Page 224 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 203

POLITICAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBALISED WORLD
paraging remarks about their superior officers, including the vice-President
7
and President Obama. Obama decided that such indiscretions, and the
apparent failure to prevent their reportage in one of the United States’ most
read periodicals, had made the general’s position untenable, and he was
replaced by the more media-friendly General David Petraus.
Further difficulties for the US and its allies in Afghanistan were caused by
the release in July 2010 of some 92,000 classified military documents about
the war and its conduct. Leaked by a serving US soldier, assembled in secrecy
by Wikileaks and reported in the Guardian on 26 July 2010, the documents
revealed the true scale of the Taliban insurgency, and the extent of civilian
casualties caused by the Taliban and NATO forces both as the conflict
continued in the late 2000s.

Further reading
The history of war reportage is addressed in depth in Philip Knightley’s
The First Casualty (second edition, 2004). For a study of journalism in
conflict Greg McLaughlin’s The War Correspondent remains useful
(2002), while a second edition of the excellent Journalism After
September 11 is published in 2011 (Zelizer and Allan, eds., 2011).
Katovsky and Carlson’s Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq (2003),
Tumber and Palmer’s The Media at War (2004) and, for a critical
perspective, Tell Me Lies: Propaganda and Media Distortion in the
Attack on Iraq (Miller, ed., 2004). Maltby and Keeble’s
Communicating War is a useful collection exploring the use of
communication in recent conflicts including Iraq and Afghanistan
(2007). Maltby’s Military Media Management (2011) adds more new
material to this key topic.

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