On War Journalism and its Critics

By Johannes Malmgren

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has put war high on the agenda of world media. Consequently, the state of war journalism is a highly pertinent matter. In this article, common critiques of such journalism, namely, the critique presented by those adhering to so-called peace journalism, will be reviewed.

Coverage of the war in Ukraine has been stifled in Russia by an all-out crackdown on free media. As of today, Russian journalists face the threat of fifteen years of imprisonment if they disregard the bans on reporting aspects of the war in opposition to the Kremlin’s view.

At the end of March this year, Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta, whose chief editor Dmitry Muratov received the Nobel peace prize last year, announced that it would stop publication as an answer to increased state censorship. The last issue contained two blank pages. The Russian free media is thus one of the many victims of the war.

As the war is intensely covered by international news media, critique of war journalism has received renewed relevance. Some critics have charged journalists with failing to avoid parroting propaganda; others have criticized the war coverage for being disproportionate in comparison with the coverage of other armed conflicts. Some even question war journalism in toto, calling for “peace journalism” in its place. In this article, this latter criticism will be addressed. What peace journalism proponents get right, what they get wrong about news coverage, and why this matters will be discussed.

Photographer Horst Faas in Vietnam, the 1960s. (CC BY 2.0)

The pictures in our heads

Journalist and media critic Walter Lippmann begins his 1922 book Public Opinion by stating that people are aware of much more than they will ever personally experience. For much of our knowledge of the outside world, we rely on media representations. As these representations are something else than direct experience, they give rise to mental images that form what Lippman calls a pseudo-environment. As we navigate our everyday reality, we simultaneously interpret it according to the pseudo-environment we have created.

Wars are fought on many fronts. One dimension of warfare that is attributed with increasing importance is the shaping of how war is perceived by different actors. Accordingly, states and researchers are engaged in trying to understand and master the strategic narratives pursued by conflict actors. The concept of strategic narrative refers to the stories used to win over audiences to a favorable interpretation of the conflict by tying together actions and events by referral around a shared interpretative structure.

Traditionally, Ukrainians are depicted as a “brother nation” to Russians in Russia. As media scientist Irina Khaldarova has shown, the beginning of the Euromaidan and the following Russian annexation of Crimea and war in Eastern Ukraine was followed by a transformation in how Ukrainians were portrayed in Russian television news broadcasts. From then on, reports on Ukraine tended to report on the country in a way evoking associations of Ukrainians to fascism, thereby associating Ukraine with a traditional enemy of Russia. According to Khaldarova, opinion surveys In September 2012 showed that 74 percent of Russians had favorable attitudes toward Ukrainians. By November 2014, after the Euromaidan, the proportion of Russians with a favorable disposition towards Ukrainians had decreased to 28 percent. If we assume that the television broadcasts reflected a wider change in Russian media portrayal of Ukraine, we could reasonably argue that this led to a change in the Lippmannian pseudo-realities of the Russian people, thereby changing their attitude toward Ukraine. The pictures in our heads shape our attitude to the world outside.

Peace and war journalism

Criticism of war journalism has led to the formation of perspectives in journalism studies calling for “peace journalism”, guided by different criteria than mainstream war journalism. According to peace journalism proponents, war coverage adhering to common standards of good journalism, such as simplification, dramatization, and personalization, gives

pre-eminence to a view of conflict as natural and renders resolution by negotiation as unlikely. The war is portrayed as a zero sum contest between two parties, and visible signs of progress such as casualties, material damage, and episodes of violence are in focus. This is to the detriment of coverage of more complex matters such as underlying context and the multipolarity of interests involved in the war. The proponents of peace journalism argue that it is a form of socially responsible journalism with peace as its central value. In contrast to war journalism, peace journalism explicitly sides with the victims of war and pursues an agenda of de-emphasizing aspects of coverage naturalizing armed conflict in favor of the aspects facilitating peace. It could thus be interpreted as a consciously partial form of journalism.

Peace journalism advocates tend to have incisive critiques of the state of war coverage, but on the other hand, their proposed remedies suffer from several shortcomings. The idea of peace journalism assumes a powerful media capable of autonomously shaping audience perceptions of conflict. Yet, the example of the recent crackdown on Russian media should provide a sobering account to those adhering to the conception of the powerful media. The Russian example strikingly captures how the media is a prisoner of external structural and political limitations. Moreover, it is not only in dictatorships that the media is constrained by outside conditions; there is a lot of research showing that media coverage is shaped by structural limitations in democracies as well.

Journalists are guided by the same prejudices, temptations, and limitations as other individuals in the society in which they operate. Thus, as communication scientist Thomas Hanitzsch has argued, “peace journalism” cannot come into being from outside of society but can only emerge in a culture of peace. Peace journalism proponents argue that media depictions of war are distorted, yet it is not evident that the ideals of peace journalism are means by which an undistorted reality could be represented. On the contrary, peace journalism could introduce yet another kind of bias in war reporting.

Concluding remarks

Both proponents and opponents of peace journalism point out that material constraints stand in the way of objective journalism, and thus that there is a structural bias in war journalism. On the other hand, if journalists give in to pursuing biases of their own, such as the bias toward peace, this does not remedy the structural bias. At its worst, consciously partial journalism could pave the way for relativism or become an excuse for the attached war coverage typical of non-democratic countries with far-reaching censorship. How could this double danger of false objectivity and relativism be navigated?

Renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who covered most of the major conflicts of the 20th century, once advised the war correspondent to “limit yourself to what you see and hear. Do not invent and do not suppress.” In some ways, this advice acknowledges that war journalism is inherently subjective, bound to the viewpoint of the reporter, but Gellhorn, at the same time, demands journalists to strive for objectivity and be transparent about their limitations. Perhaps the hallmark of truly great war journalists, such as Gellhorn and Ryszard Kapuczinski, is their radical pursuit of honesty. ♦