The Media, War and Terrorism

Last night while sorting the recently returned books, two caught my eye: War and the Media, edited by Thussu and Freedman (Sage, London, 2003) and Framing Terrorism: the News Media, the Government and the Public, edited by Norris, Kern and Just (Routledge, NewYork, 2003).

War and the Media features a Pentagon DOD briefing on the cover; Framing Terrorism is illustrated by 18 newspaper front pages from Europe (Britain, Germany and Spain, I think) showing World Trade Centre attack.

I started skimming through War and the Media and found this passage about Al-Jazeera which I found intriguing:

Faced with a battle for the 'hearts and minds' and the need to tell moderate Muslims that the US is not waging a war against Islam, in 2001 the US considered advertising on Al-Jazeera TV. ... The US government even planned to launch a TV station to rival Al-Jazeera. Initiative 9/11 put half a billion dollars into a channel that would compete in the region... (War and the Media, p.158)

The most interesting theme in the book though, is not specifically about war or terrorism, but the difficulty of reporting any incident in this era of 24/7 news coverage. The need to check facts and confirm details is contrary to the immediacy of global 24-hour reporting.

Skimming through Framing Terrorism, it is clear that the editors favoured statistics over theory. They discuss percentage change in number of stories about Muslims, Muslim organizations and Arab-Americans in American newspapers before and after the 2001 WTC attack (about 11 times the number in the 6 months following as the 6 preceeding); they graph public opinions; and they chart an interesting correlation between the percentage of Americans who felt terrorism was the "Most Important Problem" facing the country and the number of news stories about terrorism on network TV (p.291).

Framing Terrorism also talks about the conflict in Northern Ireland and the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict so it's not all 9/11. In fact, in the conclusion, the authors note that "...even the scale of the tragedy of 9/11 incidents did not put the United States in a category of high terrorist vulnerability comparable to that of many other states in the world." (p. 282)

Where War and the Media focuses on the how journalists see war and terrorism (several chapters are written by former or current war correspondents); Framing Terrorism is more about how people understand and react to the reports. Between the two, they offer some intriguing insights and leave plenty of room for debate.