War reporting and technology

It could be argued that war coverage has become as much a part of eCulture as other forms of ‘entertainment'. The State and Media have a close alignment in managing what is reported on war. “Reality” television has become one of the most popular forms of entertainment, so programmers and networks play on the consumer’s desire for this entertainment by presenting war as a part of ‘reality television/news’.

Network news stations give their audience a small snippet of what is going on in the war, it is an edited and mediated presentation. Audiences never see the full picture; images are taken from a camera to a TV set, so the reporting of war becomes a reality viewed through small moments in time. Sometimes the footage is live or perceived to be live but taken hours before. Embedded journalists have been sent to report on the war in Iraq, but everything they see and hear cannot be shown in the space of a half hour news program and much of the information is highly confidential. What programmers tend to do is cut filming in a particular way to show support for the American soldiers and hide the ‘reality’ of what is actually going on at the army camps in Iraq. The media limit what information they choose to show to raise interest in the population, to give people a ‘taste’ of what is going on in a packaged form of entertainment.

The reporting of war has become a form of entertainment; we have no true idea of what war is until we are actually there on the battlefield. Baudrillard’s theory of hyper-reality can be applied to this reportage. According to Baudrillard we start feeding off the hyper-real, what we see through the footage of the war becomes our hyper-real idea of what the war is. People see images of death, decay and destruction from the war and claim it to be like “something from the movies”. For the majority of western society our only encounters and knowledge of war is drawn from Hollywood films and the occasional edited news report. Without ever having a true encounter of war, what we know war to be is a hyper-reality.

By using reality style media it becomes re-embodied; because the genre is reportage we understand it to be real, but we also know that it is made from technology so it is therefore hyper-real, disembodied. There is no longer a human behind the camera it is now cameras attached to technology. Instead of it being something we can represent it becomes something we can structure to represent. For example the introduction of the Predator in the Gulf war meant that man no longer needed to be at the scene for combat to take place. The predator is a windowless airplane that is constantly streaming footage of the areas it flies over back to its base (Nevada), it is also equipped with hellfire missiles. This means that the assassination of a suspected Iraqi terrorist could be completed with the touch of a button million miles away. The killer could literally walk away without a drop of blood on their hands. For an account of the Predators hits and misses look at Jordan Crandall’s Unmanned: embedded reporters, predator drones and armed perception. Technology in war has given man a complete separation from being in the field, yet their control and command over technology is still needed.