The reporting of war throughout the media

Jordon Crandall (2004: 110) believes that the popularity of Reality TV has something to do with the change of attitude towards the reporting of war. Reality TV now constitutes over half of the top 10 shows in the United States. As reality televisions popularity increases we are now beginning to see the decrease in “real” news stories regarding the topic of war.

As Crandall said embedded reporters in the middle of the many current wars are under strict guidelines as to what they can and cannot produce. Rules of engagement for embedded journalists include details of military action could only be described in general terms and journalists are prohibited from writing about possible future missions, classified weapons or sensitive information. It is understandable that future missions are not to be written about for the protection of the soldiers and also the civilians of the proposed location. However when looking at the traditional ethical codes of conduct as outlined by the Society of Professional Journalists it can be seen that abiding by the rules of engagement all of their ethical codes of conduct cannot be achieved. They include to seek and report the truth, minimise harm, act independently and to be accountable. Embedded journalists are often put into a unit therefore being assigned a commander. The commander is then given the right to block a journalist from filing stories via satellite connection at any time

Are the images which we receive on a daily basis through the media a true representation of what is really happening all around the world? Or simply what the media regulators choose for the public to know? There have been many arguments put forward in regard to the reporting of war being staged. For example it has been said that footage shown to the public by the media had been pre recorded and also the wrong images
As the old saying goes a picture speaks one thousand words. However, how are these words being ‘spoken’ if the public are being deceived by the media who are the individuals responsible for reporting worldly events to us? It is probably unrealistic to think that we will ever be shown true representations of events from our media, especially scenes of war unless we went to the war zones ourselves.