Phil Taylor's papers
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BACK TO : Some Taylor publications and media output
On the question of truth in wartime by P Cass (reviews of 2 Taylor books) 
Knightley, Baudrillard and Taylor on the question of truth in wartime. by Philip Cass Jean Baudrillard. The Gulf War Did Not take Place. Indiana University Press, 1995. Philip M.Taylor. Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945. Routledge, 1997. Philip M.Taylor. War and the Media. Manchester University Press. 1998. Philip Knightley. The First Casualty. London. 2002. Michael Moore. Stupid White Men. Pan. 2002. Christopher Ferrell. 'Journalist Cronkite Warns Against Potential War.' The Eagle. 2002. It is now nearly two months since Baghdad fell and Saddam Hussein's statue was torn down by an American tank in front of an approving crowd. But how do we know what really happened during the short ground war and how do we now make sense of what we see and read about the situation on post-war Iraq? If people want to know what is really happening in a war, they have to understand not just what the media say, but how they say it. The media in every country is manipulated in time of crisis and journalists have to fight very hard to stay on top of the story and bring some semblance of truth to their readers. Readers, listeners and viewers have to work equally hard. Remember those excited reports during Gulf War 1 about how successful the American Patriot missiles were? We know now that they weren't. Remember the harrowing stories presented to American politicians by Kuwaiti politicians about Iraqi atrocities? Most of them turned out to be carefully fabricated and expensively funded lies on a par with British stories about the Germans boiling babies to make soap in the First World War. Remember CNN's heroic lone stand in Baghdad? That was partly a fiction, too. Veteran American journalist Walter Cronkite recently warned about the paucity of information made available to people during recent conflicts. He said there was no real history of the Gulf War, only the version the military had let the media tell. Dan Rather, one of America's senior anchormen, admitted in an interview in the UK that many journalists had felt unable to ask the questions they should have in the wake of September 11 because of an unspoken but heavy pressure that it "wasn't the right time." Finding out what is really going on from the swirling mass of truth, lies and half truths that make up the media is not easy. Fortunately, there are some guideposts. Most media professionals and media educators will have read them already, but one has recently emerged in a new edition and they are books that should be pretty well mandatory for your students and anybody who wants a guide to dealing with the media in time of crisis. Philip Knightley's The First Casualty, has just been reissued with a new section covering the Balkans crisis and the way in which the media dealt with that unhappy conflict. The controversy over ITN's use of footage of a camp in Srebrenica and the consequent court case brought against Living Marxism for questioning the way the footage was presented are a reminder of just how manipulated our view of war can be. Knightley, an Australian journalist long resident in London, has written what is virtually the ur-text on war reporting and how, in times of war, truth becomes the first casualty. After reading his book, nobody can entirely trust anything they are told in war time. They should not, of course, entirely dismiss the possibility that what they are seeing is that truth, but they should be continuously aware that there may be other facts to be discovered. The nature of truth, and how it is defined, is very much at the heart of Jean Baudrillard's The Gulf War Did Not Happen. Baudrillard argued cogently in a series of articles (first published in the Leftist newspaper Liberation), that what people were seeing on their screens was not a war, but merely a simulacrum of one, in which the various elements of a drama were orchestrated before an audience which was alternately mesmerised by special effects and the threat of demoniacal elements. Baudrillard argued that Saddam Hussein was serving the needs of the United States and the West in a carefully staged media spectacle. 'People like him (Saddam) are necessary from time to time in order to channel irruptive forces. They serve as a poultice or an artificial purgative. It is a form of deterrence, certainly a Western stratagem, but one of which Saddam, in his pride and his stupidity, is a perfect exutant. He who loves decoys so much is himself no more than a decoy and his elimination can only demystify this war by putting and end to that objective complicity which itself is no decoy.' Saddam Hussein was, for Baudrillard, a false enemy, a pantomime demon; but one created by the West for its own purposes. One could apply his ideas to the current crisis with ease, substituting Osama bin Laden as the demonic "other." Those seeking a guidebook for dealing with the current crisis, understanding how the media deals with it and the implications for the dangerous relationship between war, global diplomacy and a globalized media, could no a lot worse than to seek Philip Taylor's two books, War and the Media and Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media since 1945. Taylor, who is Reader in International Relations at Leeds University in the UK, is an expert on propaganda and his web site contains a wide ranging examination of the role of propaganda in the media since September 11. War and the Media examines the role of the media in the Gulf War and makes some telling points about the television coverage of the event. Because of the media's demand for constant news, the military fed large slabs of undigested and often inaccurate information to reporters who quickly fed it back to their audiences. The public, often with no other source of information - or without the will to look for one - accepted what was given to them. This contrasted with the way in which journalists working with the carefully monitored reporters' pool in the field had their work vetted, censored and delayed. This meant that more thoughtful analyses of the situation might not reach the audience for some days, when they would be regarded as out of date. More importantly, Taylor points out that by "going live," the military could effectively bypass the journalists, whose traditional role as mediators of the message was undermined. This, Taylor said, also allowed the military to broadcast messages direct to the Iraqi leadership and to include propaganda and disinformation in their broadcasts because they knew the Iraqis would be watching. Global Communication takes a much broader look at the issue of the media and reaches some unsettling conclusions, not the least of which is that the very speed of global communication and the demands of an insatiable market, have made it more and more difficult for the world's leaders to sort things out calmly behind closed doors. Where once the problems of Europe could be settled by the sort of long conferences, discussions and behind closed doors bargaining that marked the Treaty of Westphalia and the Conference of Vienna, now leaders are under pressure to react instantaneously and to make pronouncements for the media without the time to think clearly. Metternich, of course, would simply have jailed any journalist who threatened to interrupt his attempts to re-order Europe; George Bush Jnr and Vladimir Putin know they must succumb to questions from CNN or the BBC World Service and Osama bin Laden (or his successors) know they have only to send a tape to Al Jazeera to have their message aired. And where does the public fit into all of this? The Institute of Communications Studies at Leeds University conducted research into the public reaction to the Gulf war as it had been portrayed on television, particularly the so-called 'highway of death' footage showing the destruction of the Iraqi army as it fled Kuwait. The researchers concluded that in fact viewers in the UK had seen what they wanted and that they were satisfied with the presentation of the war. They did not want to see the war and its consequences as they really were. In some countries the media merely reflects what the public wants, which is not hard questions, but flag waving and patriotism; one merely has to watch a few minutes of Fox News to see jingoistic news at its worst In some countries, such as Iraq, the government controlled media will push only one line. Some people do not have the chance to find out what is really going on. Those who refuse to look further, even when they have the opportunity to do so, they will not be able to see the larger, albeit infinitely more confused picture. The larger picture is confusing - and frightening - but it is one that must be confronted by the media and the public alike. |