Digital Media and Reporting Conflict: The book and the end of Mediating Conflict

This blog has been dormant for a while and the publication of Digital Media and Reporting Conflict: Blogging and the BBC's Coverage of War and Terrorism is the right time to formally close it.

It's been an amazing journey over the last five years or so and I've really enjoyed working on the project, working with people at the BBC and meeting people throughout the media industry.

I'd like to thank all the people who made this book possible - my family, my friends, my PhD supervisor at King's College London, everybody at the BBC who gave up their time to participate, the Frontline Club and the countless people I interacted with online.

When I decide to do something I put everything into it. I hope the book testifies to the high standards and hard work that I tried to bring to it.

But perhaps more than that I hope the book and the hundreds of blog posts I wrote continue to be a useful resource for students of warfare, media, journalism and the BBC.

I took most pleasure from knowing that other people found my work useful and that it contributed in a small way to public understanding of the changing nature of reporting war and terrorism.

Achievements come at a cost and over the last couple of years in particular I invested a lot of myself, my time, my financial and physical resources into seeing the book through.

I also spent a lot of time banging at academic doors that I found were closed to me or only open if I was willing to work for free which I sustained for far longer than I should have done.

In hindsight, all this effort was too much and I really burnt myself - not giving up is a great strength and a terrible weakness. I think it's a sacrifice I am only willing to make again in a different context.

A wise man once said that you have to give up your life in order to save it. And it's time to leave a road which had become intolerably tough and start something new.

I'm not entirely sure what that looks like yet but I have long been involved in Christian ministry and I'm pretty sure it involves achieving a lot less and loving other people a lot more. In the meantime, I need to rest, heal and rebuild my strength.

For those of you who want to remain in touch my current email address is mail-AT-dsbennett.co.uk.

More Twitter conventions would have aided Mumbai coverage

I've stuck this up on my Frontline blog, because it's been a while...

An insight into RICU - the UK Government's counter terrorism unit...

...can be found on my Frontline blog.

Stuff I've written elsewhere recently

1. I was at a talk on the representation of political violence in literature earlier in the week. I did a review for the Complex Terrain Laboratory.

2. I have a Frontline Club post up on the potential use of Twitter by terrorists.

Citizen journalism?

Terence Eden uses Qik, a video-streaming website, to film being stopped and searched under the Terrorism Act at Waterloo station. He has a blog post about his film here.

Picked up via Joanna Geary.

'Terror Blog Live': Blogging the debate on 42 days

Channel 4 News is live blogging the House of Commons debate and the vote on whether to extend the terror detention limit to 42 days. You can follow it here. The debate began at 3pm, the vote's at 6pm and the result is due around 7pm.

Channel 4 are using CoverItLive, a piece of software which allows you to do exactly what it says on the virtual tin, (though when I tried it a few months back it crashed my laptop and everything was a little less than live...but given that Channel 4 will be able to factor out my laptop I'm sure they won't have these problems).

And after you've had your fill of that live debate you can watch another one. The Frontline Club will be asking whether the Taliban are winning in Afghanistan from 7.30pm.

PM talking to blogging 7/7 survivor

The PM programme on BBC Radio 4 is promising to talk to Rachel North this evening - any time now, in fact. Rachel was on the Piccadilly line train that was caught up in the terrorist attacks on London in July 2005.

She began a blog (still going strong) which described how she came to terms with the events of that day. It ended up on the BBC website. She later added her voice to calls for a public inquiry.

On PM, she'll be talking about a new study that says it might be better not to share your feelings after being subjected to major trauma. It'll be interesting to see what she has to say. After all, she ended up sharing her thoughts with thousands of people, first in blog form and then in the pages of her book, Out of the Tunnel.

I'll update this post in due course.

UPDATE 6.55pm

Generally, Rachel agreed that the findings made sense. She believed that it was usually better for people to deal with trauma in their own way and shouldn't be forced to relive the experiences if they didn't want to.

She did briefly talk about her blog, noting that it enabled other survivors to get in contact and form a community that could help one another, but it wasn't something presenter Eddie Mair pursued.

For me, I think the way Rachel North was treated as a source of information is interesting. She has made the transition from being an eyewitness, or a 'blogger', to being an expert source that journalists regularly call on. Her opinions are treated as reliable, trustworthy and accurate.

This is not unwarranted as Rachel has clearly become very knowledgeable in this area, but it's evidence of how far the relationship between bloggers and the mainstream media has come in the last decade.

And I would suggest that more and more bloggers, like Rachel, are being used, and will be used as sources of information, providing their expertise on the news, in the future.

When is a 'terrorist', a terrorist?

'ONE LESS TERRORIST, ONE MORE EUPHEMISM' cries the blog 'Biased BBC'. The author of the post, David Vance, is not happy about the BBC's decision not to describe Hizbollah leader, Imad Mughniyeh, as a 'terrorist' in a headline for an online article:

'Mughniyeh was a senior terrorist within Hezbollah, and his death has seen him eulogised him as a "jihadist" and as a "martyr" by those who hate Jews and Americans. This monster was involved in a series of bombings that took the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people. And yet, the BBC headline describes him as a "top Hizbollah leader."'

David Vance says this choice of language leads to inaccurate reporting and 'moral relativism'.

A comment on the blog post notes that later on in the article a spokesman for the US state department describes Mughniyeh as a "cold-blooded killer, a mass murderer and a terrorist responsible for countless innocent lives lost".

One of the other problems with Vance's position is that accurate descriptions vary depending on where you are in the world and which side of the very long Middle-Eastern argument you are coming from.

In an interview with Al Jazeera television in October 2001, the British Prime Minister was reminded by the interviewer that:

‘Hizbollah, Jihad Islami, Hamas, other radical organisations based in Damascus in Syria…are considered freedom fighters’ while ‘they are considered by you [Tony Blair], maybe, or the Americans, as terrorists’.

The BBC sets out some of the thinking behind why it tries not to use the word 'terrorist' in its Editorial Guidelines:

'We must report acts of terror quickly, accurately, fully and responsibly. Our credibility is undermined by the careless use of words which carry emotional or value judgements. The word "terrorist" itself can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding. We should try to avoid the term, without attribution. We should let other people characterise while we report the facts as we know them.'

This position is backed up by academics view of the word terrorism. In her book, Mass Mediated Terrorism, Brigitte Nacos says that calling ‘an act of political violence terrorist is not merely to describe it but to judge it’ (p. 17).

It could be argued that calling Mughniyeh a terrorist is not merely descriptive but the sort of value-laden judgement that the BBC tries to avoid. (Though the process of description is itself usually a result of a series of judgements, prejudices and selections).