Synopses & Reviews
This book demonstrates how international media coverage of contemporary wars often encourages serious misunderstandings of complex situations. The shortage of information and the reporting only of those events easily understood by western audiences compounds misconceptions. The contributors are concerned with getting behind ethnic categorizations and examining how they have been constructed from the perspective that ethnicity is essentially a negotiated and relational phenomenon, not something static, primordial or "natural."
Review
... it... may provide a good look into a topic that few journalists understand well enough to cope with in their stories.
Communication Booknotes Quarterly
Synopsis
Savage wars in Bosnia, Rwanda, Liberia, Iraq and many other places continue to fill our television screens and newspapers with terrible images of conflict. Despite the optimism about world peace, brought about by the collapse of super-power hostilities in the early 1990s, we seem to be encountering more wars, or at least wars that are more socially traumatic. All too often, the media suggest that these conflicts are caused by the return of primordial loyalties and hatreds after the collapse of the Cold War, or that mass slaughter can be explained by reference to the inherently evil nature of individuals or groups.
This book counters this kind of nonsense, and asks why such views have gained a currency. It examines the role of the media in inciting conflicts within nations, as well as the adverse impacts of news reporting on international perceptions - and on policy-making. But it also reveals how valuable informed journalism can be. Above all, it highlights the dangers of basing analysis on vague assertions about deep human motivation, or on mythologies of the past and the present promoted by the protagonists themselves.
About the Author
Tim Allen is at the London School of Economics.
Jean Seaton is at the University of Westminster.
Table of Contents
About the Contributors
Introduction
Tim Allen and Jean Seaton
Part One: War, Ethnicity, Media
1. Perceiving Contemporary Wars
Tim Allen
2. The New ‘Ethnic’ Wars and the Media
Jean Seaton
3. Ethnic Pervasion
Richard Fardon
4. ‘Who’s it Between?’ ‘Ethnic War’ and Rational Violence
David Keen
5. A Duty of Care? Three Granada Television Films Concerned with War
Peter Loizos
Part Two: Case Studies
6. Manipulation and Limits: Media Coverage of the Gulf War, 1990-91
Fred Halliday
7. Ethnicity and Reports of the 1992-95 Bosnian Conflict
Marcus Banks and Monica Wolfe Murray
8. Culture, Media and the Politics of Disintegration and Ethnic Division in Former Yugoslavia
Spyros A. Sofos
9. Nationalism, Ethnic Antagonism and Mass Communications in Greece
Roza Tsagarousianou
10. Deconstructing Media Mythologies of Ethnic War in Liberia
Philippa Atkinson
11. ‘The War in the North’: Ethnicity in Ugandan Press Explanations of Conflict, 1996-97
Mark Leopold
12. Representing Violence in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe: Press and Internet Debates
Jocelyn Alexander and JoAnn McGregor
13. Media Ethnicization and the International Response to War and Genocide in Rwanda
Mel McNulty
14. Misrepresenting Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa? Constraints and Dilemmas of Current Reporting
David Styan
Index