Locating Accountability: The Media and Peacekeeping. (Economic and Social Implications)
2002; Columbia University; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0022-197X
Autores Tópico(s)Military and Defense Studies
Resumounequivocal effect of the media is not to change or even shift policy, but to influence its timing--and especially to compress the time available for making policy decisions. In 1999, Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden published his you-are-there account of the Battle of the Black Sea--a firefight in Somalia on 3 October, 1993, in which 18 Americans were killed and more than 70 injured. Titled Black Hawk Down, (1) Bowden's story was first serialized in 29 parts in the Inquirer. In short order, he was tapped to adapt the best-selling book into a film of the same name. Originally scheduled for March 2002, the release date was moved forward three months (to December 2001) by the producer Jerry Bruckheimer to capitalize on the massive public demand for military action movies in the wake of September 11. Black Hawk Down turned out to be a blockbuster. It has been called powerful and rave by reviewers--so thoroughly convincing, it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation. (2) It is also a creation of the Pentagon, Director Ridley Scott told CNN that the Pentagon proved very, very user-friendly over the film, as long as you are actually trying to do is represent the [military] in the right and proper light. The result, Scott said, was an almost page-by-page process of negotiation with Pentagon officials about the screenplay. (3) An on-screen prologue sets up the battle explaining that A combination of famine and civil war had persuaded the United Nations to send a peacekeeping force into Somalia. (4) But Scott doesn't delve into the geopolitical implications of the famine or the war, nor does he linger on the reasons why the fiercest firefight for Americans since the Vietnam War occurred in Mogadishu. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the images that Americans had come to associate most with the Battle of the Black Sea are precisely those images that are not included in the film. There is no footage of the Somali mob dragging the naked corpses of two American soldiers through the streets. Hollywood films, no matter whether their genesis is in news reporting, are not in the business of relating background, analyzing politics or locating accountability. That's what the media are supposed to do. They cannot do more. We can only hope that they do not do less. The conventional wisdom that the media hold Rasputin-like powers is a myth: a phenomenon similar to the fantasy that journalists were responsible for the loss of Vietnam. Proactively, decisionmakers work to exclude, to co-opt or to spin the media. The Bush administration employed all three tactics, for instance, during recent operations in Afghanistan, especially in regard to the bombing of civilian areas. But as events in Afghanistan have also demonstrated, the media are most effective at raising questions about policy after that policy has been implemented. Strategic and economic interests dictate the formation of policy; however, the media can, when they do their job, reveal that the wizard pushing the buttons and pulling the levers behind the curtain is not all he seems. The media are best at show and tell: If they can show and tell their audience what is happening, then those words and images can act to check the veracity of the diplomats' and policymakers' assertions. For example, the images that came out during the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam--such as the street-corner execution--prompted Americans to question what they had been told by the Johnson administration. The news from Vietnam illuminated a gulf between prior official rhetoric and evident military reality. In Mogadishu, the media performed the same function. They dramatically showed that the peacekeeping doctrine of armed humanitarianism was both a rhetorical and a military oxymoron. DEFINING PEACEKEEPING The media's understanding--and therefore the public's understanding--of peacekeeping has been complicated by shifting notions within the United Nations about what the word means. …
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