The Role Of Media In War

War is a state of armed conflict between societies. It is generally characterized by extreme collective aggression, destruction, and usually high mortality. The role of the media in conflict is one not ambiguous. This paper will explore the role that media has played in the representation of war. Two writers that have worked on amalgamating media and war are Susan Sontag and Judith Butler. In ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’ (2003), Susan Sontag an American writer and film maker, examines the manner in which war is perceived. She states that war imagery is open to both interpretation and manipulation. Butler a philosopher whose work inspired political philosophy, talks about ones reaction to images of war. Sontag argues that war imagery does

The problem with cameras at that point of time were that they were not portable and had to be lugged around and set up on a tripod. There was so immediacy in photo taking. The same was justified in war photography and in most cases the photos of war were said to be staged. (21 sontag). During the Crimean War, (1853) also known as the Eastern war in Russia, the photographer Roger Fenton who was termed as the first official war photographer was sent to Crimea by the British government in 1855 in order to give a more positive impression or the war. They wanted to counter the printed accounts of the risks that were being faced by thr British soldiers the previous year. From there onwards photography began to affect civilians: more newspapers were bought and pictures of war were discussed with favor. war became an irresistible. Under instructions from the War Office not to photograph the dead, the maimed, or the ill, and precluded from photographing most other subjects by the cumbersome technology of picture-taking, Fenton went about rendering the war as a dignified all-male group outing. (F) With each image requiring a separate chemical preparation in the darkroom and with exposure time as long as fifteen seconds, Fenton could photograph British officers in open-air confabulation or common soldiers tending the cannons only

And this is essential to the moral authority of these images. The signature Vietnam War horror-photograph from 1972, taken by Huynh Cong Ut, of children from a village that has just been doused with American napalm, running down the highway, shrieking with pain, belongs to the realm of photographs that cannot possibly be posed. That there have been so few staged war photographs since the Vietnam War suggests that photographers are being held to a higher standard of journalistic probity. One part of the explanation for this may be that in Vietnam television became the medium for showing images of war, and the photographer now had to compete with the proximity of TV