Conclusion
Images of violence and images related to violence now permeate across global communicative environments. The ways they are circulated and disseminated have evolved. Even as recently as the 1960s pictures had to be flown back from Vietnam.[1073] Politicians had more time to digest the implications of a news story.
Journalists had more time to interpret a set of pictures. From the 1970s, film crews and reporters began to visit exotic or dangerous locations to be the audience's eyewitnesses of ‘foreign violence', and the audience watched news as it happened. Today some journalists claim the ‘feast of digital pictures generated by anyone and everyone' renders the official ‘reporter's presence on the spot well-nigh obsolete'.[1074] This is significant because it means local specialist correspondents with time to learn about the distinctive contours of their patch are replaced by reporters parachuted in for a few days or by journalists interpreting footage or social media at a distance. This leads to a preference for the spectacular at the expense of reporting hidden forms of violence.Representations of spectacular violence can contribute to a sense that while the current status quo is unfortunate it is almost unavoidable. The noise created by media spectacles drowns out the cries of those who suffer daily and die from treatable diseases, and related forms of structural violence. The dominance of spectacle puts non-dramatic pictures outside the news frame, and so beyond attention and memory. Chronic, hidden or structural violence can all too easily be overlooked.
It is commonly believed that the more dramatic the pictures, the more likely a story will find its way to the top of the news schedule. While there is some truth in this, spectacular pictures are not always the defining criterion for a news story's precedence. Some stories are more spectacular than others, with or without pictures of the actual violence. The sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the suicide of Hitler are a few examples of major news stories, lacking pictures of the event. If this is so, then what makes something spectacular is partly in the imaginative eye of the beholder. Seeing the world differently can lead not only to different kinds of definitions of the spectacular, but also to different kinds of questions. How far is there a moral obligation for spectators to dissent from the accounts of reality dominated by violent spectacle? How far is there a moral responsibility for viewers and journalists to look beyond the screens in search of unspectacular stories? What is the role of both audience and broadcaster in settings where ‘post-truth' politics and the echo-chambers created by Facebook and other social media can trump more established forms of news reporting? And in what ways will peaceful practices responding to media visions of violence lead towards peace?
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