More 'Gaza media coverage' on the soon to be improved Frontline Blog

I've got a couple of other bits on Gaza up on the Frontline blog.

One post on War 2.0 and another about discrepancies in the figures the Israelis are giving out on the number of rockets being fired into Gaza.

The latter was picked up by The Guardian's live Gaza blog.

Incidentally, the Frontline blog is currently undergoing a makeover and I'm hoping that very soon you'll be able to bask in the shiny new glow of the updated blog.

From my point of view, it should mean blogging will be much more straightforward. I'm looking forward to being liberated from the blogging dark ages where moving photos involves coding in the phrase 'align="right"', (by hand), and resizing means taking out a calculator.

(Maybe one day I'll look back at these days with a sense of nostalgia. But probably not.)

Video removed by YouTube and Live Leak

The video I linked to below has been removed. This does not surprise me - the footage was horrendous. It showed a young Iraqi woman being stoned to death last April in Mosul.

I have since discovered this isn't the first time somebody has tried to post this video.

The argument about how and when to publish death and suffering has a long history and there are no easy answers. Here's a few points:

Against

• The video represents an appalling invasion of privacy on behalf of the dead girl and her family. Would they want her death to be published in this way?

• There is a danger that the video might incite revenge attacks

• Some people might argue this is a form of perverse voyeuristic entertainment - why do we need to see what happens to her? Surely to imagine is more than enough.
  

• 'To stand and stare, to expose the person who suffers to the public gaze is refined cruelty'. Karen Sanders, Ethics and Journalism, pp. 94-5

• Showing graphic images does not necessarily move people to compassion. (See Susan Moeller in Compassion Fatigue, p320)

• The video could be accessed by children who might the video excpetionally disturbing (Though Youtube does restrict access to graphic videos and could have done this)

For

• The argument that media audiences should be informed about suffering and death in an accurate, truthful, and perhaps even, in a shocking, disturbing and upsetting manner is compelling.

• The danger of sanitising coverage of death and suffering is that we ignore the plight of our fellow human beings. Sometimes we need to be shocked in order to understand the full reality of a situation.

• 'We can’t believe in a make believe world where no-one cries. Bad things happen. People suffer.' Karen Sanders, Ethics and Journalism, p. 103.

• We can become immune to death and suffering that is conveyed only in words. Casualties in Iraq are often presented as numbers with no human face.

• Mike Hudson and John Stainer quoted in Richard Keeble, Ethics For Journalists: '...could the carnage on the Somme, Passchendale or Verdun [World War One battlefields] possibly have continued if it had been witnessed nightly in millions of European sitting rooms?' p103

Arnim Stauth on war reporting

Yesterday at the War Studies department at King's I listened to Arnim Stauth talking about his career as a war reporter. At the moment he's doing some work for CNN, but most of his reporting has been done for ARD/WDR in Germany. He was the first journalist to report the Taliban uprising at Qala-i-Jangi in November 2001 and followed the British into Southern Iraq in 2003 operating around a mile behind the front line. Here are a few things that caught my attention:

• He said journalism has "a mission in a democratic society" It is based on values and these values are violated in war by both sides in a conflict. We need to give people the information they need so they can act as responsible citizens.

• Sometimes as a reporter you have to decide whether you want to go for the human interest story or a piece providing context and analysis. Stauth suggests that as a reporter you should go for the former and leave the newsreader back home to provide the rest.

• Stauth's clearly a meticulous researcher, and his journalism benefitted from simply having more knowledge about a subject than the people around him - both other journalists and military press officers. He took a Geiger counter with him to Iraq to demonstrate the dangerous levels of radioactivity present after the use of depleted uranium shells by Coalition forces - a story based on simple, but effective, research prior to the conflict.
  

• He prefers slower editing to the short, sharp edits that characterise American news reports. "Often the tragedy of war happens on one face", he says, and if that face makes compelling viewing why cut away too quickly?

• He was critical of 'under-fire' piece-to-cameras suggesting they were irresponsible and that the German public do not appreciate the bravado. Compare this approach with BBC journalist, Jeremy Bowen, who observed in a documentary that if you do enough 'under-fire' pieces you won awards. But Stauth's caution hardly made him immune from danger. He found himself 50 yards from the Taliban uprising at Qala-i-Jangi and wondered whether he would have to shoot at the Taliban to defend himself before fleeing the fortress.

Reporting strategy and tactics

http://kingsofwar.wordpress.com/2007/11/16/the-missing-link/#comments