PROOF Contents List of Figures and Tables ix Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 1 Media Power: A Radical View 5 1 Media effects 10 2 Media power 16 3 For a new analytical framework 20 4 The sources of power: the image and the arena 25 5 A four-dimensional definition 31 6 Two case studies 33 7 Looking for media effects 38 2 Power over the Agenda 47 1 ‘Agending’ Kosovo 53 1.1 The beginning: Kosovo in 1992 58 1.2 The creation of a visual link with Bosnia: Kosovo in 1993 61 1.3 Climbing the agenda: Kosovo between 1997 and 1998 63 2 ‘Agending’ Afghanistan 65 2.1 Building salience 66 2.2 Building narratives 71 3 Comparison and conclusions 76 3 Power over the Process 80 1 Real-time Kosovo 82 2 Real-time Afghanistan 92 3 Comparison and conclusions 96 4 Power over the Channel 99 1 Media Diplomacy in Kosovo 101 1.1 The level of the actor 102 1.2 The level of the interaction 107 vii PROOF viii Contents 2 Media Diplomacy in Afghanistan 113 2.1 The level of the actor 114 2.2 The level of the interaction 118 3 Comparison and conclusions 123 5 Power over the Instruments 126 1 Kosovo’s Semiotic War 128 1.1 The air strikes 132 2 Afghanistan’s Semiotic War 146 2.1 Operation Enduring Freedom 149 3 Comparison and conclusions 160 6 Conclusions 163 1 Media power clarified 165 1.1 The medium and the system 167 1.2 Narratives, framing, and the image 169 1.3 Release of sensitive information 173 1.4 The arena 175 2 Implications for warfare 176 2.1 Mediated perceptions, analogies, and practices 178 2.2 Mediated interaction 181 3 What’s next 182 Notes 185 Bibliography 188 Index 216 PROOF 1 Media Power: A Radical View Even though they are recognized as being among the most impor- tant agents of contemporary societies (see Debord, 1967; Baudrillard, 1981; Harvey, 1990), the media have rarely been investigated as an agent contributing to the transformation of war.∗ That a transforma- tion has occurred seems to be confirmed by the constellation of labels that have been used to define contemporary conflict: it has been called a war that is ‘of the third kind’ (Holsti, 1996), ‘postmodern’ (Gray, 1997), ‘without identity’ (Laïdi, 1998), ‘new’ (Kaldor, 1999; Shaw, 2005), ‘virtual’ (Ignatieff, 2001), ‘virtuous’ (Der Derian, 2001), ‘humane’ (Coker, 2001), and even a form of ‘spectator-sport’ (McInnes, 2002). Besides the nuances differentiating each scholar’s view, contemporary conflict and warfare have been invariably connected to several recur- rent elements: globalization; the decline of the state; the emergence of transnational relations, both cultural and economic; late capitalism; post-industrialism; the end of ideologies and metaphysics; post-heroism; and the rise of the ‘society of spectacle’ and the information age.1 Only Der Derian and Shaw recognize an active role of the media in defining the new nature of the Western way of war. Der Derian’s ‘virtuous war’ is the result of a new alliance of the military–industrial– media–entertainment network. Moreover, it is characterized by the production of a new configuration of power in which ‘made-for-TV wars and Hollywood war movies blur, military war games and com- puter video games blend, mock disasters and real accidents collide’ (Der Derian, 2001, p. xi). At the heart of a ‘virtuous war’ is the technical capability and ethical imperative to threaten and, if necessary, actualize violence from a distance, with no or minimal casualties. Shaw (2000, 2005) argues that Western warfare changed after the Vietnam War when it became clear that it is necessary to legitimize a military intervention 5 PROOF 6 Media Power and the Transformation of War in the eyes of the public in order to win it. War, he explains, is nowa- days fought in a context of global surveillance, where ‘national publics take notice of what allied governments and public think, as well as of a broader international official and public opinion’ (Shaw, 2005, p. 75). As a consequence, war ‘must be strictly time-limited’ (ibid., p. 76); ‘must, above all, minimize casualties to Western troops’ (ibid., p. 79); ‘should rely heavily on airpower and look to others – as far as possible – to take risks on the ground’ (ibid., p. 81); must kill the enemy ‘efficiently, quickly, and discreetly’ (ibid., p. 82); must minimize civilian casualties (ibid., p. 84); must ‘rely on “precision” weaponry’ (ibid., p. 87); must hide suffering and death (ibid., p. 88); and must have media manage- ment at its core because ‘it maintains the narratives that explain the images of war’ (ibid., p. 92). Holsti, Kaldor, and Laïdi, on the other hand, do not turn to the media at all to better understand the new wars. In the case of Gray, Coker, McInnes, and Ignatieff, the media are treated as channels of communi- cation or spaces of war representation rather than as agents or factors shaping contemporary conflict. According to Gray, two of the aspects of contemporary war are related to the media: (1) the increase in human communication which, in turn, increases international networking and changes the nature of local conflicts as well as potentialities for peace; and (2) the centrality of machines, TV satellites included, in war fight- ing and information control. Ignatieff (2001) claims that the virtual war, which takes place on television screens and at a distance, emerged because it promises to restore war to its place as the continuation of pol- itics by other means. The reality of war is, in fact, blurred by the lexicon of ‘humanitarian action’ and ‘coercive diplomacy’, as well as by the use of precision weaponry for destruction. McInnes (2002) focuses instead on the nature of the enemy which has changed in contemporary con- flicts. Indeed, he claims that wars are no longer fought against another state but rather against the regime or government of a state. The result is that we observe war from a distance, as if it is a show, and we experience it as if we are sport spectators. By combining the ideas developed by Coker and Laïdi, Hammond (2007) explains the specific role of the media in postmodern conflict as a reaction to the ‘crisis of meaning’ that Western societies have been experiencing since the end of the Cold War and which coincides with a search for meaning that is ultimately destined to failure. As a result, humanitarian interventions as well as the ‘War on Terror’ and culture wars are used to produce meaning in order to set the political agenda. This in turn has led to a heightened emphasis on images, spectacle, PROOF Media Power: A Radical View 7 and media representation (Hammond, 2007, p. 11); has favored the media’s narrative in many contemporary conflicts, for example, in the Balkans; and has exacerbated a preoccupation with images and the representation of war in all recent military interventions. With a very similar argument, Michalski and Gow (2007) underline how war narratives are constructed and shaped through the charac- ter of ‘moving-image media’. They argue that the image itself and its consumption are salient in shaping and defining the interpretation and understanding of a conflict with respect to its legitimization. The possi- ble meaning of war is limited by the discursive possibility of the moving image, which, at the same time, becomes a potential source of sense and a weapon. ‘The image is a “blunt” instrument’, they argue (Michalski & Gow, 2007, p. 222), and its impact is difficult to control, even when it is part of a propagandistic design. War legitimacy, indeed, is affected not only by intentional attempts to control information and shape public opinion, but also by unintentional effects due to the simple diffusion of images, no matter if they are managed or not. Thus, the media, which are structured by their dependence on the image, can challenge the nar- ratives of the political elites and participate in the construction of war legitimization. Arguably, influential to all of the most recent studies is the notion of ‘mediatization’ as formulated by Mazzoleni and Schulz (1999), Jansson (2002), Schulz (2004), Hjarvard (2004), and Strömbäck (2008) who write of ‘a process through which core elements of a social or cultural activity (like work, leisure, play etc.) assume media form’ (Hjarvard, 2004, p. 48). Furthermore, most of the arguments discussed above are indebted to the works of so-called ‘postmodernist’ scholars like Virilio and Baudrillard (1981). The latter characterizes postmodernity as the age when, in a complete reversal of modernist thinking, images, appear- ances, and signs become more important than material or objective values. According to him, it is the mass media that transfigure real- ity into simulation through a continuous semiotic process: on the one hand, the media segment, fragment, and transform the world into suc- cessive signs while, on the other hand, we consume, interpret, and experience not the ‘real’ world, but just the signs of it. In this radical analysis of the epistemological effects of the media, Baudrillard argues that events are ultimately transformed into ‘nonevents’: media simula- tion prevails over the ground-level event and causes events not to take place. Baudrillard uses contemporary conflict as an example of this pro- cess when he provocatively claims that the Gulf War in 1991 did not actually happen (Baudrillard, 1991). Moreover, he also argues that the PROOF 8 Media Power and the Transformation of War prevalence of simulation has put the credibility of war, and therefore its social function, under question. According to Baudrillard, after 1945 war passed from being ‘hot’ to ‘cold’, and finally ‘dead’, because it is con- ducted according to the media model, by annihilating the ‘other’, the enemy, at a distance so that we only have technologically mediated and ‘clean’ relations, while any dual or personal relation is missing.