Impunity and the Media
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Mass Media and Impunity. This issue includes articles on Digna Ochoa y Plácido, murdered in Mexico for speaking out, "Breaking the silence on the war in Algeria - the fight for truth and reconciliation" by André Jacques, and relfections on "Impunity, the media and Dietrich Bonhoeffer" by Edwin H. Robertson. Charles Villa-Vicencio brings in the South African perspective on amnesty with "Neither too much, not too little justice", Jake Lynch looks at impunity in journalism, "The Red Sea catch: A Palestinian perspective" is an instructive case study put forward by Mitri Raheb of Bethlehem and Cees J. Hamelink shows how "Communication may not build peace but it can certainly contribute to war". Other articles in French and Spanish are also included.
Mitri Raheb
It seems that there is one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless. How are some nation-states able to manipulate the mass media to portray their side of the argument to the exclusion of others? Why should the public be wary of news coverage that reinforces stereotypical images? What can journalists do to balance the books? The following example from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict raises these important questions.
Edwin H. Robertson
In times of conflict the mass media have always been used to manipulate public opinion. The victors in war often rely on a warped notion of moral impunity to evade the consequences of their actions and the losers suffer doubly because few question that impunity. Based on the experiences of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the following article asks what societies and their mass media can do to be of any use in finding a moral solution to this conundrum.
Héctor Schmucler
La impunidad es un fantasma familiar en la historia de la Argentina. En realidad, desde la mirada de los vencidos, todas las historias podrían ser vistas como una suma de impunidades. No ocurre lo mismo, por supuesto, con los vencederos: cada triunfo contribuye a que las condiciones previas no aparezcan como producto de anteriores triunfos sobre otros, sino como lo necesariamente dado. Cada nuevo triunfo tiende a borrar la memoria de que lo que antes existía era, a su vez, resultado victorioso de alguna disputa. Cuando, después del triunfo de un determinado poder material o espiritual, el pasado conflictivo se desdibuja, la amnesia disuelve la conciencia de los crímenes que suelen acompañar a las victorias. Simétricamente, para los vencidos (la expresión claramente alude a Benjamin) cada derrota consolida la derrota anterior.
Pradip Thomas
This article deals with issues related to absolute poverty as a missing dimension in the context of mainstream communication interventions in development and media fare in India. It argues that development communication theory needs to be informed by theories and practices based on a radical interpretation of political economy that shifts it from the current impasse in which any concern for larger, structural change has been elided in favour of discrete tinkerings and sectoral change that are more often than not linked to narrow, information-centred, IT-based agendas. These information-centred agendas are largely devoid of any consideration of structural variables or of local factors that make all the difference to any project for change with justice.
Charles Villa-Vicencio
The South African brand of qualified amnesty was not an invention of a group of ivory tower academics or legal scholars. It emerged out of the specific needs of an ever-intensifying political crisis. If ‘impunity’, be ‘the triumph of falsehood, silence and oblivion … [within which] past criminal acts are neither condemned nor questioned’ (Jacques, 2000), then the South African version is not impunity. The following article explores the tensions and unresolved problems thrown up by that particular situation.
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