paperhive conversations_ greg mclaughlin - paperhive magazine
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22/7/2016 PaperHive Conversations: Greg McLaughlin PaperHive Magazine
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PaperHive Conversations: GregMcLaughlinTOPICS: Greg McLaughlin Journalism Media
The War Correspondent
Greg McLaughlin - Writer & Researcher "The War Correspondent"
POSTED BY: MANUEL BLÁUAB MAY 2, 2016
Professor Dr Gregory McLaughlin is a sociologist, anassociate of the Glasgow Media Group at the University ofGlasgow, researcher and writer. This year, his rstbook, The War Correspondent, got its second editionreleased with Pluto Press, showing that times can changebut the issue of ideology subjecting the media and theaudience around the world stays intact.
Prior to the publication of the rst edition of your book The WarCorrespondent in 2002, the US Army held interventions in Kosovo,
(1999), and the most signi cant in Afghanistan in 2001 as a responseto the 9/11 terrorist attacks that lasted until 2014. Were these two
events an inspiration for your rst book?
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PaperHiveConversations:Molly WallaceMolly Wallace is an AssociateProfessor at Queen’sUniversity, Canada. In thepast, she has been publishedin ISLE: InterdisciplinaryStudies in Literature andEnvironment, ContemporaryLiterature, Cultural Critique,and symplokē. Her mostrecent work, Risk Criticism,…
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events an inspiration for your rst book?
Not really. The rst edition includes a critical look at themedia response to NATO public relations and propagandaduring the Kosovo intervention but it went to pressshortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. The second editionincludes a new chapter that sets the scene in theimmediate aftermath of 9/11 and examines the ‘war onterror’ as an interpretative framework for reportinginternational con ict from Afghanistan and Iraq up to thepresent day.
I suppose the real inspiration for the book goes back tomy time as a student in the 1980s and reading PhilipKnightley’s history of war reporting, ‘The First Casualty’.It challenged my then rather uncritical and romanticnotion of war reporting as a noble profession. While myown book aims to question the role of the warcorrespondent today, it does not go so far as Knightleyand see war reporting as just another form of propagandabecause there are many independent journalists out theresuch as John Pilger and Robert Fisk who resist thepropaganda and censorship that de nes all major wars.
What di erences do you nd in war media coverage between the rstedition of The War Correspondent in 2002 and the second in 2016?
The two most interesting and signi cant differenceswould be the advent of the ‘embedded’ journalist(Afghanistan and Iraq) and the use of social media asboth tools of and sources for journalists in the war zone.
The mainstream, corporate media greeted the embedsystem as a new and revolutionary way of reporting war.It allowed the reporter to get up close and personal withthe troops and the action; and it lent a new and excitingimmediacy to TV coverage especially. But what theyseemed to forget was that the system was one of militarycontrol – just like the pooling system in the Gulf War1991 – and that it raises a serious question about theobjectivity of journalists who work within it. Critics haveargued that because embedded reporters cover war
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exclusively through this military lter, they tell us only apartial and selective version of events. They are also morelikely to censor themselves when reporting dif cultstories such as civilian casualties and military abuses.This is exactly what the military want to see.
As for the rise of social media in the last few years, thathas been received in the mainstream with rather moremixed feelings. For the war correspondent, social mediaplatforms deliver immediate information and breakingnews that might otherwise be dif cult to get for a varietyof reasons. Good examples of this included the proteststhat followed the Greek debt crisis in 2009 and the ArabUprisings (or Arab Spring events) that began in Tunisia in2010. Paul Mason for Channel Four News was probablyone of the rst UK journalists to highlight the role ofTwitter in mobilising grass roots support for fast movingevents like these and he sees it as a very positivedevelopment for news and journalism by and large (seehis book Why it’s still kicking off everywhere, published byVerso in 2013). Others such as the Guardian’s PeterPreston worry about the propaganda potential of theplatform, as well as its anonymity. For him, social mediaand citizen journalism are no substitutes for the objectiveprocedures of the professional reporter with their focuson the production of veri able facts and the importanceof authoritative sources.
My own position on both these developments is rathernuanced. I used to be very skeptical at rst about citizenjournalism but (with just a few lingering reservations!)I’ve come to a point where I recognize it as a valid formthat should be taken seriously. As for the claims of theprofessional journalist, especially those of truth andobjectivity, the history of journalism is littered withexamples of bias and distortion, as well as uncriticalrelationships with sources of power such as the militaryand any government at war. As I argue in my book, thejob of the war correspondent is to get the information andget the story while the job of the military is to control theinformation and spin the story. Both make mistakes, ofcourse. But if we look at the Gulf War in 1991, Kosovo in
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1999, Afghanistan in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003, wesee the military learning from their mistakes ahead of thenext war and the majority of journalists forgetting theirs.
Your work, as depicted in four books, The War Correspondent, (1st and2nd edition), The Propaganda of Peace: The role of media and culture inthe Northern Ireland Peace Process and The British Media and Bloody
Sunday, is mostly about the media role and the media coverage ofsigni cant events. In your opinion, what are the main challenges
when presenting these events to the general public? Could theproblem of reliability in news media be xed with more available
information from di erent sources or is that a delusion? How do youenvision the near future of journalism with more open access
information and fast connectivity?
First off, I think you’ve put your nger on something veryimportant. A lot of ideological work is done in the mediapresentation of major events like international wars orpeace treaties. If we asked the media what the challengesare, they would probably point to issues of logistics,technology, nancial cost and the obvious risks tojournalists and production staff. But as Slavoj Zizekwould argue, it’s not just about the meaning that ispresent in the text and how it’s framed by power but alsothe meaning that is absent. For example, the media soldthe Irish peace process as a self-evident story of con ictresolution. Yet my book with Stephen Baker, ThePropaganda of Peace, proposes that there was another,implicit narrative there: that a peace agreement between‘the warring tribes’ would return Northern Ireland to‘civilisation’ or, to translate from the language of neo-liberalism, the global free market. There was a similaruse of double-speak in the media’s coverage of America’sinvasion of Iraq. As the US launched operation ‘Shock andAwe’ on the country in March 2003, the western medialooked on in wonder and declared it the rst step in‘softening up’ Saddam Hussein’s regime and ‘liberating’the people of Iraq. With very few exceptions, it neveroccurred to reporters and news anchor to consider‘softening up’ as something of an understatement orquestion the liberating potential of this destructivedisplay of military might.
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Part of the problem here, as you suggest, is the over-reliance of the corporate media on sources of power,which is totally re exive and structured into a hierarchyof assumed ‘authority’ and ‘reliability’. The rolling, liveTV coverage given over to the Gulf War 1991 and Iraq2003 was de ned by a production line of military expertswho were treated with a reverence usually reserved forpresidents, prime ministers and religious leaders. Evenwhen the media bother to use alternative sources ofinformation or to refer to critical voices, the re ex then isto minimalize these within the story or, in broadcasting,either question their credibility or shunt them into themargins of the schedule.
So the corporate media’s lip service to the use ofalternative sources is institutionally structured andideological. The responsibility, then, shifts to the readeror the viewer to seek out their own alternatives, which ismuch easier now in this era of social media and high-speed internet where most people have a tablet or a smartphone. Of course we need to be judicious about the valueand reliability of these sources but at least we are actingas citizens rather than passive, uncritical consumers ofof cial statements and propaganda.
As for what this means for the future of journalism wecan only speculate but more and more journalists todayare buying into social media networks. We might beseeing a revolution in journalism practice there along thelines of the printing press in the 16th Century or whathappened during the American Civil War (1861-65) whenthe commercial imperatives of the telegraph utterlychanged the nature of war reporting and its presentationin newspapers. It sounds very exciting and romantic,doesn’t it? But as Thomas Hobbes once wrote,‘Knowledge is power’. Citizens lost that power with therise of the commercial press in the 19th Century. Perhapsthe enormous potential of social media and the activitiesof Wiki Leaks promise an era when we might just seize itback?
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PaperHive would like to ask you: If the reader had only 5 minutes, what speci c pages or sections should they de nitely read to gain
insight into your research?
The concluding chapter is short and concise and asks,‘What is the ultimate role of the war correspondent? Is itto tell truth to power?’ It summarises the key issues anddebates that are raised in the book and suggests that‘telling truth to power’ is a delusion because as ArundhatiRoy has argued, power owns the truth and it probablyknows the truth better than any of us. The very best warand foreign affairs reporters through history – such asWilliam Howard Russell, Morgan Philips Price, MarthaGellhorn, John Pilger and Robert Fisk – have spoken thetruth to us about power in a time of war.
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Manuel BláuabEditor-in-Chief Manuel Bláuab is a
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