Los horrores de la guerra en tiempos de redes sociales

Lea la columna de David Carr que empieza en la portada del New York Times de hoy. Le paso cuatro párrafos seguidos por si le da pereza leer la columna completa:

The public has developed an expectation that it will know exactly what a reporter knows every single second, and news organizations are increasingly urging their correspondents to use social media to tell their stories — and to extend their brand. (Unless the reporter says something dumb. Then, not so much.) 

Anne Barnard, a reporter for The New York Times covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was criticized on Twitter for ... not tweeting. She sees journalistic value in the short-form text service. Interviewed on NPR, Ms. Barnard said: “I think over all it brings more benefits than problems. I think we just — again, we have to remember our primary work is the reporting we’re doing on the ground. You know, our job isn’t to tweet in real time.” 

Twitter’s ability to carry visual information has made it an even more important part of the news narrative. A message may be only 140 characters, but we all know a picture is worth many, many words. 

Often, it is a single image that comes to represent big, complicated events. The children fleeing napalm in Vietnam, an incinerated soldier along a “highway of death” during the gulf war or the hooded prisoner standing on a box in Abu Ghraib.

Siempre, siempre, sieeeeeeeempre, informar sobre las guerras ha sido un modo de evitarlas o de terminar con ellas. Quizá por eso quienes las hacen tratan de evitar a toda costa que el mundo conozca sus horrores.