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 |  | Warwick Arts Centre recently held a free debate titled Cover or Cover Up? The Ethics of War Reporting. The discussion was on 19 February, with Maureen Freely, Kate Adie, Michael Jermey and Jake Lynch.
Inspired by the debate, Will Barton Catmur considers the concepts and of presentation war.
Discussion by Will Barton Catmur, senior lecturer at Coventry University
| 听 |  | A close-up of graphics from the 大象传媒 War Report
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It's commonplace these days to say that we live in an "information age", that production of ideas and knowledge is more important than production of material
goods.
Generally, though, we still think of war as something irreducibly material.
When wars take place, real people get hurt, real damage is done to real property, real deaths pile up.
No one thinks that war has somehow moved from the material to the intellectual plane from the point of view of the people fighting it or caught up in it.
The war is not happening
During the first Gulf War, the French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, scandalised readers by claiming the war was not happening - that it was essentially a television event, rather than one in the world.
Those who were so shocked, however, were missing his point - the war for most of us watching it was precisely was a television event, not only in the sense that this was the only way in which we encountered it, but also because this was one of the key reasons for fighting it.
An exemplary war
| 听 |  | Peter Snow presenting the War Report
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No war is simple and no war has simple causes.
The first Gulf War was about territory, about oil, about power struggles within the Arab nation and the balance of power in the Middle East.
It was also, and in a wholly new way, about communication.
One of the key reasons for the US and its allies to prosecute this conflict was to demonstrate that it could.
This was an exemplary war, for the first time, the fighting was there to support the propaganda as much as the propaganda was there to support the fighting.
The observers back home
The first Gulf War and its successor conflicts in Kosovo and Afghanistan have been fought as much for their effect on the observers back home (that is us, the home media audience) as for the traditional aims of territory and control.
The victims are no less dead, but their deaths achieve a different purpose.
Avoiding bias
| 听 |  | Robin Duff reporting from a bombed London in 1942
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When the war becomes as much about information as about territory, war reporters face wholly new demands.
If they insist on working independently of the armies engaged, they will be excluded from the information they need to fulfil their task.
If they operate within the constraints of the military authorities, they will inevitably be the subjects of an intensely one-sided and partisan information flow.
If war reporters are to avoid becoming little more than the mouthpieces of their military information sources, they will need to employ new strategies of newsgathering.
Their fear must be that if they cannot find a way to do this, they will become, in effect, a part of the war machine they are seeking to report.
Have your say
What do you think about these views?
Does a war reporter have a duty to explain the roots of a conflict? Should the media raise questions of class and race? How can reporters add to the peace process without compromising their principles?
Email us your views and read other people's opinions in the penny forum via the links on the left.
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