The Struggle overThe Valour and the Horror: Media Power and the Portrayal of War

Abstract

AbstractThe Valour and the Horroris a series of three documentary films describing Canadian participation during the Second World War which were aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1992. The series aggressively challenged “official” war history, arguing that while ordinary soldiers served with dignity and bravery, the incompetence and immorality of senior British and Canadian commanders produced terrible blunders and losses and grotesque assaults against civilian populations in Germany. This article analyzes the controversy that surrounded the series, a controversy that mushroomed into a political struggle over who had the right to control “memory” and who had the right to produce and interpret “reality.” The struggle produced a Senate subcommittee investigation, placed the CBC under intense pressure and scrutiny and evoked strong reactions from veterans' groups and the journalistic and artistic communities. Three frameworks are used to assess the forces that contend against each other in media production: the hegemonic view (that the media celebrate and reinforce the dominant interests in society); the organizational or institutional perspective (that media organizations pursue their own interests even if these interests do not necessarily coincide with those of other dominant groups in society); and the journalist-centred framework (that journalists as professionals exercise considerable discretion over their own work). The article suggests that each of these perspectives can provide valuable insights, but that each by itself fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for the events. By utilizing multiple perspectives for the analysis, a wider range of questions is addressed.