Journalism in the New World order: Ch. 4 TV Wars, the Audience and the Public (original) (raw)

2002, Journalism in the New World Order, Volume 2

The availability of television news from distant places in a few seconds represents just a brief period of media history, but it may still be difficult to envisage how people responded to war in times prior to television. For instance, Ignatieff (1998) notes that one hundred and fifty years after Jean-Henri Dunant got his initial shock at seeing dead and dying soldiers left in the mud at Solferino (in 1859), warfare has changed beyond recognition. Dunant went on to found the Red Cross on the basis of the horror that he saw on that battlefield. For one hundred years, the ICRC (Red Cross) and other humanitarian organizations carried out their work on those battlefields with only remote connections to the general publics around the world. During the last 50 years, however, massacres have become a regular staple in television news. We have all seen them. Soldiers seem to be younger than they were. They do not march in neat ranks. And what we have come to recognize is that, contrary to what was often said during the Gulf war and before, it is not truth that is the first casualty of war, but humanity. Something comes before deception, namely, that which lies can serve to hide. The death of human beings and the way they die runs prior to the reporting of death and dying – at least for most people outside the news profession. And that order of things has not changed.