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This book analyses British news media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It describes the analytical framework that serves as the basis for theoretically informed and systematic analysis of wartime media performance. The book synthesises a range of models, hypotheses and explanatory variables to set out a framework composed of three models of news media performance: the elite-driven model, the independent model and the oppositional model. It provides three case studies which, in different ways, illuminate each model of news media performance in wartime. The three case studies include the case of Jessica Lynch, the case of Ali Abbas and the case of the anti-war movement. The book then presents an account of how the relationship between foreign policy, news media and war might be expected to operate, based on current theoretical understanding. In order to place British coverage of the invasion in context, the book offers brief summaries of the structure and character of Britain's television news services and its press. The book provides an analysis of the ways in which the news media's visual depictions of the war reinforced supportive coverage. It is devoted to documenting and analysing evidence for negotiated and oppositional coverage. The book also examines the representation of civilian casualties, military casualties and humanitarian operations across both television and press, three subject areas that generated a good deal of media criticism.
. ( 2011 ), ‘ Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan: Evidence-Based Advocacy and Enhanced Protection ’, Humanitarian Exchange Magazine , Issue 49, Overseas Development Institute, https://odihpn.org/magazine/civilian-casualties-in-afghanistan-evidence-based-advocacy-and-enhanced-protection/ (accessed 17 June 2020 ). Olesen
form of airlifts supporting politico-military ambitions. Well-known examples are the 1948–49 airlift by the American army into the city of Berlin, which served to provision both the garrisons of the Allied Forces and the civilian population during the blockade, and Operation Poomalai by the Indian Air Force over the besieged town of Jaffna in June 1987, intended to spare civilian casualties as well as to support the Tamil separatist movement somewhat symbolically. Organising mass evacuation of civilians has also long been the prerogative of States, for humanitarian
Дмитро Лубінець] ’, 3 September, https://ukrainian.voanews.com/a/ombudsman_lubinets_interview/6729554.html . Washington Post ( 2022a ), ‘ Russia Could Seize Kyiv in Days and Cause 50,000 Civilian Casualties in Ukraine, U.S. Assessments Find ’, 5 February, www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/05/ukraine-russia-nato-putin-germany/ . Washington Post
6 ‘Independence, diversity and professional autonomy’: Evidence for negotiated and oppositional coverage Overview This chapter is devoted to documenting and analysing evidence for negotiated and oppositional coverage. This is done in three ways: first, by examining critical coverage that emerged across specific subject areas; second, by describing patterns of coverage in particular media outlets; and third, by presenting time series data. The chapter begins by examining the representation of civilian casualties, military casualties and humanitarian operations
garage.24 When Lewis was transferred to head the new SSY5 mobilizing in London, O’Conor took over as Commanding Officer of Unit 9. ‘Strenuous’ described work for all French units during the Spring of 1918, as drivers evacuated hospitals, dealt with civilian casualties and endured nightly air raids. Although driving was relieved by better weather, it was complicated by a huge increase in traffic on the shell-pitted muddy roads and many drivers reported witnessing accidents since no lights were allowed at night and men driving reinforcements to the Front worked so
privilege their own. Perhaps even more than in earlier wars, these accounts from the Iraq War, even while they treat the so-called enemy and civilian casualties, foreground what Butler defines as ‘grievable’ lives (‘that the life would be grieved if it were lost’),4 in this case those of American combatants.5 Yet it can be argued that in wartime the representation of the soldier’s death as heroic sacrifice relies on an abstraction of death that obscures the unpalatable facts of bodily damage that causes the death, so that even ‘grievable’ lives are subject to a silencing
An ex-Trident submarine captain considers the evolution of UK nuclear deterrence policy and the implications of a previously unacknowledged, enduring aversion to military strategies that threaten civilian casualties. This book draws on extensive archival research to provide a uniquely concise synthesis of factors affecting British nuclear policy decision-making, and draws parallels between government debates about reprisals for First World War Zeppelin raids on London, the strategic bombing raids of the Second World War and the development of the nuclear deterrent to continuous at-sea deterrence, through the end of the Cold War and the announcement of the Dreadnought programme. It develops the idea that, in a supreme emergency, a breach of otherwise inviolable moral rules might be excused, but never justified, in order to prevent a greater moral catastrophe; and it explores the related ethical concept of dirty hands – when a moral actor faces a choice between two inevitable actions, mutually exclusive but both reprehensible. It concludes that, amongst all the technical factors, government aversion to be seen to condone civilian casualties has inhibited government engagement with the public on deterrence strategy since 1915 and, uniquely among nuclear weapon states, successive British governments have been coy about discussing nuclear deterrence policy publicly because they feared to expose the complexity of the moral reasoning behind the policy, a reticence exacerbated by the tendency of policy and media investigation to be reduced to simplistic soundbites.
The image operations of drone warfare oscillate between a disappearance of the human figure and its obstinate re-appearance. While drone crews fly their missions from bases in the US and hence put their bodies out of harm’s reach, people in the target regions are subject to the kind of warfare that targets individuals and reduces kill boxes to the size of the human body. However, if one takes operators’ testimonies and the number of civilian casualties into account, the drone’s optics regularly fail their task. What the drone is meant to detect are individual bodies; yet, what it actually transmits are abstract landscapes with human figures reduced to mere shadows. A number of artists have picked up on this dynamic between landscape and body that, according to art historical terminology, can be described as a tension between figure and ground. In order to trace that tension, the chapter will, for the first time, juxtapose works by Noor Behram and Seth Price.
alternative viewpoints. In offering negotiated coverage, journalists could be expected to remain neutral towards the outcome of war, avoiding a simplistic focus on ‘our’ military victories and covering also military problems and failures. Examples of such an approach include the editorial decision by the BBC during the Falklands War to avoid using the words ‘we’ and ‘us’ when referring to the British (GUMG, 1985: 14), the positioning of correspondents in Baghdad in 1991 and 2003 so as to provide reports on civilian casualties and the humanitarian situation, and the use by