ABSTRACT
The development of information warfare, and the centrality to it of ‘perception management’, has paradoxical effects. On the one hand, it has led to more sophisticated techniques of propaganda. On the other hand, however, this is strikingly difficult to achieve satisfactorily because media and means of communication have so proliferated that information cannot easily be channelled continuously in a preferred direction. Professional ethics, combined with a cynicism towards sources, tend towards media expressing scepticism about any allegedly authoritative account of what happens during warfare. This is not to say that journalists are morally neutral, nor to deny that they may act as filters for preferred versions of the truth. It is, however, to observe that reporting war nowadays is problematical for those engaged directly in the war effort. Domestic dissent will be reported, it is possible that journalists from the protagonists’ side will be stationed in the area under attack during the conflict (and, not surprisingly, they then are likely to report events from that locale), and unsettling speculation about the progress of the war effort will be given extensive treatment. The Balkans War in 1999 gave rise to many examples of these phenomena, of which the reportage (and the umbrage it created among government) of John Simpson from Belgrade for the BBC is an instance (Porter, 1999).
