[Reader-list] The war as commodity

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Daily Times
March 20, 2003 
Op-ed.

The war as commodity

M V Ramana

As President George W Bush gets ready to give the final order for the 
anticipated carnage in Iraq, US media outlets, especially TV 
channels, have been having a field day with numerous reports and 
interviews on the upcoming war. Once the bombing starts, all major 
television channels in the US are expected to switch to covering the 
war. Mainstream channels like NBC and CBS have reportedly delayed 
scheduled comedy shows till April in anticipation of the war.
The Pentagon, for its part, has tried to ensure that all this media 
coverage will be favourable by introducing a new process called 
embedding under which media personnel will be allowed to live and 
travel with the troops. As part of the bargain, journalists promise 
not to report certain categories of information and agree to honour 
news embargoes. About 500 journalists have chosen to get embedded. 
Already, prior to the start of war, the investment has paid off; 
these journalists have been filing the kind of "human interest" 
stories that the Pentagon likes.
In effect, mainstream media has functioned and is functioning as a 
way to drum up support for the war. It does this in many ways. To 
start with the voices that are heard are overwhelmingly pro-war. This 
is not reflective of the general public sentiment. It is because when 
it comes to security issues, TV channels almost inevitably feature 
only retired military personnel, each one more conservative and 
hawkish than the other. Many are employees of these channels. 
Utilising brightly lit maps and fancy graphic capabilities, they 
engage the viewer in the arcane details of how an attack would likely 
proceed or outline alternate military strategies. The basic question 
of whether there should be a war at all is never discussed.
Despite this bias, the worldwide anti-war movement has by its sheer 
size forced itself into the mainstream media. But US media, 
especially television, has sought to minimise its impact in various 
ways. One device is to follow up any report of an anti-war event with 
some commentator dismissing them as fifth columnists or simply 
ignorant or as completely ineffective. Another tactic that is used on 
the rare occasions when a speaker opposed to the war appears is to 
"balance" him or her with a super-hawk.
Also working against those opposed to the war is the format used by 
TV channels - short sound bites. In such a milieu, only familiar 
thought, i.e., what is already offered by the mainstream media, has a 
chance of making an impact. Under such circumstances, to talk about 
the openness of the media in inviting a variety of viewpoints, is 
like freedom in the fast food industry: "you can serve the audience 
any variation of a burger with fries that you want, but you cannot 
try anything else," in the words of Andrew Lichterman. "This rules 
out most thought which is a departure from what people already know."
The strongest argument against the war - the expected humanitarian 
consequences that will befall the Iraqi people from the bombing - has 
been almost completely blacked out by the mainstream media. This is 
not due to lack of material. Numerous humanitarian and relief 
agencies, as well as the United Nations itself, have issued urgent 
warnings about the impending crisis. If ever these are mentioned, 
they are portrayed as though the US has nothing to do with it, 
blaming it all on Saddam Hussein, who is, in any case, demonised by 
the media.
Once the war starts, one can expect a continued blackout of the 
casualties on the Iraqi side. The language, instead, would involve 
antiseptic terms like surgical strikes and collateral damage that 
obfuscate a painful reality. In analysing how the TV networks present 
war, Kevin Robins observes, "The screen exposes the ordinary viewer 
to harsh realities, but it screens out the harshness of the 
realities. It has certain moral weightlessness: it grants sensation 
without demanding responsibility and it involves us in a spectacle 
without engaging us in the complexity of its reality."
Hand in hand, the media has also implicitly justified any casualties 
in Iraq as the necessary price for ensuring that attacks like the 
ones of September 11, 2001 do not occur. The media has left 
unchallenged the Bush administration's baseless allegations about the 
relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq. No wonder then that 57 per 
cent of Americans believe that Iraq was involved in those attacks, 
according to a survey published by the Pew Research Center.
US mainstream media's skewed coverage and drummed up support for the 
war is not without reasons. One factor is the huge profits involved. 
As Robert McChesney points out, the US "media system is dominated by 
a dozen or so enormous media conglomerates, whose investors have no 
more intrinsic interest in journalism or democracy than they do in 
cigarette smoking or manufacturing anti-depressant pills or nuclear 
weapons. Their sole purpose is to use their semi-monopolistic market 
power to maximize profits, usually by doing whatever they can to 
please the advertising industry." The 1991 Gulf war, the first 
televised war in history, was hugely successful in terms of viewer 
ratings. CNN, in particular, made its mark during that war. This war 
is expected to be no different in terms of media profits.
US mainstream media has over the years evolved into a wonderful 
propaganda tool. Its central feature is that though different media 
outlets diverge on a number of subjects, there are some core issues 
on which they essentially expound a common line. Differences, if any, 
are relegated to tactics, but the basic assumptions - the purported 
threat posed by Saddam Hussein and the necessity of getting rid of 
him, for example - are never questioned. The system works so well 
that the vast majority of the US public does not realise this role of 
the media, viewing it as independent and seeking the truth. The 
media, in the analysis of Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann, attempts 
to manufacture a consensus.
M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton 
University's Program on Science and Global Security and co-editor of 
Prisoners of the Nuclear Dream