Thursday, September 04, 2008

metrics for balance in journalism - disproportionate warfare and reportage

so whenever someone is killed on one side of a war where each side claims the other is terrorist, or another there's a demand by the other side for balanced reporting.

However, what really constitutes balance? is it number of events, or body count?

certain lobbies exist to make sure every event is balanced by a report of all the events of the other side. However,. recently, sides have complained about "disproportianate responses" in war. However looking at recent press on Georgia and Russia (and Ossetia etc), and older events in Ireland, South Africa, Israel, and many others, one can surely say that asymmetric warfare is carried out just as much in the information domain as in the real world, and not necessarily (ever) in a correlated way between the two domains/worlds. Indeed, one expects since many clashes happen in the edges between the tectonic plates of 1st, 2nd and 3rd world, and that asymmetry in weaponry and information/media power are not simply connected, one might expect to see big seismic shifts between the two ways of shooting your neighbour and shooting your mouth off.

good site for this is cardiff journalism:http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/jomec/research/researchgroups/mediatizedconflict/fundedprojects/index.html> which has great stuff about iraq for example

No comments: