Disproportionate Power of TV
The LA Times ran an Op-Ed yesterday that addresses a modern aspect of war–how television distorts war.
Frida Ghitis’ article makes the very important point being overlooked in the coverage of the battles in Israel and the greater war on terror, the disproportionate power of moving pictures with sound on the human psyche.
As a former TV news producer, TV news photographer who has stumbled into the world of producing documentaries, the power of moving pictures with sound cannot be overstated.
The easiest stories to tell with video or film are emotional ones, stories with impact images.
Unfortunately, because it is so easy to tell that story, the complex, underlying factual stories are not told.
Ghitis writes:
“The power of the picture to dominate public debate creates enormous incentives to manipulate the media. It can hand victories to the side that positions and fires its weapons from civilian areas and then invites the media to witness the carnage caused by attacks on those weapons. And it punishes the side that invests in civil defense.”
In 4th Generation Warfare to goal is not to beat your opponent in a physical, kinetic war, but convince him to give up by weakening support for the conflict.
4GW is fought primarily in the media battlespace, and a press that is unaware that they are the terrain of battle, a press that is willing to do, as Ghitis says, show footage civillian carnage, but not the use of civillian areas as rocket launching sites is giving one side a terrain advantage.
And when the media gives one side a terrain advantage, they are supporting a side and that is bias.