The Fog of War and Media at War

Reviewed by:

Lee Artz

 Purdue University Calumet

Ralph D. Berenger, ed. Global media go to war: Role of news and entertainment media during the 2003 Iraq war. Spokane, WA: Marquette Books. 2004. 382 p. $49.95 (paper). (ISBN 0-922993-10-6).

As has become abundantly clear, global media were at war long before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, participating in the battle for the hearts and minds of world citizens. And just as enemies face off in battle, media took sides. Any effort to document and explain how media norms and practices of national, corporate, or independent media produced and distributed information could help improve our understanding of the underlying political motivations and machinations of government powers and direct us to more rational and ethical decisions and actions. Thus, journalist professor Ralph Berenger should be applauded for his foresight and delivery of one of the first contributions to that urgent process of investigation and reflection, even if many of the thirty essays selected for this volume fall woefully short.

Perhaps Berenger cleverly intended to illustrate the battle by and over media participation in the US war on Iraq by balancing crisp investigations with more modest contributions that analyze little, state the obvious, or ironically echo the dominant political justifications sent up by the media in their early coverage of the 2003 invasion.

Certainly the arrangement of essays maximizes the point-counterpoint arguments.

The book begins solidly with an essay by Cees Hamelink emphasizing the central issue: how did media of the invading countries assist in justifying the attack, how can this "connivance with partisan propaganda" be explained, and attenuated in the future? John Merrill's short response foreshadows the responsive tenor of many contributors: rather than confronting the role and function of US media, let's stress that Arab media also had a point of view . . . "it could be that the media--intrinsic institutions of their own cultures--are simply reflecting the biases and values of their people" (p. xxvi). This counsel to temper all investigations with assumptions that discount political culpability for media activity is well-represented throughout the book.

For example, although James Napoli ultimately concludes that sometimes the United States "deserves to be opposed" (p.12), it is not clear if he believes that the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq is one of those times. In fact, Napoli is so "annoyed" with antiwar sentiments in Egypt, France, and elsewhere (p. 3), which he marks off as the result of historical "anti-Americanism" and the lack of professional journalism in those countries, that he never actually discusses pre-war coverage of claims, evidence, sources, and other norms of reporting. Others adopt a similarly soft critique. For example, Howard Schneider argues that major US media had difficulty assembling facts but made rolling refinements in correcting their coverage, by citing many examples. Inexplicably, he omits any discussion of the New York Times knowing use of unreliable sources such as Ahmed Chalabi, AP and other media propaganda cropping of the photo-op toppling of the Hussein statue, the burying of "corrections" of inaccurate sensational headlines, and many other examples available to less academic investigators such as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Likewise, Kris Kodrich and Sweety Law favorably conclude that major US/UK media sought to cut the fog of war and represent opposing viewpoints (p. 203), again missing the discredited Chalabi source in Judith Miller's New York Times accounts, and more systematically accepting at face value the US media's "high standards of journalistic practice" (p. 197)--standards roundly challenged with documentation elsewhere as noted in Kaarle Nordenstreng's "Afterword" to this same volume (also see Artz, 2004, e.g.). In another soft critique, Steven Cooper and Jim Kuypers gloss the Pentagon's policy of "embedding" news reporters in combat units as advantageous because it was not blatant censorship and the journalists seemed to have a positive experience. Moreover, Cooper and Kuypers conclude that "embedded reporters were relaying their eye-witness accounts" while other journalists could only report "second-hand accounts filtered through their preconceived understandings of the war" (p. 170). Fortunately, despite an abundance of these cautious approaches, Berenger provides some essays which are more assertive in their critiques. For example, the obtuse discounting of civilian experience is rebutted by Abdullah Al-Kindi in the final essay. As he reflects on coverage by Al-Jazeera and other media that refused both Iraqi and US/UK dictates, Al-Kindi agrees with other media critics that embedding systems "favorably slant coverage toward one side, rather than focusing on the events of the conflict and the war's consequence on ordinary people" (p. 340). The dismissal of Arab opposition to the US/UK invasion is also corrected with Emmanuel Alozie's account of major African media and government principled preference for negotiation, inspections, and international cooperation. In their exposure of Murdoch's Australian media, Martin Hirst and Robert Schutze demonstrate how researchers and commentators might investigate the "big lie" by Murdoch's Fox news in the US. And Makram Khoury-Machool does more to explain the functioning and failure of US media influence outside the US, than all of the apologetic essays combined: "In this war, it was the suffering of Iraqi people who gained possession of the majority of Arab hearts and minds" (p. 318). The suffering of Iraqi people would likely have stirred Westerners, as well. Unfortunately, most US/UK citizens did not witness that war because the US/UK media's are so embedded in elite ideology that their "rolling refinement" of the news never overcame the "fog" of patriotism and propaganda.

Several fine essays are included in this collection which might better appear elsewhere, because although the research and insights are valuable, they do not seem to address the stated intention of the book to investigate the role of the media in the war. For example, Glenn Sparks and Will Miller find that some personality types avoid stress through selective media exposure, but leave aside questions of the which ideological justifications provide emotional coping, how propagandists and journalists interacted to provide coverage of this war that was or wasn't emotionally acceptable, or how acceptable selective exposure might be affected by prior mediated cultural experiences. George Gladney updates McLuhan; Naila Hamdy and Radwa Mabarak reveal that citizens turned to the Internet or information and interaction; and Muhammad Ayish found that Egyptian students found Al-Jazeera more credible than Western media. In each case, the contributions were informative, yet, one is left wondering: what do these findings tell us about the media war? The world is divided (Gladney); citizens want information about war (Hamdy and Mabarak); Arab students find US/UK military intervention intrusive (Ayish). Beverly Horvit offers more in her content analysis of global news agency coverage of the pre-war debate, reaffirming that "non-Western news agencies did not transmit as much information to support US policy as did the Western agencies" (p. 81). Still, as Horvit concludes we don't know how and why news agencies select news sources or how accounts interact with existing cultural codes.

As well presented and representative as these essays are, one feels the need for the intervention of a political economist to connect the dots between media ownership, control, national identity, and military policy, propaganda and public relations campaigns of protagonists, and democratic discourse. Global media go to war may not be the "most comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the role of the mass media" in the US war on Iraq, given the many exemplary alternatives available, a few of which are included in the “References” below. Nonetheless, this book has great value for students and citizens who want to compare competing analyses of media war activity.

Most importantly, there are at least a dozen essays that really do help us understand the social control function of the dominant media, in particular the essays of Part II: The World War of Wars, especially those by Yahya Kamalipour on media language; Jack Lule's on metaphors of war; and the analysis of late-night talk show war humor, by Andrew Williams, Justin Martin, Kaye Trammell, Kristen Landreville, and Chelsea Ellis; and Part IV: The War in Other Places, with studies of media coverage in Hong Kong by Yoichi Shimatsu; South Africa by Christine Buchinger, Herman Wassermand, and Arnold de Beer; and India by Janet Fine.

References

Artz, L. (2004). War as promotional “photo-op”: The New York Times’ visual coverage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In N. Snow and Y. Kamalipour (eds.), War, media, and propaganda: A global perspective (pp. 79-91). Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.

Artz, L. and Kamalipour, Y. (Eds.) (In press, 2004). Bring `em on! Media and power in the U.S. war on Iraq. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.

Kavotsky, B. and Carlson, T. (2003). Embedded: The media at war in Iraq. Lyons Press.

Schecter, D. (2003). Weapons of mass deception: How the media failed to cover the war on Iraq. Prometheus.

Solomon, N. (2003). Target Iraq: What the news media didn't tell you. Context.
Rampton, S. and Stauber, J. D. (2003). Weapons of mass deception: The uses of propaganda in Bush's war on Iraq. J. P. Tarcher.

Weiner, R. (2003). Live from Baghdad: Making journalism from behind enemy lines. St. Martin’s Press.

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