not the stars of Hollywood, but the old men of Moscow and Washington who took the limelight, and facilitated the Russo-American dialog that brought the beginnings of the Cold War into the full-focus of the American television audience.

At this stage Barnouw questions America’s new love affair with television, revealing the networks' complicity in the censorship and government propaganda that resulted. But the challenge in controlling television output soon became virtually impossible as innovation allowed for live coverage, and again it was the President of the United States who became the star of this new show, as John F. Kennedy played host to the first live press conferences. Yet, as JFK was the first president to truly embrace the new media, live coverage took a sharp and tragic turn as he became the first ever person to be murdered live on television, sparking a similarly novel period of four-day, non-stop coverage. The nation was gripped, and the innovation that had seen the rise of arguably the first populist president then saw him abruptly put to rest.

In Elder, Barnouw continues to chart the rise and rise of commercial television, dealing with developments such as the Vietnam War, the growth of cable television, and the invention of the laser. His historical account across these sections, while leaving great chunks out simply as a result of the space constraints inherent in his ambitious goal of condensing the development of television into a single volume, manages to maintain a subtle blend of narrative and fact. His commentary is neutral, and he gives balanced weight to the opinions of the stakeholders he features in his account, while telling the stories of those involved.

Yet in Progeny, which draws the book to a close, he makes some solid conclusions about the undesirable side-effects that result from the development of a commercial broadcast media. Of particular significance is the effect that Barnouw perceives this to have on news coverage. His book is peppered with examples of the networks tip-toeing around their sponsors, usually at the expense of balanced reportage. The earliest example of this is the Camel News Caravan on NBC, where as a result of the sponsorship of Camel Tobacco, only Winston Churchill was allowed to smoke in any of the reports (due his exceptional iconic status), and cancer coverage was forbidden. The visual requirements of a new televised news service also meant great restrictions in content, for there was simply not the infrastructure to obtain film coverage of events taking place across the world. Rather than summarize them vocally, they were omitted.

This problem diminished as more portable means of recording video were devised, but the commercial unpopularity of news coverage was still a problem in the sixties. CBS Reports, which President of CBS Fred Friendly had once promised to keep on air, was threatened by his successor, James Aubrey, who reportedly said in a board meeting: “You can see, Mr. Chairman, how much bigger our profits could have been this year if it had not been for the drain of news,” (at page 346).

In the midst of the Vietnam War discussion, Barnouw cites Canadian journalist Neil Compton, who after comparing US television coverage to Canadian, observed both that the “great networks” seem to express a “massive political consensus,” and that “they are commercial to a degree which even an outsider used to television finds overwhelming,” (at page 381). To Compton, these two phenomena were “not, of course, unrelated,” and he concludes that anyone relying on US network coverage of the Vietnam War “would have been far less well informed than his Canadian counterpart,” despite US coverage being more frequent.

In his most eloquent epilogue (at page 524), Barnouw attributes the failure of television news to its “eruption” amid an aesthetic medium where “havoc was more photogenic, and quickly perceived.” And through this havoc, the words needed to “clarify causes” and illustrate the “historical context” of events had been suppressed on television. A 23 minute news bulletin simply did not have time for elaboration, especially in the foreign context. What’s more, from the start of the Reagan presidency, “the White House became determined to shape this segment to the fullest possible extent.”

In his conclusion Barnouw points the finger at the excessive commerce of the American broadcast media—not only had advertising stood in the way of the development of a truthful and objective news media, but it had become a necessary mouthpiece for those seeking political office, obscuring open debate with financial pandering. Before giving his assent for an unregulated, commercial broadcast media in the 1920’s, Hoover had spoken of the distasteful nature of excessive commercialization, adding he hoped there would never be the “sandwiching” of Presidential addresses with adverts for pharmaceutical patents on television. Self-regulation was, to him, the answer. In a sorry twist of fate, when Hoover died, a dedication to his life aired on CBS was followed by a cigarette commercial and a political campaign ad. Not only had Presidential coverage become sandwiched, but it was no longer possible to reach the office that Hoover had once occupied without engaging in the sandwiching!

Barnouw finishes his book by asking if it is possible for the television industry, which has had a dangerous complicity in the perilous trend seen in American democracy, to help the nation face the dilemmas of a new millennium. It seems that, at the end of the long journey that charts the evolution of television, Barnouw has lost faith in its capacity for democratic good. This bleak outlook forces the reader to reconsider the book’s title, Tube of Plenty, which at first seems a simple reference to the rich content the television-tube has facilitated. But is Barnouw instead making oxymoronic reference to the tube’s vacuum, where there is no plenty, but in fact nothing at all?

Posted by Joe Braidwood at 11:45 PM | Permalink

We see it every day. We open our eyes and we are saturated in it. We close our eyes and our minds obsess over it. We see it, and yet we believe that we can hear it, smell it, feel it, and even taste it. From the moment we are born we begin to sink ever deeper into dependency until, through our consumption of it, it consumes us. By “it” I am referring to the “spectacle” as perceived by Guy Debord in his book Society of the Spectacle, translated by Ken Knabb. The spectacle is every form of media. Debord wrote Society in 1967, yet developments in media technology and practice have only strengthened his analysis. Many of his critiques of the spectacle read as if they could have been written today.

The media creates a false world, one which the real world embraces and sustains. Debord describes the spectacle as a “concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving” (7). It is concrete because it is a product of the real world. It exists in many forms, but it is dead. It has no life in and of itself, yet it produces the appearance of life. As people venture farther into the illusion, and the image of the illusion grows ever clearer, they forget that it is false and take it as real. In this way, society subconsciously stumbles into a hyper reality and is taken over by the spectacle. The spectacle informs us, directs us, and conditions us to desire it. It is programmed to ensure its own survival.

This mechanistic process is fueled by consumerism. The spectacle portrays an image of life that people aspire to attain. It sets a society’s agenda by making people desire what the spectacle exhibits. People see a personality on television or in the movies that they admire and they want to emulate him or her. People see a lifestyle and they want it to be theirs. People see products and they want to buy them. On another level, the media produces stories that people want to hear. It induces people not only to buy into it, literally and figuratively, but also to hunger for more. The economy of the spectacle is a force in itself, making it timeless.

For consumerism to sustain the spectacle, however, the people who are bound to consume it must also produce it (22). Debord sees the media, and the society of the spectacle, as an instrument of power, of capitalist control. Capitalism does not just promote in the short term but also creates the necessary conditions for the perpetuation of the spectacle. Debord comments, “The economy has come to dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its own continued operation” (57). He goes on to say that this power created by the bourgeoisie “is capable of maintaining itself even without a bourgeoisie” (57). Class exploitation is the structural product of a system which, on the surface, appears to offer its benefits to everyone.

For Debord, this society of the spectacle is nothing more than a veil of lies. It binds people to a life they are told they want and to things they are told they need. As the spectacle grows more powerful and pervasive, people become alienated from one another. Ironically, as the individual becomes more insulated within society, individuality crumbles and loses meaning. The spectacle creates the illusion of identity within the mass of society. Debord says, “as with the adoption of seemingly aristocratic first names which end up being given to virtually all individuals of the same age, the objects that promise uniqueness can be offered up for mass consumption only if they have been mass produced” (34). Individuality is packaged and sold to a society of people trying to be different, but which in the end makes them the same. Individuality depends on how you appear to others and how others define you. Each individual has a certain degree of freedom within the society of the spectacle, yet that freedom is nothing more than a vision. Debord says, “The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life” (17). People create their identity by selecting and accumulating within the spectacle. They define themselves by what they see, what they want, and what they have, but all of these defining factors are outside of themselves and are imposed upon them.

For this reason, Debord describes the spectacle as a “visible negation of life” (9). While we continue to live, in physical essence, we move farther and farther away from the reality of living. At this point, it is hard not to think of the exaggerated dichotomy of human existence presented in the Matrix films and the questions it raises: What does it mean to live? What is real? How do we know? In the end, does it really matter?

Stepping away from abstraction and toward something more concrete, it is interesting to contemplate this book as a medium. As a translation, Debord’s commentary has passed through many filters. Ken Knabb drew from the original text, which was written in French, as well as the several other English translations available. To a certain extent, the text has evolved into its current form and taken on a life of its own. It is similar to the spectacle in that it persists. People reproduce it and add to it. Through their interpretation and translation of the text they make it their own and yet it can never be theirs. This false sense of ownership, of reality, is what characterizes the society of the spectacle.

This fundamental dilemma presented to us by the spectacle is one that we cannot overcome. It “presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned” (9). While Debord attempts to do so, to a certain extent, the spectacle is unquestionable. The spectacle is born out of reality, and the vague point where it blurs into illusion exists within our heads; there is no clear point of crossing over, and therefore this subconscious drift into illusion is unique for everyone. When we begin to question the spectacle, we may come to understand it better, but it is already too late; from the moment we begin to breathe we are adopted by the spectacle, and by living we breathe life into it. We created it, we desire it, and it enslaves us. It is our inspiration, our safety net, our salvation from ourselves, and yet our curse. But why exhaust so much effort in contemplation when it is far easier to relax and let the spectacle sweep you away?

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Verónica Cortez
INTL 1800
Der Derian and Santos
Lit Review for 2.27.08

The article “The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance and, Speed ” gives one much food for thought in the context of both the cold war and today’s media and representation of what could be happening behind the scenes. Simulation, the idea that instead of preparing for real events through actual practice and training, a video module gives all the training that is necessary. Surveillance makes one wonder how much one can actually keep things completely secret if everything is potentially being listened to. Speed is necessary to continue at the top of the global hierarchy therefore we see technology advance every day. This article presents how technology has changed the security and war and how it will continue to change.

Professor James der Derian argues that people like to know that they are safe; they like to feel that the government is keeping them out of harm’s way and therefore stealth and illusionary practices are necessary. Disneyland itself only exists to give reality to everything else, but everything else is lost to simulation and to the effort of making it real. Illusions, simulations, the ones we create ourselves or those that are created for us can have great impact on our perceptions and how we react. “…simulations have been staged to prepare nation states for future wars; by doing so, as many players would claim, they help keep the peace…” (300). They help keep the peace, because even imaging war through a computer visual is too hard tolerate. These simulations can also as was the case with the Vincennes, “That training relied heavily on tapes that simulate battle situations, none of which included overflights by civilian airliners – a common occurrence in the Gulf” (301). In this case simulation training did not help keep the peace it proved instead to not be proper training for real life situations.

The object brought to mind by the term surveillance is the panopticon, which can see all around it without reciprocating. It is now an outdated method in comparison to the possibilities opened up by changes in technology. “The modern panopticism takes many forms but it is the communications intelligence (COMINT), electronic intelligence (ELINT), radar intelligence (RADINT), telemetry intelligence (TELINT), and photointelligence (TECHINT) – that constitute a new regime of power in international relations” (304). There are various options to communicating and therefore methods are created to exercise control over them. The ability to detect key words during phone calls can beget the illusion of safety. If there is constant vigilance there is constant safety whether or not it invades the privacy of citizens. The fact that some of the information is achieved through unknown means generates conspiracies complicates matters as understanding who should be to blame. In the end “it normalizes relations by continuing both war and peace by other, technical means” (305). Some of the surveillance via satellite coverage becomes complicated when it interferes with countries which can generate conflict.

Speed, according to Paul Virilio, is the essence of war, “It is speed that transforms the hand into a dangerous fist…” (307). During war it is speed that saves your life and it is speed that makes you the winner. The faster that a person can dive for cover or find the enemy the faster the threat will be neutralized. Speed then, is key to being a winning force, to being an important force in International Relations. Time can become even more important than the space the war is fought in when weapons like nuclear bombs are being used. Speed becomes most necessary.

This article brings to mind the television show Alias. The show ran for five seasons giving one the impression that the idea of espionage is one that caters to a large public. The show itself presents visuals of the ideas presented in this article. The image of Surveillance in the way the CIA uses ECHELON to listen in on phone conversations and in this way is tipped off to potential threats to national or global security. They are then to use the utmost speed to change the potential disaster that has already been simulated to them via computer technology if they fail the mission. Surveillance, simulation and speed are especially important to someone that is a double agent in helping to keep that particular status secret.

There are no real conclusions as to what happens next only questions. Where have we come since the Cold War and where are we going with this war in Iraq? What role have these actions played and what role will they continue to play in the upcoming years?

Posted by Veronica Cortez at 01:19 AM | Permalink

Literature Review
By Megan Loucks

Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia: Communication in World Order Transformation
By Ronald J. Deibert

Fundamental changes in the world order are related to large-scale changes in the modes of communication. Yet “Parchment, Printing and Hypermedia” is not a story of a “master variable”. Ronald J. Deibert seeks to expand on the foundations of media theory, as provided by such scholars as Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, without falling into the pitfalls of technological determinism. He seeks to create a fresh analytical lens with which to view the world. Deibert continually emphasizes his attempt “to articulate an open-ended, nonreductionist medium theory approach, embedding it in a much wider evolutionary perspective on human existence that I refer to as ‘ecological holism’”. His success in this goal is clearly achieved.

Interestingly, ecology is the base foundation of his argument. It provides an overarching framework that creates good clarity for what could easily have become a dense and scattered discussion. Faulting traditional approaches for focusing on single technologies, Deibert looks at the communications environment. By treating media as such, Darwinian concepts can be applied. Thus each world order transformation is explained as a result of a “fitness” between the interests of particular social forces and the communications environment. Some forces flourish, while others are put at a disadvantage. This ecological lens sounds simple enough, but it does very well in helping to explain the relationship between emerging modes of communication and the complex rise and fall of social, economic, and political orders.

In a helpful strategy, he divides his analysis of world order transformation into “distributional changes” (relative power of social forces) and “changes to social epistemology” (collective mentality/metaphysical underpinnings). The latter is a unique inclusion, but highly beneficial for his argument. It is about the “importance of mentalités collectives in structuring and orienting political behavior”. This includes social constructs, symbolic forms, and cognitive biases seen on both the individual, spatial, and community level.

Part I “The Medieval to Modern Transformation of World Order”

Distributional Changes

With the emergence of the printing environment, the papal-monastic network of the Catholic Church found that it could not thrive as well as other forces. With growing literacy, the secularization of learning, and skepticism regarding the formalist infrastructure of the church, the communications environment favored the strategic interests of the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism. With the growth of printing presses, one religious heresy could spread ideas rapidly and cheaply to a wide audience. The single “Christian Commonwealth” of Europe faltered in step with the disintegration of cosmological ties. Deibert avoids attempting an exhaustive causal explanation of these complex changes. Rather he uses media theory to aid in our understanding of why certain things happened at that time and at that pace. The Protestant Reformation clearly would have been significantly slower or would have fizzled altogether if its interests hadn’t been so clearly in line with the opportunities created by the printing environment.

The printing environment was also conducive to the rise of the urban bourgeoisie and socioeconomic relations based on standardization, homogenization and formal contracts. This move away from overlapping loyalties (largely a result of dependency on oral communication) created a “leveling effect” on feudal social relations. This opened up the possibility of rule from one center. And lastly, this new communication environment favored state monarchs who, in alliance with urban bourgeoisie, sought to create “standardized rational policies and impersonal bureaucracies to administer them over clearly defined territorial spaces”.

Social Epistemology

Stressed in the Global Media seminar is the relationship between media infrastructure and media content. Deibert clearly agrees that this is essential. The essential properties of the printing environment, visual uniformity, mass reproducibility, and its standardized nature, fostered a certain social epistemology.

The foundations of modern individualism, the antithesis of medieval social order, were encouraged. For example copyright and authorship encouraged a novel pursuit of personal fame and fortune, while silent reading fostered abstract thinking and solitary, personal reflection. In terms of spatial biases, more rigid, linear definitions of political and social space were favored by the similar spatial biases created by cartography and the printed page.

Deibert completes this view with one last level of analysis: the imagined community. Language in the medieval world order was not delineated by political spheres. Printed language was able to achieve a “fixity” that written languages never could. This standardization of language became tied up with centralizing interests of monarchies and growing industries producing shared “national” vernacular languages. This major communication change created an altered sense of community within political boundaries, spreading the seeds for nationalism and thus the modern nation state.

Part II “Modern to Postmodern World Order Transformation”

In this section, Deibert speaks of the emerging “hypermedia” environment; an apt name to describe the convergence and ubiquity of various technologies. Tracing the military and commercial sources of technological innovation, he then focuses on the core properties of this environment: the movement from independent technologies to an integrated web, digitization, computerization, and innovations in transmission capabilities (internet, satellite, fiber optics etc).

Distributional Changes

The hypermedia environment favors those actors who have “an incentive to cross political barriers”. The ability to spread a lot of information incredibly widely and quickly encourages a trans-border flow of production ever-increasing in velocity and volume. Businesses are able to spread out risks and costs. This flow includes “multilocational flexibility”, and “transnational joint-ventures”: allowing “small locally based firms to reach a global audience” and “facilitating more flexible production keyed to the vagaries of local consumer tastes”. A high level of transparency is encouraged in everything from the political to the economic realm by dispersed centers of surveillance. All these distributional changes favor “negarchical” security arrangements while undermining “centralized/hierarchical forms of rule, or real-states”.

Social Epistemology

In the most eloquent section of this text, Deibert explains that all characteristics of this newest social epistemology surround one word: postmodernism. I predict this term has already joined “soft power” in Professor Der Derian’s categorization of painfully ubiquitous “sponge terms”. But in a refreshing twist, the second half of page 180 has an excellent definition of “postmodernism”. In this framework, postmodernism is treated as a coherent cultural development, a “species” whose “fitness” in this modern media environment is then analyzed.

Deibert proceeds to explain the “functional bias” of this environment towards “postmodern notions of fragmented identities” and a multi-dimensional “decentered” self. Previous notions of “authorship” and “sovereign voice” are not thriving in this new environment (think intellectual property rights, copyright, illegal downloading and the modification of images and video). The distinction between “public” and the “private” spheres of life has blurred (think consumer data and surveillance). On page 186 he again prevents deterministic accusations by making an important distinction: participating in this hypermedia environment does not “induce a sudden individual gestalt-shift to a ‘postmodern consciousness’”, rather it “opens up a critical space…in which the idea of a postmodern ‘multiphrenic’ self might seem more plausible…”

In explaining the transformation in spatial biases, Deibert makes one crucial point: digitization. The reduction of video, audio, graphics, and text to the common language of ones and zeros has allowed them all to intertwine and meld together. Our spatial biases increasingly lean away from linearity and towards a “mosaic” or “pastiche” : non-linear, overlapping, and discontinuous. Plural worlds are made as lines are blurred between “reality and irreality”. Juxtaposition connects contradicting and disparate ideas, objects, and images. This “intertextuality” can easily be demonstrated by a simple Google search or the moment you catch yourself channel surfing. In the years since this book was written, technological innovations have made even greater leaps in the extent to which one media melds into another.

In the broader sense of imagined communities, the media environment challenges the mass-broadcasting paradigm by favoring interactive, web-like communication regardless of geographical connectedness. This fosters the creation of overlapping “niche” communities or an “ecosystem of subcultures”.

Conclusion

A frequent focus of current IR study is the perceived decline of the state. In Deibert’s view, people are too quick to claim disappearance instead of looking closely to see fundamental transformations. From the lens he outlines, there is not a “withering away” of the state, but instead a “hollowing out” where new webs of authority are created and values are shifted. This idea is compelling and consistent with his philosophy throughout. In addition, Deibert’s expectation of conflicts being within and across states is proving true.

Global imagined communities are coexisting with multiple fragmented identities. Hegemonic “global market forces” are present with “counter-hegemonic movements of global civil society”. These diverging and converging forces, this fragmentation and integration, are operating simultaneously, creating the web we live in. With his skilled description of “postmodernism” it is no surprise that Deibert applies this postmodernist belief in the “indeterminacy” of things and the lack of a “master narrative” to his media theorizing.

By connecting modern changes to historical ones, Deibert explains transformation without neglecting the history’s inevitable continuum of change. Thus he carefully resists the frantic revolution hype typical of discussions about communication and media technology.

Deibert offers a way to view and interpret current trends with a useful lens that better adjusts to world we live in. Often we fail to properly adjust our viewing lens for our times, using instead the “conceptual blinders” of theoretical frameworks set by previous academics. Deibert realistically assesses both the limitations and advantages of creating a broad theoretical lens such as his. He is extremely self-aware in his construction of his own argument, relating it to media theory precedents and differentiating himself when necessary. His conclusions converge with those of many other theorists of different perspectives, yet he fills an important gap in IR theory. And despite his distaste for predictions, his expectations have proved remarkably accurate.

Posted by Megan Loucks at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Mediated: How the Media Shapes Your World and the Way You Live in it.
By Thomas Zengotita
Literature Review by Yeye Zhang

In his book Mediated, Thomas Zengotita demonstrates the process of mediation in our lives and explains our active, participatory role in the process. He defines mediation as “dealing with reality through something else,” (8) through what Marshall McLuhan identifies as mechanical tools – extensions of man – but also through the effects of these tools on how we experience the world. In recent decades, the proliferation of representational spaces through cable, satellite TV, and the Web, has spurred “a virtual revolution” (116) that constantly flatters and solicits the spectator. The “real” world we live in is becoming more and more like the world we watch on television, and we are part of the reason. The instantaneity of “real-time” has further fused real and representation, conditioning the spectator to be a flattered self, a reflexive self, and ultimately, a mediated self.

However, the “problem of understanding the process of mediation is that you can’t get outside it,” (26) and Zengotita cannot separate his explanation of the mediation without playing into it – constantly referencing pop culture and repeating his own catch phrases i.e. Justin’s Helmet Principle, MeWorld, Virtual Revolution. A professor of anthropology at New York University and a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine, he is critiquing the media while being part of the media. While Zengotita cannot step away from the mediation process, his refers to his own experience of mediation leaves him endearing, and consequently the audience can relate.

Media is often critiqued as an exploitative force, an instrument of the intellectual and political elite used to mold the way the way we think and shape how we act. However, Zengotita clarifies that the effect of the media on our lives is not a top-down oppression on a passive spectator, that we actively learn how to be representational and to be mediated. The Teenager is the ultimate expression of a mediated person; “the teenager is the creature and creator of pop culture,” (79) ceaselessly extending the spaces of representation. Consumer culture solicits the teenager to the extent that we are conscious of our importance in the world. The flattering media ultimately insulates the spectator into a narcissistic MeWorld.

Conscious, insulated, and reflexive, Zengotita claims we now also realize the optionality of identity in a representational world and can “start deciding who [we] are” (94). We learn how to act; we learn what is appropriate by watching scripted actors. So much that our personality in real life becomes a “tool kit of postures” (187) that is also scripted, though adaptable since we are reflexive. In this process of perpetual representation and reflection, mediated people become actors: Method actors (145). Our participation in the process of mediation is what drives it.

We used to want our children to run free and hence, experience things first-hand for the first time – for real; breaking an arm was part of growing up. However, parents have learned through advertisements, consumer reports, and parenting guides to treat their kids like “hemophiliac heirs to the throne of the Hapsburgs” (29). This is what Zengotita explains as the Justin’s Helmet Principle. Amid vast optionality, we forego option and choose the bike helmet; we insulate because we have been given the obvious benefits of protection, so it must be better than the unknown. But there are dangers in yielding to the given option:

As an adult, we want options, but we don’t want to choose so rather we keep moving in a routine, “the busier the better” (185), and in this insulated routine, Zengotita argues that “representational technologies have colonized our minds” (196). We yield to a structured routine, and even recreational activities become a task when we have to schedule going to the gym into our already busy lives. Nevertheless, the constant feeling of stress out of a numbing routine makes us feel real; “the feeling of being busy is the feeling of being alive” (190). Could this be the beginning of the zombification of the spectator?

Everyday we are inundated with “high-impact” images of violence and misery; Zengotita criticizes the belief that we are apathetic to the real world problem. Rather, we have become psychologically numb in order to defend against the painful and unavoidable intrusion in our lives. Similarly, political apathy took hold because political representations were boring when they weren’t painful. Only when a scandal breaks out in politicians is when politics becomes reality TV (145). Since we would rather watch reality TV than actual events, news reporting has taken an event and transformed it to an event-story. News reports make a story out of reality while its happening then cover that story, so essentially reality is the story. Although we hail the promises of real-time information, the numbing consequences of overrepresentation may lead us all to become zombies.

The attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon on 9/11 perhaps ultimately demonstrated how vulnerable we are as mediated individuals. Although this was not the first time we were attacked on our soil; unlike Pearl Harbor, 9/11 was the first time everyone directly experienced the attack via vast media outlets. As mediated individuals, we all framed the event through our eyes, personalized the event and reacted. But the reaction was not scripted. It was surreal – a reaction beyond the scope of real and representation. The possibility of another attack was real and that possibility could not represented, could not be mediated. At this moment, we rely on other representations to distract us from an unrecognizable real feeling. Zengotita ominously warns that “the bubble of self-regarding self-representation that has insulated us for so long from the suffering of millions in a world dominated by our interest and institutions – the bubble will reform and cradle us again. Until next time” (291).

Our mediated selves have left us no tool for when representation cannot prevail. As Americans, we are most vulnerable in the face of the unknown; at a time when we need to think for ourselves and acknowledge the real possibility of a future attack.

The process of mediation and consumer-driven society has commodified humanity. As the spectator, we are first products and consumers before anything else. Zengotita references the Industrial Revolution that focused on raising the productivity of labor and essentially commodified the laborer. In the same way, the Virtual Revolution has commodified the educated, privileged, work-obsessed spectators. He appeals those who are routinized and in love with their busy lives and their flattered selves, whose “ambition is nurtured by the culture of mediation” (179). Nevertheless, Zengotita’s case is derived from the American experience, whether it will translate to the global stage is unclear. It would do him well to explore what the Global Media Project has touched upon in how terrorists can also exploit the media and how that has conditioned our victim representation.

Zengotita clearly knows his audience, those that like him that may be able to recognize the representational, mediated routine our psychologically numbing lives in order to break away from it this commodification of humanity. It speaks to the Global Media Project that there is truth behind mainstream media, and if we recognize that something is not quite right to not yield to Justin’s Helmet Principle but to seek out the unknown. To combat routine, we should incorporate unstructured time into your life, create more “accidents” so that you can respond for the first-time to new experiences rather than react according to scripted performances. Sound familiar? Zengotita would definitely support the case for the practicing psychogeographic drift.

Posted by Yeye Zhang at 06:01 PM | Permalink

The Society of the Spectacle
Written by Guy Debord
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

Literature Review by Rukesh Samarasekera

Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle is a collection of 221 theses that elaborate on the theory of Situationist International (SI). In turn, these theses are ordered under nine sections: Separation Perfected, The Commodity as Spectacle, Unity and Division Within Appearances, The Proletariat as Subject and Representation, Time and History, Spectacular Time, Environmental Planning, Negation and Consumption in the Cultural Space, and Ideology in Material Form. Originally Debord published Society of the Spectacle in French in 1967-1968. At the time of the book’s release France was in the midst of robust student riots and Debord’s words on the Spectacle and SI strongly influenced the dialogical intercourse on a variety of germane issues and continue to influence us to this day.

Debord’s writings on the Society of the Spectacle emerged through his work with the Situationist International. Funded in July 28, 1957, the Situationist International was originally a journal consisting of a small group of avant-garde artists and intellectuals. SI was a fusion of two other minor avant-garde groups: the Letterist International and the Imaginist Bauhaus. From the outset, the Sitiationist International was divided into two spheres (the artistic and the political) that were to be reconciled by the principles of the group. Debord was the group’s self-proclaimed leader.

In this book, Debord sets forth the notion that, “All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”(12) In other words, Guy Debord postulates that we live in a world of simulation, where duplication and reproduction is so perverse that any and all real sense of authenticity has been lost and at times, the duplicate or the fake is valued over the genuine or the original. Essentially, Debord sets forth his SI beliefs with a Marxist interpretation. Throughout the treatise, he directly criticizes capitalism, the media, modernity, and society at large. From the onset, Debord defines the various definitions of the spectacle, emphasizing its ubiquity and fluidity. “The Spectacle is essentially tautological, for the simple reason that it means and its ends are identical. It is the sun that never sets on the empire of modern passivity. It covers the entire globe, basking in the perpetual warmth of its own glory. (15) Seemingly, Debord understands his concept’s intrinsic complexity and layered nature, and in fear of alienating his audience in the beginning, he bombards the reader with an amalgamation of distinct explanations of the spectacle. Ultimately, Debord successfully imparts the Spectacle’s flexibility, omnipresence and influence on people’s everyday lives.

Debord’s theses and theory presented in the Society of the Spectacle are especially applicable to this classes’ milieu of global media. Alongside the discussion of commoditization, is the issue of reification. As Debord quotes Lukacs stating, “The commodity can only be understood in its undistorted essence when it becomes the universal category of society as a whole. Only in this context does the reification produced by commodity relations assume decisive importance both for the objective evolution of society and for the stance adopted by men towards it. Only then does the commodity become crucial for the subjugation of men’s consciousness to the forms in which this reification finds expression....” (25). As Debord explains, “This is the principle of commodity fetishism, the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things,” which reaches its absolute fulfillment in the spectacle, where the tangible world is replaced by a selection of images which exist above it, and which simultaneously impose themselves as the tangible par excellence.” (26) Similarly, commodity fetishism is widely practiced in the media. Fundamentally, it is in the business of buying and selling images.

At the end of the first section, Debord mentions in thesis 33 that, “Though separated from his product, man is more and more, and ever more powerfully, the producer of every detail of his world. The closer his life comes to being his own creation, the more drastically he is cut off from that life.” (24) While reading this I was reminded of Professor Der Derian’s discussion on military simulations and their affects on the human psyche. As mentioned in class, people now have the technological capacity to construct true-to-life simulations. The military, specifically, has a vested interest in perfecting this simulation technology in order to best train their soldiers for combat. Thus in many of these programs one is witness to the great attention to detail. So, even from a very literal aspect, people are responsible for creating and recreating all the details of their world. Consequently, Debord warns that as the simulations become less artificial and the creation of a “hollodeck” becomes more realistic, one begins to see a striking behavioral shift where people can no longer differentiate simulation from reality. Thus, in hope of saving more lives the military may create a simulation that is more true-to-life. Consequently Debord warns this may lead to the loss of life, as soldiers begin to conflate reality with virtual reality and dangerously assume some false sense of immortality.

I found it particularly interesting how Debord’s theses were in close dialogue with our class conversations. For example, Debord discusses scientific determinism and comments that “History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong.” (55) This statement is very similar to Gar Alperovitz’s assertion that humans have historically failed at predicting the future. This is an example of Debords theory on the Society of the Spectacle and they way it explains how everything is derived from something so in that sense nothing is original and everything is simply one replication after another. To conclude this literature review I would like to end with Debord’s 190 thesis statement. It is representative of the mélange of art and politics that Debord used to propel his unique views on modernity, capitalism, media, and the society of the spectacle onto the social and theoretical forefront. “Art in the period of its dissolution, as a movement of negation in pursuit of its own transcendence in a historical society where history is not yet directly lived is at once an art of change and a pure expression of the impossibility of change.” This is a book that anyone interested in media should read. If you’d prefer to watch the movie Debord made on the Society of the Spectacle click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y-6SQkRsyI&mode=related&search=

References: Global Media Lab 4/11/07

The Game of War. Guy Debord and the Society of the Spectacle.
http://www.threemonkeysonline.com/threemon_articleGuy_de_Bord_society_of_the_spectacle.htm

Posted by Rukesh Samarasekera at 02:47 PM | Permalink

The Future of Media
- Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century

Editors:
Robert McChesney, Russell Newman and Ben Scott

Literature Review by Shveta Raina
5/2/2007

The Future of Media is an amalgamation of various articles by authors who believe that there needs to be a public outcry against the way that Media is being run today. Russell Newman and Ben Scott describe it as “A user’s guide to winning back our media, written by those who are fighting the battles firsthand.” (Newman, Scott 5) While the first part of the book describes why there is a need for action from the public, the second part of the book highlights how media activism can take shape, and provides each reader with steps on how to take action. I believe that while the problems presented in this book are current and real, the solutions prescribed might not be the surest way to success.

The editors seek to establish that “The digital convergence of traditional print media, broadcasting, telecommunications, and the Internet now promises to drive a series of major policy changes that will substantially reshape the media of the future and with it, the future of our society.” They go as far as to say that these changes will decide “who owns what networks or newspapers…who will control access to public information…[and] whether or not the public will be involved in the governance of our own media.” (Newman, Scott 3) They divide the book argument into five sections, each with several articles by authors describing how they see the current issues in media.

The first section, ‘The Threat to a Free Press,’ examines the problem of corporate and political media ownership, in light of current media controls with respect to the Iraq war and other “propaganda campaigns.” In Newman and Scott’s article on “The Emerging Struggle for a Free Press,” the four myths that they believe exist about corporate media power are enlisted in detail. These highlight that the existing profit-driven United States media system is not the American way, professional practices in journalism will not protect the public, the media does not give the people what they want, and the Internet will not set us free. Thus the authors intend to tell people that they can change the status quo, and the current reasons they allow it to exist are just myths that need to be shelved.

The second section is on ‘Systematic Marginalization,’ and highlights perhaps a less- discussed skeleton about media ownership – that of race and the media. Malkia Cyril’s article on “Media and Marginalization” provides people with tools to combat the problems that arise from only 2% of television news directors, and 1.9% of radio news directors, being black, as of 2002. It calls for Media Justice, and asks that controlling media content, not media access alone, be central to this battle. It cites the example of a Clear Channel radio station in the San Francisco Bay area where a popular radio host, a person of color, was fired in October 2001 for his antiwar sentiments, and perhaps for drawing an audience that the radio station did not want to encourage, people who were “young, of color, and working class.” Thus the argument of marginalization is extended from race, to people of certain political views and economic standings as well, leading to the thought that only the majority is given a voice in mainstream media.

The next section is on ‘Media Regulation in the Public Interest,’ where it is explained that media conglomerates, FCC decisions, and skyrocketing advertising are beneficial only to a select few. Vidya Krishnamurthy’s article on “The Media and Campaign Reform” describes how current political campaigns don’t help voters make an informed decision; instead, they rake up money for media corporations and political clout for candidates who can generate funding. The only way to help this disastrous situation, and lead to greater accountability among political candidates, Krishnamurthy advises, is for broadcasters to use their control over public airways to offer meaningful and engaging programming.

We now move to a section on what the title of the book promises – the future. In ‘Toward a New Media Age: The Politics of Convergence, New Media, and Innovation,’ the authors look at what problems exist in the current and upcoming era of constantly evolving technologies. In Sascha Meinrath’s article on “Wirelessing the World,” we are hit with the fact that even while we think that the Internet and going wireless will give us more freedom to share information, and give the public a chance to own media at last, unfortunately control over wireless technologies again has been harnessed by a few corporations. Meinrath cites the story of Cingular Wireless, which has managed to buy a majority stake of the US wireless systems.

In conclusion, the section on ‘The Future of Media in a Global Age,’ talks of global media policies that need to be established in the interest of the public at large. The unfortunate reality is that “The commercialization and concentration of media is a key part of neo-liberal globalization.” (Costanza-Chock 259) Thus combating the issues of combined media ownership in a fast integrating world is an even greater challenge. When media activists defend localism, diversity and pluralism, these are seen as barriers to trade in today’s WTO negotiations, and hence create opposition to several lucrative negotiations for countries, and political and economic systems that are at the forefront of most international organizations.

I believe that the problems written about in this book are real. Each author creates a strong point, and definitely backs it up with examples. In fact, on the front page of today’s New York Times was an article about Rupert Murdoch of The News Corporation, making an unsolicited bid to buy Dow Jones and Company for $5 million, from the Bancroft family. The family has believed that newspaper ownership must be in the form of a public trust, and has controlled the Journal since 1902. If Murdoch was to win this battle, he would control one of the most widely read and respected financial newspapers. His views were broadcasted on the Fox News Channel, also owned by his company. At this rate, the notion that we are receiving different perspectives in the media is completely violated since ownership is already and further becoming vested in just a few hands.

However the solutions in this book are a bit idealistic. Much more than just the action-steps described in the last seventy pages of the book is needed to create real change. This is because the themes of the book strive to fight what epitomizes the world today – capitalism, globalization, and economic synergies. In order to fight the effects of such a huge, intertwined system, you have to begin within the system, not outside it. Also if you would like people who control the media today to sit-up and take notice of a book like this, it cannot exude such an Anti-Republican, anti-Bush sentiment as it does. It will just further alienate those in power from those who want the power, instead of helping them to work together. As Vidya Krishnamurthy writes, “The fact is that the media is a part of the problem. They have to be a part of the solution.” (Krishnamurthy 148)

If we really want to make a difference then it has to be done by sitting at a table with people from the very political parties and economic corporations that this book shuns and drafting new media policy that can change the way the future of media will run. These new policies should take into account regulation of the media, take stringent action against marginalization, and encourage local media networks. In the United States, the is sue of media control takes into consideration Republicans versus Democrats, or issues of race; in places like China, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan it is a matter of a tradition, conservative and nationalistic government versus the people. In fact in Afghanistan the first thing that the Taliban tried to control was the media. This is because the media is a way of reaching out to the common man and influencing his beliefs, it is a very powerful tool that must not be misused. Let’s hope that the authors of Future of Media recognize that in seeking to control the media they do not alienate those who currently control it, and hence lose the battle before it has even fully begun. We, as readers, should encourage them to fight real problems with realistic solutions.

Posted by Shveta Raina at 02:31 PM | Permalink

The main concept discussed intensely in the final chapter of Phillip Knightley’s “The First Casualty” was that of media correspondents being “embedded” with military personnel while covering wars. Media correspondents would get annoyed when they felt like the Pentagon was trying to “manage” them, so instead of managing the media, the Pentagon decided to “incorporate” the media into the national war effort itself (531). Embedding media outlets was not a new concept. In the First World War, the British army embedded six war correspondents with their troops (531). Apparently, though that version of embedding served the interests of the military well, it was a disaster for the integrity of journalism. Indeed, one of the correspondents, Sir Philip Gibbs, said in 1923 that “we identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies on the field… There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors” (532).

While embedding media correspondents may seem like a good short-term solution to keep everyone happy (the media can still do their war stories, and the military does not have to worry about the media leaking potentially sensitive information), it clearly leads to a corruption of exactly the type of “fair and balanced,” “objective” coverage we ideally like to think our media provides. Director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, commented on this phenomenon, saying that American media outlets had “wrapped themselves in the American flag and substituted patriotism for impartiality” (542). Media correspondents are not oblivious to this danger, but they were disillusioned about their role as “embedded” war correspondents. Initially, they thought that their embedded status would enable them to give an accurate and complete picture of the war – how it was progressing, what mistakes were being made, who was being held accountable, and what false claims were being made (534). Instead, “questions were rationed, follow-up questions were frowned upon, and answers were often evasive” (535). The correspondents were merely pawns in the military’s attempt to control what information the American public was getting about the war.

When the war correspondents caught on to their role in this game, they were still in a difficult situation. Given George W. Bush’s assertion “you’re either with us or you’re against us,” the correspondents either had to present the information the military was comfortable with them presenting or they had to face the potentially awful consequences of presenting a dissenting perspective (537). In fact, since the Pentagon had made it so clear that it did not want correspondents reporting from other perspectives, it followed that independent correspondents had to be acknowledged as enemy targets (541). Thus, war correspondents refusing to comply with all the rules of “embedding” were actually endangering their own lives.

Clearly, the war correspondents had little choice but to follow the guidelines set for them by the Pentagon. And thus they became the version of “embedded war correspondents” that we are familiar with today. Their coverage of the famous toppling of the Saddam Hussein statue and the saving of Private Jessica Lynch followed the mold exactly of what a “good embedded war correspondent” would say and how he or she would say it. As it turns out, the way the embedded correspondents covered these events is far from completely truthful (543-547).

What approach should war correspondents take from here on out? Knightley seems to believe that the question is more what approach will war correspondents be forced to take from here on out. Letting the media have full range of potentially sensitive information is not desirable or realistic. Embedding the media in the way that has happened in the current Iraq war leads to confusion. A letter to the editor published in the Guardian states tellingly that “despite scouring two national newspapers every day, listening to the radio, surfing the web and watching the TV news, I have absolutely no clue how the war is going” (543). Clearly, something needs to change. Either “embedding” as we know it must change and a return to a more objective system of reporting can occur or the entire way in which we view our war correspondents must change.

Knightly ends his book with a fairly bleak outlook as to what the future holds for war correspondents. In keeping with President Bush’s “with us or against us” dichotomy, along with the increasing realities presented by insurance and other institutions, Knightly thinks that future war correspondents will be given the options of becoming embedded with troops or they will be forced to be independent correspondents, whose lives and jobs will constantly be in great danger (547). Given these two dire options, Knightly boldly ends his book by declaring that “the age of the war correspondent as hero appears to be over” (548). In its wake, we come upon the age of the war correspondent as government tool, in the hands the one-sided interests of the government. Thus, we must alter the way we view our war correspondents, questioning the “truth” they present to us time and time again.

Posted by Paran Daria Quigley at 04:52 PM | Permalink

Herzog on Herzog is not quite a direct transcript of a series of interviews with Werner Herzog, the famed German director. Paul Cronin, Herzog's interviewer and editor of the work, states in the introduction that while all the words are theoretically Herzog's, anything that does not relate to a film has been spliced. Furthermore, he writes: "Over the course of our lengthy talks we would often repeatedly touch on the same subjects from different angles, and so Herzog's answers have been compiled into single responses which has sometimes resulted in lengthy responses to very short questions. 'You should let the readers know this,' Herzog told me. 'I sound so talkative in the book, but I'm really not that garrulous.'" And Herzog's introduction to the book is simply this sentence: "Facing the stark alternative to see a book on me compiled from dusty interviews with all the wild distortions and lies, or collaborating—I choose the much worse option: to collaborate."

A strange way to frame truth for a narrated biography of a director of "documentaries," but then again, I guess that's Herzog. Part of the intention of this bizarre (auto)biography is to set the rumors of Herzog to rest, to explain his directorial oddities — he hypnotized his cast in one of his films and cast a 40-year-old man with a history of abuse as a 16-year-old mentally impaired boy in another — but throughout the book the truth flutters out of reach. The reader is left wondering whether to accept Herzog's words as scraps from the table of a genius or to reject increasingly impossible-sounding tales as a bizarre and eccentric man's nostalgic memories.

Continue reading "Saraiya on Herzog on Herzog" »

Posted by Sonia Saraiya at 01:31 AM | Permalink

James Der Derian’s Virtuous War investigates the dual – and in contemporary times, linked – meanings of “virtuous” war. Etymologically and historically, the words “virtual” and “virtuous” have had almost the same meaning – that of “power inherent in the supernatural, of a divine being endowed with natural virtue” (Der Derian xv). Yet in modern parlance, “virtual” has become a more technological term, referring to a representational digitized reality, while “virtuous” has morphed into the expression of virtue, or moral qualities. However, in contemporary innovations of military technology – namely, the integration of computerized networks and digital representation into every level of the United States armed forces – and transformations of U.S. foreign policy – which, with the fall of the Soviet Union, is now dedicated to spreading free markets and democracy while minimizing civilian casualties – Der Derian sees the beginning of a reunion of the meanings of “virtual” and “virtuous,” in what he calls “virtuous war.” Wars of the 21st century, and Der Derian includes the 1991 Gulf War as the first example, will be fought both “virtually” and, at least in American eyes, “virtuously.” In fact, the twin virtual/virtuous aspects of 21st century war enable and reinforce one another. Virtuality makes political violence seem less immoral – CNN presents “clean” wars without civilian casualties, American deaths, or carnage, while showing off the ability of U.S. military technology to pinpoint and kill the “bad guys” without any collateral damage. At the same time, virtuous warriors feel the need to use that technology to spread rationality, democracy, free markets, and modernity (all the necessary ingredients for the development of virtuality in the first place) around the world.

Virtuous war adds important, and potentially dangerous, new poles to Eisenhower’s famous “military industrial complex” – how will the “military-industrial-media-entertainment network” (MIME-NET) influence American foreign policy, military affairs, and the general public? Chapters one through four of Virtuous War explore the basis for what Der Derian hopes will become, by the end of the book, the beginnings of a theory on how both kinds of “virtuality” in war will intersect, contradict, compliment, and negate each other. Will innovations in technology disperse or further complicate the “fog of war?” Can America spread democracy and capitalism without the horrors of war we’ve come to expect? Does a virtualized army have the capacity to implement a virtuous foreign policy? Can war ever truly be virtual, in either sense of the word?

To grateful students the world over, Der Derian’s work takes the form not of another theoretical tome on technology, war, and media, but instead that of a travelogue. He chronicles his journeys to places representing various aspects of MIME-NET and to locations where the future of “virtuous war” is being explored and strategized – chapters one through four feature a war game at Fort Irwin in the Mojave Desert, Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Pentagon, a peace game at the Hohenfels Combat and Maneuver Training Center in Germany, various conferences in London, Oslo, and Aberystwyth, Paris to interview Paul Virilio, and, finally, the “Simulation Triangle” formed by the Interservice/Industry Training Systems and Education Conference, the STRICOM (Simulation, Training, and Instrumentation Command) military base, and Disney World (which is surprisingly hard to infiltrate). Naturally, Der Derian is aware that he stands on the shoulders of French, German, and Argentine giants, and he guides his journey and theoretical development with quotations and theories from works by Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, Friedrich Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Jorge Luis Borges.

So what is Der Derian’s theory for virtuous war? Well, I can’t really say, since this literature review assignment is only for the first four chapters of the book. Nevertheless, chapters one through four establish important foundational theoretical concepts – the “revolution in military affairs,” the power of hyperreal war game simulations, the cyberdeterrent, and MIME-NET – that play fundamental roles in the theory Der Derian develops later on. The “revolution in military affairs,” what military eggheads call the “RMA,” is, potentially, the third major military technology revolution of the 20th/21st century. The first revolution came during the First World War, in which, for the first time in European history, political violence was industrialized on a mass scale. The military’s industrial revolution was followed, after the Second World War, by a second RMA – the integration of nuclear arsenals into the armed forces of NATO and the Soviet Union. Presumably, just as the Industrial Revolution triggered an industrialization of war, and the harnessing of nuclear power lead to another leap in military technology, so too should our brave new “Information Age” have a corresponding RMA. This third RMA, which the United States is currently experiencing, involves the integration of digital technologies into the armed forces, the wide-scale use of satellites, the complete networking of the armed forces (from generals to aircraft carriers all the way down to individual soldiers), the manipulation of world-wide media outlets, and the reliance on simulated war games for training and strategic decisions.

However, Der Derian is not totally convinced that this new RMA will be able to truly cure the inherently unpredictable nature of war, and fears that the over-reliance on simulated war games may dull American troops to the chaos, dangers, and horrors of “real” war. Additionally, he sees the potential for hyperreal simulated war games to actually manifest themselves in reality, “Has the paradox of simulation moved from the surreal to the hyperreal? Was the Gulf War the product of a U.S. war game designed to fight a war game bought by Iraq from a U.S. company? To be sure, the given reasons of protecting the oil fields and deterring aggression were significant factors for rallying the coalition forces. But it is possible that new – let us say digitally improved – simulations can precede and engender the reality of war that they were intended to model and prepare for?” (15-16). Finally, just as the physical networks of the interstate highway and the digital network of the internet increased the opportunities and the potential devastation of car crashes and terrorist attacks, a completely networked, integrated, digitized army may become, in fact, even more vulnerable to accidental and intentional injury.

Another possible outcome of our third RMA is the emergence of a new kind of “cyberdeterrent” to replace the Cold War’s out of fashion deterrent of “mutually assured destruction” (so ‘80s). For example, by virtually flexing its techno-military might on CNN during the First Gulf War, the U.S.A. could potentially deter would-be rouge states from misbehaving, as it demonstrated the incredible power of a digitized, networked army. Of course, the cyberdeterrent doesn’t necessarily lead to stability. The awesome power of the revolutionized U.S. army may just inspire potential rouges to more actively pursue nuclear weapons, which still pose a mighty strong deterrent against any kind of invasion – even one by an army finished its third RMA.

MIME-NET is both an outgrowth of the third RMA and also an important factor in its development. For perhaps the first time in American military history, technological innovations are migrating from the commercial sector to the military sector, rather than the other way around. At the same time, U.S. military demand for advanced simulation technology and improved digitalization also stimulates the media and entertainment industries to invest and explore areas with military application more heavily. Wars are produced on T.V. like movies, entertainment executives are hired to speculate on potential future terrorist attacks, videogame technology is adapted for military training – the process is cyclical and self-reinforcing.

Of course, the elephant in the room through all this is September 11th, the Second Gulf War, and the resulting “Civil-Sectarian-Ethnic-Religious-International-War-Conflict-Insurgency-etc.” in Iraq. Virtuous War was published in June 2001, just three months before 9/11 and its foreign policy aftermath. At the very least, this makes for great nostalgia, especially bits of pre-9/11, pre-Iraq mess, pre-IED tidbits, like a description of “the new, more isolationist President Bush,” (76), military strategists focusing primarily on “threats that might emerge from Asia” (29), and the otherwise scarily prescient Paul Virilio remarking, “A civil war wasn’t possible in the desert of Iraq” (66).
Naturally, there are more serious implications for Der Derian’s investigation of “virtuous war” in the wake of America’s, er, quagmire in Iraq. After all, what do networks, simulations, hard/soft/wetware, 21st century warfighters, and the “Revolution in Military Affairs” matter if, as Bill Maher rather politically incorrectly put it, we’re “losing a war to Arab teenagers?” To his credit, Der Derian is impressively; perhaps even prophetically, skeptical of the Army’s cyberpunk vision of a completely wired, networked, virtualized, and thus unstoppable war-machine. Nevertheless, what happens, for example, to Der Derian’s theory of a 21st century “cyber-deterrent” when Iraq has shown the world that the American goliath can be, if not defeated, in any case held off long enough with weapons and bombs made from ingredients available at the local hardware store?

Perhaps “virtuous war” is just another facet of what Der Derian termed (in IR135 class last year) the new, heteropolar nature of international affairs. Sure, virtuous war operates and has a significant impact, but it is not the only discourse – technological, political, or moral – shaping the world today. Virtuous war runs up against religious war, territorial quarrels, ethnic/tribal conflicts, terrorism, narcotics trafficking, and more in constantly changing ways. Virtuous war may just become an expression of American technological prowess and ideological rigidity, rather than the unstoppable phenomenon the military envisions. A uniquely American strategy and perspective, rather than the next era of war.

Posted by Jacob Schuman at 01:26 PM | Permalink

As I sat in an airplane reading Philip Knightley’s analysis of the relationship between government and the media during the Gulf War, widely acknowledged as a major turning point in American war correspondence, the woman sitting next to me suddenly piped up and revealed that she was a veteran of the Gulf War (and that she felt reading was a boring way for me to study it)—from a low income family, she was unfortunate enough to have witnessed the war as more than a video game the way many people remember the green screens with periodic flashes framing the over-enunciating talking heads in the foreground. This woman, like Knightley, knew an Iraq filled with body parts strewn about on anarchic streets, American soldiers covered in their own blood, and angry civilians forever traumatized by the fate of their family members.

For Knightley, war correspondents faced an unprecedented degree of censorship in the Gulf War due to a direct and aggressive campaign by a U.S. military that had learned its lessons about the importance of public opinion in Vietnam. From the beginning, all actors involved were well aware that American public opinion reigned supreme in governing not only the course of the war, but the very decision to go to war. Indeed, one of the key humanitarian triggers, a myth that Iraqi soldiers were ripping Kuwaiti babies from their incubators and leaving them to die, was fabricated entirely by an American public relations form employed by the Kuwaiti government (Knightley, 488). Once the war was underway, the American military explicitly censored the information available to its public by allowing only correspondents known to be “friendly” to the war access to the press pool, forcing them to wear military uniforms, labeling journalists who dared to document real carnage “unpatriotic,” and even threatening physical violence against these “intruders” on occasion (491). In addition to criticizing the military’s undemocratic actions vis-à-vis the press, Knightley sheds light on the deceitful “sanitizing” of war through technological language, which represented “an attempt to change public perception of the nature of war itself, to convince everyone that new technology has removed a lot of war’s horrors” (494). For a public whose only exposure to these “horrors” was a dark screen featuring distant, video game-like explosions in the background, it is no wonder the pseudo-scientific discourse of precise, or “smart,” weaponry was readily accepted. Particularly abominable in Knightley’s view was the military's bold declaration that the two hundred Tomahawk missiles it had fired represented a 98% launch success rate, all the while defining “launch success rate” as the proportion of missiles launched successfully—what the missile did after it was launched was irrelevant (496). This undercurrent of active elite manipulation against a relatively inactive and innocent public runs throughout his analysis.

Perhaps most striking about Knightley’s analysis of the media’s failings during the Gulf War is his fruitless search for a cause or a culprit. Why was this war different from other before and since? Was it truly different from them at all? If it was different, who was at fault? He is blatantly critical of the particular administration in charge during the war for its cynicism and its open hostility to a fundamental pillar of American democracy: a free press. However, this thesis makes one question the health of a democracy in which the press can be squelched at the whim of a particularly hawkish administration any time one is voted into power. Since the beginning of American democracy, individual leaders have been tempted repeatedly to subvert the system, particularly in times of war. By limiting his discussion simply to the direct relationship between the media and the military (with the public as a third wheel willing to support whichever side emerges victorious), Knightley rarely questions the failure of the checks and balances system to protect that fundamental freedom of speech to which Americans usually adhere so tightly. Subtle grabs at dictatorial power are, unfortunately, an undeniable feature of democratic government.

Knightley occasionally strays from blaming the monstrous government and shifts his attention to the media themselves, who “unwittingly acted as unpaid publicists to help weapons manufacturers get government contracts” (497), failed to enlighten the masses on Britain’s disastrous colonial role in Iraqi history (500), and allowed themselves to be divided and conquered by engaging in a myopic competition for military access that forced them to cater to military interests over their own journalistic integrity (490). However, despite these detours, he remains loyal to his original culprits: the U.S. government and military. According to the Knightley narrative, the government lied while the media were lied to, the military threatened while the media were threatened, the government and military together blacklisted while the media were blacklisted. Markedly absent from this narrative is the American public itself, ironically despite its role as the centerpiece of the post-Vietnam war theater. Although he casually notes that nearly eighty percent of American and British citizens believed censorship was the right policy in wartime and sixty percent believed censorship should actually increase (492), he never pursues this line of thought to the extent it deserves. The American public did not play a peripheral role in determining the relationship between the media and the military in the case of the Gulf War; it operated as a third, equally dynamic actor as capable of altering them as they were capable of altering it.

Neither the media nor the government exists without a public and vice versa. In this way, they are mutually constitutive to an extent that makes any analysis neglecting one of the three dimensions (the government, the media, and the public) in the study of war correspondence at least somewhat dubious. As Anderson Cooper once insinuated in a moment of profound cynicism while giving a lecture at Brown, the mainstream media are financially constrained by their publics who dictate what material they must show (and not show) in order to remain alive in the competitive news market. As it turns out, Knightley’s frustrations with the war coverage during the Gulf War demonstrate the importance of a democratically minded society in maintaining an atmosphere truly conducive to transparency during times of war when all other forces seem to conspire against it. Perhaps a good litmus test for this theory will be the You Tube Effect. It is entirely plausible that once the public has unlimited visual access to the gruesome horrors of war (although media presence is still constrained by military policy, the likelihood that there will be leaks to the press increases dramatically with this virtual democratization), its appetite for these horrors will change in the process. However, it seems to me that the military was permitted to treat the media in such an aggressive, undemocratic manner at least in part because the American public was thoroughly satisfied with its black and green video game. Contrary to what Knightley seems to argue, the truly frightening aspect of Gulf War correspondence is not that the military-entertainment complex managed to convince the public that war was actually “sanitized”—I doubt that this effect was ever achieved in a literal sense—but that the public was content with its own sanitized illusion.

Similar problems emerge from the second half of the Knightley reading, which concerns the relationship between the media and NATO in the 1999 intervention in Serbia. He mentions the fickle role of the public this time when he claims that “[t]he revolution in communications technology…should have provided the public with an unprecedented overview of the war…Instead, the public drowned in wave after wave of images that added up to nothing” (504). However, just as before Knightley’s main complaints are against the various governments involved and the media itself, which “must shoulder a large share of the blame for the poor way the war was covered” (505), while the role of democratic media consumption is again conspicuously absent from his analysis. In this case, he follows the various cover-ups, scandals, and skillful lies regularly employed by NATO representatives to block the public from discovering NATO’s major mistakes and atrocities while some tougher correspondents like John Simpson of the BBC fought tooth and nail for their right to report the whole truth. While the military may have attempted to smear Simpson for being unpatriotic because he reported “from the other side” (the Serbian side of the battle), Knightley acknowledges that he was “well able to defend himself” and quotes Simpson himself saying “we were free to say what we wanted to say” (513). In other words, despite an aggressive backlash against honest reporting in Serbia, at least a few established war correspondents were able to overcome the barriers before them.

So what happened to this information once it passed the military censors? Knightley notes that “[i]n the flush of victory few wanted to know the cost in either human or financial terms” (520). It is true that many of these stories never hit headlines despite their obvious importance in educating the public about realities on the ground in Serbia. For example, Audrey Gillian, a British reporter who openly doubted the validity of NATO claim that the Serbs had committed massacres and genocide, had her story denied by the Guardian and was instead forced to publish in a less well-respected newspaper. Indeed, the economic element of war reporting (a factor Knightley glosses over) is central to understanding the changing relationship between the military and the media in wartime. However, this factor cannot possibly be understood without taking the public, with its social trends and personal ties to a given conflict, into serious consideration. Although Knightley rarely considers this dimension of the media war, he does concede that “it is likely that [citizens] do not want truthful, objective and balanced reporting that good war correspondents once did their best to provide” (525). Although I am suspicious of the nostalgia underlying this point, it is a least plausible that, in the battle between the media and the military for control over the war theater, the audience may have changed right along with the traditional actors. The salient question is whether the You Tube Effect has or will spur yet another transformation in the target audience or whether it will simply reflect the new tastes this audience acquired during the “sanitized” wars of the 1990s. We’ll have to wait and see.

Posted by Bethany Gerstein at 10:54 AM | Permalink

DESCRIPTION
Ronald Diebert’s Parchment, Printing, and Hypermedia reads like discarded background material for writers of the Matrix. In that movie’s future, humans, strung out on arrogance and technological know-how, create artificial intelligence. They embed it in machines which quickly become smarter than their makers, and we’re all familiar with the hellish dystopia that Neo confronts in the real and virtual world.

But whereas the screenwriters forecast a bleak future burned by technology gone evil, Diebert offers a rosier picture, at least for all entities transnational. Instead of fretting over killer robots, Diebert considers iPods. He doesn’t literally, since he published his book in 1997—practically the Stone Age in digital music history, but he does talk about technologies like iPods. He seems to ask the old chicken-or-the-egg question, but with a twist: Did Steve Jobs invent the iPod or did social epistemologies and forces converge to first invent Steve Jobs? His answer, of course, is a qualified, evidenced, and nuanced “it’s both.”

Diebert bemoans international relations’ collective overlooking of medium theory. Traditional focus on content, similar to traditional focus on nation-states, is rapidly becoming outdated. Rather, he argues, international studies must come to grips with hypermedia and its implications for international studies. He doesn’t exactly sound the death knell of the nation-state system, but he clearly believes hypermedia has begun to usher in an era of transnationalism and multiple identities.

Printing, Parchment, and Hypermedia studies the ebb and flow of political power and authority as a function of changes in modes of communication. Diebert proposes “nonreductive evolutionary medium theory,” which is his spin on medium theory thought up by Harold Innis and made famous by Marshall McLuhan. Medium theory studies methods of storing, transmitting, and distributing information in different media environments throughout history. The “nonreductive evolutionary” component addresses causality; he applies an almost Darwinian evolutionary analogy to changes in modes of communication. “Ecological holism” examines distribution and social changes, which heuristically produce environments. By “nonreductive” he announces disbelief in “technological determinism.” Diebert would not buy the recent New York Times article that attributed the demise of music conglomerates and compact discs to iTunes and the iPod. Diebert recognizes that the iPod didn’t appear out of thin air, and he assigns appropriate value to context and process.

The “hypermedia environment reflects a complex melding and converging of distinct technologies into a single integrated web of digital-electronic-telecommunications,” writes Diebert. But hypermedia has shifted world order in more ways that rapid transmission and digitization. It has evolved power. Its “unprecedented capability to blur territorial and political lines, will have an effect on all spheres of human interaction, from economic production and political security to knowledge and culture.” To study hypermedia, Diebert looks to the past at a historical transformation brought on by changes in modes of communication. In Part I he writes about the printing press. In Part II he explores the implications of hypermedia. After examining both sections in turn, this review weighs his contributions and offers criticism.

PART I: PRINT
Diebert points to the printing press as the catalyst for the transformation of political authority from medieval feudalism to modern sovereign state system. For centuries the Roman Catholic Church maintained a monopoly over written communication, which underpinned its authority. It further used the “multimedia” of religious art and imposing church architecture to feed its message of power. But the “rise in secular literacy from the end of the twelfth century, the replacement of heavy expensive parchment with lighter cheaper paper, and the arrival of the printing press in the mid-fifteenth century provided an environment for political change,” wrote Judith Bannister in her review of Parchment. These changes disadvantaged the church and fueled the rise of other social forces and ideas, namely the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, social pressures demanded more efficient communication in areas outside the church. “To the detriment of the Catholic Church, this new communications environment favored the Protestant Reformation and scientific humanism, the rise of centralized state bureaucracies and an urban bourgeoisie, and empowered the emerging nation-states.”

Diebert reads a “message” into the historical fact of mass-printed pamphlets: cheap reproduction led to mass distribution and subversion of monastic papacy, which heretofore had a monopoly on literacy and God. Literacy rates grew faster in Protestant regions than in Catholic regions. Leaders of the Reformation exploited the power of this mode of communication, which allowed for the success and historical importance of the movement. Diebert hypothesizes in a counter factual that the Reformation wouldn’t have had the same endurance had it not been for printing.

Social abstractions such as “contracts, constitutions, and newspapers” gained ground, largely because of humanity’s burgeoning sense of individual identities. Modern, centralized states arose with the rise of the urban bourgeoisie. Further changes included changes in social epistemology, spatial bias (“linearity” of political space), and scientific humanism.

PART II: HYPERMEDIA
Diebert carries over his framework from Part I to Part II. As he looks at the contemporary world, he offers a key insight: no innovation today exists independently. Just as cellular phones, blogs, optic fibers, and e-mail are interconnected, so are the many power structures in hypermedia. Diebert sees the interlocking elements of nation-states unraveling. As it becomes increasingly difficult to define “states,” finance and trade are being quickly deregulated. He sees world order moving away from mass identities, linear political boundaries, and territorial spaces toward multiple identities, non-territorial communities, and overlapping boundaries.

As he explores the “transnationalization” of firms, global localization (adjustment to local markets), and local globalization (global village), he is careful not to assign causality to technology or the media, a product of technology. “[C]hanges in the mode of communication do not generate new symbolic forms, social constructs, or cognitive biases de novo, but rather the elements of social epistemology present in society will tend to flourish or wither as a result of a fitness between those elements and the new environment.” Multinational corporations with production facilities all over the world conform to hypermedia. Traditional nation-states do not. Diebert does not go so far as to proclaim the death of nations just yet, but he does point to shifting values that make such formations increasingly unstable. NGOs, already an established feature in world politics, offer an example of a heterogeneous entity that flourishes in hypermedia. Still, if there is “one clear ‘winner’ in the hypermedia, it is the collective interest of transnational capital.” The flexibility and agility necessitated by changing world order demands the crossing of boundaries and threatens nationalism.

CONTRIBUTION
There’s no question that Diebert’s arguments for the inclusion of hypermedia in international studies are reasoned and sound. Clearly, the most pressing implication is that “the theoretical tools and concepts International Relations theorists have inherited and employed for centuries to study world politics will be in need of revision.” He argues that scholars need a new method of framing power relations. Since “the elements of international politics which mainstream rationalist approaches presuppose to be ‘natural,’ ‘essential,’ and ‘unchanging’ are, in fact, the products of historical contingencies and thus subject to change over time,” these reformulations are all the more pressing.

CRITIQUE
Parchment deserves criticism as well. The work is admittedly a theoretical text, but even so, the jargon overwhelms. Diebert demands such extensive knowledge of theory (without accompanying explanation) as to render the text more obscure than it otherwise could be. Furthermore, he compares processes that took 1500 years (from the 6th to 19th centuries) to those that have taken place in 50. No one doubts the mind-boggling pace of modern innovation, but it seems premature or at least imperfect to draw similar conclusions about events that are inherently incongruent. By that token, if he wants his arguments to hold water, perhaps he should issue a revised and updated edition of his book every year, month, day, second…

Finally, what might be called “arrogance” undermines his logic. He makes several offhand references to “primitive orality” in simpler cultures. His dismissal of “mere orality” as a mode of communication glosses over some qualities that might not have counterparts in the latest technologies. Some aspects of oral history, for instance, might be lost if (when?) hypermedia subsumes it. The future doesn’t necessarily have to be Matrix¬-esque to be cause for concern. Diebert at one point explicitly deals with fears of “Big Brother” by holding up “electronic” and “international” scrutiny as a check against it. But if even the all-knowing academic is quick to dismiss parts of human culture as
“secure” or “primitive,” there’s not telling which kind of damage might be wrought by hypermedia.

Continue reading "[Literature Review] International Studies in the Era of Hypermedia: (IR)relevant?" »

Posted by David Nickels at 07:01 PM | Permalink

News Imperialism? (author unknown) presents an interesting argument about the role of news agencies (e.g. AP, Reuters which provide news to local newspapers) as manifestations of Western neo-imperialism. Some developing nations and dependency theorists have raised the argument that the West controls the diffusion of international news through its monopoly on international news agencies. The author begins the article by demonstrating how expensive it is to maintain news bureaus abroad, and how little revenue these outposts can generate, making them prohibitively expensive for all but the largest, wealthiest newspapers. So, organizations like the Associated Press arose to pool the resources of many papers to maintain staff in far flung locales. Even large newspapers, like The York Times, can’t have correspondents everywhere, or find it cheaper and easier to use a wire service, giving a small handful of agencies tremendous control of international news flow.

In the developing world, the problem is compounded. No Third World newspapers can afford to have their own staff abroad, so they must rely entirely on news agencies for their international and even regional news. These agencies are exclusively located in industrialized West (or North, or Core), “distort[ing] international knowledge of the cultural, political and economic progress of the Third World” (p. 70). Western journalistic philosophy, the author argues, is to focus mainly on “aberrational” events (e.g. “war, crime, corruption, disaster, famine, fire, flood” p. 70) portraying a excessively negative image of the Third World in the First World (which then gets feedback to the Third World). The author then gives a sweeping history of news agencies and their imperialist tactics since the 19th century, showing how four agencies have come to dominate global news (AP, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, UPI). The article is outdated (making references to the Soviet Union), but still presents an interesting argument that should be discussed in a class on global media.

The historical stratagem of news agencies, at least according to this author, took a overtly imperialist approach and reflected many of the more recognized forms of state-sponsored imperialism. Towards the end of the 19th century, for example, the major European news agencies “carved up” the world between them. This reminded me of events like the Berlin Conference in the 1880’s which divvied up Africa. The news agencies of the respective colonial powers (e.g. Reuters in England) took control of their empire’s colonies and became a tool of colonial rule, with our without overt cooperation with the governments. Sometimes, there was even outright collusion, like when the head of Reurers’ was “appointed director of propaganda” during WWII (p.80). This legacy has carried on to the present day (or when the article was written). Because the South lacks control of these information flows, we (in the North) get a image of the Third World consisting of only murderers, terrorists and corrupt officials (p.110). Despite the application of the same journalistic philosophy, this does not happen to the US or France or Germany because of their own journalism; diffusion of a more positive image through popular culture, physical and cultural exports; and the work of foreign journalists within these countries (p. 109).

News also flows disproportionately North to South because reporters are overwhelmingly located in the developed world so that “Third World papers pay as much attention to lives of American celebrities…as they do to comparable personalities and issues in their own societies” (p.72). The author supplies tables to demonstrate this disparity. Communist “imperialism” (though the term is totally inappropriate) has (or actually had) a news agency as well. Russia’s Tass and China’s Hsin Hua played more directly “imperialistic” roles, selling overtly sensational or propagandistic news designed to aid Communist expansion abroad (p.80-85).

Ultimately, however, the author concludes that the news agencies themselves are not really to blame for this problem, but that it is really a product of the West’s “pre-existing image of the developing world” and its “selfishness and paternalism” (p.110). So the problem is much bigger than, and exists outside of the control of these agencies; but the author argues that journalists should be the ones to help break the cycle. “Journalism of the West is helping arrest the historic process of development,” and if there is anywhere this can be resolved, he continues, “it is there, in the intractable issue of information, though it may take a leap of imagination to achieve it” (p.110).

While outdated, I think this article presents a very interesting point which has been touched upon in class with things like ‘the CNN vs. the Al Jezeera Effects’. The narrative is largely controlled in the First World, I agree with the author about this, but I do not agree with his conclusion that the Western journalist must be the one to break this cycle. This would help, certainly, and if we created an Al Jazeera-like operation in Africa (and Latin America, and Pacific Islander etc. etc.) that is a step in the right direction, but not complete. Just as we concluded that you can’t avoid making ethno-graphic portrayals in The Devil Came on Horseback, I think it is impossible for the western journalist to escape the history paternalism and negativity when reporting on the Third World. The developing world is home to more “war, disaster, famine” etc. than the North because of its socio-economic problems, so these issues cannot be avoided in reporting on the Third World. Paternalism is also an inescapable product of the current geo-political reality: aid for war, disaster and famine relief comes almost entirely from the developed world; international norms of human rights were created by European and American actors; and the nature of the post-Cold War Western “psyche” is to try to fix the war , disaster and famine where they occur (usually the South). For example, I doubt anyone would call Nick Kristof of the New York Times, a neo-imperialist, he writes extensively about the global South. But he chooses to report on negative things like the Darfur crisis. Furthermore, his articles on Darfur are extremely paternal; they aim to raise awareness so that one day, perhaps, the West will take real action to engage in Darfur, because Sudan or the AU won’t or can’t do it on their own. I don’t think this is wrong, I think the political reality is that the West has to be somewhat paternalistic if it wishes to prevent things like genocide in Sudan. So if the Western journalists can’t do it, then who can?

If the news agencies are the “nuclear weapons” of our George Orwell paradigm, then it will be the small arms fire of new global media that will fight this battle. Already we see bloggers, filmmakers, independent journalists etc. in the Third World reporting on their lives from in an unmediated fashion (well, less mediated at least). The democratization of media works not only from large corporation to individual, but from North the South, center to periphery. I hope that this will help break the cycle of News Imperialism discussed in this article.

Posted by Alex Seitz-Wald at 02:02 PM | Permalink

Justice Potter Stewart of the US Supreme Court explained that the constitutional guarantee of a free press was "to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches." Therefore, the role and responsibility of the media in politics is to expose potential governmental deception and corruption, and to create an informed public by ensuring a transparent system. Phillip Knightley, in his account of the history of war correspondence, reveals the difficulties for the press in fulfilling this duty, and the consequences of a breakdown in this fourth branch of government. Erik Barnouw focuses on the evolution of television and, in his analysis, politics becomes another branch of television, instead of the other way around.

Knightley places the reality of war correspondence against its theoretical purpose and argues that oftentimes journalists fall short of their responsibilities. War correspondents should strive to distance themselves from the political and the human and to focus on objectively reporting events.

Knightley places a great deal of blame on the poor reporting by journalists during the Vietnam war for the public's ignorance as to the truth of the politics behind the offensive. He states that the "freedom given to correspondents [in Vietnam] to go anywhere, see everything, and write what they liked is not going to be given again" (Knightley, 482), but that the incredible opportunity given was largely squandered.

Knightley condemns reporters for "not questioning the American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness" (Knightley, 417). But how much of this questioning is the responsibility of the journalist? Knightley uses the example of Peter Arnett, a Vietnam correspondent for the Associated Press, to illustrate a feeling among correspondents to avoid speculating on the morality of the conflict: "...even if he had known he was witnessing a war crime, he would not have described it as such, because that would have been making a judgment, and as a correspondent for the AP he dealt in facts, not judgments" (Knightley, 435). Therefore, the only avenue for a reporter to express his or her opinion would be through choice of topic. Which massacres were common, and which were news.

Much of the difficulty of reporting on the Vietnam War was due to this very dilemma. As correspondents spent more time on the front line, they began to see and become entangled in the complexity of the situation. There was no 'good' and 'bad.' Atrocities were committed daily. Knightley notes that many correspondents left for Vietnam supporting the United States, then were unable to reconcile what they had been told about the situation there with what they saw.

Furthermore, reporters were constantly confronted with situations that forced them to choose between their responsibilities to their readers as reporters, and their responsibilities to give aid to those who need it as those in a place to give it. These ethical dilemmas were particularly difficult for photographers whose "craft is by its nature more obviously voyeuristic and intrusive than that of a writer" (Knightley, 449). Arnett, when describing photographing a monk committing suicide by fire in protest to the South Vietnamese government’s anti-Buddhist policies, states, "I could have prevented that immolation by rushing at him and kicking the gasoline away. As a human being I wanted to, as a reporter I couldn't" (Knightley, 446). Knightley mentions some correspondents who chose being human over reporting. It's possible that these reporters were actual hurting the victims they were trying to help by not reporting the events. By not doing their job. By not alerting the American public—the people with the power to influence the US government and, thus, the war—as to the truth about Vietnam.

I was reminded of these questions during our debate last week over filming infanticide. At what point does the cameraman, the correspondent, or the photographer stop being helpful and start being gratuitous? When does a picture or a description become ineffective through overuse? And when is the suspense of an absent image more powerful than the image itself?

Television, an even more intrusive medium, brought scenes of "real-life violence, death, and horror" (Barnouw, 451) to the American living room. Knightley states that although "it was from television that 60 per cent of Americans got most of their war news" (Barnouw, 451), there is little evidence to prove that these graphic images had any effect in changing people's attitude towards Vietnam. In fact, he argues that the images had the opposite effect. The public became more tolerant of violence and more likely to support the war.

Although Erik Barnouw's discussion of the history of television is much broader than just news broadcasts, he does talk about the role of TV in American politics. One very interesting point that Barnouw makes is, "alone among major democracies, the United States had incorporated election campaigns into its merchandising procedures" (Barnouw, 483). American candidates and their platforms were reduced to 30 second appeals sandwiched between advertisements for hair gel and mouthwash. As television became more lucrative, competition among advertisers for air space--especially during peak hours--increased. This was supplemented by the availability of hour-by-hour data on the demographics of viewers. Brief and flashy was essential to making election campaign ads competitive.

News, however, was not brief, or flashy. And news was not making money. "Programs yielding such low-revenue slots seemed to network executives an obstacle to the much higher earning that would be possible with other programming. The demographic mania produced intense efforts to jazz up news programming" (Barnouw, 472). As Knightley argues, part of the blame for the poor reporting during Vietnam falls on the heads of editors and executives back in the US. Stories needed to make money in order to be news. Facing pressure from the government to censor war reports, and from investors to keep capital flowing in, editors and executives leaned towards sensational but not inflammatory reports.

The government wanted stories that would encourage public support. During Vietnam, the US maintained a very open and helpful attitude towards correspondents hoping that they would in turn write praises of the US government. The government condemned writers who opposed the war as unpatriotic, and blamed such reporters for drops in morale. But when does maintaining morale become more important that accurate reporting? If a war is only conveyed in positive terms in the press, but then is "suddenly" lost, the media would be unable to hide behind the pretense of morale preservation to excuse propagandistic reporting. And would subsequently have failed its duty as the fourth branch of government. The media would be nothing more than a tool for deception and manipulation of the population by the government.

During our discussion with Deborah, one student asked if the news reports aired in the barracks on the front lines were censored. He proposed reverse media censorship to keep troops ignorant and morale high. He suggested that if soldiers did not know that their efforts were not supported back home, enthusiasm would be high, and troops would be more effective. His proposal assumes that troop morale is based solely on homeland public support, and that soldiers are too directly immersed in the war that they cannot come to their own conclusions about the effectiveness of their campaign, or the policies behind it.

Balancing media responsibility and media interest was made more difficult by the lack of publishing or broadcasting options. Today, with the introduction of miniaturized personal media (digital cameras and camera phones) and the Internet, more perspectives are available and, as a group, can offer a less mediated, more objective viewpoint; they can be an effective fourth branch of the government—a truer representation and tool of the people.

Posted by Ann Kidder at 10:12 PM | Permalink

Over and over again, Hardt and Negri’s chef d’ouvre Empire is described as a sort of “communist manifesto for the 21st century"—an attempt to identify the exploited (the multitude) the exploiter (empire) and the means of resistance in today’s postmodern world. And over and over again, critics deplore Empire’s ontology of “the multitude” and “empire” and its revolutionary, even communist, telos, especially as a book that claims to be embedded in the postmodern. Cynthia Weber, in her textbook, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction, quite frankly ravages Hardt and Negri on these counts:

“In losing the resistive potential of the multitude, Hardt and Negri lose themselves. They cease to be making meaning and potential progress through contemporary history. By writing Empire—a terribly scattered, fractured contradictory set of propositions and ideas—into “being,” Hardt and Negri not only call the multitude into being. They call themselves into being. They, in other words, fulfill their desire to be relevant communist intellectuals”(145).

Ouch.

So what is “Empire” anyways, why are so many people so down on it, and why do we bother reading about it? The concept of Empire, most simply put, is a response to two theoretical deficiencies observed by Hardt and Negri. The first deficiency is found in current theories of economic globalization. Many have begun to notice that as capitalism is more and more globalized, state sovereignty is rapidly declining. However, to declare that sovereignty had come to an end would essentially mean that there are no power relations outside of the economy, a notion that Hardt and Nergi reject—as they say from the start, “the decline in sovereignty of nation-states, however, does not mean that sovereignty as such has declined. … This new global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire”(xi-xii). Empire is, first of all, the location of sovereignty in today’s world.

The second deficiency is found in current theories of the postmodern. Postmodernist theories typically aim to tear apart the foundations of oppression by deconstructing power relationships. However, according to Hardt and Negri, “the structures and logics of power in the contemporary world are entirely immune to the ‘libratory’ weapons of the postmodernist politics of difference”(142). The problem, ultimately, is that while postmodernism deals with constructed power relationships, it has little to say about real economic exploitation. While one can theorize a subjected identity group out of oppression, one cannot theorize an exploited laborer out of a factory. The second function of Empire, then, is to account for real exploitation in a postmodern world. Empire is not only the location of sovereignty; it is the new dominant class, which oppresses a new proletariat—the multitude.

How can Empire play both of these roles at once? The extraordinary significance of the passage to Empire lies in the fact that both of these roles become one and the same. Hardt and Negri show that this is the case by giving two histories of the world—a history of sovereignty, and a history of production. Their intent is to show that, ultimately, these parallel histories converge with the birth of Empire. To briefly recount their production story:

Capitalism grew up around industrial enterprises. Labor was exploited, but there was ultimately a division between economic relations and personal relations. However, with postmodernity, the economy becomes informatized. In this postmodern economy, labor became immaterial—instead of producing the goods that sustained the community, labor began to produce the community itself. Service labor, “affective labor,” “produces … social networks, forms of community, biopower. … At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itself is the site of both production and circulation”(298). Since social networks are the foundation of politics and power, power becomes embedded in production itself—or, rather, it becomes biopower (a term Hardt and Negri borrow from Foucault). Thus, “the multitude can only be ruled along internal lines, in production, in exchanges, in culture—rather, the biopolitical context of its existence”(344). Empire, then, is the subject in capitalism that exploits the multitude, and controls them biopolitically.

Meanwhile, the sovereignty story goes something like this:

Modernity began with a crisis—men had discovered the “plane of immanence,” they had found that there was nothing that transcended themselves, and thus they were masters of their own lives. This revolution was countered by those who were sovereign powers--those who acted under the pretense of being the masters of other men's lives. Hence the crisis. The enlightenment served to legitimize these sovereign powers by establishing them as transcendent, using notions of “the nation,” and the “people" to do so. However, as mentioned above, late capitalism brought about the rise of biopower by embedding the mechanisms of power in the production and reproduction of life itself, and, therefore, effectively brought sovereignty onto the plane of immanence. Empire, then, is the subject in postmodernity that controls the multitude biopolitically by controlling production and reproduction, or, rather, exploiting them.

Thus, Hardt and Negri present us with Empire, in which exploitation and power are one and the same thing. However, one might still note that the ontological foundation of Empire is still very vague. Who is Empire? According to Hard and Negri, Empire has no ontology—it is truly postmodern in this sense. It is merely the exploiting agent in society—or, rather, those who benefit from the exploitation present in society. And, since neither Empire nor the multitude has an ontology, it seems somewhat absurd to speak of a telos in this situation.

Regardless, however, Hardt and Negri go on in the final part of the book to describe how Empire can be resisted and ultimately overthrown—in short, they outline their communist project. Since they have located the means of oppression and exploitation, they believe they can identify the means of resistance. In essence, then, they develop a telos for the multitude.

This is where the bulk of criticism of the book arises. How can you overthrow something that doesn’t have an ontology? The concept of a revolution, a telos, seems absurd. At this point, many discredit the book in its entirety, as does Weber in the above passage. Especially since 9/11, most people reject the idea of a unified constitution of the multitude, as Hardt and Negri present it. In fact, due to this objection, many discredit the book entirely.

So why read Empire today? Ultimately, we read these “Marxists” for the same reason we still read Marx today. One can trace two distinct narratives that run throughout Marx’s work—one utopian, a project for the future, and one scientific, a description of the world today. Except for a select group of radicals, most people have deemed Marx’s utopian project to be a failure—the communist revolution didn’t, and probably will never happen. However, the irrelevance of the first vein does not discredit the second. In fact, despite the unrealistic nature of the utopian narrative, most find the second narrative to be a strikingly valid and useful description of the workings of capitalist society. We can say the same about Empire—that even though their communist fantasy is just that—a fantasy—their account of postmodernity, as recounted in the bulk of this review, is quite powerful and relevant. Hardt and Negri do not lose themselves, as Weber might argue, even if they have lost their communist project.

In fact, Hardt and Negri provide us with important ways of resisting oppression in contemporary society, even if such resistance might never amount to a revolution. Since power and exploitation take the form of biopower, or, rather, since power lies in production and reproduction of bodies, power can be resisted through our very means of production and reproduction. Furthermore, “If communication has increasingly become the fabric of production, and if linguistic cooperation has increasingly become the structure of productive corporeality, then the control over linguistic sense and meaning and the networks of communication becomes an ever more central issue for political struggle. … All the elements of corruption and exploitation are imposed on us by the linguistic and communicative regimes of production: destroying in them words is as urgent as doing so in deeds” (404). How does one resist oppression today? By taking back the means of communication. By using media. Even if the utopian narrative in the book collapses, this advice is by no means undermined. Thus, using media is not just a mere tool for resistance; it is the essence of resistance itself.

Thus, while Empire might fail as a new communist manifesto, it seems like an appropriate manifesto for a global media class like ours, a class whose mission is to “speak truth to power.” Empire may not successfully support a Global Communist Project, but it certainly speaks to our Global Media Project.

Posted by Andy Garin at 06:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

hey everyone, here's the literature review I wrote for this week. enjoy
- Kenta

The readings from this week both dealt with the relationship of power and media within the context of Middle Eastern politics of the past decade. Hugh Miles’ Al-Jazeera is fascinating in its account of Al-Jazeera’s ascent as an organization; the growth and dynamism of this organization is certainly amazing. However, it is naïve and unfounded to describe Al-Jazeera as an ideal in terms of its truth journalism. Al-Jazeera itself professes an agenda “to enhance the media revolution in the Arab media and to bring it up to standards with the Western media” (302). Ironically it is contrast to the Western media’s crass journalistic mediocrity that Miles has used throughout the book to establish Al-Jazeera’s virtues. Miles’ provide nuance to his account, but still errs on the side of idealizing Al-Jazeera as a bastion of objectivity, which leads him to overestimate the (persuasive) power of Al-Jazeera vis-à-vis other sources of information. Knightley’s chapter on the role of war correspondents in the Iraq invasion of 2003 deal with matter similar in time and place, but focusing on the relationship of media and state power. The chapter paints a dour picture (at least from the perspective of the journalist) of media at the subordinated by the powerful state, and illustrates with examples from the Iraq War.

Overall Miles’ book seems optimistic about the democratic changes introduced by Al-Jazeera in Arab societies, especially when compared to the state-controlled media of the past. Miles sees Al-Jazeera’s growth undermining authoritarian status quo regimes and providing a medium for criticism and activism. Meanwhile, as a global news organization available via satellite and over the internet, Miles also seems to think that Al-Jazeera is a fresh and different from the convention western media giants that shy away from criticizing powerful Western regimes. Miles commits much of the book to developing the idea that Al-Jazeera is either unbiased, much less biased than Western counterparts, or that its bias is negligible considering the enlightening service it provides in its news. Miles introduces several methods of arguing this point most of which do not make much of a point. One notable approach (also used in Control Room) is to point out that that opposing parties’ have contradictory notions of Al-Jazeera’s bias: “In the Middle East I was told time and again that it targets Arabs. In the West it is repeatedly alleged that Al-Jazeera spreads hate against Israel and America” (351). Attractive as it is, opposing views do not necessarily cancel each other out. Miles’ opinion seems to be that this confirms that no one is ever content with anything, even a gem like Al-Jazeera, however, one could also say (the argument is perhaps weaker) that it also corroborates the opinion that there’s something fishy about Al-Jazeera’s news. Another of Miles methods is to qualify accusations of bias not by disputing the grounds of the claim, but with ad hominem tangents about disingenuous politicians, right-wing loonies, etc. This is most evident in the treatment of the an instance in which documents surfaced claiming that Al-Jazeera had been infiltrated by members of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat in the late 1990s. Here Miles seems to insist that relevance of the documents is belittled by the fact that they were presented by Ahmad Chalabi who had an unrelated axe to grind with Al-Jazeera. Clearly this abstracts from the more important point that Miles does not refute the authenticity of the documents.

The glaring omission from the argument seems to be the fact that Al-Jazeera is clearly an organization that is essentially a wing of the Qatari government. Miles notes that Al-Jazeera, due to various constraints, has always operated at a loss. Commercial incentives do not justify its existence. The organization’s economic needs are only satisfied by bailouts by the Emir of Qatar (Al-Jazeera was originally established with capital provided by the Emir). Miles tries to insert some qualification here, saying that it is not clear whether these funds are those of the Qatari government or those of the Emir himself, as though there would be a difference (as far as I know, as an absolute monarch the Emir is the government). Miles cites the testimony of the Al Jazeera itself which says that “although it takes Qatari money, this has no impact whatsoever on its editorial policy”. Would one expect them to profess anything else? While Miles admits “there is probably an informal connection of some kind”, to him it is obvious that “this has a negligible effect on Am-Jazeera’s editorial policy”. Usually in order to deem an effect negligible one would have to know what that effect was in the first place. Miles seems to draw his conclusions from the fact that Al-Jazeera has criticized the Qatari government in the past and critical voices have not been barred from the air. While that is stronger evidence, it is not conclusive—could it not be possible that the Emirate cultivates the image of being liberal and benevolent? This would seem not impossible given that in the book’s opening Miles goes to some length to describe the Emir’s intentions to differentiate Qatar from other Arab states by making it an enlightened country (attracting Western universities, priorities on education, etc). An alternative explanation that the Emir has an affinity to democracy is strange because of the fact that he is an emir, but also by the opening of the book, the monarch expresses explicit disdain for democracy (“the concept seemed so ridiculous to him that he had to be led in hysterical laughter from the balcony of the House of Commons” 13). Miles’ analysis could use more insights into how Al Jazeera relates to the machinations and political considerations of its patrons and overlords. Miles’ book does not exclude mentioning these elements of the story, however, he treats them as marginal when they would seem to underpin the particulars and have a rightful place in the center.

Philllip Knightley’s chapter “No More Heroes March-April 2003” reflects on role of war correspondents in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During this campaign the state clearly viewed the instrumental strengths of the media—hoping to use its broad message to mold the unfolding combat. Knightley includes a correspondent’s observation that “if word comes out at Centcom that there’s an uprising against Saddam’s regime, [that is because] they [Centcom] can be thinking, planning and hoping that the information will be picked up and local people will build on that and an idea will become reality even if it never existed in the first place” (536). In other words the state not only displays the tendency to not only patronize the media to its own ends, but incorporate it as an appendage of the state itself. Knightley argues that coverage of the invasion of Iraq in spring of 2003 was largely a product of journalism operating under the cynical morality of the Bush administration: “You’re either with us or you’re against us”. War correspondents were faced with the choice of embedding with Coalition military units or pursuing their journalism “unilaterally”. In Iraq, journalists operating in enemy territory were liable to be targeted as enemies, and in many cases were. Knightley mentions the bombing of Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau as well as an instance in which an American tank was filmed aiming and opening fire on Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, a location known to be housing media. Although the details of this incident remain somewhat obscured, the military’s assertion that the tanks were drawing sniper fire from the hotel continue to baffle, considering that eye witness accounts and the empirical evidence of audio records contradict this claim. Knightley’s conclusion is that the 2003 Iraq campaign demonstrates that the new morality governing war correspondence is almost unilaterally defined by the state, and transgression is corrected by draconian means. State mastery over the dissemination of information has largely castrated the media, since alternative voices can forcibly silenced and affirmations are easily propagated. Knightley does not end on an optimistic note, but he is not without hope either (writing the chapter itself expresses this). He ponders the question of whether the audacity and courage of journalists will be enough to offset the monolith of the state, and essentially whether the sword is conclusively mightier than the pen.

While Miles’ book demonstrates that even those mediums identified as the bastions of objectivity and truth are invariably not that, it is not to say that one should forsake truth altogether and arbitrarily pick one position. While truth may be subjective and knowledge only instrumental, the soundest and most verifiable opinions are probably still preferable, and these will not be afforded by reliance on extrinsic authorities (Knightley’s anxiety about state-control, and my dissatisfaction with Miles’ portrayal of Al-Jazeera). Reason demands opinions that can encompass and account for numerous alternatives.

Posted by Kenta Tsuda at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

hey everyone, here's the literature review I wrote for this week. enjoy
- Kenta

The readings from this week both dealt with the relationship of power and media within the context of Middle Eastern politics of the past decade. Hugh Miles’ Al-Jazeera is fascinating in its account of Al-Jazeera’s ascent as an organization; the growth and dynamism of this organization is certainly amazing. However, it is naïve and unfounded to describe Al-Jazeera as an ideal in terms of its truth journalism. Al-Jazeera itself professes an agenda “to enhance the media revolution in the Arab media and to bring it up to standards with the Western media” (302). Ironically it is contrast to the Western media’s crass journalistic mediocrity that Miles has used throughout the book to establish Al-Jazeera’s virtues. Miles’ provide nuance to his account, but still errs on the side of idealizing Al-Jazeera as a bastion of objectivity, which leads him to overestimate the (persuasive) power of Al-Jazeera vis-à-vis other sources of information. Knightley’s chapter on the role of war correspondents in the Iraq invasion of 2003 deal with matter similar in time and place, but focusing on the relationship of media and state power. The chapter paints a dour picture (at least from the perspective of the journalist) of media at the subordinated by the powerful state, and illustrates with examples from the Iraq War.

Overall Miles’ book seems optimistic about the democratic changes introduced by Al-Jazeera in Arab societies, especially when compared to the state-controlled media of the past. Miles sees Al-Jazeera’s growth undermining authoritarian status quo regimes and providing a medium for criticism and activism. Meanwhile, as a global news organization available via satellite and over the internet, Miles also seems to think that Al-Jazeera is a fresh and different from the convention western media giants that shy away from criticizing powerful Western regimes. Miles commits much of the book to developing the idea that Al-Jazeera is either unbiased, much less biased than Western counterparts, or that its bias is negligible considering the enlightening service it provides in its news. Miles introduces several methods of arguing this point most of which do not make much of a point. One notable approach (also used in Control Room) is to point out that that opposing parties’ have contradictory notions of Al-Jazeera’s bias: “In the Middle East I was told time and again that it targets Arabs. In the West it is repeatedly alleged that Al-Jazeera spreads hate against Israel and America” (351). Attractive as it is, opposing views do not necessarily cancel each other out. Miles’ opinion seems to be that this confirms that no one is ever content with anything, even a gem like Al-Jazeera, however, one could also say (the argument is perhaps weaker) that it also corroborates the opinion that there’s something fishy about Al-Jazeera’s news. Another of Miles methods is to qualify accusations of bias not by disputing the grounds of the claim, but with ad hominem tangents about disingenuous politicians, right-wing loonies, etc. This is most evident in the treatment of the an instance in which documents surfaced claiming that Al-Jazeera had been infiltrated by members of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat in the late 1990s. Here Miles seems to insist that relevance of the documents is belittled by the fact that they were presented by Ahmad Chalabi who had an unrelated axe to grind with Al-Jazeera. Clearly this abstracts from the more important point that Miles does not refute the authenticity of the documents.

The glaring omission from the argument seems to be the fact that Al-Jazeera is clearly an organization that is essentially a wing of the Qatari government. Miles notes that Al-Jazeera, due to various constraints, has always operated at a loss. Commercial incentives do not justify its existence. The organization’s economic needs are only satisfied by bailouts by the Emir of Qatar (Al-Jazeera was originally established with capital provided by the Emir). Miles tries to insert some qualification here, saying that it is not clear whether these funds are those of the Qatari government or those of the Emir himself, as though there would be a difference (as far as I know, as an absolute monarch the Emir is the government). Miles cites the testimony of the Al Jazeera itself which says that “although it takes Qatari money, this has no impact whatsoever on its editorial policy”. Would one expect them to profess anything else? While Miles admits “there is probably an informal connection of some kind”, to him it is obvious that “this has a negligible effect on Am-Jazeera’s editorial policy”. Usually in order to deem an effect negligible one would have to know what that effect was in the first place. Miles seems to draw his conclusions from the fact that Al-Jazeera has criticized the Qatari government in the past and critical voices have not been barred from the air. While that is stronger evidence, it is not conclusive—could it not be possible that the Emirate cultivates the image of being liberal and benevolent? This would seem not impossible given that in the book’s opening Miles goes to some length to describe the Emir’s intentions to differentiate Qatar from other Arab states by making it an enlightened country (attracting Western universities, priorities on education, etc). An alternative explanation that the Emir has an affinity to democracy is strange because of the fact that he is an emir, but also by the opening of the book, the monarch expresses explicit disdain for democracy (“the concept seemed so ridiculous to him that he had to be led in hysterical laughter from the balcony of the House of Commons” 13). Miles’ analysis could use more insights into how Al Jazeera relates to the machinations and political considerations of its patrons and overlords. Miles’ book does not exclude mentioning these elements of the story, however, he treats them as marginal when they would seem to underpin the particulars and have a rightful place in the center.

Philllip Knightley’s chapter “No More Heroes March-April 2003” reflects on role of war correspondents in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During this campaign the state clearly viewed the instrumental strengths of the media—hoping to use its broad message to mold the unfolding combat. Knightley includes a correspondent’s observation that “if word comes out at Centcom that there’s an uprising against Saddam’s regime, [that is because] they [Centcom] can be thinking, planning and hoping that the information will be picked up and local people will build on that and an idea will become reality even if it never existed in the first place” (536). In other words the state not only displays the tendency to not only patronize the media to its own ends, but incorporate it as an appendage of the state itself. Knightley argues that coverage of the invasion of Iraq in spring of 2003 was largely a product of journalism operating under the cynical morality of the Bush administration: “You’re either with us or you’re against us”. War correspondents were faced with the choice of embedding with Coalition military units or pursuing their journalism “unilaterally”. In Iraq, journalists operating in enemy territory were liable to be targeted as enemies, and in many cases were. Knightley mentions the bombing of Al-Jazeera’s Baghdad bureau as well as an instance in which an American tank was filmed aiming and opening fire on Baghdad’s Palestine Hotel, a location known to be housing media. Although the details of this incident remain somewhat obscured, the military’s assertion that the tanks were drawing sniper fire from the hotel continue to baffle, considering that eye witness accounts and the empirical evidence of audio records contradict this claim. Knightley’s conclusion is that the 2003 Iraq campaign demonstrates that the new morality governing war correspondence is almost unilaterally defined by the state, and transgression is corrected by draconian means. State mastery over the dissemination of information has largely castrated the media, since alternative voices can forcibly silenced and affirmations are easily propagated. Knightley does not end on an optimistic note, but he is not without hope either (writing the chapter itself expresses this). He ponders the question of whether the audacity and courage of journalists will be enough to offset the monolith of the state, and essentially whether the sword is conclusively mightier than the pen.

While Miles’ book demonstrates that even those mediums identified as the bastions of objectivity and truth are invariably not that, it is not to say that one should forsake truth altogether and arbitrarily pick one position. While truth may be subjective and knowledge only instrumental, the soundest and most verifiable opinions are probably still preferable, and these will not be afforded by reliance on extrinsic authorities (Knightley’s anxiety about state-control, and my dissatisfaction with Miles’ portrayal of Al-Jazeera). Reason demands opinions that can encompass and account for numerous alternatives.

Posted by Kenta Tsuda at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hey everyone - Here's my literature review for this week. Let me know if there's any problem reading it, and I'd really appreciate your comments! Thanks!
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Leora Fridman
3/6/2006
IR180.95

Literature Review: Global Media and Documentary Rhetorics

Although they come from distinct analytical perspectives, each of the readings on this week’s topic tackles the questions of media as it intersects with “the Real” and with “reality”. According to Jacques Lacan, “the Real” consists of that part of the outside world that resists description and compartmentalization through language. The documentary engages with the complications between the Real and reality as its makers and subjects struggle to intersect the written, the scripted and the filmed. Peter Steven’s The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media tackles these issues by defining in straightforward terms the power and effects of today’s globalized media. He highlights the political intersections of readership, ownership and manufacturing of knowledge through an explanation of conglomerates and summarized theories. Liz Stubbs’ Documentary Filmmakers Speak tackles several of Steven’s points more literally in a collection of interviews with contemporary documentary makers and their various techniques for handling objectivity, style, representation and the business of surviving on nonfiction film. Lastly, John Johnston’s collection of Friedrich A. Kittler’s essays in Literature, Media, Information Systems contextualizes Stubbs’ and Steven’s more economic and technical points in order to build a broader theory of screening, authorship and presentation in a mechanized age. I will proceed to summarize and analyze these texts further through the three central themes that I see running throughout; first, issues of objectivity, secondly, manners of authorship, and lastly, technology and its effect on representation.

Kittler uses the term Aufschreibesystem (translated as discourse network) to explain inscription by and on culture. This concept ties together some more diverse opinions on the handling of objectivity in media production. In the introduction to Literature, Media, Information Systems, John Johnston summarizes Kittler, saying,
“the notion of the discourse network points to the fact that at any given cross-sectional moment in the life of a culture, only certain data (and no other) are selected, stored, processed, transmitted or calculated, all else being ‘noise’…” (Johnston 9)
Johnston explains also that “in information theory ‘noise’ is precisely what disrupts a communication channel” (Johnston 9-10). In Kittler’s view we must then contextualize a documentary maker, who sees him or herself as a communication channel for a particular subject, as a filter for data within the discourse network, rather than a clear lens.

Stubbs’ interviews seem to fall relatively in line with this understanding. Albert Mayles highlights, “the problem we have in documentary in that it’s very difficult to film anything but what’s contemporary” (Stubbs 14). Mayles, like several of the other documentary makers in the book, does not downplay his personal role in filmmaking, but rather highlights the importance of empathy in gaining access to a story. He says, “There’s subjectivity and objectivity, and for me the thing that makes both possible is the affection, the empathy that you put into it” (Stubbs 6). This statement concurs with Kittler in some sense, by recognizing the fact that a story is brought out by an individual’s connection with it.

While there may be many levels of data, the documentary makers of Stubbs’ book admit that they can only represent one section of one moment if they hope to present a narrative. However, Kittler defines the role of film slightly differently than narrative, saying, “To presentify rather than narrate, simulate rather than verify –these are the maxims” (Johnston 98). The role of the filmmakers then, as defined by Kittler, would be to bring to light a particular moment’s presentness, rather than to narrate its existence. In turning a lens on one subject or element, film brings to light the responsibility of this element for allowing another object to present itself. Kittler, however, focuses on a general readership and general production rather than examining the intentions that come into play when individual creates a film. While they each express their goals differently, none of the interviewees in Stubbs’ book claim full objectivity. Bruce Sinofsky refuses to call his work “definitive truth,” saying,
I’m not one of those believers that you can ever have the definitive truth on film, because as soon as you edit one frame, what your cinematographer chooses to shoot…[has] an effect on the reality’s perception. I believe that it’s an impression, never the defined truth” (Stubbs 165).
The human voices of interviews like this one may be more difficult to condense into a theory, but they certainly present the individual aspect that Kittler neglects. D.A Pennebaker comments, “reality can mean so much to so many different people that I hesitate to even call our films reality films” (Stubbs 54). This comment also brings in the issue of multiplicity in filmic and genre interpretation, a theme, that is touched upon throughout several of the interviews.

The variation of answers in Stubbs’ book to the objectivity question indicates that different goals of media-makers can create different relationships with their subjects and societal contexts. In Global Media Steven explores this concept when he outlines three relationships of media and society; that in which media influence media, in which media reflect society, and in which media affect society (Steven 108). By engaging with these different categories, Steven is able to point at the subjectivity not only of the media itself, but of the audience, depending on what it hopes to receive from the media. For example, he discusses the pressure of business interests on journalists as media reflecting society and emphasized racial, ethnic and gender stereotyping as media affecting society. Steven’s outlook bears perhaps too heavily on the image of media as social control, but it does allow us to understand from a different perspective what documentary makers face in dealing in Kittler’s “discourse network.”

Stubbs’ focus on each documentary maker’s cutting and editing process forces her reader to look closely at the role of editing and self-editing in authorship. Though not all the interviewees agree with his statement, Joe Berlinger says, “The editing process, to me, is everything. That’s the equivalent of the script process, where you discover things you may not have noticed before…As a human being you can’t help but have some preconceived idea, but you have to be open to changing those ideas” (Stubbs 153). Ross McElwee also explains that he finds the structure of his film in the editing room that he many not have been completely aware of while shooting the footage (Stubbs 101). The documentary makers are aware of their own role in creating story. Some even speak of the pain of realizing that a scene has nothing to communicate. Many of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book, however, seem to have escaped the larger ideological power conglomerations that Steven continually highlights, perhaps simply because of the marginal financial and power status that each one mentions in their interview.

In his reflections on editing, Steven emphasizes the fact that media communicates and emphasizes the legitimacy of those in power. However, when it comes to viewership he does admit that “not all texts are perfectly shaped vehicles for delivery of the dominant world view,” (Steven 100) and asks the reader about our own role in authorship by receiving media, particularly through the media of audience studies and broadcast rates (Steven 105). He differentiates between dominant, residual and emergent media, (Steven 93) each of which the reader understands and accepts at different levels.

Kittler, however, is much more unflinching in his approach to the godliness of the media creator, and cites the Bible and Koran as original texts of the storage of creation in writing. “…Writing stores only the fact of its authorization,” he writes, saying, “It celebrates the storing monopoly of the god who has invented it” (Johnston 37) and going on to detail the homogenization of the writing ability by state apparatuses. Kittler’s theory on inscription becomes even more relevant if we think of it in terms of a documentary maker like Ken Burns, who spends much of his films citing historical images and sources. Kittler declaims upon the “suspicion that all power comes from archives to which it returns,” (Johnston 35) pointing directly at the role of archival footage in films. Burns describes his work in the editing room as one with “all essentially detached static, moribund images. And we’re trying to tell a story. We’re trying to make the past come alive…into a moment where history is not was, but is, as William Faulkner says” (Stubbs 81). The story-making, then, comes about in the technology that allows for the cutting and re-forming of these images.

According to Kittler, the editing process and technology of film mimics human processes of perception. He writes,
Whereas the traditional arts treat orders of the symbolic or orders of things, film emits to its viewers their own process of perception—and this with a precision available only to experiment, which is to say, that it cannot be accessed either by consciousness or language. (Johnston 100)
Kittler is particularly fascinated by the contemporary shrinking difference between media through digitalization for the purpose of the viewer. He writes, “Sound and image, voice and text have become mere effects on the surface, or, to put it better, the interface for the consumer” (Johnston 32). It is the process of readership then, that today’s technology serves. Even when there are incompatibilities between connected media, which he admits, Kittler says that it is the reader’s sense perception that “computes data” (Johnston 33).

Kittler meets Steven again here in the idea that though media’s forms converge in the personal computer, all this technology serves not only writerly, but readerly needs. Steven breaks these needs down into solutions to problems; as needs for realism, for spectacle, for privacy, for crowds, for consumption, for surveillance, for war, for globalization, and for democracy (Steven 69). Steven follows his familiar pattern in breaking down technology into the many different industrial forces that view for power on the viewer, but reminds us that, “to see technology as all-powerful…leads us into the conceptual trap known as technological determinism” (Steven 64). This is the point at which he differs from Kittler, who holds;
Film is total power…Mechanical media and strategies of shock…are triumphant precisely because of their self-exhibition. That is to say, how could a simulacrum of the central nervous system—and that, after all, was at one time phrased ‘of the Spirit’—be subject to further analysis? (Johnston 98)
To Kittler, it is the fact that we can see conceptualize a film is made that most tempts us to believe in its ability to capture reality, or even the Real that cannot be captured by other more language-based forms of media.

We can see in Stubbs’ interviews that the more her subjects are able to utilize technology, the more they feel able to program, or create, a film that closely aligns itself with their reality. Many address the beauties of a small camera that is less obtrusive during conversation or verite shooting, or the ease with which digital footage can be edited. In his introduction to Kittler’s essays Johnston summarizes that behind all of Kittler’s ideas “lies the recurrent specter of a totally programmable world” (Johnston 25). As a critical reader, one has to question the innate dangers of programming if film’s “presentifying” programming allows for the communication of unfamiliar or innovative stories, as in the cases of the documentary makers in Stubbs’ book.

Works Cited

Johnston, John, ed. Literature, Media, Information Systems: Friedrich A. Kittler Essays. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 1997.

Steven, Peter. The No-Nonsense Guide to Global Media. Oxford: New Internationalist Publications, 2003.

Stubbs, Liz. Documentary Filmmakers Speak. New York: Allworth Press, 2002.

Posted by Leora Fridman at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)