Conflict Coverage and Conflict Escalation

Though still existent traditional state propaganda as characteristic during the World Wars (see Lasswell, 1927; Knightly, 1975; and chapters 2 and 4 of this volume) has been partly delegated to professional PR agencies in recent conflicts (Kunczik, 1990). During both the Gulf War (MacAlthur, 1992) and the Bosnia conflict (Beham. 1996), the role of PR agencies became so massive, and filters used to sort out virtual PR reality from real facts so few, that it became extremely difficult to assess the situation without knowing what the PR firms had transmitted. But this was only a first step in what may be called the privatization of propaganda (Luostarinen & Kempf, 2(00). During the Bosnia conflict, journalists themselves deliberately threw away professional rules and standards of truth in the name of a moral enterprise 'that is aware of its responsibilities; and will not stand neutrally between good and evil, right and wrong, the victim and the oppressor' (Bell, 1997). As one of the results of the post-Cold War military conflicts, journalists have become aware that the media do not just report about war and peace, but they play an active part in the game. As a reaction to this insight, a new school of war reporting is taking over the media world, which BBC correspondent Martin Bell (1997) calls the Journalism of Attachment. This Journalism of Attachment says that reporters cannot remain detached or neutral in the face of modern evils like genocide in Bosnia, but that journalists have to take side with the victims and demand that something must be done. So far, the Journalism of Attachment sounds like a worthy appeal for concerned reporting and seems to share the same values as Peace Journalism. But the problem with Journalism of Attachment is that it has no vision of constructive conflict transformation and no analysis of the political and social roots of wars. Journalism of Attachment depicts war as an exclUSively moral struggle in which Right fights Wrong. As journalists appoint themselves judges of who is good or evil in the world, and as they place moral pressure on the international community to take sides, the Journalism of Attachment replaces the rules of journalism with the rules of propaganda. The coverage of the Bosnia and Kosovo conWcts is full of examples of how journalists served their moral impetus by means of information control and fabrication of news (see chapter 13 below),