Page 53 - Mass Media, Mass Propoganda Examining American News in the War on Terror

AN the News That's Fit to Omit 43

"War on Terror." In other words, the subtly, and sometimes not so subtly ex-
pressed ideological assumptions that guide reporting, editorial policy, and media
positions throughout this war are aimed at confirming the conventional view-
points laid out in government frames. In their book News That Matters, Televi-
sion and American Opinion, Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder reflect upon the
reality of television news reporting that is dominated "by official sources and
dominant values."" The authors view "television news as inherently cautious
and conservative medium, much more likely to defend traditional values and
institutions than to attack them."I8 These traditional values and institutions often
include support for the United States' reliance on force as the primary means of
global dispute resolution.
Reporting and editorializing in the mainstream media favors state capitalism
over socialist or other non-capitalist frameworks of analysis, particularly in the
case of the more openly conservative television and print media such as Fox
News Channel, the Weekly Standard, and the Washington Times. "Liberal" me-
dia establishments, such as the New York Times are also pro-capitalist in orienta-
tion.
There are many popular methods by which corporate media framing rein-
forces pro-war positions. Nationalistic pressure is one such method by which the
media establishment can limit dissent in its framing of the news. Presenting a
vision of the U.S. as a benevolent superpower in global affairs, many Americans
accept, and the major media reinforce, the notion that the U.S. is fighting a war
between the "good," "civilized" world and the "evil" terrorists. That the United
States is a peaceful superpower-albeit a superpower that sometimes makes
modest or serious mistakes and miscalculations-is taken as self-evident. The
framing of the Iraq war as driven by noble and humanitarian motivations is typi-
cally followed by the assumption that those who support the war are, by defini-
tion, patriotic; and as support for war is often deemed patriotic, opposition to
war, conversely, is framed (particularly at the beginning of wars) as unpatriotic.
The assumption that patriotism requires support for the Iraq war is an im-
portant part of what former CBS News Anchor Dan Rather deems "patriotism
run amok," for journalists who are reluctant to ask tough questions for fear of
being labeled un-American or anti-American.19 As a result, reporting on the
growing U.S. anti-war movement has been relegated to the margins of main-
stream reporting. Washington activist Adam Eidinger explains, "I think the
media has been completely biased. You don't hear dissenting voices; you see
people marching in the streets, but you rarely hear what they have to say in the
media. . . The antiwar movement in this country is far bigger than it was during
the first few years of the Vietnam War, but you wouldn't know it from the cov-
erage."20
Corporate media framing of the U.S. as a benevolent superpower affords the
U.S. government the power to act as global enforcer in the "War on Terror."
Prominent media critic Robert McChesney calls this the "007 License," under
which the U.S. reserves for itself the right to intervene whenever, however, and
for whatever reason it sees fit in the affairs of other statex2' As a result, those in