Page 16 - Conflict, Terrorism, and the Media In Asia

1 US journalism

Servant of the nation, scourge

of the truth?

Toby Miller

Introduction
The period since 11 September 2001 has seen both continuity and change in the
way the US media and state have combined to produce realities for their audience
and citizenry. This Chapter lays out how the mainstream US media, notably net-
work and cable television, have worked as effective spokespeople for nationalism,
in ways that coincide with the enunciation of national interest by the state. I will
show it is no surprise that almost three quarters of the US public supported the
invasion of Iraq (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press 2003a). It
would have taken immense initiative, knowledge, and drive to think otherwise,
especially given the shock of September 11 (Taylor 2003: B2) and the way that it
heightened a sense of risk and hence self-protectiveness in the population of a
world power capable of supreme destruction. The White House’s 2002 National
Security Strategy was correct in identifying the nation’s gravest peril as located
‘at the crossroads of radicalism and technology’. But was that taken to signify the
logocentric interdependence of US Zionism, militarism, transportation, construc-
tion, and high-octane fuel, which, together with Middle Eastern authoritarianism,
economic inequality, and Islamic hyper-masculinity and religiosity produced the
conditions of possibility for September 11?
No. It was taken as the cue for a reinvigorated propaganda effort via the
euphemism ‘public diplomacy’. The desire to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of
the global south (signifying Islam) was invoked again and again. The new public
diplomacy is supposed to transcend the material effects of policies and businesses
and instead permit closer communication at a civil-society level, directly linking
citizens across borders to ‘influence opinions and mobilize foreign publics’
(Council on Foreign Relations 2003: 15; also see Gilboa 1998) by, as the State
Department puts it, ‘engaging, informing, and influencing key international audi-
ences’ (Brown 2004). The idea is to achieve these goals in ways that work for the
interests of the US government but avoid both that connotation and potential
opposition from other states.
Republicans had nearly ended public diplomacy once they took control of the
Congress in the mid-1990s, diminishing funding and staffing by 20–25 per cent,
but quickly turned to it under George Bush minor as a way of affirming that