// essays //
Fall 2014
War Theater:
A Necessary but Risky Business
Dore Feith
War is oddly popular. Despite its brutality and destruction — or maybe because of it —war garners a lot of attention in history classes, movies, and television. Throughout this past summer, scenes from Ukraine and Gaza dominated TV news. For days the public watched reports from the site of the downed Malaysia Airlines 17, where passengers’ bodies and belongings were strewn across a wide field. And out of Gaza, the media frequently aired the footage of an errant bomb landing on a beach and accidentally killing children.
Why the fascination with these videos? Does it indicate a sadistic or militaristic general viewership? Are those who tune into news channels the same viewers who watch NASCAR for the wrecks and hockey for the fights?
All of this is not to say that there are no respectable reasons to watch war. There is value, for example, in examining gory war footage. It can improve one’s understanding of technology’s effect on war, how militaries adopt new strategies, and how different sides use different tactics.
But for some, watching war is about something more visceral and close to home. Those who live near warzones take a less academic approach than viewers from afar, principally because they have a more immediate and palpable interest in the subject. Israelis and Ukrainians watched the fighting this summer in order to know whether they were winning or losing; their lives, not their opinions, were in danger.
In Israel, for example, Sderot’s residents–who have been vulnerable to indiscriminate rocket attacks for seven years–wanted to see what their government was doing to protect them. Watching the airstrikes helped them determine the effectiveness and organization of the bombing campaign and perhaps gave them hope that the rocket fire would soon be over. Photographers caught Sderot citizens sitting on a couch on a hilltop, in a scene that soon went viral under the headline “Sderot Cinema.”
But where is the line between justifiable war-watching and a craving for catastrophe? Consider this question in light of a well-known legal standard: the need to weigh the probative value of evidence against the shock value of that evidence. A lawyer representing a party who lost an arm in an accident, for example, is not allowed to wave the severed arm in front of the jury. The severed arm is not faulty evidence, but still the judges rule that waving it around is simply too gory and distracting–its shock value outweighs the probative value, so the evidence, no matter how pertinent, is excluded. The court’s responsibility is to inform the jury, not to shock and upset it so that its faculties of reason are overwhelmed. A similar framework ought to be applied to war coverage: is there valuable information to be gained by watching war unfold, or does war imagery have an inhibitive effect on one’s capacity to assess the content?
This framework has been particularly relevant to members of the media over the past few months as ISIL beheaded Western journalists and posted the execution videos on the Internet. Most news channels played footage up until the brutal moment when the head is severed. The probative value of the video for the general audience is contained in the events leading up to the execution; the beheading itself serves as shock value and not much more. That much of the media froze the clip at the tense moment before the beheading indicates that the probative value of watching the act of execution, in this case, does not outweigh the shock value.
Though the media deliberately did not air the actual beheading, American public support for military intervention against ISIL still rose. A September Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that over 70 percent of Americans supported strikes against ISIS, up 17 percentage points from when the question was asked before news of the executions surfaced. Evidently, one did not have to watch the actual execution to understand ISIL’s brutality and the threat it posed to the U.S.
It is important to be a spectator of war. Without the outrage that came from Americans’ watching ISIL’s videos, the president may not have ordered the recent airstrikes against the terrorist group. Imagery is powerful and may resonate in ways that words do not. War is hideous, and is best watched reluctantly– for purposes of education –rather than eagerly as a form of entertainment.
// DORE FEITH is a Freshman in Columbia College and a Staff Writer for The Current. He can be reached at dlf2133@columbia.edu. Photo by Flickr user Tyler.
Why the fascination with these videos? Does it indicate a sadistic or militaristic general viewership? Are those who tune into news channels the same viewers who watch NASCAR for the wrecks and hockey for the fights?
All of this is not to say that there are no respectable reasons to watch war. There is value, for example, in examining gory war footage. It can improve one’s understanding of technology’s effect on war, how militaries adopt new strategies, and how different sides use different tactics.
But for some, watching war is about something more visceral and close to home. Those who live near warzones take a less academic approach than viewers from afar, principally because they have a more immediate and palpable interest in the subject. Israelis and Ukrainians watched the fighting this summer in order to know whether they were winning or losing; their lives, not their opinions, were in danger.
In Israel, for example, Sderot’s residents–who have been vulnerable to indiscriminate rocket attacks for seven years–wanted to see what their government was doing to protect them. Watching the airstrikes helped them determine the effectiveness and organization of the bombing campaign and perhaps gave them hope that the rocket fire would soon be over. Photographers caught Sderot citizens sitting on a couch on a hilltop, in a scene that soon went viral under the headline “Sderot Cinema.”
But where is the line between justifiable war-watching and a craving for catastrophe? Consider this question in light of a well-known legal standard: the need to weigh the probative value of evidence against the shock value of that evidence. A lawyer representing a party who lost an arm in an accident, for example, is not allowed to wave the severed arm in front of the jury. The severed arm is not faulty evidence, but still the judges rule that waving it around is simply too gory and distracting–its shock value outweighs the probative value, so the evidence, no matter how pertinent, is excluded. The court’s responsibility is to inform the jury, not to shock and upset it so that its faculties of reason are overwhelmed. A similar framework ought to be applied to war coverage: is there valuable information to be gained by watching war unfold, or does war imagery have an inhibitive effect on one’s capacity to assess the content?
This framework has been particularly relevant to members of the media over the past few months as ISIL beheaded Western journalists and posted the execution videos on the Internet. Most news channels played footage up until the brutal moment when the head is severed. The probative value of the video for the general audience is contained in the events leading up to the execution; the beheading itself serves as shock value and not much more. That much of the media froze the clip at the tense moment before the beheading indicates that the probative value of watching the act of execution, in this case, does not outweigh the shock value.
Though the media deliberately did not air the actual beheading, American public support for military intervention against ISIL still rose. A September Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that over 70 percent of Americans supported strikes against ISIS, up 17 percentage points from when the question was asked before news of the executions surfaced. Evidently, one did not have to watch the actual execution to understand ISIL’s brutality and the threat it posed to the U.S.
It is important to be a spectator of war. Without the outrage that came from Americans’ watching ISIL’s videos, the president may not have ordered the recent airstrikes against the terrorist group. Imagery is powerful and may resonate in ways that words do not. War is hideous, and is best watched reluctantly– for purposes of education –rather than eagerly as a form of entertainment.
// DORE FEITH is a Freshman in Columbia College and a Staff Writer for The Current. He can be reached at dlf2133@columbia.edu. Photo by Flickr user Tyler.