TOPIC 2 REPORTING THE WORLD - OR BITS THAT MATTER.THE COLD WAR AND AFTER

Humanitarian Communication

THESE ARE ARE PRISMS THROUGH WHICH THE MEDIA REFLECTS WORLD EVENTS.

THEY CAN HELP ORGANIZE AND MAKE SENSE OF SUBJECTS BUT THEY CAN ALSO STEREOTYPE, DISTORT OR INDICATE PRIORITIES FOR COMMERCIAL, POLITICAL OR CULTURAL REASONS..

SELECTION, AS PART OF FRAMING, DECIDES WHY SOME PLACES MATTER AND SOME DON’T?

Framing and representation:

News criteria – from Galtung and Ruge and SchlesingerFrequency: Events that occur suddenly but fit into a news organization's time/print/broadcast schedule are more likely to be reported than those that occur gradually or at inconvenient times of day or night. Long-term trends are not likely to receive much coverage. And nor are long-term crises that are not of key importance to audience.Negativity: Bad news is seen as more interesting and likely to grab the audience’s attention that bad news; conflict more than other bad news – if it bleeds it leads!Unexpectedness: If an event or development is out of the ordinary /unique/highly unusual it will have a greater impact on journalists/editors and so they think on audiences than something that is routine or normal, even if important..Unambiguous: Events whose meaning, causes, consequences are clear make for better news than those that are open to more than one interpretation, or where any understanding of the nature and causes of the event depends on first understanding the complex context of the events..

News criteria 2

• Personalization: An event that can be portrayed as or through the actions of individuals will be more relevant to many of the audience than one in which there is no such "human interest“ – it could be me!

• Meaningful/relevant: A story must be one with which your audience can identify. "Cultural proximity" is a key -- stories concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the same culture/way of life of the audience will receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different lives and environments.

• Involvement of powerful/elite nations: Stories involving global powers are more likely to be reported than others – also the bad guys – axis of evil, Iran, North Korea.

• Involvement of major public figures/celebs: Stories involving the rich, powerful, famous and infamous get more coverage.

News criteria 3• Conflict: Clash of people, nations or forces resulting in a dramatic conflict – verbal, economic

or physical – are likely to be more newsworthy than stories not involving conflict.• Consonance: Stories that fit into existing frames of reference or understanding of the

journalists and of their view of the audience’s understanding are more likely to receive coverage than those that fall outside them. While this conflicts with unexpectedness of highly unusual stories being newsworthy the two can operate together.

• Continuity: A big or known story that is already in the news may run because news media have people and resources there to report the story, and previous reporting has made the story more understandable.

• Composition: Stories compete with one another for space. Editors usually try to provide a balance of diverse stories and formats. Foreign news often has a lower priority, so often major foreign stories may be ignored to make way for lower value domestic news. So the prominence given to a story may depend on its own news values AND on those of competing stories. (Galtung and Ruge, 1965)

• Competition: Competition between media may lead journalists to follow rivals and reject good stories so as to compete on a story.

• Co-optation: A marginal story may be covered if it is related to a major running story.• Prefabrication: A story that is marginal in news terms but is ready to go may be selected

ahead of a much more newsworthy story that must be researched and written from scratch.• Predictability: An event is more likely to be covered if it has been pre-scheduled. (Bell, 1991)• Time constraints: Traditional news media such as radio, television and daily newspapers have

strict deadlines which can govern selection of items that can be researched and covered quickly.

News criteria 4• Logistics: Although assisted by improved global communications, the ability

to deploy , access and control reporters and the resources for story transmission can determine whether a story is covered. (Schlesinger, 1987)

• Co-optation: A marginal story may be covered if it is related to a major running story.

• Prefabrication: A story that is marginal in news terms but is ready to go may be selected ahead of a much more newsworthy story that must be researched and written from scratch.

• Predictability: An event is more likely to be covered if it has been pre-scheduled.

• Time constraints: Traditional news media such as radio, television and daily newspapers have strict deadlines which can govern selection of items that can be researched and covered quickly.

• Logistics: Although assisted by improved global communications, the ability to deploy , access and control reporters and the resources for story transmission can determine whether a story is covered. (P Schlesinger, Putting Reality Together, London, 1987)

The Old Wars in the Cold War

• Cold War: World divided into two blocs Capitalist and Communist with Asia, Africa and Latin America caught in between.

• USA, W Europe, Canada, Australasia and even South Africa vs USSR, E Europe, Cuba, China, North Korea. Sino-Soviet split made it a three way competition.

• War in Korea directly related to Cold War. Malayan insurgency.• Wars of National Liberation or uprisings against colonial/settler rule

in Kenya, Vietnam, Angola, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe – all viewed at times in Cold War frame.

• Post-colonial conflicts – India, India-Pakistan-Bangladesh, Ethiopia-Eritrea. These developed Cold War overtones.

• Left-wing insurgencies against US-backed dictatorships in Nicaragua and El Salvador; left-wing/narco insurgencies in Colombia and Peru. All had to be fought to keep filthy commies out of Uncle Sam’s backyard and later became the fight to keep drugs out..

Cold war: ideology ‘a way of life’:

• Not only about territory but about ideology/politics• Often about access to resources (copper, gold, labour)• Hearts and minds -the importance of fascism vs

democracy; communism seen as the new fascism – don’t repeat Munich 1938 by appeasing expansionist Soviet Union

• Humanitarian frame existed during Cold War – Biafra, Bangladesh, Ethiopia 1974 but it was coloured by Cold War prejudices but became a powerful frame after late 1980s, especially under influence of Ethiopia in 1984-85.

New frames and new world order

• Since the Cold War, new frames have been developed because:

• The world has , in the view of neo-liberals and Western securocrats, become more chaotic and threatening as a result of what they see as:

• new forms of conflict• upsurge in ‘ethnic/tribal’ antagonisms• ‘rogue states’• terrorism aimed against West• Rise of Islam• The Cold War is seen to have contained these dangers –

though, of course, it didn’t – Afrghanistan, Angola, IRA, ETA, Corsican separatism, Cyprus, Biafra, Bangladesh (being just a few examples).

Angolan war – 500,000+ dead after 42 years (1960-2002) :

During Cold war and ideological conflicting pitting Soviet “proxies” against US “allies”.

1992-2002 – viewed as an ethnic/tribal war

Post-Cold War Conflicts

• From 1990-2001, there were 57 different major armed conflicts • In 2000, about 30 million people were believed to have been displaced from their

homes as a result of conflict• Biggest displacements? eg Northern Uganda – invisible to media. Holy Spirit

Movement, Lord’s Resistance Army. LRA still active in areas of DRC and CAR.• In 2013, UN personnel deployed in peacekeeping operations (does not include AU

forces in Somalia, Mali and CAR).• Uniformed personnel: 92,099

– Troops: 77,702– Police: 12,553– Military observers: 1,844

• Civilian personnel (28 February 2013): 16,831– International: 5,107– Local: 11,724

• UN Volunteers : 2,088• Total number of personnel serving in 15 peacekeeping operations: 111,018• Total number of personnel serving in 16 DPKO-led peace operations: 112,840

Post-Cold War Conflict 2

• Many have claimed that during the Cold War, the world's conflicts were organised along an east-west axis (capitalist versus communist) but in the post-Cold War era, they are organised along a north-south axis (‘the haves’ versus the ‘have-nots’) and religious axes

• Identity, economics and culture have replaced ideology and politics – or was it just that we understood conflicts between 1948 and 1990 as ideological?

Problem of state breakdown – during Cold war it was prevented or hidden

• Growth in paramilitary orgs, private armies/party militias. Privatization of violence – eg Colombia, Kenya etc. Loss of state’s monopoly over violence

• Kidnapping, drugs, poaching, arms exports and people trafficking as means to finance them

• Blurring boundaries state and non-state• Disruption of civil society• Growth in numbers of refugees and displaced

people

How has the media responded?• The simplistic east v west, bad guy v good guy picture has been

replaced by an even more simplified version of a more complex reality

• The bewilderingly complex, small, inter-related, geographically obscure, conflicts and antagonisms that have developed over the past decade are rarely explained well and usually in simplistic terms according to the outlook of the particular media responsible or the link of the conflict to the home territory of that media

• This has led to different news frames - the media’s use of different news frames and discourses to report diverse conflicts to its readers and viewers. But many of the frames have common elements.

The popularity of the ‘ethnic/tribal’ explanation

• Fits nicely into the Cold War legacy – lift the Cold war lid and find ethnicity bubbling underneath.

• It diverts from issues of policy and complexity. • Disguises the consequences of the Cold War and

Western foreign policy during and after• It is simple and easy and avoids complex explanations

and blames these primitive ethnic or tribal combatants.

The ‘ethnic’ explanation;

• Greater volume of news = battle for audience attention, Often journalists use regional stereotypes, thus Serbs totally to blame in Balkans; they are the ethnically stereotyped Balkan bandits. While not wanting to reduce their guilt, were they alone responsible for what happened in the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo?

• Journalists have to do more, with less money: you come with a preconceived idea, if there’s no-one there to contradict you, keep with the idea.

• No time to discover context, not column inches, web space or air time to explain complexities. Keep it simple, give your audience what they have come to expect, don’t expect them to think too much. But make it exciting and get interviewees who will fight on air!

The ‘ethnic’ explanation: simplification• Greater volume of news output = tighter deadlines, less time

to research and prepare stories• Fewer journalists, fewer experts, less specialisation• In Jean Seaton’s words: • “they know less, they cost less, but they produce news that is

disseminated more powerfully than ever”

• Ethnic explanations are a simplistic form of framing and representation that exclude many factors and may distort understanding. Socio-economic and political factors tend to be kept out of the frame and cultural, religious and ethnic ones included. Ethnicity and tribalism become a shabby shorthand.

Simplification - depoliticise

• Result is neglect of historical and economic factors.• Random, fickle reporting, no context or background

explanation to reasons behind the fighting.• Post cold war less interest but very scary. Wae of

civilizations or religions posited by neo-cons as replacement for ideological competition.

• Sometimes good to scare audience, • Fear sells papers – just look at Daily Mail. • But unless you are the Mail don’t scare people too

often (they don’t like it and neither do advertisers and don’t report distant, complex conflicts that are too far away to really scare or interest people unless there is some element of cultural proximity or they are bizarre or particularly brutal.

What the Daily Mirror used to do

What it does now

What is ‘ethnicity’?• The term ‘ethnicity’ gained currency in the 1980s• interpret it in one of 2 ways• as a counter to the term ‘race’ or tribe (i.e. a ‘better’, more

accurate, less limiting way of describing difference)• as a euphemism for the term ‘race’ (i.e. different term but same

effects)

• In any case, using the term ‘ethnicity’ tends to imply fixed, innate and inherited differences between particular groups of people – long-term, immutable and usually primeval differences.

• Actually it’s formless and means nothing – it’s a label and it depends how you use it. Same with tribe, which is an even more historically loaded term.

• It has been used to provide simplistic accounts of why certain wars occur – especially in Asia and Africa.

Stereotypes and disaster reportingStarving child (preferably crying)Feeding centre (complete with emaciated mothers who cannot feed their starving babies and dying children covered in flies)Aid worker (usually white, usually a woman, battling against the odds)Reporter (breathless and shocked saying how awful it is)Staggering statistics of how many will die each day

Stereotypes and compassion fatigue

• This can lead to Compassion Fatigue and a failure to provide context. You get the reaction – another flood in Bangladesh, another famine or war in Africa – it’s all the same, it’s an endless crisis news loop.

• Moeller: “ We’ve seen the same pictures, heard about the same victims, heroes and villains, read the same morality play. Even the chronology of events [in media reports] is repeated: A potential crisis on the horizon, the crisis erupts, the good guys rush in to save the victims but the victims remain to threaten the denouement…The dashing French doctors and American Marines rescued the starving brown child-victims in Somalia, for example, but the evil warlords stole away the chance for peace and prosperity” (Compassion Fatigue, p. 13). Should we question Moeller’s rather complacent, US-centric view, that it is better “a stereotyped memory than no memory. Better to recall Somalia in terms of starving babies, than not to remember the country at all” (Compassion Fatigue, p. 53)