War Journalism and Propaganda - The embedded deceit of Oedipus - a podcast by Nav. C with Co-Host Nav.M

War zones since the early 2000s have challenged the core principles of modern journalism and prompted a reexamination of the role of war journalism during violent conflict. In recent years, the esteemed values within journalism such as objectivity and detachment which aimed to create a balanced coverage of victims and aggressors alike, have been downgraded by many media commentators
This episode briefly explores the history of conflict coverage by focusing on two key aspects; The use of propaganda in war journalism and a more recent concept called embedded journalism. Embedded journalism refers to news reporters being attached to military units during armed conflicts. From the media perspective, the privileged access offered by embedding, creates a standard of openness in journalism, helping to appraise the public of military action in foreign wars. There is also a strong willingness by the military to maintain an embedded program because of the potential for garnering public support. Nevertheless, it remains completely subservient to the operational objectives of the military and thus its scope is narrowed. This has led to accusations of one-sided reporting because it concentrates on state and military matters. Since its full scale introduction in the 2003 Iraq war, the program has been dogged by questions of impartiality. How can a journalist who lives, travels and relies on military protection be claim to be unbiased in their reporting? which ultimately calls into question the reporter’s objectivity.
Warfare has a long history of requiring the backing of public support, and great effort is involved to shape public opinion and convince domestic populations to accept the actions of their governments in a given conflict. As such, the visual media’s unique power of influence also makes them more likely to deploy propaganda techniques during military conflicts. Equally, warring parties resort to even greater effort to influence, steer, and control the distribution of visual images and journalist reporting at an international level. For the mass media, war by its very nature is highly newsworthy. War journalism attracts large audiences and engages people, very deeply at an emotional level. The media will often present conflicts as a win-lose scenario in which an idealized, positive ‘self’ defeats the demonized, negative ‘other.’ War journalists are trained to construct news in a simplified narrative form, based on their existing belief systems. Often this is manifested as the evil “un-democratic” antagonist facing off against the virtuous, democratic protagonist. This classic media framing technique is used to exploit cultural and psychological values of news audiences.
How can we evaluate whether the public is truly benefiting from war journalism through the practice of embedded reporting? Because during conflict coverage, there is always an imbalance of shared information between the state and its public, meaning new audiences lose the most.

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