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justification for this activism, however, were necessarily different from the past. This book is about how the media have interpreted conflict and international intervention in the years after the Cold War. By comparing press coverage of a number of different wars and crises, it seeks to establish which have been the dominant themes in explaining the post-Cold War international order and to discover how far the
-communist and anti-Allied, yet its broadcasts were lively, and its transmitters powerful, bringing it a large audience.4 The French were also avid cinemagoers during the war. Filmed news in the Occupied Zone was produced by the Propaganda Abteilung and a Paris-based section of the Reich’s main production group.5 The Vichy government set up its own propaganda service, which vigorously promoted the National Revolution, and controlled and censored media content.6 From February 1941, when the fascist Paul Marion began to gain influence in the Propaganda Ministry, a programme of
, none had heard of the BBC children’s programme – but of course, my sample size was small and drawn from the Occupied Zone where listening to the BBC was more difficult. Children were influenced by public discourse about bombing, but explanations were given subtlety and shape within private contexts. The interviewees identified two main channels through which they learnt about bombs: perhaps unsurprisingly, people and the media. Parents and teachers were important, although no one I interviewed remembered a parent explicitly explaining bombing to them. Instead they
, although there are strong public representations of war (propagated in films, books, television, media, memorialisation, politics, academia), which plant the seeds of a dominant narrative of the past that take root over time and grow until they block out parts of lived experience.3 Events become codified, and the only way of recounting them is by using the appropriate cultural scripts. This was evident when I discussed the 1940 civilian exodus in my interviews. No one spoke of it without v 221 v Conclusion Figure 6 Memorial in Hellemmes, near to Lille. The inscription
Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF).17 The COSI’s (many) critics condemned it as a tool of German propaganda but it was at pains to emphasise that its finance came from Parisian trade unions.18 The Germans also gave it one hundred million francs, however, which came from a fine imposed on French Jews.19 A fundraising drive in the collaborationist media raised a further ten million francs, and when Déat entered the government in 1944, he allocated public funding to the COSI. By October 1943, the COSI had set up eighty-seven local committees and claimed to have
The breakdown of the long-established Cold War ideological framework has been widely understood as presenting a problem for journalists seeking shorthand explanations of new crises and conflicts, but no clear understanding has so far emerged of how the media have responded to this situation. Greg McLaughlin, for example, observes that in the 1990s the first potential
ignominious defeat to the UN. As Walter Clarke and Jeffrey Herbst ( 1996 ) point out, for instance, despite formally handing over to the UN, all the main Security Council resolutions were written by US officials and the US retained operational control, with Jonathan Howe, a retired American admiral and former deputy national security advisor, in charge of UNOSOM II. In terms of the analysis of media coverage
should be explained: as systematic genocide or as an outbreak of spontaneous ‘tribal’ violence. In the literature there is near-universal agreement that it should be understood as genocide, but many critics have found that ‘tribal’ explanations were preferred in media reporting. This point is most often made in relation to early coverage (Livingston and Eachus 2000: 218), although a study of British
and gas from the Caspian basin’ (Pilger 2001; see also Mahajan 2002: 32–3). Critics tended to complain that these sorts of alternative explanations were not explored by the mainstream media. Pilger (2001) remarked that some news coverage contained ‘little more than fables straight from the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence’ and that the ‘Real reasons for the actions of great power are seldom
short of an all-out invasion could bring Iraq into line. In February 2003 France and Germany agreed a plan for a ‘peaceful invasion, involving reconnaissance flights, triple the number of inspectors and UN troops backed up by 150,000 US soldiers stationed on Iraq’s borders ( Guardian , 10 February). Media commentators also sometimes combined an anti-war stance with an emphasis on the need for tough