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Liberal Ethics and the Spectacle of War

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Ethics of Media

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Abstract

In his moving account of the First World War, Sir Philip Gibbs, war correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, describes the difficulty that journalists faced in communicating their battlefield experiences to those back home:

Those young men who had set out in a spirit of adventure went back to Fleet Street with a queer look in their eyes, unable to write the things they had seen … Because there was no code of words which would convey the picture of that wild agony of peoples, that smashing of all civilised laws, to men and women who still thought of war in terms of heroic pageantry…

(1920: 4)

It is this in/communicability of war that concerns me, here. There is, on the one hand, Gibbs’s absence of a whole ‘code of words’ about war that turns its professional storytellers into ‘mute witnesses’ of the unspeakable horrors of the battlefield (Hood 2011: 40). And yet, on the other, Gibbs did write about the battlefield, not only as a correspondent but also as an author of five books about the Western Front. Indeed, stories about his war, and others since, abound today: photojournalism, television news, films, poetry, novels, paintings, games and comics are only some of our public practices of storytelling that mundanely confront us with the realities of war.

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Authors
  1. Lilie Chouliaraki
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Goldsmiths College, London, UK

    Nick Couldry

  2. University of Leicester, UK

    Mirca Madianou

  3. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

    Amit Pinchevski

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© 2013 Lilie Chouliaraki

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Chouliaraki, L. (2013). Liberal Ethics and the Spectacle of War. In: Couldry, N., Madianou, M., Pinchevski, A. (eds) Ethics of Media. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137317513_9

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