Lapdogs or watchdogs?
Constructing truth from media reports of war is no easy task

by Amir Hassanpour

April 7, 2003 -- There is some truth in the dictum that “the first casualty of war is truth.” This claim is not, however, very enlightening. In the evolving postmodern environment, it would be more appropriate to argue that there is more than one truth. Even the claim about multiple truths is not new or radical. Feminists, for instance, have emphasized that in patriarchal society all knowledge is gendered and Marxists have never ceased to unravel the class nature of
truth.

The current war against the Ba’thist regime of Iraq has brought this old philosophical controversy to the attention of the public. Media coverage of the war is now being debated not only by peace activists but, increasingly, by the media themselves. The terms propaganda and war have been, since the First World War, intertwined. By the early 1930s, the print media and the new medium of radio were used, extensively and persuasively, by fascists and Nazis. Winston Churchill, referring to Nazi radio propaganda, said in 1939: “If words could kill, we would be dead already.” In the U.S., an Institute for Propaganda Analysis was set up to teach the public how to combat Nazi propaganda. The institute identified seven basic propaganda “devices” (name-calling, glittering generality, transfer, testimonial, plain folks, card stacking and band wagon) and taught high school students and adult citizens how to decode them and separate fact from fiction.

The seven devices do not take us far in “deconstructing” today’s wartime or peacetime struggle for winning the hearts and minds of the public. Propaganda is now far more subtle and the media environment far more complex. The televisual image, now broadcast live from the killing fields, has displaced or, rather, powerfully augmented the authority of the written or spoken word. The live images of the bombing of Baghdad instantly create nationalist feelings throughout the Arab Middle East, inflame religious emotions in Islamic communities and invite pacifist outrage throughout the world. In the same vein, the display of American hostages mistreated in captivity incites the wrath of President George W. Bush and other U.S. and British leaders, who use it to appeal to nationalism in order to rally more support for an unpopular war gone wrong.

Current understanding in media studies and cultural studies tends to obliterate the “modernist” distinction between fact and fiction: all facts are socially constructed. However, the constructed nature of facts does not or should not imply that the competing claims of the war front and the peace movement are equally valid or accurate. It means, rather, that there is human interest (economic, political, military, etc.) in any reference to or representation of “reality.” For instance, it does not mean that Iraq’s use of chemical weapons against its Kurdish citizens and Iranians is fiction. It implies, rather, that the American and British near silence about the event before 1988 and their more frequent references to it in recent weeks is motivated not by its “facticity” but by their politics of regime change in Iraq.

An extensive body of research since the Second World War rejects the claim that western media are objective, neutral, impartial or balanced. According to received wisdom, media hold up a mirror to society (including the state and the market) and reflect it (by reporting untarnished facts) to an educated and rational citizenry so that they themselves make sense of events. Moreover, media act as watchdogs or even adversaries of the state as a Fourth Estate (the press) or a Fifth Estate (radio and TV). This claim is based on the myth of the separation of state and media powers: since the media are privately owned, they do not engage in propaganda and censorship.

The claim that the government is the locus of propaganda and censorship was rather accurate in the 17th and 18th centuries. However, in the wake of the democratization of the state, the privately owned mainstream media emerged as powerful sources of censorship and propaganda. From a critical theoretical perspective, these media are lapdogs rather than watchdogs of the state. In the current war, for instance, the U.S. media support the nation-state in part by under-reporting the peace movement while they do not hesitate to give the war front hegemonic presence.

In spite of the shift of locus of propaganda from the state to the media, the U.S. government devises news pools (1991 Gulf War), embeds reporters, engages in psy-ops (psychological operations), conducts daily and multiple briefings and funds several clandestine and open radio broadcasting stations.The media and the state are, however, only one element in the construction of truth. We as audiences, too, are crucially engaged in making meaning. All texts, ranging from news to photographs to statistics, are polysemic, i.e., have multiple meanings, and lend themselves to a diversity of readings. For instance, depending on our politics, we make different meanings of the “fact” that the British government plagiarized a student paper in order to make its most important case for joining the U.S. war on Iraq or the “fact” that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell relied on lies about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in order to convince the Security Council about the need for the war Seymour Hersch, Who Lied to Whom? The New Yorker, March 31, 2003.)

From a pro-war position, the American and British reports are read as minor or technical errors while, from a peace movement perspective, they prove that the two governments should not be trusted to conduct war.

The U.S. government engineers, as it did in 1991, a new language in order to sanitize the war. For instance, “target of opportunity” euphemizes the act of “assassination attempt” and “moment of truth” replaces “declaration of war.” In spite of this, audiences, reporters and other media workers quite often resist state propaganda. This resistance ranges from audience demonstrations against CNN to the protests of the staff of the state-operated Voice of America in the aftermath of Sept. 11. As audiences and citizens, we have to critically engage with the state, the media, their texts and ourselves.

Amir Hassanpour is an assistant professor in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations

 

by Amir Hassanpour (published in University of Toronto, The Bulletin, Volume 56, No. 16, 7 April 2003, p. 11)

 

http://www.news.utoronto.ca/bin4/thoughts/comment030407.asp