Military Censorship and the Body Count in the Persian Gulf War

Norris, Margot

doi:10.2307/1354316

Cited by 42 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…11 The Vietnam experience created in the US armed forces at least a clear aversion to body counts, with the result that by the 1991 Persian Gulf War the military exercised near-total control over what Margot Norris has called military necrology, and pre-censored all battlefield reporting, in part to minimise reporting of civilian casualties. 12 Similar struggles over numbers took place in the war in the former Yugoslavia, with the final tallies (around 100,000) much lower than the figures bandied about to win the media war (which ranged from 250,00-329,000 at the upper end). 13…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Bodies count: the politics and practices of war and violent death data

Krause¹

2017

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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In discussions of conflict, war and political violence, dead bodies count. Although the politics and practices associated with the collection of violent-death data are seldom subject to critical examination, they are crucial to how scholars and practitioners think about how and why conflict and violence erupt. Knowledge about conflict deaths – the who, what, where, when, why and how – is a form of expertise, created, disseminated and used by different agents. This article highlights the ways in which body counts are deployed as social facts and forms of knowledge that are used to shape and influence policies and practices associated with armed conflict. It traces the way in which conflict-death data emerged, and then examines critically some of the practices and assumptions of data collection to shed light on how claims to expertise are enacted and on how the public arena connects (or not) with scholarly conflict expertise.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Bodies count: the politics and practices of war and violent death data

Krause¹

2017

Human Remains and Violence: An Interdisciplinary Journal

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“…She says that public authorities try to extinguish or blur the "realmaking sign of warfare -namely the injured and dead body -into an unreality, unknowability and undecipherability". 13 The paper picks this up later.…”

Section: Sanitised Languagementioning

confidence: 99%

Literature Review

Fyjis-Walker

2024

Who Benefits From the Sanitized Language of Violence?

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“…The widespread disdain for such a tally seemed to influence their communication policies during subsequent conflicts in Iraq (1991) and Afghanistan (2001–2002). Norris (1991) argues that the suppression of the body count by The Pentagon during the First Gulf War (1991) was part of a wider media censorship strategy. This approach seemed to continue into the US bombing of Afghanistan between 2001 and 2002, with General Tommy Franks explaining ‘you know, we don’t do body counts’ (Broder, 2003).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How journalists do memory work with numbers: The case of the 220,000 deaths during the Colombian conflict (1958–2012)

Ortega

Lawson

2022

Journalism

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This paper explores the relationship between memory, journalism and numbers. It does so through a case study that examines how the Colombian news media reported on a particular figure during a peace negotiation: the 220,000 people who died because of the armed conflict in Colombia. The number was produced by the National Centre for Historical Memory in 2013 in a comprehensive report about the ravages of the Colombian conflict (1958–2012). Following a mix-method approach – a quantitative content analysis and a thematic analysis of the news articles – we find that the way in which journalists reported on the figure contradicts two key aspects of the report. While the report rejects an ‘official memory’ of the conflict for one that is more open to political and social debate, one characterised less by ‘closed truths’, the news reports treated the number as a fact and very rarely provided a form of contestation to it. Moreover, while the report emphasises the need for clarification over distortion and concealment when constructing memory, the news articles misrepresented those accountable for the casualties: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) was consistently positioned as the main illegal armed organisation responsible for the death toll. This representation ran counter to the findings from the report that emphasised the way paramilitary groups, rather than guerrilla groups (e.g. FARC), were more responsible for the killings. Considering our findings, we argue that an adherence to accuracy by journalists is more desirable than a practice of vagueness in the contribution to memory formation in post-conflict contexts.

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Military Censorship and the Body Count in the Persian Gulf War

Cited by 42 publications

References 0 publications

Bodies count: the politics and practices of war and violent death data

Bodies count: the politics and practices of war and violent death data

Literature Review

How journalists do memory work with numbers: The case of the 220,000 deaths during the Colombian conflict (1958–2012)

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