Whether or not it is an ‘interlude’, as many European media say, the meeting a few hours ago between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and the newly elected Donald Trump in front of reporters in the Oval Office turned a possible negotiation into a spectacle.

Too much TV time, too many actors, too many said and unsaid between pauses, individual performance, questions and jokes, and too many interests put on the same plate live yesterday in front of journalists and global audiences

Excessive transparency and individual performances destroyed the attempt at agreement at the time.

Negotiations, of any kind, can be narrated before or afterwards, but never publicly filmed during the deal-making phase. Because otherwise the negotiation becomes representation and other rules come into play.

In the face of military – political conflict, what we are continually witnessing is a ‘reduction of complexity’, a process of simplification through the activation of mechanisms underpinning the dominant public discourse in the public sphere.

The international media fall into the trap of perpetuating and reinforcing ethnic divisions that are then activated by propaganda orchestrated on the ground, including through the control of local media. 

The real manipulation strategy is to construct information from the very place affected by the crisis. This is because the local dimension of the event (and its public narrative) is already in itself reliable, compared to the news reported by a foreign newspaper, far from that reality.

While in the old wars the mass media were an excellent tool to create consensus and demonize the enemy, and their action took place in a context where demarcations and political boundaries were already clear, in recent conflicts the role of information is even more important as the flow is necessary to extend the criteria of inclusion and exclusion to the entire population, to mobilize it and create the conditions for conflict.

Peace plans generally have a ‘political’ limitation, a preventive attitude towards the phenomenon that is believed to have provoked the war, and thus constitute a kind of inventory of the causes of the conflict. The constant presence of an irrational element in the phenomenon of war should also be noted.

In order to arrive at scientific pacifism and its public narrative/presentation, it is necessary to achieve an adequate scientific knowledge of social phenomena on the part not so much of scientists, but of institutions and information workers.

This aspect is largely part of the proposition repeatedly highlighted by Gaston Bouthoul (sociologist) in his writings, when he states that we are condemned either to prepare for war or to engage in the advancement of polemology, where the boundary between war and peace becomes even more blurred when conflict enters the sphere of public media.

The news media can prove to be effective instruments of propaganda and incitement to hatred, creating the conditions that make the use of violence possible and conceivable.

But the opposite is also true.

Newspapers can also be used by political actors for ‘positive’ purposes such as conflict prevention, resolution and transformation.

The globalization of communications has created ‘media bridges’ that negotiators can use to unblock international crises and mediate between disputants.

This innovative use of media should be linked to a broad change in the mechanisms that govern international relations and a new geopolitical design of the world.

Making the media a peace-building tool would certainly be a positive step forward, but in some cases, it can still backfire and cause pathological social effects.

For scholars Dayan and Katz, putting the spotlight on a negotiation, for example, could certainly help to build trust, but it would inevitably lead to turning that political situation into a media event, a great public mass communication ceremony capable of keeping the public in suspense.

It may therefore happen that the enthusiasm shown by the media leads to the concealment of certain aspects of the background of the clash. And should hidden problems emerge with regard to the ongoing conflict, this could generate a greater escalation of violence, and the shock could be enormous.

The crisis of expectations for a definitive peace can lead to frustration and confusion with extremely negative consequences for a real solution to the war.