Book Review - The Media at War
The Media at War,
Written by: Susan L Carruthers,
Second Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011,
ISBN 9780230244573, 329 pp
Reviewed by: Cynthia Banham
Susan Carruthers wrote the first edition of The Media at War in 2000—before 11 September 2001, the war on terrorism, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and before the advent of ‘new media’. Yet if one thing is clear from reading the updated version of her book, published eleven years later, it is that when it comes to the reporting of war, little if anything has changed.
Today’s soldiers might write ‘mil-blogs’ and snap digital photos on the battlefield; terrorists might connect with each other over the web; and Internet-based news sites and ‘citizen journalists’ might interpret the story of the day according to their own perspectives or agendas and disseminate that view to the world. But the essentials—like state censorship and propaganda in wartime, or journalists cooperatively running with the government line in order to protect elite sources or avoid being branded unpatriotic by their readers or viewers—remain unchanged. The Media at War is a thought-provoking book, full of deep insights into the complexities that help explain what is going on in the world of war reporting, and why we get the news we get. Its truths might be unpalatable for some journalists, politicians and members of the militaries and public alike. But Carruthers dismantles myths and challenges assumptions to come up with some deeper structural explanations that, I believe, hit home.
Carruthers’ book is divided into themes. The first chapter deals with ‘mobilisation’, and looks at the role media plays in marshalling popular energies for war and framing the political issues at stake. To my mind, this was the most insightful chapter, and the lessons she draws go far beyond explaining the behaviour of media during wartime, to media coverage of politics more generally. In assessing in particular the largely uncritical media coverage in the United States of war policy in the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, she concludes that this appears ‘less an anomalous breach of journalistic procedure than the predictable outcome of a set of professional norms more concerned with following the policy-making flow than disrupting it’. Carruthers’ basic point is that journalists have an embedded tendency to ignore those beyond the inner policy-making world; they privilege elite sources—with entirely foreseeable results for media coverage.
The next chapter deals with opinion management by political leaders in the first two World Wars. Chapter three deals with the role television played in the trajectory of the Vietnam War, and the consequences that the perceptions about that role—which did not always reflect reality—had for the tight controls governments placed on media in subsequent wars.
Chapter four considers, with scepticism, the ‘CNN effect’. This is the assumption that rolling 24-hour coverage of distant wars provokes emotional reactions and instant, sometimes ill thought-out, policy responses. Carruthers sees parallels with the Al Jazeera effect’ and the ‘YouTube effect’ today. As policy-makers did over the CNN effect twenty years ago, so with new media today do they continue to ‘greet each new technological development as a harbinger of their own diminished authority, with power trickling from executive hands into the grip of impassioned but ill-informed masses’. It’s an ill-founded fear, as Carruthers argues.
Chapter five deals with ‘wars on terror’ and again demonstrates how battles for ‘hearts and minds’ are nothing new. The proliferation of the Internet has not altered the fact that information played a central role in counterinsurgency wars of past decades as it still does today.
The final chapter deals with ‘war in the digital age’, and Carruthers considers the new challenges posed for militaries and governments by soldiers having the capacity, thanks to digital technology, to act as ‘alternative chroniclers of combat’. If I had one disappointment with this book, it was that I would have liked more analysis from Carruthers on this modern phenomenon. Is mil-blogging good for solider morale? Is it good for democracy because it gives an alternative take on the conduct of a particular war? Can it be damaging to the military when soldiers write negative takes on a war? Should they thus be censored? What is the more compelling policy objective of these conflicting outcomes? Carruthers addresses these questions, but a bit too fleetingly.
The larger objective of Carruthers’ book, the author writes, is to ‘stimulate reflection on how media operate at distinct moments in the life-cycle of wars of different durations and degrees of intensity: variously serving as midwife, mythologizer and memorialist’. I think Carruthers achieves this very skilfully.
Among her conclusions, these are the ones that gave me most pause for thought. Despite what politicians and militaries might tell you, and despite changes in media technology, state power over the media does not look set to wither away. And publics, despite what they might tell themselves, are often ‘intolerant of dissent, disdainful of protest and reluctant to contemplate how our wars appear to those on the other side—or those who refuse to take sides’. When it comes to war, is anybody really interested in the truth? It’s an interesting question to ponder.
