Page 227 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

Catapult the Media

President George W. Bush once stated that, "in my line of work, you got to keep
repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of
catapult the propaganda."' Like the Bush administration, the American mass
media has long been known for repetition when it comes to the promulgation of
pro-war propaganda. The mainstream media's reliance on government propa-
ganda was explored at great length earlier in this book. And yet, many criticisms
of wartime media coverage fail to discuss constructive alternatives to the status
quo of government-dominated reporting.
Focusing solely on criticisms of the U.S. media's one-sided framing of the
events in Iraq is seriously limiting because it fails to identify alternative models
of reporting which the American public may explore in their search of a wider
diversity of news and views. The growth of independent, non-establishment
media could do much to further media independence from entrenched political
and economic interests.
A media system priding itself in greater levels of balance would require the
incorporation of divergent and dissenting views, not merely on a nominal or
infrequent level, but on a regular basis. The emergence of such a system, where
a plethora of pro-war and anti-war views thrive, becomes less and less likely in
the face of extreme corporate consolidation and conglomeration of media. As
fewer and fewer corporations exercise more control over media markets, views
reflected in the news are further homogenized, rather than diversified.
Some scholars have spoken critically of the "cast iron grid"2 through which
a state-centric approach to studying media and domestic and international poli-
tics takes precedence. "Indexing" could be seen as one example of this state-
centric approach to the study of media, as the emphasis on elite disagreement as
the basis for media criticism of government is of primary concern. In a break
with this tradition, this chapter seeks to analyze national and transnational media
systems that exist largely (if not entirely) outside of the U.S. political-military
state apparatus that traditionally dominates news American reporting. Rather
than merely "indexing" reporting and editorializing to reflect the major criti