Coverage Of War Research Articles

Front Cover Imagery and the Social Construction of the Vietnam War: A Case Study of LIFE Magazine's Iconology and its Impact on Visual Discourse

War coverage in the media, its impact on people's perceptions of wars, and its influence on political actors have increasingly been analysed in political communication research. In recent times, there has been a special focus on television war coverage. In this study, the coverage of the Vietnam War in LIFE magazine, the most famous photo magazine of the 1960s and 1970s, is analysed. An iconographic analysis of all the covers devoted to the war in Vietnam (1960/65–1975) helps to identify different periods of the visual construction of the reality of the Vietnam War. Ambivalences and a polysemic variety of competing interpretations which are probably typical for any war coverage become obvious. Those results support the assumption that the growing rejection of the Vietnam operation by US citizens was not the effect of a supposedly homogenous, let alone unambiguous, presentation by the media, but rather of recipients transforming the construction of the social reality of the Vietnam War.

Weighing the Costs: The Scripps-McRae League Reports the War in Cuba

This is the first historical examination of how the Scripps-McRae League of US newspapers reported the uprising in Cuba in the 1890s and the Spanish-American War in Cuba in 1898. It is based on the E. W. Scripps papers at Ohio University and a close reading of all war news in the league's flagship Cleveland Press. Founder E. W. Scripps applied his conservative business model to limit expenses, which put his newspapers at a competitive disadvantage. News from the war zone was delayed by disease, military censorship, and limited independent transportation and was overshadowed by war coverage in Washington. The league's low-cost strategy pushed coverage toward observational narratives, including portrayals of the Cuban people that shifted from admiring and supportive before the war to racist deprecation afterward. Scripps-McRae war correspondents are identified and their contributions analyzed.

Uplifting Manhood to Wonderful Heights? News Coverage of the Human Costs of Military Conflict From World War I to Gulf War Two

Domestic political support is an important factor constraining the use of American military power around the world. Although the dynamics of war support are thought to reflect a cost-benefit calculus, with costs represented by numbers of friendly war deaths, no previous study has examined how information about friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties is routinely presented to domestic audiences. This article establishes a baseline measure of historical casualty reporting by examining New York Times coverage of five major wars that occurred over the past century. Despite important between-war differences in the scale of casualties, the use of conscription, the type of warfare, and the use of censorship, the frequency of casualty reporting and the framing of casualty reports have remained fairly consistent over the past 100 years. Casualties are rarely mentioned in American war coverage. When casualties are reported, it is often in ways that minimize or downplay the human costs of war.

Red, White, and Black

When the United States declared war on Mexico in 1846, newspaper publishers weighed in through editorials and war coverage on the debate over how much land the United States should acquire. This study compares and analyzes how two newspaper publishers, Moses Yale Beach and James Gordon Bennett, Sr., expressed their political views through the pictures they published of Mexicans. Both used racial stereotypes that highlighted either the Native American, African, or European ancestry of the Mexican people, choosing which component to emphasize in different illustrations in order to make specific points about Mexico and Mexicans. They both imposed stereotypes about Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans on Mexicans to depict Mexicans as an inferior race. Bennett used this perceived inferiority to make the case that Mexico was an easy target from which the United States could, and should, acquire land. Beach insinuated through his illustrations’ nuances that the United States would be better off limiting its territorial ambitions to bring as few Mexicans within its borders as possible.

From Stalingrad to Grozny: Patriotism, political pressure, and literature in the war reporting of Vassily Grossman and Anna Politkovskaya

Comparing the work of the 20th-century Soviet journalist and writer, Vassily Grossman, with that of his compatriot, Anna Politkovskaya, almost half a century later, this article examines the two journalists’ writing for what it tells us about the changing nature of Russian journalism, and reporter involvement in the coverage of war. Grossman was reporting on his country’s fight for survival in a war with Nazi Germany; Politkovskaya had no peer in her coverage of the bloodiest consequence of the collapse of that country, the Soviet Union: the wars in Chechnya. It also considers the literary nature of Grossman and Politkovskaya’s reporting. The article argues that the two journalists’ work has significance far beyond the time when they were reporting, and should therefore be more widely read and studied for what it tells us about covering conflict, and especially civilian suffering and, in the case of Politkovskaya, counter-insurgency.

The American media and the Iraq war at its tenth anniversary: Lessons for the coverage of future wars

Abstract On the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War of 2003, most scholars agree that the war had serious consequences for the Middle East and the United States. Some journalists now believe that the war coverage constituted a ‘mini-Alamo’ for American journalism. Deficient war coverage damaged the reputation of the American media as a source of reliable news about the United States because of the way it covered the Bush administration’s case for going to war, and the way it reported war’s devastating effect on the Iraqi population. This study analyses how the Bush administration managed to get media compliance for its verbal and visual narrative of the war, thus co-opting American journalism (and by extension, that of other countries that relied on it). The study also illustrates how Arab historical master narratives disseminated by the frames introduced by Al Jazeera through its reporting from the scene challenged and sometimes foiled CENTCOM’s narrative and its psychological operations. Finally, the study illustrates the role of cartoonists in culture-jamming the official narrative by publishing on the Internet, thus undermining the Bush administration’s main Orwellian message that ‘war is peace’. This study suggests that the examination of what went wrong for the media in Iraq provides a cautionary tale about the dangers of acting as government stenographers during wartime.

Book Review: The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War, by Debra Reddin van Tuyll

The Confederate Press in the Crucible of the American Civil War. Debra Reddin van Tuyll. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 344 pp. $99.95 hbk.Debra Reddin van Tuyll of Georgia Regents University is an accomplished historian, and her study of the Confederate press during the Civil War is based on primary sources-newspapers, Confederate government records, letters and personal commu- nications, and contemporary documents of all kinds. Author or editor of several other books, Professor van Tuyll has written a superb book that will have its readers enthralled by the pace and delights of its story and impressed by its documentation. Consuming The Confederate Press is rather like eating a piece of roasted corn from the outside toward the middle.This book goes a long way to solving that conundrum of not knowing what you do not know. Probably few readers have read the J. Cutler Andrews volumes about the Civil War coverage by the Northern and Southern presses. The Civil War historian Gary Gallagher has estimated that there were approximately ten thousand battles, from the First Manassas through the Seven Days, to the fall of Atlanta and retreat to Appomattox, if all the skirmishes and small battles in the flatter lands to the West, the mountains and swamps of the East, and along the rivers with their forts, and elsewhere are included. There has been on average, Gallagher estimates, the publication of a book, article, news story, pamphlet, film, novel, or other such media product every day since the opening of the war at Fort Sumter in April 1861. The Civil War goes on. The literature on the war and its causes are vast and growing. But the literature on the press is really neither. This is an important and overdue addition to the literature produced by American historians.Professor van Tuyll presents newspapers in a comprehensive way. The book is not just a review of how battles were covered but examines how hard it was for newspa- pers to hold onto printers and journalists who were drawn to the patriotic attractions of duty at the front (early in the war). The study presents a case of study of newspaper subscribers (from whom editors found it challenging to collect payment). One in fifty was of the planter class, while one in ten was a merchant, and about four of ten were farmers. Those planters' views, though, permeated-or contaminated, depending on your perspective-the region and propelled the nation to war. Of course, railroads spread across the North far more than in the South, and mail was slower in rural regions. Still, Southern newspapers published stories that had appeared in Northern newspapers in a week or less. Of course, the reverse was true, but battles took place along the Mississippi and in Virginia and other border states in the beginning.As in the North, Southern military leaders often kept reporters at a distance for fear that they would leak important military information, through a contempt of journalists that remains. Southern newspapers, like the region as a whole, cherished individual freedom-ironically, despite slavery-and there was no shortage of criticism of President Jefferson Davis as Davis gathered more power in the presidency in the late war years. A few newspaper editors, especially in North Carolina and Georgia as well as in the Confederate capital, were thorns in the side of Davis, along with the gover- nors of those two states. Some newspapers sought to find peace, but not surrender, with the North. Because the South eschewed political parties, the criticism seemed individual and uncollected-and dangerous. But for the most part, it was tolerated. Throughout the war, editors and correspondents balanced what they could say versus what they should say, in-generally-an atmosphere that favored a good degree of press freedom but a respect for authority. …

Post-traumatic stress disorder: ethical and legal relevance to the criminal justice system.

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is a major public health concern in both civilian and military populations, across race, age, gender, and socio-economic status. While PTSD has been around for centuries by some name or another, its definition and description also continue to evolve. Within the last few years, the American Psychological Association has published the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which includes some major changes in the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Recent data on epidemiology, etiological theories, and empirically supported methods of treatment, as well as implications for legal processes and criminal justice system personnel, are discussed.

Post Tamil Eelam war coverage in Dinamani newspaper

The war for Tamil Eelam and the last battle at northern region of Sri Lanka between the Government and LTTE has been seriously viewed and reported by media around the world. However ‘Eelam’ is an issue close to the heart of the Tamils in the world. The present investigation has chosen the post war period January 2009-January 2011 to study how the Tamil print media in Tamil Nadu reacted to the end of the LTTE and whether it reflected the sentiments of the Tamil population. Editorials and columns are one place where newspapers can freely voice their opinions on any issue. However, only one Tamil newspaper-Dinamani-had been publishing editorials during that period. Therefore Dinamani newspaper was chosen for content analysis of all the editorials and columns published during 2009–2011. The study revealed that editorials and columns published during that time exposed violations of human rights than other war related issues in Sri Lanka, after the war was over. It also criticized the roles played by the then Indian and Tamil Nadu Government and discussed the post-war impacts on India. It can be concluded that the editorials and columns published in the renowned Tamil daily expressed a pro-Tamil sentiment reflecting the social context of that period.

Propaganda de guerra para el Nuevo Mundo. El caso de la revista "América-Latina" (1915-1918)

Fil: Tato, Maria Ines. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Cientificas y Tecnicas; Argentina

“Truthful as the Record of Heaven”: The Battle of Antietam and the Birth of Photojournalism

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Civil War was a little more than a year old first days of September 1862, and Confederate general Robert E. Lee knew South could not win a prolonged struggle against manpower and industrial might of Union. He hoped for a decisive victory that would lift South's spirits, weaken North's will to fight, and bring European recognition of Confederacy--and, with that recognition, a halt to war. Lee planned to invade Maryland, strike Pennsylvania, and ultimately move on Washington, D.C. Union commander George McClellan marched his army across Potomac from Washington to meet Lee's challenge. The two armies arrived on either side of Antietam Creek northern Maryland on afternoon of September 15. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia numbered about 40,000 men. McClellan's Army of Potomac totaled more than twice that number, about 87,000. A skirmish occurred on afternoon of September 16, but it was a prelude to climactic battle, which commenced at dawn on September 17,1862. (1) More than 6,000 Union and Confederate soldiers died that day farm fields outside Sharpsburg, making it single bloodiest day American military history. More soldiers died that day than died combat all other wars fought by America nineteenth century combined: War of 1812, Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and Indian wars. Beyond statistics was indescribable carnage. Words are inadequate to portray scene, wrote one soldier. Another, charge of a burial party, described dead in every state of mutilation, sans arms, sans legs, heads, and intestines, and greater number than on any field we have seen before. It was said that a person could walk a mile or more atop bodies without touching ground. (2) An estimated 5,000 people watched fighting from a hill a safe distance away. Edwin Forbes of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper reported that battle took place on open ground and was fully visible from hillside, which was black with spectators. No battle of war, I think, was witnessed by so many people, he reported. It is possible photographers Alexander Gardner and James F. Gibson were among them. The two men, employees of Mathew Brady, had been following Union army for about two weeks, primarily photographing soldiers their camps. When exactly they arrived at Antietam is uncertain, but they were on field with their equipment day after battle; no other American battlefield had been photographed so soon after fighting. The pair exposed seventy glass negatives within five days of battle. Their images include landmarks of field, hastily dug graves, and corpses of horses and men. A union surgeon described bodies stretched along, one straight line, ready for interment, at least a thousand blackened bloated corpses with blood and gas protruding from every orifice, and maggots holding high carnival over their heads. (3) Gardner and Gibson's photographs were first of dead soldiers on American soil. They would be displayed Brady's New York studio a few weeks later, presenting public with a previously unseen, shocking aspect of war. That two men had managed to take photographs at all under conditions was a technological and psychological feat. But it is not technical expertise that is ultimately Gardner's accomplishment, wrote his biographer Mark Katz. [R]ather it is extending power of photographic image affecting public awareness. The photographic coverage of Civil War by Gardner and others sent authentic images of horrors of battlefield directly to public for first time. This, Katz contended, was the birth of photojournalism as we now know it. (4) The American public already thirsted for visual news of war, and illustrated newspapers did their best to supply it, but Gardner's photographs, because they could not be reproduced print, remained accessible only to a limited number of people. …

Discurso imagético e representação do iraque nas capas da revista Veja

O estereótipo do mundo islâmico é, frequentemente, difundido, através dos meios de comunicação, por meio dos signos do caos, do terror, da inferioridade e do mal. Estes signos fazem parte de um conceito chamado orientalismo, que foi proposto pelo historiador Edward Said (2007). A partir da compreensão desse conceito, como uma visão cultural do ocidente sobre o oriente, o objetivo deste trabalho é entender como se dá a representação destes signos na imprensa brasileira, especificamente, no caso da representação do Iraque na cobertura da Guerra do Golfo, em 1991, e da invasão Norte-americana, em 2003, pela revista Veja. A pesquisa identificou este discurso, por meio dos signos ideológicos, a partir dos eixos de produção de sentido de Harry Pross (1980) e do conceito de ideologia, discutido por Terry Eagleton (1997), de base marxista. Viu-se que, em ambos os casos, o posicionamento da revista deu-se a partir de uma visão orientalista. Entretanto, em 1991, o inimigo a ser de derrotado foi figurado por Saddam Hussein; já em 2003, o oponente era a nação iraniana, como um todo.

Themenzyklus der Kriegsberichterstattung – ein Phasenmodell

In this article, we analyse war coverage from a longitudinal perspective. In doing so, we refer to the classical issue cycle model, which has been discussed frequently in communication science. We adapt the model to war coverage and – according to the duration and the predictability of war events – we distinguish different types of news cycles. We assume that different stages of news coverage differ not only quantitatively, but also qualitatively with regard to the cited sources. The coverage on the war in Lebanon (2006) in the newspapers Süddeutsche Zeitung and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung serves as a case study for the empirical exploration of the suggested model. The coverage can be divided into four different phases, and the results show that it was mainly event-driven. In the peak phase of coverage, increased citations of actors participating in the conflict and of other media actors are observed, as well as generally the most diverse range of voices to be heard in the coverage.

Raising children in a violent context: An intersectionality approach to understanding parents' experiences in Ciudad Juárez

Children and parents' daily lives are rarely highlighted in coverage of drug wars. Using 16 interviews with parents in the Mexican border city of Juárez in 2010, we examine how drug violence impacts families with a focus on intersections of gender and social class. Related to mobility (the first emergent theme), fathers had increased mobility as compared to mothers, which caused different stresses. Material hardships heightened mothers' isolation within the home, and mothers more often had to enforce children's mobility restrictions, which children resisted. Related to employment (the second emergent theme), fathers took on dangerous jobs to provide for the family while mothers had fewer options for informal employment due to violence. In sum, men and women faced different challenges, which were intensified due to class-based material disadvantages. Conformity with traditional gender expectations for behavior was common for men and women, illustrating the normalization of gender inequality within this context.

‘Our Boys With the Maple Leaf on Their Shoulders and Straps’: Masculinity, the Toronto Press, and the Outbreak of the South African War, 1899

Coverage of the South African War by the Toronto daily press at its outbreak in late 1899 was implicitly gendered. Placed within the context of nineteenth-century connections between manhood and war, claims of ineffective soldiering, poor shooting ability, and indecisive political action were also implicit attacks on the manhood and character of Canadian politicians at home and the Boer enemy in South Africa. Representations of soldiers, enemies, and politicians in the press also expose connections between war and gender and allow historians to question how war is sold and characterized to the nation through ideas about masculinity.

Does AIDS involve some collusion by the neuro-immune system because of positive learning of the disarmament strategy?

Korzybski’s general semantics recommends considering living beings as organisms-as-a-whole in their environment. Our cognitive abilities, specific to the human species, have thus to be taken into account. In this framework we establish a semantic similarity between particular stressful events of the 20th century and AIDS in which the immune-deficiency-caused is semiotically seen as a biological state of disarmament of the organism. It then appears that:–at the extent of the worldwide propagation of the pandemic, the disarmament concept was valued as a hopefully survival strategy because of the media coverage of the Cold War and of the associated threat of nuclear annihilation,–at the extent of the African regions of origin of the different HIV strains, the best survival behavior of slaves fits the disarmament concept.These observations suggest that AIDS could benefit from some collusion by the neuro-immune system because of positive learning of the semiotic concept of disarmament, thus making the terrain favorable to the germ in response to intense stress. The disease would then result from a conditioning process based on semiotics and involve some confusion at the level of the unconscious cognitive system between disarmament toward outside the body and disarmament toward inside the body. This hypothesis is discussed within a multidisciplinary perspective considering the specificities of our modern lifestyles, the cybernetic ability of signs to control metabolism and behavior, and the recent advances of epigenetics and cognition sciences. This hypothesis may explain the multiple cross-species transmissions of the immunodeficiency virus into humans during the 20th century. Further research is suggested for evaluating this hypothesis.

Television coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom

Extant research on the media coverage of the Gulf War demonstrates that the media tend to reflect the political ideologies of the mother nation, actively participating in the generation of political support for national policy. A large number of studies on news reports of the Gulf War pointed out that the media constructed the war as a military operation, highlighting military strategies and the triumph of technology, whereas the casualties of the war were omitted. More than a decade after the Gulf War, the United States and Iraq engaged again as key stakeholders in Operation Iraqi Freedom. This article examines the frames present in the media coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom based on qualitative and quantitative analyses of the war coverage on CNN and Fox. Hypotheses also are tested regarding the favorability of specific frames toward key stakeholders.

Indian Media Coverage of Kashmir

This commentary provides an insight into the security risks and inclination, albeit unconsciously, to be swayed by national interests, that journalists face in their coverage of war and sectarian conflicts. The author, a journalist with The Week magazine in New Delhi, alludes to the issues of verification, attribution and personal security in his coverage of the conflict in Kashmir. He concludes that as long as editors and news organisations support the journalist, one should pursue the story despite the security risks.

Journalistic Identities and War Reporting: Coverage of the 2008 Russian-Georgian War in the Russian Press

The article analyzes the coverage of the Russian-Georgian war in August 2008 in three leading Russian newspapers, the official Rossijskaja gazeta, the tabloid Komsomol´skaja pravda, and the oppositional Novaja gazeta. A total of 247 articles on the war written in the three papers between 8 and 14 August 2008 were examined; in addition, seven journalists who had worked as war reporters in the war zone were interviewed. To the war reporters in all three newspapers their professional identity as journalists was clearly important. They were proud of the work they did, and reflected on their role as mediators of information to the public. They defined the task of the journalist in basically the same way: it meant giving a balanced and objective account of what actually happened. Even so, they covered the war in very different ways. To a large extent, the journalistic culture and political sympathies of the various papers determined what the correspondents “saw” on the ground.

A Lack of Balance: An Examination of Local Detroit, Michigan, Newspaper Coverage of the 2006 War in Lebanon and the 2008–2009 War in Gaza

By examining source use and the emergence of frames, this study analyzes news coverage of the 2006 War in Lebanon and 2008–2009 War in Gaza in two local newspapers in Detroit, Michigan, USA: The Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press. Metropolitan Detroit is home to the largest concentration of Arab individuals outside of the Middle East, as well as a substantial Jewish population, making it an interesting case to explore how local reporters use sources and frames to portray issues important to its readership. In the coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War, three frames emerged in both newspapers' coverage: Arabs versus Jews, interfaith efforts to bridge understanding, and the lack of American support for either side of the conflict. Several years later, the only frame that emerged in coverage of the Gaza War was Arabs versus Jews. An analysis of source use in the coverage of both wars revealed that local reporters favored Lebanese sources during the 2006 war and Israeli sources during the 2008–2009 war.