Gulf war revisited : a Comparative Study of the Gulf War Coverage in American and European Media

Abstract

Experiences from the Gulf War and other post Cold War military conflicts have stimulated an ongoing discussion of the role of the media in modern warfare and conflict situations. Media critics - as the Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung (1995) - have taken the view that the way media operate, reporting on war and violence, they not only serve as catalysts to unleash violence, but are violent in and by themselves.The current discussion among journalists and scholars in media research and peace studies focuses on the question how the media can become vehicles for conflict prevention and constructive, nonviolent, conflict transformation, including the problem of reporting on how to repair war-torn societies - materially, socially and humanly. This proposal of critical peace journalism as an alternative to traditional war reporting is not suggesting that violence should not be reported, or what is reported as facts should not be empirically correct. It stresses the point however, that the form in which they are reported may contribute either to the escalation or to the deescalation of the conflict.Escalating conflicts entail systematic distortions of how the parties in the conflict view themselves, their opponents and impartial third parties who try to mediate in the conflict, how they evaluate their goals and actions etc. The more a society is involved in a conflict the more will its public and its media be susceptible to such distortions.