Robin Andersen, a communications scholar and professor has provided us with a very important book on the US media's relationship to war over the past century. The author demonstrates that there has been a consistent relationship between US government propaganda and the news media's reporting on US foreign wars since WWI.
Beginning with the US government's efforts to get the American public to support the US entry into WWI, President Wilson created the Creel Commission. The Creel Commission was designed to manufacture the public's consent to go to war against Germany. Photos were fabricated to show how blood thirty German soldiers were and used on posters, billboards all across the country. The leader of the commission, George Creel had "75,000 speakers, operating in 5,200 communities making over 750,000 speeches to an estimated audience of 400 million," according to Andersen. Another tactic was the creation of the "Four-Minute Men." The Four-Minute Men would give talks in movie houses all across the country, which eventually led to Hollywood's participation in the war effort. D.W. Griffith is best known for his White Supremacist film Birth of a Nation, but he also directed Hearts of the World, a film set in occupied France where villagers were victimized by German troops.
Building on the successes on WWI, the US government continued to create media to support it's foreign policy in what Andersen calls "the Grand Narrative." This broad theme continues to the present with the notion that what the US forces do is "good" and the enemy "bad." Andersen notes that the US media continued along the same path with full cooperation with military planners in presenting nothing but noble actions abroad.
The book continues with Korea and Vietnam. While it is popular belief that the US media was more antagonistic to US military actions in Vietnam, Andersen demonstrates that this existed with some reporters, but most stayed within the "Grand Narrative." It was only years into the war that more and more reporters began to question the "official" position and provide the US public with the evidence of the human cost of the war. Even Walter Cronkite, upon visiting Vietnam in 1968, had to question the logic of US actions. He stated this on air when he said that "It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors but as honorable people."
Part II of the book deals with the US wars in Central America in the 1980s. One quickly discovers that Andersen herself did some investigative reports from war-torn El Salvador with teams of TV journalists she calls budget and bang bang crews – TV crews that had limited budgets and tended to report on the latest conflict with little context or analysis.
It was during the Reagan years in the 1980s that another government PR department was created, the Office of Public Diplomacy. This department played a large role in crafting the public image of the US backed terrorist forces in Nicaragua, the Contras. A significant portion of the book is spent on the Central American wars, which I think is important for two reasons. First, many of the current Bush administration officials were deeply involved in these wars -- men like Otto Reich, John Negroponte, Elliot Abrams, Colin Powell, Robert Gates. The other aspect of examining the 1980s is that it produced very clear examples of government propaganda and US news media complicity. Andersen has a whole chapter on the Iran/Contra scandal to illustrate this point. She notes that this fraudulent government campaign that included deception, arms deals and violations of international law, came down to the prosecution and eventually canonization of Col. Oliver North. That the media glossed over the role of those mentioned earlier, along with Reagan and Bush Sr. is a testament to the level of what Noam Chomsky calls the "internalization of the values of the system" by US reporters.
The last part of the book deals with both the 1991 and present US wars in Iraq, a section of the book that would be more familiar to readers. However, Andersen does include information that might be unknown to many readers, specifcally with regard to what she refers to as the "military-entertainment-complex." The author notes that there is this symbiotic relationship between digital animation specialists, the US military, and weapons manufacturers. This is an area that has received little attention, but one where Andersen says the public needs to pay attention to. One such consortium in this military-entertainment-complex is STRICOM, a Florida-based research team that is developing "twenty-first century war fighter's preparation for real world contingencies." A look at their website is quite revealing - www.stricom.army.mil.
Overall the book provides readers with a good framework of the US media's historical relationship when reporting on US wars and it's role in supporting military policy. I highly recommend Robin Andersen's book as it can give us an important analysis of how current US military actions are presented by both the government and corporate owned media in the US.
Robin Andersen, A Century of Media, A Century of War, (Peter Lang Publishing, 2006)
