Topic 11: Modern Wars and War Conflicts in the News

Modern Wars and War Conflicts in the News

I’d like to tell you a few words about my topic which is called “Modern Wars and War Conflicts in the News”. What is the greatest mistake of the mankind? I’m completely sure that it is a war. Every war brings agony and sufferings to all people who somehow involved in it. Much of what the world learns about conflicts around the world comes from mass media. But mass media of different countries interpret information and news in different ways. In my topic I’m going to speak on the news coverage of modern wars and war conflicts in the foreign and home media.

 

For the better understanding of the problem let’s analyse the word “war”. According to the Macmillan dictionary “war is fighting between two or more countries that involves the use of armed forces and usually continues for a long time”. But as you can see, mass media try to make us imagine heroic young men marching in parades, winning glorious battles, and bringing peace and democracy to the world. But war is something quite different from that. It is hundreds of thousands of human beings dying years before their time. It is millions of people separated forever from the ones they loved. It is the destruction of homes for which people worked for decades. It is the end of careers that meant as much to others as your career means to you. War is genocide, torture, cruelty, propaganda, dishonesty, and slavery. We can observe so many wars today but mass media of different countries give such views on the conflicts which are profitable for their governments.

        

 First, the war in Iraq. The War in Iraq began on March 20, 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by the United States under the administration of President George W. Bush and the United Kingdom under the Prime Minister Tony Blair. American and British newspapers maintained that that was a war against terrorism after the terrorist attack on 9/11 as al-Qaeda was thought to be responsible for it. Moreover American mass media said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But many independent enquiries exist as to why the U.S. attack on Iraq was not justified. Iraq has not been found to have weapons of mass destruction and is not even linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist group. Not so long ago Russian mass media maintained that there was a good chance that the Bush Administration attacked Iraq simply to control their oil supply.

         

 Second, the war in South Ossetia. The conflict began on August 8, 2008, after Georgia claimed South Ossetian separatists had broken a ceasefire by attacking villages, although South Ossetian officials deny that they attacked villages. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin accused foreign media of pro-Georgian bias in their coverage of the conflict between Georgia and Russia over breakaway South Ossetia as Western media blamed Russia for attacking Georgia. "We want television screens in the West to be showing not only Russian tanks, and texts saying Russia is at war in South Ossetia and with Georgia, but also to be showing the suffering of the Ossetian people, the murdered elderly people and children, the destroyed towns of South Ossetia, and Tskhinvali. This would be an objective way of presenting the material," Grigory Karasin said in a statement to Russian news agencies. Western media coverage of the events in the separatist republic is "a politically motivated version" in the eyes of government officials. Many Western media editors disagreed. However, The Washington Post, for example, argued that Moscow was engaging in "mythmaking".

        

And finally, the war in Libya. The 2011 Libyan civil war started as an armed conflict between forces loyal to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and rebels who wanted to change the government. The information warfare started from the very beginning of the war when such channels as Al Jazeera and BBC talked about fierce fighting in several towns although even the local community didn’t hear anything about it. After some time the EU and the USA supported the rebels and declared a war on Gaddafi who was suggested to commit a crime against humanity. The official reason of it was the bringing democracy to the country.  Although according to the official information more than 50 thousand people have been killed for this goal and it’s not the end. Some independent enquiries insist that the war has been started because of Libyan great reserves of oil.

In conclusion I’d like to say that mass media is “the fourth estate” which rules the world. It forms our opinion about all events especially war conflicts. True information is hidden so deep that it’s impossible to realize which events are real and which ones are just imagination of the reporters. That’s why we don’t know on which resources we may rely on. I’ll give you advice – rely on yourself and everything will be good.