| Former Four Corners executive producer from the University of ... Former Four Corners executive producer from the University of Technology Sydney, Professor Peter Manning |
Former ‘Four Corners’ producer discusses the narratives of Iraq
30 Nov 2007 | Renee Criddle
The Australian involvement in Iraq has not only been a battle of military hardware, men on the ground and massive civilian casualties but a battle of key narratives.
Dictatorship versus democracy. Terrorism versus stability. How are such key concepts decided? Who decides which will prevail? How are they transmitted and received?
University of Technology Sydney academic and former executive producer of ABC’s Four Corners program, Professor Peter Manning, addressed these issues when he presented a seminar at the University of Wollongong last night (Thursday 29 November).
His lecture examined Australia’s involvement in Iraq in the light of its history in the Middle East, its relationship to imperial powers and the transparency of the process by which foreign policy decisions are made.
It asserted that long-term national interests, not grand concepts, remain the over-riding criteria by which such foreign and defence policy decisions as the occupation of Iraq take place. Professor Manning also argued that such national interests are easy to detect but rarely incorporated into the grand narratives of the media that justify such interventions.
“The ‘facts on the ground’ remain largely hidden from public view as the gory consequences of such decision-making take place,” he said.
Professor Manning’s seminar was part of a symposium sponsored by the Centre for Asia Pacific Social Transformation Studies (CAPSTRANS) titled Occupying ‘the other’: Australia and military occupations from Japan to Iraq presented by the Faculty of Arts. The symposium has brought together journalists and scholars from a variety of disciplines who are investigating Australian involvement in foreign military occupations and interventions to discuss these very issues.
Professor Manning is the author of Us and Them: A Journalist’s Investigation of Media, Muslims and the Middle East.
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