Stealth Conflicts: How the World's Worst Violence Is Ignored by Virgil Hawkins

Author:Virgil Hawkins [Hawkins, Virgil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351897945
Google: uqWoDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 33344454
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2008-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Entertainment Media

At a different level, the Western entertainment media industry has similarly shown itself to be nation-and ethnocentric. Hollywood movies that deal with conflict focus almost invariably on US involvement in conflict. In the USA, military movies over the past decades have focused on Cold War issues, the Vietnam War, conflicts in the Middle East and more recently the spectre of anti-Western terrorism. The US military usually cooperates with the making of such movies if it is expected to improve public understanding of the military and to be beneficial for recruiting (Eitelberg and Little 1995, 43–4). African conflicts (real or fictional) very rarely appear as a backdrop in Western movies. There must almost always be a connection to the country making the movie or the dominant racial group in that country. Black Hawk Down was about the conflict in Somalia, but it was entirely a US military story. Tears of the Sun was set in Nigeria, but again was essentially a US military story. The Interpreter and Blood Diamond both were stories set in or about Africa, with Africans as leading characters, but in each case, those Africans were white and were played by famous Western actors. The British movie on the Rwandan genocide, Shooting Dogs, is essentially the story of white missionaries caught up in the genocide, and The Last King of Scotland, although focusing on Idi Amin, is more the story of a white doctor and his relationship with the dictator. Hotel Rwanda is at least led by black African characters, although they are played by Hollywood actors.

Similar can be said of regular television programming. In 2006, the Oprah Winfrey Show, for example, aired a program focusing on threats facing the world. It featured Queen Rania of Jordan and a number of experts as guests. The entire program, however, was centred on terrorism, Iraq, Iran and Israel-Palestine. Two of the three experts featured were terrorism experts, and all three discussed only the issue of terrorism and the Middle East. Although the program claimed to discuss threats to the world, it covered only those threats seen from a US, or at best Western perspective.10 The Christian television channel, Trinity Broadcasting Network, has a US base, but broadcasts its message across the globe using a large satellite network. Despite its apparently global message and global audience, television hosts on the program regularly display their pride in rallying around the US flag (see Zahn 2006), and, particularly since the invasion and occupation of Iraq, broadcast programs and hold prayer sessions saluting and/or asking protection for ‘our troops’ (see TBN 2005).

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