The historian and sociologist of the media Isabelle Veyrat-Masson deciphers the media treatment of war in Ukraine and its specificities compared to other conflicts.
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While the conflict in Ukraine enters its third month, the traditional war story by the media is struck by the emergence of the faces of the victims of the war permitted by social networks, explains Isabelle Veyrat-Masson, director Research at the National Center for Scientific Research and Specialist in Political Communication.
How does the media treatment of war in Ukraine seem to you from the treatment observed during previous conflicts?
A systematic study of the work on the media treatments of contemporary conflicts led me to offer a typology of the different relationships, ways or constructions that organized war images on television. We find them all in this war in Ukraine.
There is the fictional model, which accumulates the structure of the story, the sole aspect of the information and suspense – will the Russians attack? Win kyiv? Will Marioupol fall? -, but also the presence of a hero – Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president. There is the political paradigm – “war is only the continuation of politics by other means”, according to the formula of Clausevitz -, which seizes the war to shape the media story with its usual techniques that are information control, censorship, propaganda, etc.
The model that I call “sports”, appeared during the Gulf War in 1991, when CNN claimed to film the war live, installing its cameras as if it were a match to follow. Finally, we find the military model, which was already present at the time of Vietnam but especially of the Iraq war, with its experts on television sets and its journalists on the field “Embedded” (“integrated” in the army ): It is a question of seeing the conflict with a particular filter. The current conflict combines all these models, while adding a completely new element: the emergence of faces. The war in Ukraine is a media war with “human faces”. The plural is important!
what do you mean?
Amelia, this little Ukrainian who sings the song of the snow queen that everyone knows, a cappella in an anti-bomb shelter in kyiv, embodies this war. The women who come to tell what happened to them on the television sets in France, the testimonies of the grandmothers overwhelmed by sorrow are the ones who move us. Not the destruction of cities and villages, images to which we are used, by news but also by fiction, for decades.
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