News Correspondents As Lacanian Seers Of War

The media-person (or news correspondent) who tags along in an on-the-ground war operation is considered by the soldiers to be some kind of seer of war, able to predict the war's course with expertise, sophistication and prophecy, a prediction which he/she does in his war reporting for the camera. Once the camera turns on, the news correspondent has an intense feeling of awareness of what is going on around him/her, and treats the war with utmost seriousness and problem-solving ability. Soldiers who realize the importance of such a skill-set in their team may enlist the help of a media-person, who typically has years and decades of expertise reporting in wars all over the world, something which the soldiers themselves, ironically, may lack.

Although the media-person seeks for perfect camera-work on the ground, this aspect of his/her part in the war effort is indeed amateurish today, the camera-work often being shaky and too narrow to take in the whole context of war. But curiously enough bad camera-work does not disqualify them from war and war-reporting. The media person's problematic camera-work is compensated for with his/her knowledge, which he/she does not necessarily need to share verbally, with direct commands to the soldiers, but which can be visible in his/her psychology when someone is firing at him/her, his/her bodily behavior/movement when there is gunfire, and the way he/she chooses to interact with his/her “team/unit” when the enemy is further away and there is brief safety. How, we can ask, is the news correspondent ready to engage in war without a weapon of his/her own?

The media-persons are enlisted by the war effort as prophets, akin to ancient “wise men” who saw the war's course, or other things such as “potential war weariness” in the soldiers, before the army's soldier himself/herself saw these future events. The media-person's claims of their neutrality in no way makes them exempt from war, but enables them to be a seer of both sides to a conflict, in order that this knowledge be shared with one particular side over another. When the media-person makes a final analysis report, it contains a lot of original knowledge and conclusions that the army personnel/warlords scrutinize carefully. Hence the media-person may not necessarily be an outsider in the war-effort, but may indirectly, perhaps even without his/her conscious intention, participate in the war-effort. Even if the media organization as a whole may be outside/neutral from the war-effort, the media-person on- the-ground may have agreed to share his/her expertise, or become, in a sense a “model soldier” for the other soldiers on-the-ground, in exchange for good shots for his/her camera.

These news correspondents on-the-ground are Lacanian “subjects-supposed-to-know” for the warlords during a war effort. The news correspondents' analysis is not doubted and not further analyzed, but trusted as a kind of final knowledge on the situation. These media-persons play two roles, in the television and in the army, in order to become these Lacanian analytical subjects-supposed-to-know for warlords as well as for the television viewers around the globe. They can be crucial Lacanian subjects who blend together a television persona with a more aggressive “war driven” attitude, but they need to share their spot more with others with differing analysis regarding the war. The interaction between two news correspondents would be significant today, as would be comparing the two news correspondents' on-the-ground bodily behaviors between different news channels/programs, but not to select a winner and reward his/her abilities with prizes. To get a look at two news correspondents negotiating the gunfire differently while in the same on-the-ground event could indeed reveal how both their statuses as subjects-supposed-to-know is problematic.