Silencing the Violence of War
by Victor Pickard
From the Public i, published by the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, Nov. 2005.
http://www.freepress.net/news/12228Mainstream media have blood on their hands. That is one lesson we can draw from official apologies for pre-Iraq War coverage, beginning with the New York Times’s public confession in May 2004. Typically, these “media culpas” confessed being overly credulous in accepting the Bush administration’s rationale for war. They attributed mistakes to good-intentioned professionalism and innocent oversight, but not systemic or individual failures. (To their increasing embarrassment, the Times’s apology conveniently failed to note Judith Miller’s byline on four of the six articles singled out as seriously flawed). Perhaps media elites assumed that tepid apologies and strategic ambiguity would inoculate them against further scrutiny. As passive consumers of news, we’d accept that there’s nothing to see here; better to move along, keep quiet and go shopping. Media have apologized and we can rest assured that now they’re getting it right.
Of course, this doesn’t stand up to a nanosecond of scrutiny. There is now little doubt that media helped sell an illegal war –– for which they have yet to come clean –– but ongoing coverage continues to normalize and even glorify barbaric aspects of war by daily serving up an antiseptic version of events in Iraq. We see embedded reporters interviewing the troops and ex-generals discussing tactics, but almost never hear the huddled voices of those at the target end of military operations. As Amy and David Goodman wrote in a Seattle Times op-ed: “If the media would show for one week the same unsanitized images of war that the rest of the world sees, people in the U.S. would say no, that war is not an answer to conflict in the 21st century.” But aside from quick remarks on the number of people killed by the most recent suicide bombing or roadside attack, mainstream media rarely stray from their sanitizing script.
Media sanitize war in many ways. They neglect to show the physical and psychological horrors of battle that linger long after the war has ended. They neglect to make clear the economic and environmental costs the invasion will wreak upon the occupied country. They typically downplay peaceful alternatives proposed by dissenting voices. In collusion with military officials, they de-emphasize the wounded and elect not to show us the dead, including flag-draped coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base. Even when accurate data are readily available, they underreport Iraqi civilian casualties. In stark contrast, Robert Fisk, an un-embedded reporter for The Independent, visits morgues and hospitals after bombings to expose the brutal facts of war.
As we consider the press’s ongoing complicity in making war palatable, we must dispatch another myth: the abiding belief that elite media like the New York Times rise above the crass journalistic norms of cable news. The critique that Fox and CNN depict war as a videogame is fairly well known. But there is a prevailing myth that our print media provide more thoughtful analyses for a more educated audience.
A content analysis of early Iraq war coverage gives the lie to this comforting fiction. Regardless that 10 million people marched worldwide to protest preemptive war just weeks before, once the “shock and awe” bombs fell on March 20, 2003, the Times turned on a dime, rallied behind the flag, and fell in line behind the Bush administration. While ghettoizing dissent to small spaces of newsprint, the Times churned out a special war-coverage series titled “Threat and Response,” toning it down after the first day to “Nation at War.” Typically spanning 14 pages dedicated to various dimensions of the war, sub-titles included “Hearing of War” and “In Search of Security,” but tellingly, no sections with titles like “Missed Targets” or “Invading a Sovereign Nation.” A March 22nd front-page story titled “A Staggering Blow Strikes at the Heart of the Iraqi Capital” began “American War on Saddam Hussein exploded tonight in a ferocious display of precision bombing and cruise missile strikes that blasted the heart of the Iraqi Ruler’s power with a spectacular opening bulls-eye on his most forbidding palace.” The story described the “almost biblical power” of American military prowess that “turned the target area into a cauldron of fireballs and drifting smoke, with one huge building after another erupting in a fury of flame and obliterated granite, marble and steel.” Reducing the bombing to a contest with Saddam Hussein, there was no mention of even the euphemistically labeled “collateral damage.” If our leading news media intended to inform citizens what their government and military were doing in their name, we’d hear more about the less elegant consequences of U.S. foreign policy. Instead, the Times took on the dramatic pomp most often associated with the faux patriotism of Fox News.
This early Times coverage also stands out for its cartoonish diagrams and descriptions of weapons at a level of technical minutiae verging on the eerily surreal. While fetishizing war weaponry and soldier gear down to the range of various rifles and night vision goggles, never are the lethal effects of this cool gadgetry considered. A central story here is how the Times’s fetish constitutes a safely distanced domestication of war: We are tamed into following the bloodless statistics of machinery, weaponry and technology, but steered away from unseemly aspects of war like the severed limbs of mutilated civilians. Indeed, these diagrams were either sourced to or reprinted from military journals, transforming the press “from adversarial watchdogs into military public relations agents” as communications scholar Gordon Mitchell described television coverage of “smart bombs” and “precision warfare” during the first Gulf War.
To be fair, some of the jingoistic coverage has given way to more realistic accounts as the war drags on. But there are still glaring omissions. What happens when those cute-looking bombs explode next to a crowded apartment building or busy market square? What happens if those little cluster bombs fail to explode on impact, as they are wont to do? What happens to the depleted uranium after it releases into the environment? These are important questions, but fall outside the bounds of mainstream media’s straitjacketed coverage –– coverage constrained by commercial pressures, he-said/she-said stenographic reporting and an over reliance on official sources.
Lost from our public discourse is a common-sense grasp of media’s obligations to society. News media are afforded special constitutional protections based on the contract that they perform a unique and vital role in a democratic society. By shirking their historic mission of providing the public with crucial information and holding those in power accountable, media do an incredible disservice to our country. By de-contextualizing the brutalities of the deadly weaponry used in our name, media help perpetuate a senseless war. Indeed, as the war worsens and critical voices multiply, a compliant media system abets nervous elites as they retool their strategic messaging to invent new rationalizations for the necessity of war. As Todd Gitlin demonstrates in his classic book The Whole World Is Watching, media coverage shaped by conservative journalistic norms and market forces typically produces a version of reality that bolsters claims for war and diminishes the salience of dissenting opinions.
Another myth we can dispense with is the historical trope that has the so-called liberal media doggedly covering, and thus bringing to an end, the Vietnam War. In his book The Uncensored War, Daniel Hallin convincingly debunks this misconception, suggesting that media usually lag behind public opinion, rather than charge ahead of it. This relationship brings to mind a paraphrase of something Gore Vidal once wrote about the Times: After the battle’s fought, they sneak out onto the battlefield to shoot the wounded. Whether due to benign neglect, calculated indifference, or intentional censorship, we cannot assume that without public agitation, mainstream media will contest official lies. Media scholars Donohue et al suggest that, taken as a whole, our media act as neither watchdogs nor lapdogs, but as vicious “guard dogs” –– guard dogs for the status quo. Indeed, it seems our media system strives to manage our outrage, render us de-politicized, and remind us that we are consumers, not citizens, repeatedly telling us: Nothing to see here, move along, go shopping…
It is not inevitable that our media fail us. Hurricane Katrina momentarily revealed that, when forced to face horrible inequities, even some pampered media personalities could break with racist storylines to confront government officials with tough questions. The same demands for answers must be brought to bear on the Iraq War. Though conservatives relish attacking coastal elite newspapers like the Times for their purported opposition to the Bush agenda, there is little evidence to warrant their ire. The “paper of record” downplayed potential bombshells like the Downing Street Memo, and has yet to fully give the Jayson Blair treatment to Judith Miller’s scandalous duplicity in advocating for preemptive war. As the Miller-Libby-Rove plot thickens, it now appears that not only did the Times fail to probe obvious gaps in the war rationale, but also one of their star reporters conspired with war hawks to suppress countervailing evidence by outing a CIA agent. Worst of all, the Times ignored the great muckraker I.F. Stone’s crucial two-word maxim passed on to aspiring journalists: Governments Lie.
What we need now is a national conversation focused on truth and reconciliation. We must hold accountable those individuals and institutions that brought us to war, begin discussing ways for ending it, and to never let it happen again. As it becomes abundantly clear that a corporate media system cannot withstand commercial pressures long enough to confront an elite-driven status quo––especially during war––we must entertain democratic alternatives to the current system. Yet, despite deep systemic flaws, we cannot give up pressuring the mainstream press to do a better job. There is too much at stake to leave their misrepresentations unchallenged. Veteran war correspondent and author Chris Hedges reminds us, “There is nothing glorious or gallant about combat. But if the Press told the truth, we would keep our children away. Indeed, it would be hard to wage war.”
Mainstream media helped start this war. Now it’s time they help end it.
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