The Department of Media Study is gearing up present a host of international speakers prepared to discuss and debate associations between war and the press next week.
The two-day War and Media Conference, set to take place Monday and Tuesday, will offer an array of cultural, artistic and academic viewpoints, with special concentration on the level of media exposure in the recent conflict in Iraq.
"We are holding this conference now because I believe that it is a timely thing to do, given our current political situation," said Bernadette Wegenstein, conference organizer and media study professor. "Never have we talked about the representation of war in the media as much as now with the current war in Iraq."
The conference will feature many speakers, including SUNY Distinguished Professor Bruce Jackson, who will inaugurate the conference Monday at 2 p.m. with his discussion,"The Media at War: Bringing it all Back Home."
"We don't know anything directly about war," Jackson said. "We're dependent on the media, and we rarely examine them. I'm going to be talking about the impact of media on our understanding of the wars we're in. Most wars, at least for a rich country like us, would happen some place else and the media brings it back home to us."
Jackson will also will also moderate a panel discussion entitled "Challenges of Covering the War in Iraq" between journalists Jerry Zremski, a Washington correspondent for The Buffalo News who was entrenched with the troops in Iraq, Thomas Seifert, an Austrian foreign politics correspondent who reported the war from a unilateral standpoint in Baghdad, and Ian Kalushner, a television news producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation who covered the war in Southern Iraq and on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border.
These members of the press will speak about their own first-hand exposure to war in covering it.
According to Wegenstein, Tuesday's schedule is likely to appeal to the artistic community with multimedia presentations including Trebor Scholz's hypermedia documentary entitled "79 Days," which examines the media coverage of the wars in Iraq and Kosovo.
The panel "War and Media Resistance" will follow, moderated by Holly Johnson, adjunct instructor and graduate student, and will focus on modes of war resistance. Speakers will include Moroccan-born United States conceptual video artist Abdelali Dahrouch, Buffalo State professor of journalism and media studies Michael Niman, and Italian sociologist Pierluigi Boda from the Univerista degli Studi di Roma.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
