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The aim of this research is to examine the changing nature of risks that face journalists and media workers in the world's difficult, remote and hostile environments, and consider the 'adequacy' of managing hostile environment safety courses that some media organizations require prior to foreign assignments. The study utilizes several creative works and contributions to this area of analysis, which includes a documentary film production, course contributions, an emergency reference handbook, security and incident management reviews and a template for evacuation and contingency planning. The research acknowledges that employers have a 'duty of care' to personnel working in these environments, identifies the necessity for pre-deployment training and support, and provides a solution for organizations that wish to initiate a comprehensive framework to advise, monitor, protect and respond to incidents. Finally, it explores the possible development of a unique and holistic service to facilitate proactive and responsive support, in the form of a new profession of 'Editorial Logistics Officer' or 'Editorial Safety Officer' within media organizations. This area of research is vitally important to the profession, and the intended contribution is to introduce a simple and cost-efficient framework for media organizations that desire to implement pre-deployment training and field-support – as these programs save lives. The complete proactive and responsive services may be several years from implementation. However, this study demonstrates that the facilitation of Managing Hostile Environment (MHE) courses should be the minimum professional standard. These courses have saved lives in the past and they provide journalists with the tools to "cover the story, and not become the story."

This thesis examines how secrecy and absence shape the representation of covert counter-terrorism in the public sphere. Contemporary covert practices, from missile strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles to special forces 'kill/capture' operations, have come to exemplify U.S. counter-terrorism in public debate. This is significant because these practices shift the ethical stakes of witnessing state warfare. Previous scholarship on war and news media has argued that public glimpses of state violence, alongside official declarations, can demonise or dehumanise the targets of such violence, and thus prompt witnesses to accept the state's rationalisation of these actions and the use of secrecy. News coverage of contemporary covert action, however, offers no such glimpses. Instead, coverage draws primarily upon residue: the rumours and debris left behind. By applying this concept of residue to drone strikes, the special forces raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and kidnap rescue efforts in the Sahara-Sahel, the thesis argues that it is all this speculation, rubble, and empty space, rather than the state itself, which signifies to newsreaders the possibility of state secrecy. That suspicion of secrecy then frames the absences in this residue, the conspicuous lack of certain bodies and objects. Secrecy makes those absences appear suggestive, in that the latter cannot publicly corroborate different aspects of these unseen events. This allows residue to intimate – to hint at unverifiable ideas about that which is absent, in a way which can undermine more explicit claims and justifications of what has taken place. To examine how this dynamic reframes the ethics of witnessing, the thesis develops an historical affiliation, a method of linking disparate practices of violence based on similar representational qualities, in order to examine whether witnessing is being shaped by these qualities in obscured or unspoken ways. This affiliation is made between representations of covert counter-terrorism and those of lynching in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite their differences, in both cases unseen violence and absent bodies are represented as significant in their being disconnected from wider society and difficult to comprehend, to understand how and why the violence takes place. This occurs in today's counter-terrorism through hints and allusions from absence, which represent these covert events as physically intangible. As with lynching, violence and its casualties are implicitly represented in their absence as reflecting the public's intellectual and moral distance from the practice. This takes covert counter-terrorism beyond a binary of fostering assent or dissent towards the state. Instead of prompting newsreaders' complicity with state narratives for its actions, residue intimates doubts and unspoken possibilities about these events that curtail their rationalisation. Insodoing, however, these representations marginalise the violence inflicted upon casualties from ethical consideration. They do so while obscuring how that marginalisation occurs, as newsreaders are prompted to see themselves as distanced from these events and to focus upon that distance, rather than on how absences are being given significance in the public sphere. Using the historical affiliation with lynching, the thesis concludes that an ethical witnessing of covert counter-terrorism through its residue cannot be based on an attempt to recognise and 'recover' lived experiences of suffering from rumours and debris. Rather, ethical witnessing would involve an awareness of how distance is constructed through that residue, and how this gives unspoken meaning to absence.

The objective of this thesis is to investigate and understand why and how consent is manipulated in societies where severe coercion seems to be effective in securing power. This text therefore analyses the role and nature of coercion and consent – of armed conflict and news production - in Colombia: a society where severe coercion seems to be both effective and profitable. Part 1 of the thesis studies the role of coercion from the Spanish Conquest and Colonial Period to the current regime in terms of the political, social and economic interests that predominate in each period, in terms of the role of armed groups – the main instruments of coercion - in the implementation of these interests, and in terms of the resistance to these pressures. Part 2 analyses the role of consent in terms of historical interests in Colombian media production, in terms of the role of media organisations – the main instruments of consent - in the implementation of these interests, and in terms of dissent. Part 3 focuses on current Colombian news production because this is the main method through which official information related to the present armed conflict is currently being transmitted to the public and because Colombian news production seems to bridge the gap between coercion and consent: by framing and promoting armed conflict. Part 1 uses historical sources, academic articles, human rights reports and nine personal interviews with representatives of the Colombian Armed Forces, guerrilla groups and human rights organisations to represent the broadest possible political spectrum. Part 2 is based on political pamphlets and literature, newspaper and magazine articles and leaflets and 14 interviews with representatives of mass media conglomerates, alternative movements and media groups. Part 3 uses a sample of 851 current news stories to understand the nature of a hypothetical frame that contextualises the actions of the FARC – the main guerrilla group - as illegitimate challenges to proper authority. (Continued ...).

Thesis (M.S. in Defense Analysis)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2007. / "March 2007." AD-A467 086. Includes bibliographical references.

This paper explores the role of images in facilitating debates on the responsibility of convicted war criminals. Previous research on the mediation of war crime trials in Serbia has mainly focused on political and media discourses or everyday practices as verbal or textual modes of communication, showing the dominant nationalism and widespread denial, with convicted war criminals appearing as heroes and celebrities. This article argues that the normalization of convicts was partially realized through the avoidance of atrocity images and the prevalence of iconic images of convicts, who are described as persons “freed by the court.” The paper explores two instances when iconic images of convicts served as catalysts in debates on their criminal responsibility, pointing out that images might limit the scope of the debate, and condition the type of questions posed. Archival atrocity images, on the other hand, might provide much-needed context and evidence about crimes. Considering the powerful role of images, the article urges a more systematic analysis of images in the transitional justice field, as some of the images turn into symbolic presentations of the past for future generations.

This thesis describes the situation of French media during World War II and after its end. It compares the degree of collaboration in the territory occupied by Nazi Germany and in the area administered by Vichy government with Marshall Pétain as its head. The work notes that the Vichy government gradually becomes pro-German. It also emphasis on the Resistance movement as the new French media arises just of Resistance press. After the Liberation extensive trials with collaborators were carried out. This work is focused on the purge held in media especially. It explains the re-creation of new French press on Resistance press basis, politically mostly left-winged. The field is evenly professionalized - schools arise, the technical equipment is improved, women have been entering the editorial departments. But the shaky political situation, including the threat of the Cold War, results in a crisis of the political press. Journalists react by putting emphasis on truth and facts, and create, within co called new left tendency, platform for emerging democracy. The press of entertainment (sports and women's magazines, e.g.) is also developed as reaction to politics. Radio broadcast and telecast are slowly growing after the Liberation. However military conflicts in colonial areas (Indochina, Algeria, etc.)...

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