Peter Young & Peter Jesser
The Media and the Military: From the Crimea to Desert Strike.
Melbourne: Macmillan Press, 1997.
ISBN 0 7329 4436 8 (hb) 0 7329 4435 (pb)

Uploaded on 29 May 1998

The mutual contempt that the military and the media have for each other would always make for interesting reading. It is the sitcom I always look for on American TV but never find! Peter Young and Peter Jesser’s book on the two protagonists makes even better reading since it is riddled with so many dramatic stories and events. But this is hardly laughing matter. The book is an exhaustive history of this murderous antagonism. The writers have assembled some of the freshest materials coming from a wide range of sources not least of all from the Press Corp itself to refresh our minds of the contemptible miscarriage of civilian-military relations in living memory. If nothing else the book is an excellent look at the two institutions locked in combat, questioning the myths, rituals and culture of war and its reporting.

The result is a well balanced though hardly insightful discussion of these relations. For a long time, until Vietnam, we never bothered to question the social obligation of war. One simply went to war because the state was at war. War was all inclusive not because the number of deaths were bearable or the ‘almost unbelievable propaganda’, but because ‘the citizen’s obligation were taken for granted’, the authors tell us. True enough. Obligations of war took a central place in our notions of civilisation and dignity. But in the world in which money is everything, and power comes through the barrel of the gun in association with access to the credit of the bank, this moralistic tinge is suspect in the era of vicious materialism.

For the casual reader the 300 pages make for fascinating reading. The narrative covers the almost 200 year story of war journalism’s relationship with the military establishment. With each of the more recent dramatic platforms of war (Vietnam, The Gulf War, Grenada, Panama and Somalia) described in flowing detail, we move from page to page with effortless complicity.

The opening chapter ‘The Changed Nature of War and the Duties of the Citizen in Time of War’, is an idealist’s perspective of the history of war and its reporting. The authors‚ discussion of the changed nature of war and the basic concept of the social contract, with Lockean and Hobbesian variables, suggests a premise forgone with conclusions: that we use the media to make references and allusions about the nature of military conflicts that suggest social complicity in the undertaking of war. This veritable catalogue of military-media misadventure is hardly earth shattering in what it unfolds.
To any discerning social critic the media text does not ever signify ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ but rather remains a comment on ‘the real’. The war correspondent is twice removed from the centre of ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ because they can only represent that which is already represented by war: the complicity of ideology and power. Not questioning this assumes that information is suppressed through the workings of the economic rationalist ideology and that given a ‘balanced’ view of the military in the reporting of war , this complicity will be revealed.

Finally, to suggest that the answer lies in the need for the ‘public [to] insist on a media able to tackle the military head on’ is fallacious. What the book does is to direct our attention to the essentialist, given and hegemonic perspectives of war justifying the nature of the conflict. Without questioning the role of the media in the hegemonic complex the book fails to examine the nature of cultural discourse and its effort to study the functioning of ideology in the media and society. However, even if the truth about war mongering will never be revealed, inquiring into it, as is done by the media, with its foibles, must continue so that we may never again fall prey to its constructed truth. And for this the book is immensely important.

Martin Mhando,
Murdoch University