AUSTRALIAN JOURNALISM AND WAR

Abstract

This paper presents an original study of Australian journalistic professionalism as observed during the Iraq invasion, 2003. Through an analysis of both in-depth interviews conducted with Australian journalists reporting from Iraq and news discourse produced by Australian journalists at Central Command and “embedded”, it is argued that professionalism provides the normative framework used by war journalists to produce accounts and make sense of war. In this sense professionalism serves as a “regime of truth”, which bounds the journalistic possibilities in reporting war and restrains the capacity of journalists to provide critical or reflexive examinations of military operations or media–military relations. Drawing on interview and news-report material the paper demonstrates that the professional discourse furthermore serves to justify and legitimate at times problematic journalistic practice and meaning construction, tending to obscure the functional role played by journalism within contemporary war administration and military strategy. Elaborating the concept of the professional ideology I argue that professionalism operates as a form of ideological fantasy, which overlooks the always already ideological nature of discourses. Professionalism here both militarises journalism and conversely journalises the military, while limiting war correspondents’ awareness of this problematic aspect of their central legitimating ethos.

Keywords:

• Australian war journalism
• discourse
• ideology
• Iraq war
• military–media relations
• professionalism

Notes

1. The concept of “discursive outside” is used by Laclau to describe a counter or contrary discourse that is not subjected to the discipline or regulation of the discursive formation in question. For Laclau, a discourse or discursive formation is limited by its necessary exclusion of “radical otherness”, which threatens the unity or coherence of a discourse. The concept of a “constitutive outside” provides the basis for the dynamic of social antagonism and the impossibility of the unity or closure of the social.

2. Australian Federal Communication Minister Richard Alston laid several complaints against the ABC in 2003, accusing the organisation of anti-Coalition bias in its coverage of the Iraq invasion. Of this episode Jonathan Harley commented, “it has had the effect of undermining the courage and confidence of ABC news and current affairs”.

3. Further research interviews conducted with Australian editors, including Sydney Morning Herald Foreign Editor in 2003, Peter Kerr, and the Editor of Melbourne broadsheet The Age in 2003, Michael Gawenda, are part of a wider research project.