Page 136 - Cultural Studies and Political Economy

Cultural Studies and the Political Economy of Media Scholarship 125

of the well-crafted, well-censored image in molding U.S. public opinion. De-
termined not to suffer another Vietnam by allowing uncensored stories and
clips on the nightly television news, the U.S. military restricted war coverage
by constraining journalists’ freedom to move in the absence of military es-
corts: “journalists who did not accommodate themselves to the rules stated by
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the central command were threatened with losing their accreditations.” The
government attained the overwhelming assent of the American public to wage
the war in the first place, it may be recalled, through an untrue story told be-
fore Congress under the coaching of Hill and Knowlton, a PR firm, by the
daughter of Kuwait’s U.S. ambassador. She represented herself as a volunteer
nurse, and claimed she had witnessed the atrocity of Iraqi troops hurling ba-
bies from hospital incubators and allowing them to die on the cold hard floor.
Her story was treated as fact, without investigation, by the U.S. media and
was repeated seemingly endlessly; indeed, her testimony was recounted by
the U.S. president as justification for waging war in the first place. Likewise
today, the phrase, “weapons of mass destruction,” is sufficient to cause most
people’s eyes to roll, but when first used, repeatedly, by White House offi-
cials, it was sufficient to gain overwhelming support for waging a second war
on Iraq. These are examples of Lippmannesque pseudoenvironments being
put to the service of the U.S. military and are a far cry from the “limited ef-
fects,” “uses and gratifications,” and “active audience” theses of mainline
media theorists.
In the opening chapter of the revised edition of his widely acclaimed text-
book, The Process and Effects of Mass Communication (1971), Wilbur
Schramm (by at least one account the founder of U.S. communication stud-
ies ) immodestly declared that he had been the first, way back in 1952, to
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suggest that audiences are “highly active, highly selective . . . manipulating
rather than being manipulated by a message—a full partner in the communi-
cation process.” Schramm added candidly that his original article, “How
Communication Works,” had been intended to be “a reaction against . . . the
irrational fears of propaganda being expressed in the early 1950s.” He con-
tinued: “The unsophisticated viewpoint was that if a person could be reached
by the insidious forces of propagandas carried by the mighty power of the
mass media, he could be changed and converted and controlled. So propa-
ganda became a hate word, the media came to be regarded fearfully, and laws
were passed and actions taken to protect defenseless people against ‘irre-
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sistible communication.’” Schramm here is as much as admitting that his re-
search program and publications were designed to neutralize or discredit po-
litical economy treatments of media.
Schramm’s position takes on a somewhat different complexion, though,
when considered in the context of his wartime propaganda activities.