Page 397 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Pres dent al Stagecraft and M l ta nment

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Jane Caputi and Casey McCabe

Presidential stageCraFt and MilitainMent

In an age of mass media, the public learns about war and understands its life
and death consequences through television images and the many other sources
of news narratives across the media spectrum. In addition to news, entertain-
ment formats (frequently based on real combat) also present forceful images of
war, weaponry, and the soldiers who fight and die in continuing global conflict.
In recent years, a hybrid format that blurs the boundaries between fiction and
nonfiction, referred to as militainment, has been employed by the media and
the military to represent war in our time. In addition, defining moments in the
reporting of war and conflict are increasingly stage-managed by the Pentagon
and White House public relations professionals.
Militainment and stagecraft are attempts to control media imagery and the
meanings of war through fictional formatting, information management, and
media choreography. These sophisticated strategies raise issues about the pub-
lic’s ability to receive accurate information and a true picture of what war and
conflict are actually like.
War is understood and interpreted, justified and judged through the media
that tell the stories of war. Most civilians experience military conflict through
the media, their impressions derived not from the battles in distant lands but
from the manner they are rendered at home. Struggles over war’s true mean-
ing, its values and necessities, play out on movie and television screens and in
the photographs of newspapers and magazines. These representations are influ-
enced by the demands of commercial media, politics, and military pressures.
By the twenty-first century, the media has become the battleground where
the struggle to win the hearts and minds of the public is carried out through
the increasingly persuasive media management strategies of militainment and
stagecraft.

ThE BaTTLE ovEr PuBLiC oPinion
The process of negotiating the meaning of war and its depictions has been
going on for centuries, but with mass media and new digital technology, that
process has come to play a profound role in global conflict. Over the last cen-
tury, the American public has at times expressed both favorable and disdainful