The Journalist's Helmet In War

The media does not in today's society of television/internet spectacle record and reflect on the wars taking place in the world. The media rather seeks to draw out the war, to expand the war-torn territory, sometimes in very concrete ways. We have all seen the journalist wearing a helmet when broadcasting from a war-torn region: this helmet indicates not that the journalist is in a dangerous area and needs a helmet to protect his/her life, but rather that he/she is in a place neighboring the conflict, yet seeks to draw out the conflict towards him/her by confusing one of the warring parties into thinking that the journalist could be a soldier from the other side, and hence must be shot at, or at least confronted. The helmet casts the journalist as if he could himself/herself be an “enemy soldier,” which is how the journalist poses and performs to make the story of war more exciting through a new narrative angle, or a new twist, risking for the sake of the spectacle his/her very life, such being the demand for extreme spectacle today.

We have come to face the reality that war itself may be too “unexciting” and “non-extreme” a content for viewers because it is waged around the world so much, and hence the need for war to be made to seem even more ruthless and animated by an even more ambitious project of taking over other territories. The media encourages the warring parties, it becomes a leading factor in why war goes on: it is not that the “media becomes the story” as is claimed by news channels when a journalist gets attacked, but rather that the “story becomes a media event,” with even more news focus, with ironically even more journalists on the scene where journalists are getting shot, only present there acting as fodder for the war's shooters.

Then why does the media seem legitimate to us if it plays a role in the perpetuation of war? Because, in another more visible role, the media serves as the representative of the ethical spectator who himself/herself cannot be in the scene of war when the violence has temporarily subsided. The media is legitimate because it plays the role of a neutral party after a certain narrative twist in which it donned its war-helmet has ended. The journalist now seeks to count and report the casualties in the aftermath, and in the eyes of an ethical subject who is watching this on television, it feels ethically right for a soldier's life to end with the image of a neutral figure of the journalist the last thing that they saw in this life, or with the figure of the neutral media the first presence in the deadly scene. Again, it is not for the daily function of its formal reporting on war which gives media its legitimacy, but rather its human sensitivity beneath the formality, which one always seeks to see when watching a news broadcast, which makes it seem today like an accurate representative for an ethical person in war-torn regions.