Media Representations and Violent Behavior - Essay Example

Media Self-Censorship in the Coverage of War 1. Introduction. A National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) report that gathered evidence from 2,500 studies conducted with 100,000 subjects from various countries around the world suggests that the evidence that violence in the media contributes to behaviour that is considered aggressive is overpowering (Methvin 1993). A similar study conducted roughly half a century earlier resulted in the implementation of laws designed to censor media delivery of offensive images. The Report of the New York State Joint Legislative Committee to Study the Publication of Comics (1955 cited in Klapper 1960:137) offered evidence of the effects of the media on aggressive behaviour, though admittedly much of that evidence was purely anecdotal. Between the New York Legislative report and the NIMH report, another was released that indicated as many as three-fourths of adults lay part of the blame for juvenile criminal behaviour at the feet of such media as comic books and television show (Bogart 1956 cited in Klapper 1960:135). 2. Media Representations and Violent Behavior. Since the law the United States is based on a Constitution where the main belief regarding rights is the First Amendment guarantee of the freedom of the press, it probably is no surprise that not much obvious censorship of programming takes place. The American television networks routinely rejects any claims of scientific evidence linking violence seen on television with unusually aggressive behaviour in children. The network executives at ABC express a conceited confidence that not only is there no real strength to the contention that media violence results in aggressive behavior, but that Congress has not desire to pursue the topic. In other words, they are in a very safe harbor (Rowland 1983). Out of those 2500 reports that were considered in NIMH study, only seven published findings that indicated no evidence suggesting that a link exists between screen violence and aggressive behaviour (Chaffee 1984). One of those findings was actually funded by National Broadcasting Network (NBC) claiming that there was absolutely no evidence linking the viewing of violence programming to violent behavior in children" (Milavsky 1982). Going even further to protect their interests, the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) issued a study claiming that CBS had actually tampered with the findings to reduce the indicated correlation between media representations of violence and behaviour (Chaffee 1984). Any study conducted with the cooperation of a media deliverer should only be expected to contain serious flaws since these studies by nature are often unreliable due to certain information being either omitted or manipulated. In the case of the studies conducted with funding or other interpretative interference by the media conglomerates it has been notoriously easy to fix the results to align with set desires. For instance, in some network studies the resulting aggressive behaviour is only included if it includes direct force against people or animals (Wurtzel 1984). Even in light of multiple studies that have reached the same conclusions that the exposure to constant images of violence—as opposed to the hysterical outcry against individual shows, songs or video games—results in at least a greater potential for a higher likelihood of aggression, very little action has been taken either by governments to enforce censorship, or self-censorship on the part of media producers. But is that conventional wisdom entirely true? The worldwide media conglomerates recognied across the globe simply by their initials--ABC, CBS, NBC, not to mention Fox—have never taken any steps to contain the evolution of television to the point where violence is now aired twenty-four hours a day. The excuse is that old standby of capitalism: giving the public what it wants and damn the consequences (Feshbach 1971). In essence, the only censorship seen on all American television and a good portion of other television in the other English-speaking nations is the censorship of the extreme to which these networks consistently inch closer. Censorship does not exist as a form of explicit governmental or business policy in these countries. That is, it doesn’t exist with one curious exception. The irony is that the curious exception is the one kind of explicitly extreme violence that is routinely censored and regulated is that which could possibly lead not to more aggressive behaviour, but rather to less aggressive behaviour and toward a more peaceful world than currently exists. 3. Journalism and the Violence of War. During the era when World War I was raging across Europe and America was steadfast in its refusal to be drawn into what was seen as a European conflict, the majority of Americans expressed a view that, if not truly pacifist, was undeniably isolationist. As the war dragged on, the administration of Pres. Woodrow Wilson became increasingly more committed to entering the war and as a result felt the necessity to propagandize the positive aspects of involving US troops in unpopular foreign conflict. The Wilson administration convened Creel Commission, a propaganda tool of the federal government which effectively needed only six short months to turn the tide of public opinion away from isolationism and toward heated desire to enter into the war against the Germans (Chomsky 1989). If history can be relied upon to do nothing else, it can be relied upon to repeat even the biggest mistakes. The censorship that affects most people in the world to the greatest degree is not the lack of censorship of dramatic recreations of blood-spurting murders, it is the very real censorship of the realities of war and how the governments lie about that brutality to reproduce an ideology of unnecessary nationalism and prejudice against those who are termed a threat simply by virtue of their being different. The most irrational movement in the latter half of the 20th century has been the public’s acceptance, if not outright ignorance, of the growing association between their government and their media. Journalists, who traditionally have taken on the role of policing government accountability, have over the past few decades become the apologiers and co-conspirators in their failure to both present both sides of an issue, and have even taken to praising the point of view without bothering to find out if it is valid. The effect has been not so much the enforced censorship of a Soviet-style totalitarian government, butthe much more alarming and subtle fascist-style relationship between government and big business. Historically, journalism and propaganda have been separated by a line that is really not as thin as one might think. For most of the 20th century it was pretty easy to tell the difference between attempts at objective journalistic questions and explicit subjective propaganda. Unfortunately, the past few decades have seen a blurring of the line to the point where the two are almost impossible to tell apart today. Journalists, it has always been thought, are there to present factual accounts that don’t contain open bias. However, the more the enormously integrated multimedia companies control the media, the more overt that bias becomes. When those who control the media are in complete agreement with the polices of the government, it does not matter how mistaken or dangerous those policies are, they will be declared by the media outlets to the benefit of the governors. Those in control of the big news companies usually benefit financially from their political contributions to the people they helped get elected. What happens then is that censorship of any news that may put the country’s leaders in a bad light is almost guaranteed to be censored until alternative media such as the internet companies pick it up and manage to make it important enough that the big companies can’t ignore it anymore. The most exceptionally upsetting example of this unnatural relationship between what should be opposing bodies has been the media’s responsibility in the both allowing for the current war in Iraq to happen and allowing for it to now be extended longer than World War II. Could anyone possibly expect anything less than censorship of a huge type never before witnessed in the history of television news when the US Dept. of Defense announced that reporters would be embedded with US military squadrons during the pre-Mission Accomplished fighting phase of the Iraq invasion? One need only realize that any journalist who refused to take advantage of the embedding program was denied access, essentially becoming little more than a pesky observer on the sidelines with no access to high or low level activities. By 2006 this situation had changed; journalists who refused to be embedded with the military were now no longer actually forbidden to enter Iraq, but were still faced with bureaucratic obstacles that made the entire process so difficult it wasn’t worth the effort. The most powerful televised images from the Vietnam War are forever burned into the memory of millions who saw them. These images include everything from a young girl running from a napalm bombing mission as her clothes are literally burned from her body, to a Viet Cong suspect being shot dead in the head at point blank range. In addition, during the Vietnam War, the casualty numbers were made public every night and were even accompanied by the site of body bags as they were loaded onto planes. The sight of body bags on TV is all but considered anti-American propaganda now. It goes without saying these visual symbols of the actual human cost of war had a negative effect that served to harm the government’s flimsy case for war, along with increasing the anti-war movement that was directly responsible for not only bringing the war to an end, but to ending the political career of Pres. Lyndon Johnson. These type of disturbing visual images have just as much impact, if not more, than dramatic violence that is fake, using actors, special effects and fake blood. And yet, at the same time, images of war are often not nearly as extreme or violent as the images shown on crime shows. If exposure of the horrors of war can be said to lead to a peace movement, then why does the media continue to challenge censorship against images that are increasingly proven to produce aggressive behaviour while engaging in self-censorship of violence that has the opposite effect? Images such as were regularly shown on television during the Vietnam War produce the effect of people challenging their government. 4. Collusion Between Government and Media in Censoring the Iraq War. Obviously, the government learned its lesson from the Vietnam War, and the changing face of media regulation only served to help along its cause. The impressions transmitted during the Vietnam War are a huge contrast to those broadcast by most of the mainstream western media during each of the Gulf Wars. The images of missiles flying towards their targets with precise accuracy appeared more similar to video games or action movies than as images of actual people dying violence. The war that most in the west saw was sterile and almost bloodless. Partially this censorship of the reality of war is due to concern over violence and partially it is due to ratings competition. While fake blood boosts ratings, bloody faces of dead soldiers rarely serve to accomplish the same thing. Al Jazeera, the Arabic television broadcasting nation, is not bound by the same laws of censorship as most western broadcasters, and as such had been highly praised throughout the rest of the world for providing a far more realistic and even a more balanced approach to what has been taking place there the last five years. Al Jazeera state that truth is their driving force and that being clear and open will show their motives to be pure. This claim is also make stronger by the kind of code of ethics that includes one particular commandment that, were it to be repeated in an ethics codes of most western media companies, would be little more than a mean joke at the public’s expense: “Distinguish between news material, opinion and analysis to avoid the pitfalls of speculation and propaganda” (Miles, 2005, p. 324). It is this loyalty to a code of ethics rather than a cozy relationship with through embedding with the government that allows Al Jazeera to hold the high public opinion it does outside the west, regardless of whether they always live up to it. As just one instance of the different approaches taken by the western and non-western media to covering the war and how censorship is used to decide public opinion while strengthening government policy, consider the coverage given to Ali Ismaeel Abbas, a 12-year-old Iraqi boy who lost every member of his family, including his mother who was pregnant with another sibling when their home was destroyed by a missile. Orphaned, left without arms and burned over most of his body, Ali is more a typical victim of the American invasion than the feared terrorist suspects that are supposedly the target. His story was wide reported by media throughout the world. His terrible ordeal even found its way into debate in British Parliament. In the US, however, Ali is all but unknown because the media was too busy contributing to the phony story of the heroism of Pvt. Jessica Lynch (Allan & Zelizer 2004). Lynch’s story is anything but typical; making matters worse is that it was almost entirely made up by the Defense Department without even an attempt by the media to make sure the story they were reporting was what really happened. Censorship is not always simply a case of replacing one important story in favor of another. The worst examples of censorship in western media are often due to the influence of ratings and the pursuit of profits. Above all else, it must be remembered the western media is in the business of entertainment and that even includes news coverage. While networks like Al Jazeera may lead off their newscasts every day with coverage of another suicide bombing of the deaths of dozens from a misfired American rocket, the American media often becomes obssessed with reporting stories about celebrity scandals or crime. It is not unusual for the top story of the day on non-western media to be something along the lines of a U.S. marine allegedly shooting an unarmed Iraqi man in the head inside a mosque on the same day that American television is devoting hour after hour of coverage to the death of a nude model or the trial of a ex-football player. What is the effect of this kind of censorship of a much larger truth affecting far more of the population? An editorial in the New York Times claimed "If we had all known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry” (Pilger 2005). The basic message of this statement is that the invasion of Iraq would not have been so easily accepted by the population had journalists only stuck by their contract with the public to hold the government accountable instead of betray their job by accepting and repeating the lies of the politicians responsible. A later report on Iraqi causalities estimates that far more civilians have been killed than the official number released by the US government would indicate (Kirkwood-Tucker 2006). Because of the enormous disparity between the official number and the new figure, the report was either ignored or pronounced untrue by the US. The coverage of the war in Iraq often seems like just another a show that is like any other when channel surfs between the dramas and movies being shown on other stations. Since the violence is presented in such a sanitized way, the blurring distinction between an actor bleeding fake blood and a real soldier bleeding real blood is becoming hard and harder to tell apart. The heroism and sacrifice of the troops are provided to make the overall conviction that if you don’t support the policies then you don’t support the soldiers and if you don’t support the soldiers, then you must support the terrorists. Meanwhile, the more likely Iraqi casualties are judged to be nothing but an unfortunate side effect of protecting the security of one’s own country. The media has been historically charged with the duty of providing the truth; the public has fought over centuries for the right to demand the truth from their government. It is in the nature of governments to hide and fabricate and keep; it should not be in the nature of the press. As the coverage during the Vietnam War proved, if the media would do their job and reveal the actual human cost by broadcasting only images as violent as they broadcast nightly on their television shows or movies, the anti-war faction in America particularly would probably be much more forceful. Because the media companies who provide most of the news that people get, including the news of war in the Middle East, have consistently proven themselves more than willing to censor the darker truths of war, anyone watching them can expect to gain very little understanding of the events taking place that are particularly disadvantageous to the ruling party that initiated the war. Almost every non-English speaking country routinely presents images involved with the Iraq war that is far more violent and gruesome than is show on American television. The mainstream media in the US also bears responsibility along with the government for creating the false portrayal of events that lead to the mindset that if soldiers return home despite the mission having been publicly proclaimed by the President to already be “accomplished” that Iraq will collapse into a state of anarchy and civil war. The images that are presented on most American news shows betray the actual truth that a state of anarchy and civil war not only already exists in Iraq, but has existed there for some time. The censorship involved in this area is a different type from the typical conception of censorship. While many cry out either for or against the censoring of offensive images portrayed by actors in dramatic recreations, the actual damaging censorship is being willfully undertaken by the media companies much to the delight of the government. With the media either holding back the truth of what is happening in Iraq or misrepresenting the fact, the censorship that is taking place with the complicit approval of the government and the public is proving to be far more damaging than either representations of violence or the censorship of them. The proof of the danger of this type of censorship can be shown by comparing the coverage in America with the coverage of the war in England. Most American media outlets have had a decidedly pro-war bias. The news coverage in the early days of the war often verged on the ridiculous with news anchors giving glowing reports of the effectiveness of US bombing missions. Meanwhile, mainstream reporters constantly were scooped by the alternative press in uncovering such less pleasant effects of the mission as the torture at Abu Ghraib prison and the death by friendly fire of a famous football player who gave up millions to enlist. Rarely seen on American television are the protestors against the war effort, despite the fact that they have been quite vocal and hardly a small minority since even before the invasion. Probably the worst type of censorship in recent memory was when the major networks in America all turned down money in exchange for a series of anti-war commercials featuring various celebrities. By contrast, the public opinion on the war among British citizens underwent a noticeable change once large anti-war demonstrations that took place across the country were aired on television. 5. Conclusion. This lack of media oversight and the dangerous symptom of self-censorship in all its forms might well be considered a natural offshoot of the rush toward capitalist globalisation where the media has become a reliable a tool of the government to be utilised for control of the masses. There used to be an ugly name for that sort of cozy relationship between the government and the media: communism. It is certainly ironic that the two forces that joined together to create a war of propaganda against the communist ideology are now engaged in exactly the same kind of relationship that was condemned as anti-democratic. Censorship is no longer an issue that addresses protecting the young and innocent. In fact, the media seems determined to produce a race of overly aggressive warmongers who don’t have the ability to settle their differences without resorting to the kind of violence glamourised on television. Censorship is now about the opposite effect; it is the self-censorship of a media that holds back coverage of actual violence because the evidence is high suggestive it does have effects on viewers. While the media wasted no effort to provide reports from the front featuring interviews with soldiers asserting things are going well in Iraq and that their mission is to keep democracy safe in the world, the only alternative viewpoints were given by well-dressed analysts far away from the battlefields who engaged in discussion and debates. While censorship of even cartoon violence is proposed by those who see danger lurking in every television signal, hardly anybody seems concerned over the effects of collusion between the government and the media in censoring the one kind of violence that has been proven to have positive effects on viewers. This censorship is particularly damaging because it can be so subtle as to go unnoticed, such as strict bans on what American government officials can be asked during press conferences, or the unceremonious dismissal of journalists who dare to break these rules. The net effect has of this type of censorship has been that a majority of western views have had their views of the issue at the heart of the current conflict in the Middle East shaped by a media seemingly bent on tailoring their reports to fit governmental policies rather than acting in their customary role as a policing force. References Allan, S. & Zelizer, B. (Eds.). 2004. Reporting War: Journalism in Wartime. New York: Routledge. Chaffee, Steven H., George Gerbner, Beatrix A. Hamburgh, Chester M. Pierce, Eli A. Rebinstein, Alberta E. Siegel, and Jerome L. Singer. "Defending the Undefendable." Society Sept.-Oct. 1984: 30-36. Chomsky, N. 1989. Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies. Boston: South End Press. Kirkwood-Tucker, T. F. 2006. From the Classroom to the Battlefield: A National Guardsman Talks about His Experience in Iraq. Social Education, 70(2), 99+ Klapper, J. 1960. The Effects of Mass Communication. 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