{"id":8135,"date":"2017-11-29T15:37:49","date_gmt":"2017-11-29T20:37:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=8135"},"modified":"2025-09-30T14:04:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T18:04:23","slug":"media-and-mass-atrocity","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/media-and-mass-atrocity\/","title":{"rendered":"Media and Mass Atrocity"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Media and Mass Atrocity\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

When Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Paul Watson<\/a> is reporting from the field, he searches for one element \u2014 a smell, a sound, an article of clothing \u2014 that will transport his audience from the comfort of their homes to the chaos of conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1993, the public response to Watson\u2019s photograph<\/a> of a dead American soldier being dragged by a mob through the streets of Mogadishu \u2014 the picture that earned him a Pulitzer, shot during the military intervention dramatized in the Hollywood film Black Hawk Down<\/em> \u2014 catalyzed the U.S. decision to pull its troops out of Somalia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the type of impact a journalist can have when they cover violent events on the other side of the world, says Watson, who will be one of the keynote speakers at \u201cMedia and Mass Atrocity<\/a>: the Rwanda Genocide and Beyond,\u201d a roundtable at Carleton from Dec. 1 to 3, 2017 organized and chaired by Journalism Prof. Allan Thompson<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Making
Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Paul Watson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe point of journalism is to make change \u2014 and to do that you need to get people to care,\u201d says Watson, an author<\/a>, writer and photographer who has covered conflicts in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Europe for publications such as the Los Angeles Times<\/em> and Toronto Star<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fighting in Syria is the most documented war in history, he continues, yet because access to the country is exceedingly difficult and dangerous for journalists, much of the coverage has come via social media posts from amateur observers \u2014 a barrage of unsubstantiated content produced by people who don\u2019t necessarily think about the ethics of their actions and may have partisan objectives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy job is to find a way to tell the truth,\u201d says Watson, \u201cand get the public to engage when the natural inclination is to turn away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Making<\/figure>\n\n\n

The Relationship Between Conflict and Media Coverage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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The relationship between conflict and media coverage will be the focus of the Carleton roundtable, which will bring together 25 experts from academia and journalism, plus special guest speakers such as Rom\u00e9o Dallaire<\/a>, the former commander of the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda who now helms a research, training and advocacy initiative<\/a> aimed at eradicating the use and recruitment of child soldiers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn an era of social media saturation, near-ubiquitous mobile device penetration and dramatic shifts in traditional news media, it is more important than ever to examine the nexus between media and mass atrocity,\u201d Thompson writes on the roundtable\u2019s website.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAdvances in information and communications technology have reshaped the media landscape, rendering mass atrocities in distant countries more immediate and harder to ignore. And yet, a cohesive international response to mass atrocities has been elusive.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the mid-1990s, when Thompson began covering the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide as a Toronto Star<\/em> reporter, there were no smartphones and the Internet was still in its infancy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hate radio had played a central role in the genocide. A Rwandan radio station\u2019s broadcasts incited violence against members of the minority Tutsi ethnicity and members of the majority Hutu ethnicity who supported peace or married Tutsis.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Making
Paul Watson during the civil war in southern Sudan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From April to July 1994, approximately 800,000 people were killed, mostly Tutsis, and two million mostly Hutu refugees fled after a Tutsi-led party gained control of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The international response to the horrific violence was late and ineffective, says Thompson, because there wasn\u2019t a critical mass of media coverage to make people understand what was happening beyond \u201cAfrican tribal bloodletting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPolitical leaders knew what was going on but didn\u2019t want to get involved in another international swamp just a year after Somalia.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, social media multiplies the attention traditional news organizations devote to international conflict. Even in countries such as Rwanda, most people have cellphones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The content we\u2019re exposed to can come from citizen journalists, militant groups such as ISIS, interested parties in distant nations such as Russia, or from NGO and humanitarian workers on the ground in a crisis zone. It can increase awareness, or it can contort facts and mobilize extremism \u2014 or any and all possible reactions in between.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s astonishing the number of people who get their news through captions on Instagram photos,\u201d says Thompson. \u201cIt\u2019s a news environment that we don\u2019t fully understand, and there\u2019s a media literacy lesson to this. We need to understand how we learn about mass atrocities and how this shapes our response.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Making Sense of Media and Mass Atrocity<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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In 2004, the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, Thompson hosted a symposium at Carleton and edited a book that emerged from the event called The Media and the Rwanda Genocide<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now the newly appointed senior fellow<\/a> in the Global Security and Politics program at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI<\/a>) is working on a follow-up book that CIGI plans to publish in 2019 to coincide with the 25th<\/sup> anniversary of the genocide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roundtable, which is open to the public, will serve as a brainstorming session for a couple dozen potential contributors. Thompson also hopes to attract people from Carleton programs such as the School of Journalism and Communication<\/a>, the Bachelor of Global and International Studies<\/a>, the Norman Patterson School of International Affairs<\/a>, as well as members of Ottawa\u2019s foreign affairs and national defence communities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Making
Prof. Allan Thompson in Kigali, Rwanda<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Despite the challenge of penetrating public consciousness in today\u2019s frenetic media landscape, Thompson is not pessimistic about the positive role journalists can play.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHundreds of thousands of deaths can become a blur, but if you can make people connect with an individual victim, everything changes,\u201d he says, mentioning the widely shared photo of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old boy from Syria who drowned while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea with his family \u2014 a death that informed conversations about the refugee crisis in Canada and beyond. \u201cThe power of narrative storytelling can make people care.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Making<\/figure>\n\n\n

Into the Field<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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During his talk at the roundtable, Watson plans to take participants \u201cinto the field\u201d with him so they gain a deeper understanding of what journalists face when reporting from a war zone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The post-9\/11 surge in \u201cembedded\u201d journalists \u2014 reporters who file stories after riding around in armoured vehicles with western soldiers \u2014 is the opposite of what he does, he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Moreover, Hollywood films \u2014 even gritty movies that purport to convey reality \u2014 never capture the fact that you\u2019re tired, dirty and physically and psychologically ailing much of the time when covering conflict or famine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Making
Paul Watson in the field<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Traditional media outlets don\u2019t want to pay \u2014 and pay for the necessary insurance \u2014 to station reporters in violent places, says Watson. And the path he took to become a war correspondent, freelancing photos to the Star<\/em> during his summer vacation from the paper, is a longshot for young journalists looking to land full-time work in today\u2019s media industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet photography, video and communications equipment is getting more portable and cheaper, and some people feel they absolutely must cover wars and are willing to accept the risks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The public \u2014 and academics \u2014 depend on these journalists for information, says Watson. And once out in the field, they quickly come to understand the most important lesson of war: \u201cthe size and amount of the lies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. is currently ensnarled in the longest war in its history in Afghanistan because most Americans are oblivious to what\u2019s happening, he argues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTheir government is lying to them and, just like in Vietnam, soldiers are being sent to their deaths,\u201d says Watson. \u201cWe live in an age when people derisively talk about \u2018fake news,\u2019 and there is a lot of fake news in foreign reporting, but there are also a lot of journalists making sacrifices to try to tell the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Pulitzer Prize-winning war correspondent Paul Watson is reporting from the field, he searches for one element \u2014 a smell, a sound, an article of clothing \u2014 that will transport his audience from the comfort of their homes to the chaos of conflict. In 1993, the public response to Watson\u2019s photograph of a dead American soldier being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[28],"cu_story_tag":[1921],"class_list":["post-8135","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","hentry","cu_story_type-community-partnerships","cu_story_tag-faculty-of-public-and-global-affairs"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/8135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/8135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":97671,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/8135\/revisions\/97671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=8135"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=8135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}