Re: <nettime> War profiteers in art (Biennale di Venezia, 2007)

[Ana Peraica <ana.peraica@st.htnet.hr>]

the role of the war reporter that has emancipated indicating a cultural

Well, the text not immediately on that, but...

>> need for the distant trauma in public
> Sometimes it's not so distant.  People in Iraq do watch TV news
> reports about the war going on around them.

Good if they have the electricity! Not quite common for war zones. But, 
reporting within a war serves for the immediate civilian function, but 
war reporting for people that do not "do" anything about the war - but 
only watch it on a daily base (see Sontag: Regarding the pain of others) 
actually turns out only into an adrenaline provoking to the society of 
the spectacle. So the difference is TO WHOM you are reporting: to people 
you save immediately or to those that will just browse channels / or 
walk through an exhibition.

You can simply see the number of CNN public and see how many of people 
do see those news and do nothing about it. And it is indeed a difference 
of the owner of the media for whom you are reporting as it can also make 
much more of damage, becoming a propaganda for getting new elections of 
a single person, for example. As as most of the media is owned by 
interested owners they turn out to propaganda, which is the question FOR 
WHAT purpose.

>> It indeed reminded me of plenty of conferences on war topics in which
>> speakers were "caught in war" for a day, having all kinds of
>> bullet-protection jackets and who had only made troubles to local police
>> that had to cover them up instead of taking care for children, old people
>> and women in danger that would not be able to escape, as these "reporters"
>
> A lot of reporters have been killed in Iraq, and quite a few of them have
> been Iraqis:
>
> http://www.rsf.org/special_iraq_en.php3

Yes, it is sad for any person, but in the amount of people getting 
killed over there that would stay anonymous.

> To get a sense of why some journalists risk their lives to cover wars,
> you could have a look at the BBC documentary "Control Room", about
> Al-Jazeera's coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, perhaps especially
> the part about Al-Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayyoub, who was killed by
> an American air strike on the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, and the
> statement by his widow, in which she implores a gathering of
> journalists to persist in telling the truth about the war.

One question, the same one: has that truth helped to Srebrenica? I am 
sorry for enforcing this issue but it happens now and the media seems to 
be interesting only when the massacre was going on: media has abandoned 
them. I do not expect to be corrected in theory there or numbers of 
killed journalists, no number of those that got killed should ever 
server for another ones to suffer, as that is actually the war logic.  
It is a matter of doing. 

Ana


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