How the media sanitises conflict

There is a good post over at a blog that I have been following recently dedicated to creating media awareness of the conflict in DR Congo.

It is a topic that has been raised on this blog a number of times and will well summed up in this comment

that the consequences of conflict are very rarely shown in the media, and if they are, they are sanitised to such a degree that the ethical and moral implications for the audience are lost.

There is a fine line between what is often called the breakfast test,would you see this over your cornflakes and sometimes what is necessary to get the horrors across to the reader.

Sometimes the media can sanitise war to such an extent that it is portrayed rather like a video game with targets mere dots on a computer screen and deaths a video scoring system.

The hard hitting image of its consequences is a responsibility of the media to remind us about the horror of war and prevent us slipping into it as we did in 2003.