Naomi Sakr is a senior lecturer in communication at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Satellite Realms: Transnational Television, Globalization and the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2001) and editor of Women and Media in the Middle East (I. B. Tauris, 2004).
Bring ’Em On: Media and Politics in the Iraq War
edited by lee artz and yahya r. kamalipour
Lanham, Md., Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. 269 pages
Paperback: UK £22.99, US $29.95
Intriguingly, the phrase chosen for the main title of this book does not reappear in its contents. That fact alone says much about the issues the book addresses. The phrase was spoken by President George W. Bush of the United States in July 2003 in response to mounting attacks on US occupation forces in Iraq. Warning that these would not precipitate a US exit, Bush said US forces were tough enough to stay put and his message to would-be insurgents was, “Bring ’em on.” That readers of Bring ’Em On are expected to recognise the allusion illustrates the degree to which reports reflecting the Bush administration’s perspective on events are assumed to dominate media headlines around the globe.
Also implicit in the title is another underlying theme of the book, namely, the slide towards a militaristic future. George Bush’s “bring ’em on” challenge to militant opponents of the US presence in Iraq reverberated with wholly literal meaning in 2004 and 2005, as suicide bombings and other killings continued to escalate. According to official US sources, the number of insurgent attacks soared from thirty–forty per day in February 2005 to seventy per day in May, with four hundred Iraqis killed and one thousand wounded in just two weeks after the long-delayed announcement of a new government at the end of April. In his foreword to Bring ’Em On, written many months earlier, Douglas Kellner explains how a foreign-policy doctrine based on militarism and subversion of international law portends a “cycle of unending violence and retribution”.
Ways in which mass media and popular culture contribute to precipitating an era of perpetual war provide the unifying theme for the fifteen chapters of the book. As the publisher’s blurb puts it, “How have political agents and media gatekeepers sought to develop public support for the first preventive war of the modern age?” This question, with its implication of premeditated manipulation of public opinion, is one that several other edited collections have sought to answer following the US-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq.
Not every book on war coverage since 2001 has started from the premise that propaganda is the order of the day. In Media at War: The Iraq Crisis (Sage, 2004), Howard Tumber and Jerry Palmer scrutinised the practice of journalism, assessing the extent to which media personnel may have become participants in, rather than observers of, the military campaign. In Global Media Go to War (Marquette Books, 2004), Ralph Berenger gathered diverse perspectives on the role of news and entertainment media during what that book’s subtitle optimistically called the “2003 Iraq War”. Only one of Berenger’s fifty authors directly addressed the issue of propaganda, arguing that, at least among Arab audiences, propaganda does not work. In contrast, judging from War and the Media (Sage, 2003), Western audiences are potentially less resistant. Shielded behind a neutral title, the twenty-five authors assembled for that volume by Des Freedman and Daya Thussu conducted their research before the invasion of Iraq. Even so, they signalled evidence of deliberate deception, polarisation and coercion in chapter headings peppered with phrases such as “the circulation of non-knowledge”, “spinning the war”, “cyber-patriotism”, and “a time of fear”.
It is a short step from these findings to the unambiguous approach of Tell Me Lies (Pluto Press, 2004), which in its subtitle not only proclaimed the existence of “propaganda and media distortion” but replaced the bland phrase “Iraq War” with the uncompromising “attack on Iraq”. Introducing that book’s multiple accounts of the media’s brainwashing, misreporting, psychological warfare, ignorance of history and normalising of aggression, David Miller urged readers to make the leap from recognising media distortion to doing something about it.
But lies are not the only form of distortion. Silence can be equally potent, as Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich showed in their exposés on sanctions, oil, depleted uranium and much else in Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You (Context Books, 2003). That book ends with a telling observation about cycles of violence and US power from the Hollywood actor Sean Penn. It is a corollary to the point Kellner makes about the route to endless war in his foreword to Bring ’Em On. Referring to the cycle in which bombing is answered by bombing, mutilation by mutilation and killing by killing, Penn says it is a pattern that “only a great country like ours can stop”.
If Bring ’Em On differs from other collections on the media and US-led wars since 2001, it is in actively documenting duplicity, intimidation and strategic silences about the invasion of Iraq by means of systematic content analysis and copious archival and bibliographic references. It points in similar directions to Tell Me Lies and Target Iraq, but takes a more calculated and scholarly approach. This strength does not immediately emerge from the contributions of either of the two editors. Indeed, rather worryingly, at least twenty lines are repeated practically verbatim between Yahya Kamalipour’s cursory introduction and Lee Artz’s polemical and reductionist first chapter. Artz proposes a model of a “triangle of power” in which government propaganda, corporate media and public culture are steered by anonymous “elites” who dupe or marginalise a passive and poorly educated citizenry. Disadvantaged by its ranting style, this chapter suffers a further loss of credibility when it says of the British Labour Party, which was in power in 2003, that it “refused to be a loyal opposition” (p. 13).
For Artz, questions about how the American people were prepared for the war on Iraq can be answered by reference to the “routines of culture”, by which he means such phenomena as video games, mandatory pledges of allegiance, “nihilism, apathy, relativism, narrowcasting, subculture self-centeredness, and an abundance of distraction” (p. 18). What we have here, in short, is the familiar thesis about the manufacture of consent. The problem with a diagnosis along these lines is that it can convince only by dint of painstaking, methodical empirical research. It comes as a relief, then, that the bulk of Bring ’Em On does provide carefully documented analysis, in chapters that stand both as self-contained studies and as building blocks in a multifaceted explanation as to how the media and public culture prepared the American public for the untested policy of so-called preventive war.
Readers taking the chapters sequentially may gain an understanding as to how certain media practices were conducted. But for deeper insights into why these practices were effective it is necessary to cut across the chapters, to piece together common threads. The latter exercise yields at least five sets of reasons for the success of the US media in building public support for the war on Iraq, which may be broadly summarised under the headings of neologism, intimidation, smearing, public relations techniques, and the confusion of plausibility with truth. The first of these, the use of old words in a new sense, gets to the heart of the ideology of preventive war. A preventive war is an oxymoron, since war can hardly be initiated and prevented at the same time. Timothy Cole, writing on “The Political Rhetoric of Sacrifice and Heroism”, quotes from a speech by George W. Bush in which he declares that the United States is a peaceful nation that has gone to war to “keep the peace”. Elisia Cohen, examining how the established concept of pre-emptive war was suddenly displaced by the new strategy of preventive war, describes the “equivocation between preventive and preemptive war” as the “rhetorical mystification of political ideology” (p. 44).
Other examples of the unprincipled misuse of language abound. Kellner refers in his foreword to the Orwellian-style doublespeak in which occupation becomes “liberation”, and the destruction of essential infrastructure becomes “humanitarian action” (p. xv). Fox News Channel, discussed by Adel Iskandar, adopted for itself the promotional slogan “fair and balanced” when it was clearly neither, having been conceived as an antidote to liberal media and being demonstrably partisan. In his chapter on war reporting by Time and Newsweek, Michael Gasher shows that “privacy” was assigned one meaning for US soldiers killed in combat, who were not to be photographed, and another for Iraqi soldiers, who were.
When meanings are twisted with impunity, it becomes harder for journalists to say what they mean. Iskandar cites Christine Amanpour of CNN, who told an interviewer about “intimidation by the administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News”, which had created a climate of “fear and self-censorship” (p. 169). Robert Jensen’s fascinating chapter on the former CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, and his struggle to be both a patriot and a journalist during wartime, reveals that Rather was self-consciously afraid to ask tough questions. Instead, his instinct in a time of crisis was to give the US president the benefit of the doubt. As Jensen points out, this was not only completely conventional behaviour on Rather’s part, but it also won enthusiastic approval from many of his peers. In this environment, it was possible for the opinionated interventions of Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly—a proponent of fighting “terror with terror” (p. 160)—to be confused with journalism and, as Iskandar shows, for O’Reilly to become a role model for talkshow presenters across radio and television.
The impact of processes such as the distortion of meaning and the normalisation of partisan journalism was compounded by the smearing and demonising of opponents of war. Jensen cites a conversation between a Nuremberg prison psychologist and Hermann Göring, in which the latter reportedly argued that people in a democratic system could be brought to do the bidding of their leaders as easily as those in a dictatorship. Denounce pacifists for lacking patriotism and for exposing the country to danger, Göring said. “It works the same way in any country” (p. 78). As Andrew Jakubowicz and Liz Jacka show in their chapter on America’s “deputy sheriff”, Australia’s prime minister, John Howard, adopted a similar technique when he denounced anti-war protesters as supporters of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein—a ploy also used by the pro-war faction in Britain. Further examples of such smearing include a whole gamut of labels introduced on Fox News, from “enemy of the state” (p. 161) to “the great unwashed” (p. 167). Even implicit denunciation can achieve similar effects. Christian Fuchs’s comparison of war coverage in 1991 and 2003 highlights the tendency of leading US newspapers to use decontextualised pictures of protesters that focused on violence and arrests.
Traditionally, the fields of public relations and journalism have been regarded as separate, despite some exchange of personnel. Today, however, according to evidence in Bring ’Em On, long-established divisions have broken down, with serious implications for media coverage of war. Fuchs gives an account of what he sees as a profound, long-term ideological shift, from a Fordist society of externally imposed discipline to a post-Fordist society of internalised self-imposed controls. His thesis is buttressed by the work of Heinz Brandenburg in a chapter on the military policy of embedding reporters with troops. Embedding integrates normally wayward and individualistic journalists with the military’s outlook and goals, and ensures that they do not need to be overtly repressed. Embedding was sheer genius, said one public relations consultant, because it is inspired by the basic tenet of public relations, which is all about establishing relationships, or even friendships, with members of the press. In the aforementioned chapter on Australia, we learn about a special relationship between the Washington PR firm Rendon and the Australian cameraman Paul Moran, who was killed in Iraq in 2003. Jakubowicz and Jacka recount investigations into contracts Moran undertook that were related to American intelligence and government work handled by Rendon in Iraq and the United States. He was killed by a car bomb while filming Kurdish fighters for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Although it contains illuminating studies of the media in Australia and cultural production in Germany, Bring ’Em On is principally about the United States, and it is here that a fifth explanation can be found as to why media cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq was able to have such a resounding effect. For Iskandar, writing about Fox News, the American public is isolated from information about the rest of the world. It is as if Americans live within the “shielding opacity” of a bubble (p. 172). Debra Merskin corroborates the point by documenting a symbolic annihilation of Arabs, in the sense that US television networks contained so little coverage of Arab culture over previous decades that negative stereotypes were able to take hold. Timothy Cole’s research on political rhetoric also points to the failure of the US media to inform Americans adequately about the outside world. He notes that foreign-policy issues are different from domestic ones because ordinary people lack independent experience against which to verify information that is fed to them about foreign affairs. In these circumstances, as Michael Gasher explains in his chapter on Time and Newsweek, plausibility becomes more accessible than truth.
The five explanatory strands identified here offer no more than a glimpse of the analysis available in the book. The explanations it contains of the reasons for the US media’s encouragement of public support for the Iraq War are many and varied, from the rapid concentration of US media ownership that followed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, to a persistent belief by US officials that hostility to US foreign policy is based on simple ignorance of American values and is therefore susceptible to a quick fix. Contrary to the impression given by Lee Artz, the book shows that elites were not all pro-war, which indicates in turn that maintaining public consent for war will be a continuing struggle. Media scholars rightly insist that texts are polysemic, and as Matthew Killmeier argues in his colourful chapter on country music and the policing of performers’ opinions, music in particular lends itself to multiple interpretations. Thus, righteous declarations alone about consent being manufactured are counterproductive because they are disempowering. In contrast, careful documentation of the ways in which consent is manufactured anew every day can empower those who seek to challenge the manufacturing process. Such documentation is contained in this book.
