PRESS, WAR, AND POST-WAR

The way conflict is reported is somewhat abruptly coming under scrutiny again, with the attention of the Western wire service and broadcast media riveted on the Boston bombings. There is an entire storyline - narrative if you will - that is being built up around this event, and this is being done by interviewing literally the grandmother, the aunt, and girlfriend etc., of the suspects.

The other aspect is the depth and width of the coverage. The story is consuming air time 24/7 on the world news channels.

The world overkill was meant exactly for such a phenomenon, but it is important to ask what the media seeks to accomplish by framing the narrative in this way. It is known that governments in the West quite often work with the media - and Hollywood -- to build up a certain consensus of perceptions on ongoing conflicts.

The media narrative now being built up in the West, particularly in the U.S after the bombings, scarcely takes niceties into consideration. There is ample incidence of racial stereotyping, and profiling - but that does not seem to bother anybody in the primary task of keeping the story alive.

Conflicts are not reported exactly in this fashion in this part of the world. When there was the long running armed campaign against the LTTE, there was hardly any triumphalism in the media, though curiously it is often a word that is bandied about by the regime's detractors after the war, to attack the leadership. There was however, never in this country this kind of extended milking of one story - or a single episode - for maximum TV exposure, as is now happening with the Boston incident.

On the contrary the media here was during the war, replete with commentary on how we should negotiate with the terrorists! This shows of course that there is probably a greater degree of genuine freedom of expression in our countries, but let that pass. But it is important that the post conflict role of the media comes under the crosshairs, and it was a good thing that a SAARC conference was held these past few days in Colombo on the role of the media in conflict resolution.

Many of the speakers at these sessions were compelled to dwell on the subject of the negative inputs that ensue from media coverage that uses the common tactics of propaganda, for the advantage of one party in the conflict.

Of course nobody can argue that a good deal of the coverage of the Boston bombings these days is also for the most part propaganda campaigns on behalf of the U.S military establishment. The U.S can go by any kind of media agenda that the elite of that country want, but it is a different story here.

The propaganda is often against the state here in our country - and therefore the shoe is on the other foot. The people have to guard against campaigns of disinformation and often it is a matter of who wins the media war, as opposed to who wins the war in the theatre of combat. Regimes that are up against formidable propaganda arms often controlled by forces outside the country, are risking being pigeonholed in the international community, so called, for instance, for no fault of their own.

Sometimes it seems that precious little can be done about this type of blatant hijacking of the media agenda for partisan and even subversive purposes. There does not appear to be a ready answer either to these conundrums, except of course for individual media practitioners to keep the faith. Happily, there is lot that genuinely conscientious and authentically independent media practitioners can do on their own.

The true media heroes of our day and age are those who do not mind being vilified, as long as they can in good conscience say that they are working in the interests of the country. That means often times supporting the regime, particularly in a post-conflict phase. There is merit in that, particularly when the rest of the media has been hijacked by big money and vested - often foreign - interests. The individual media practitioner is in one sense, the lone saviour in such a lopsided media milieu.