Abstract
The media – whether mainstream press, broadcasting and online services or social media – is still a major source of news about conflicts for the majority of people. They rely on the media to tell them what is going on in the world, select what is important or relevant and exclude the items that are deemed unimportant or unintelligible. The media uses forms of representation and framing to simplify and provide recognized depictions of distant countries, peoples and wars. These are part of the basic operating procedures of media organizations. But do they conceal or exclude more than they explain and do they give an accurate picture of the causes and combatants? Based on 40 years of monitoring, reporting and putting together news programmes on conflicts across the globe, the author seeks to analyse how framing works and the distortions in understanding that it leads to. The author gives his perspective on the five decades of conflict in Angola and the way framing has changed but done little to inform or educate.
The media – whether the mainstream press and broadcasting or the now ubiquitous social media –has been for well over a century and remains the main source of news and information about conflicts and wars. Few people directly witness or have the time or level of interest to research the nature, causes and consequences of conflicts. They rely on the media in all its forms to help them better understand war and why it is waged. Conflicts have a multiplicity of causes – political, social, economic, resource scarcity, demographics, regional and global factors. They vary in their causal weight in different conflicts, which creates huge problems for reporters and editors who have limited resources for reporting, a finite number of column inches, airtime or web space for setting out the story and the need to provide understandable, concise and timely coverage.
With the best will in the world and the most balanced and informed journalists, media outlets cannot ever give a fully accurate and totally balanced account but they can do their best to select the most important facts and present them as clearly and impartially as possible with interpretations based on verified information and clear contextual frameworks. This was something of which I was acutely aware as a monitor and editor at the BBC Monitoring Service during the last decade of the Cold War, and as a producer, documentary maker and news programme editor at the BBC World Service at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the continuation and evolution of old conflicts. Most of these conflicts had been framed as products of the Cold War. They turned into the conflicts of the new, post-Cold War era, alongside the development of new conflicts with complex causes and new modes of violence, which have led to an increase in ‘the atmosphere of fear and our sense of insecurity’ and which, through the prism of the media, ‘draw attention to the pervasiveness and apparent arbitrariness of contemporary violence’(Kaldor, 2006: viii); from the disintegration of government and the fragmentation of the state in Somalia, the resumption of what had been labelled by the media proxy war in Angola, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, to the Rwandan genocide, the Kosovo War, 9/11, the Iraq War, on to the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria and the terrifying rise of Daesh in Iraq and Syria. All conflicts which in one way or another I have been involved as a journalist producing and editing news programmes, as a documentary maker looking at the humanitarian consequences of war or a researcher and writer of academic studies, books and blogs.
What four decades of journalism, research and writing have shown me, with constant reinforcement as each new conflict requires reporting and analysis that people can grasp and which makes sense to them in the contexts in which they receive the news, is that even the most skilled and diligent journalists struggle to encapsulate accurately and with balance the nature and causes of conflict. And not all media outlets are diligent. Many have built-in biases or very set views of what their audiences want and how they expect particular issues, countries or regions of the world to be presented to them. In a world of expanding social media and shrinking numbers of experienced foreign correspondents, the availability of corroborated, reliable and properly researched accounts of war and conflict is in decline at the same time as the flood of news, opinion and unverifiable sources of news and opinion presented as news is expanding. Many sources today are barely disguised forms of propaganda presenting themselves as news providers, such as Fox News, Press TV and Russia Today, the supposedly commercial and independent successors to the overtly state-run and politically-directed media of the Cold War.
Regardless of whether or not a particular media outlet is striving for objectivity and balance and is to be trusted, it works from a set of values. Those values and the cultural, socio-economic and political contexts within which a media organization operates will have an effect on the way it perceives and presents the news, creating frames that develop over time to provide a structure and content for major stories that are intended to guide audiences in understanding an easily digested version of complex conflicts. Every organization consciously or unconsciously develops frames for stories based on the organization’s values, cultural foundations, form of ownership, relationship with the government of the state within it operates and the social, cultural and political norms of the society in which it exists and from which its journalists are drawn. The BBC World Service, for which I worked for 25 years, prides itself on its objectivity and balance, yet in the statements issued by BBC trustees and senior managers on the 80th anniversary of the Service, it was clear that those standards are grounded in explicit sets of values:
Given that even media outlets proclaiming objectivity and accuracy, and which are diligent in their pursuit of these criteria develop frames for stories – frames that are derived from deep-seated values within the organizations and held by the journalists themselves or by the societies in which they live and work and the world view that this engenders, it is important to start this analysis of my experience of reporting conflict with the concept of framing.
Framing: A guide for the audience or selectivity that excludes or obscures awkward complexities?
Staying with the BBC World Service, which I certainly felt as a journalist there and millions around the world perceived to be as objective as a media organization could be, even at the height of the Cold War, it is clear that it had certain frames of reference for its coverage and the writing of news stories and structuring and content of programmes. During the latter decades of the Cold War, it did not openly or consciously, in my experience as a programme maker and then editor, propagandize against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, but it had sets of values that meant that interpretations of human rights, social systems and democracy were very different and that journalists like me based our reporting on broad ideas of respect for human (individual) rights, freedom of speech and freedom of information. These basic frames implicitly guided the choice of stories, the angles from which they were reported and the representations of those involved. There was an implicit acceptance that Western concepts of liberal democracy and free market or mixed economies were the norm; these points were not belaboured but were unstated, core values.
Framing is very important in informing people far away from the conflict zone and is part of a long tradition of presenting images to tell stories. Modern media is more sophisticated than Plato’s simile of the cave, but it still projects to its audience an image of the reality it is reporting – Plato talks of the images people have of the world and sets out a scenario of men imprisoned in a cave who only see shadows of objects and people ‘thrown by the fire on the wall opposite them … so in every way they would believe that the shadows of the objects we mentioned were the whole truth’ (Plato, 2007[c. 380BCE]: 141). People now have innumerable walls and shadows available from all the different genres of the media, but they are still seeing the modern version of Plato’s shadows. They see the images created and propagated by the media, which may or may not be accurate and undistorted shadows of reality. The finite broadcast time available, web or page space limit the breadth and depth of reporting a subject and so selection takes place – on the basis of the values and the frames held or developed by the editors/journalists involved. These will vary in their skill, integrity and desire to give as truthful and comprehensive an account as possible. They will also have views on what interests their audiences and what their audiences will understand. These crucially affect the selection of stories to be covered, depth and angle of coverage and representation of those involved.
Selection means leaving some things out, compressing others and rarely being in the position to give sufficient context to make stories as fully comprehensible as responsible journalists would like – so with the Palestine conflict, for example, there would be news reports or even features that can go little beyond event–response–retaliation and do not provide the sufficient historical or humanitarian context necessary to make full sense of events. It is impossible within a 45-second news story or even a 3-minute interview to encapsulate the nature and history of the conflict that has led to the particular incident you are reporting Through selection of stories and angles, the journalist creates frames that exclude aspects of stories and can be distortions, either resulting from deliberate representation of conflicts and their competing sides in certain ways for propaganda purposes or vastly simplified representations that pander to popular beliefs or prejudices or to what editors believe is the level of knowledge and expectation of audiences – such as the way that after the Cold War, in particular, the conflicts that occurred in the former Yugoslavia and most commonly in Africa were rendered as ethnic or tribal ‘as a kind of lazy shorthand for beastly wars of the kind that we had hoped were over’ (Allen and Seaton, 1999: 2) and which could no longer be crammed into the now obsolete Cold War frames. Rather than look at the complex socio-economic, political, demographic and post-colonial factors involved, conflicts could be simplistically, conveniently and misleadingly written off as primeval hatreds derived from ethnicity or tribe, which could also, conveniently, absolve us of the humanitarian necessity to intervene. The framing of conflicts in these ways can be crucial, as it involves ‘the selection of a restricted number of thematically related attributes for inclusion on the media agenda when a particular object is discussed’, and in so doing puts some issues, actors or themes and excludes others, but without greater access to the events and actors themselves, the consumers of media will not generally know what other perspectives or frames may also be relevant (McCombs, 1997: 6).
The media serves to inform in these ways, but also sets broad agendas for what audiences come to think of as the important issues of the day. What appears in the frame helps to set the agenda of which stories are deemed important, what it is about those stories that are of particular importance and what the explanatory factors are for conflicts – in this way, the media
are influential in telling what issues to think about (issue agenda) and also how to think about those issues … the way media cover international events and foreign countries has serious consequences on what the public thinks about the outside world, and – to a degree – on how policy makers shape foreign policy. (Besova and Cooley, 2009: 220, 223)
The development of regularly used frames helps give them salience and over time the political issues that are most salient or accessible in a person’s memory will most strongly influence perceptions of political actors and figures. Mass media can influence the salience of certain issues as perceived by the audience; that is, the ease with which these issues can be retrieved from memory (Scheufele, 2000: 299). As McCombs (2014: 1) emphasizes, ‘for nearly all concerns on the public agenda, ‘citizens deal with a second-hand reality, a reality that is structured by journalists’ reports about these events and situations.’ Through selection, journalists focus our attention and ‘influence our perceptions of what are the most important issues of the day’ (p. 1).
Since the end of the Second World War, some of the dominant global frames have been the following.
The Cold War frame
Between the Second World War and 1990, the Cold War was a broad frame into which stories of conflict could be simply but often misleadingly fitted to enable the media to narrate a story in an established form of discourse. So, for example, the national liberation struggles in southern Africa were often fitted into the Cold War context primarily because of Soviet, Cuban or Chinese support for liberation movements, the adoption by those movements of radical, socialist programmes and the opposition of the West to what was seen as Soviet encroachment in Africa. The US supported the Portuguese militarily, and the West, as a whole, right up to the late 1980s, were economic supporters of apartheid South Africa and effective political supporters of the system for both self-interested reasons of wealth accumulation but also global political and military strategy which put opposition to the Soviet Union and its perceived allies at the top of the agenda. Rarely were the national or regional circumstances examined in detail – although there was a well-developed apartheid frame that demonized the system without justifying armed struggle and a background ethnic or tribal frame for Africa that saw much of politics and certainly conflicts within states that had no clear Cold War angle as the result of primitive tribal hatreds (for a more extensive examination of the way that tribal has become a keyword in framing Africa, see Somerville, 2009: 536–538). They could also be combined with the Cold War frame, developing narratives that demonstrated how the Cold War had taken and escalated local conflicts based on ethnicity or tribe and given them a global element, thereby expanding and prolonging conflicts.
Post-Cold War frames: Tribal, ethnic and humanitarian
The Cold War frame placed most conflicts within the supposedly all-encompassing ideological struggle between competing blocs. But other frames existed too. The Biafran War, which involved the Nigerian government crushing the secessionist bid by the would-be state of Biafra in the Niger Delta, was one conflict which was not framed as part of the Cold War – Britain and the Soviet Union both supported and armed the Federal Nigerian government, while France armed Biafra. The lack of a Cold War frame meant that Biafra was framed by both the humanitarian and tribal frames. It could be simply presented as a ‘tribal’ war between Igbos and the rest of the Nigerian ‘tribes’ – a hangover from the crude and misleading tribal framing of Africa during colonial rule; tribe, a Latin word originally used to describe the uncivilized warring factions in pre-republican Rome, was used to denote supposedly primitive peoples, with different and therefore inferior societal structures and allegedly atavistic and intractable hatreds that led to war (Somerville, 2009: 536). In Nigeria, this ignored the artificial nature of the Nigerian state, cramming together in one unworkable framework polities and peoples whose pre-colonial existence had involved trade, inter-marriage and other forms of non-violent contact between peoples as well as competition for land or resources, but not the existence of a state encompassing them all or an identity that was above community, kingdom, sultanate or cultural/linguistic identities.
Tribal framing was far more simple and pandered to popular prejudices and myths held about ‘primitive’ Africa to present the war as a simple tribal conflict defined by mutual hatred than to try to explain the complex political, economic, colonial and other factors involved. Once the Cold War had ended and the simple and misleading depictions of conflicts around the world could no longer be conveniently made using Cold War frames in which the wars in Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, El Salvador or Nicaragua, to name but a few, became proxy wars prompted and then maintained by the global protagonists, new frames and simple explanations had to be found as modern journalism demanded that stories should be easy to cover and safe to publish, so as not to overtax audiences, drive them away and so lose audience share of advertising income. The advent of 24-hour news channels, constantly updated online news, did nothing to increase the ability to increase the provision of background and context that would help explain stories; instead, the demands of these services with fewer and fewer experienced journalists able to get out and investigate stories led to churnalism, which required fast framing and regular repackaging to feed the gluttonous beast of 24-hour news (Davies, 2009: 114). Combined with the collapse of the Cold War, the changes in the nature, costs and staffing of media organizations made the development of new and simple frames vital for the new journalism. The tribal and ethnic frames would later be joined, post 9/11, by the War on Terror and Fear of Islam frames.
The humanitarian angle of starving children as the victims of evil tribal warlords could be added for extra impact.
Humanitarian frames
In 1984–1985, the humanitarian frame was used to characterize the Ethiopian famine in reporting – notably in the famous but deeply-flawed report by Michael Buerk from Korem that sparked Band Aid and Live Aid. If you watch the report today, it is obvious that, apart from the brief mention in the cue by Julia Somerville, the wars in Eritrea and Tigre do not figure in the narrative as causes of the famine. In order not to detract from the human suffering and to prevent the story becoming an overly complex one for viewers not versed in the affairs of the Horn of Africa and to avoid the consequences of the famine for people being dragged into a Cold War context (because of Soviet support for the Ethiopian military regime), the war and its prime role in turning a drought into a famine is not mentioned and the report is filmed and edited to avoid showing the military materiel and soldiers deployed close to the feeding station at Korem. The humanitarian frame is dominant – it is all about drought, food shortages and famine with passive Ethiopians reliant on white saviours (preferably young and female) from aid agencies. Drought caused local but not national food shortages, but war caused the famine. Ethiopian troops burned crops in the fields in Tigre and Wollo, bombed markets and used food aid as a lure to depopulate the region through resettlement schemes to undercut support for the rebels. Those who have studied the famine closely or who were directly involved in aid efforts have criticized the aid effort that followed Buerk’s broadcast. They argue strongly that the food aid and other support for the Ethiopian government resettlement programmes led to a higher death rate than would have been the case had aid deliveries been better targeted and not allowed to serve Ethiopian government policies – food aid was diverted by the Ethiopian military regime to feed militias fighting the Tigre and Eritrean rebels and was also used to lure people from the region to resettlement camps in order to depopulate Tigre to make counter-insurgency operations easier (De Waal, 1997; Vaux, 2001).
Framing Angola: A personal perspective over four decades
In Angola, the end of the national liberation war after the Portuguese coup/revolution of 1974, led to a civil war lasting until 2002. This was a war about competition for power between competing leaders and movements. It was not primarily about whether they were pro or anti-Soviet, but the framing of the war in the media was, until 1990, dominated by the Cold War. The Cold War intruded upon and distorted the conflict but did not cause it and, after the end of the Cold War, it continued for another 12 years until Jonas Savimbi, leader of the UNITA rebel movement, was killed. This required the imposition of a new frame – which was a mixture of tribal framing and failed state framing. I was closely involved from the early 1980s in monitoring radio broadcasts and editing transcripts for those broadcasts for publication in the BBC Summary of World Broadcasts that dealt with the conflict in southern Africa – whether directly monitoring broadcasts from Radio Moscow in English for Africa, Radio South Africa (the external service of the South African Broadcasting Corporation), Nigeria’s and Ghana’s external radio services and at one stage (working from Malawi), Zimbabwe’s, Zambia’s and South Africa’s domestic radio broadcast, or editing transcripts from Luanda Radio and the UNITA rebel movement’s Voice of the Resistance of the Black Cockerel. From the late 1980s, as an Africa specialist with the News and Current Affairs department of the BBC World Service, I made documentary programmes in southern Africa (including Angola, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe) and edited news programmes covering major developments in the war in Angola – including interviewing Angolan government ministers, UNITA officials, South African politicians and army commanders, Soviet specialists on Africa and leaders from southern African states.
As a specialist on southern Africa’s politics and author of a book on Angola (Somerville, 1986) I approached the conflict as a complex one that derived from the experience of colonialism, the hammering together of different ethnic communities into an artificial colonial state and the effect of the development of three separate liberation movements (each with its own external and mutually antagonistic supporters in the region, in the Soviet Union, China and the United States) which represented different communities not because of any inherent and unavoidable ethnic hatred or competition but because of the way that the repression of opposition to Portuguese colonial rule forced the embryonic movements to build power bases that were localized rather than national and whose reliance on operating in exile exacerbated differences – with the Front for the National Liberation of Angola (FNLA) developing on the basis of peasant grievances against enforced cotton growing in northern Angola and among Angolan exiles from northern Angola in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) emerging from the Mbundu people, mestico (mixed race) and radical white opponents of colonialism in and around the capital Luanda and in exile in Portugal or in Congo-Brazzaville, had a more urban and educated base and included former members of the small Angolan Communist Party. The last movement to form, Jonas Savimbi’s Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), developed around Savimbi’s charismatic figure in the towns of the central Plateau of Angola. They had different support bases, different ideologies and gained different external supporters. Their conflict became one of primacy in the fight for liberation and then after the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa competition for power as independence loomed.
Media coverage of the struggle for liberation in Angola was minimal, until the last months before independence in November 1975 when a major Soviet and Cuban operation to support the MPLA fought off offensives by Zairean, CIA and Chinese backed FNLAS forces and a UNITA column led by South African troops internationalized the war and brought Cubans into conflict with South Africans and the Soviet Union into competition with the United States in Angola.
From them on, with periodic references to the alleged ‘tribal’ differences between the competing movements, Angola was framed as a proxy war between the Cold War superpowers with the added spice of the involvement of the easy to frame apartheid regime in South Africa. This simplistic image was dominant in the media but not in my regular pieces in London-based but African-owned magazines such as New African, Africa and Africa Now. There, I sought to give greater context, a context lacking in most mainstream coverage of the war. Savimbi was styled the Gucci-revolutionary for his stylish military fatigues and safari suits and flamboyant public persona. The right-wing parties and media in the United States and Britain took him up as a Cold War warrior they could do business with. This image was maintained until after the withdrawal of Cuban and South African troops, the fall of the Soviet Union and the peace accord between the MPLA and UNITA. But when UNITA went back to war in 1992 after failing to win the country’s UN-supervised elections, there was a grasping in the West for new frames. The Cold War was over, Savimbi was no longer an anti-Soviet hero but the man who rejected election results and plunged Angola back into another decade of war, until his death in 2002. The familiar post-Cold War ethnic/tribal themes were generally the dominant ones, although with dips into the humanitarian when Princess Diana visited Angola during a ceasefire in the war to highlight the plight of victims of landmines – a subject which took me to Angola in 1995 for the BBC World Service. The end of the war in 2002 meant that Angola has generally fallen out of the global news agenda, except for specialized African services of the BBC, websites specializing in African news, and Chinese media which wants to laud Chinese economic involvement in Angola. If there is coverage of the country, it rapidly falls into another frame of reference for Africa – the oil-rich but corrupt frame. This latter frame does represent some of the major features of post-war Angola but without giving a comprehensive picture of the developments and role of corruption and patronage as driving forces for political and economic developments and how this developed from the history of war and the use of force as the means to power and wealth.
The result of post-Cold War framing
The primary result in the areas of media coverage with which I have maintained a long-term interest has been the re-adoption and simplistic evolution of tribal and ethnic frames to describe conflicts – particularly in Africa, where old colonial mentalities and the simplistic and frequently racist depictions of Africa (backward, barbaric, vibrant, teeming with wildlife, exciting but essentially dangerous) have been used to build new frames. African conflicts (Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, etc.) are viewed as primitive and tribal but conflicts in Europe (Bosnia, Serbia–Croatia, Ukraine, Basque region of Spain and even the desire of many Scots to break away from Britain) are presented as nationalism and intrinsically part of a more developed and civilized form of societal development.
The humanitarian frame, with all its potentially patronizing overtones, has emerged (most notably during the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, where the role of Western aid workers was emphasized over local health workers and the success of Nigeria in stopping the outbreak in its tracks was almost completely ignored). This frame is mixed with a ‘fear of being swamped’ frame to cover the current refugee crisis.
The ‘war on terror’ frame developed after 9/11 and still persists with attempts to conflate separate crises, purely because of links with sets of Islamist beliefs. So, Boko Haram’s insurgency in Nigeria (which has entirely local causes and dynamics – see Walker, 2016, and Comolli, 2015, for detailed accounts of the domestic causes and dynamics of the Boko Haram insurgency) – is viewed as part of the war on terror frame, as is the conflict against Al Shabab in Somalia, whose origins predate 9/11 and any connection with Al Qaeda. In Somalia, this has been mixed with a ‘failed state’ frame which became prevalent in dealing with African conflicts and a new, novel ‘piracy frame’.
The key point from my perspective as a journalist and long-term observer of conflicts across Africa is that these frames distort, over-simplify and so misinform and mislead. They derive from value systems, assumptions about little-understood events and conflicts, the progressive reduction in specialist correspondents and in-house experts in media groups and a journalistic compulsion to report concisely and in simple terms that it is presumed the audience will understand – just don’t worry their poor little heads with complexity. This leads to:
Neglect of historical and economic factors.
Random, fickle reporting, insufficient context or background explanation of reasons behind fighting.
Reinforcement of post-Cold War decline in public interest in foreign conflicts, but makes them very scary when they intrude into our consciousness.
Use of the fear factor to sell papers and attract listeners/viewers/page-views.
Journalism that doesn’t report distant, complex conflicts and massive humanitarian crises (DR Congo, Central African Republic or South Sudan) that are too far away to scare people but just horrify or are too complex; which editors presume their audiences will not understand or be interested in.
The long-term danger is that frames do not give a clear image of the world and enable people to develop informed opinion and make rational decisions based on knowledge – any more than Plato’s shadows in a cave did.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.