Global Policy Forum

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett

Scholars of media news reporting have long identified the importance of "frames" in determining the events and issues that get to be reported, how they are covered, and how they are interpreted. During the Cold War, for example, much reporting by western media of international affairs was governed by the assumption that "importance" was defined by whether events or issues had implications for the balance of global power between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

There were at least two fundamentally opposed frameworks within which news media could have reported the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. (and its allies) from March 2003. The first frame would accept as unquestionable that the U.S., strongest power in the world, has an international responsibility to protect itself and the world from those countries or elements that would use weapons of mass destruction, even if, at times, it is necessary to resort to pre-emptive attack, and even if many nations may be skeptical that such action has the support of the United Nations Security Council. This frame would likely be sympathetic to allegations, stated principally by the U.S. and Great Britain, regarding the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A subsidiary issue, the deeply repressive character of the Iraqi regime, was also available within this frame as supporting evidence of the desirability of immediate military action. The deaths of both "coalition" and "enemy" soldiers in the coalition's pursuit of its military objectives, as well as any "accidental" deaths of civilians ("collateral damage"), would be seen as sad but inevitable and ultimately justifiable.

A second frame would take it "as read" that there exists a system of international law governing the use of force, that the principal guardian of such law is the United Nations, and that the United Nations, through the Security Council, had not consented to the invasion by "coalition" (principally U.S.) forces in March 2003. This frame would regard action that had not been sanctioned by the United Nations as illegal, and very likely immoral, even if there were grounds for concern about the existence of weapons of mass destruction and about the character of the Iraqi regime. This framework would contextualize concerns about weapons of mass destruction by reference to the likely existence of a considerable nuclear arsenal in Israel, for example, or to weapons at the disposal of the U.S., including its controversial use of depleted uranium in the manufacture of many of its missile shells. Within this framework, therefore, the actions of the U.S. and other "coalition" forces would be acts of unsanctioned aggression against the sovereign territory of another people; resistance to such invasion would be seen as justifiable response to unprovoked aggression. In this frame, the deaths of soldiers and civilians alike would raise questions as to whether the "coalition" forces were guilty of war crimes and murder. In considering whether there might be justification for the actions of the U.S. and its allies, this framework would critically examine the evidence alleged by the U.S. with respect to the existence of weapons of mass destruction, and the plausibility of its stated goals with respect, for example, to oil and other interests.

Of these two possible frames, most news reporting of the U.S. television networks conformed to the first, particularly during the war itself, and this frame was also predominant during the period leading up to the war, and in the period immediately following the war. There are now seven principal sources of television general (as opposed to financial) news in the U.S. Of these, the most popular are the 24-hour cable news networks: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. CNN is owned by the giant media conglomerate AOL-Time Warner; Fox News is part of the media empire controlled by Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation; while ownership of MSNBC is shared by two giant corporations, Microsoft and General Electric. There are also the traditional "terrestrial" networks (although for most people these come within the basic tier of services supplied by cable or satellite television providers in return for the monthly subscriptions that the viewers pay). The traditional networks are ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox. ABC is owned by Disney; CBS is part of the Viacom media conglomerate, while NBC is owned by General Electric, and Fox, once again, is part of the Murdoch empire and his Fox Network. Of the four traditional networks, Fox is a relatively recent arrival (1985); Fox News cable channel was established in 1996. It is quickly apparent, therefore, that all major sources of television news in the U.S. are controlled by a small number of giant conglomerates, within the slightly larger circle of conglomerates that command most of the nation's media consumption of information and entertainment products. Furthermore, the war occurred at a time when the Federal Communications Commission, under the chairmanship of Michael Powell (son of Colin Powell) was seeking to undermine the already deregulated rules that govern media ownership in the U.S., with the likely result that the industry would witness even more gigantic concentrations of capital, in a process that I have elsewhere described (in a chapter for the book Electronic Empires, edited by Daya Thussu) as the "colonization of global cyberspace."

The major television networks of the U.S. adopted a framework of war reporting almost totally compliant with the policies of the U.S. Administration under President George W. Bush. Minor disagreements were aired as to whether the war was proceeding at the anticipated rate, or whether sufficient numbers of troops had been deployed. These disagreements tended to reflect fault-lines within the administration, notably those between the Department of Defense and the State Department. But the legality, morality, and necessity for war were almost universally and uncritically accepted for almost all of the time during the war itself. A modest degree of relaxation could be observed immediately following the occupation of Baghdad, but this would be unlikely to survive further U.S. invasions in the Middle East.

A greater diversity of viewpoint was available within the newspaper press, although I, for one, would not venture to say that the press adequately represented the full range of positions across the country. Yet the power of the major television news channels in this war was unrivalled. The Los Angeles Times commissioned a poll, reported in its edition of April 15th. Respondents were asked "Where are you getting most of your information about the war in Iraq?" They were allowed to identify up to three sources, in order of importance. 69% of respondents referred to one or other of the three cable news networks; 30% said newspapers; 23% cited local television news; 18% relied on one of the three broadcast networks, while only 13% were going online. The poll therefore greatly underscores the importance of television in relation to the press. The most likely source of independent or alternative news in the United States is among Internet web-sites; but most members of that growing minority of people who do use the Internet as a news source mainly go to the web-sites of established, mainstream media or are directed to such established sources by the welcome pages of the Internet Service Providers.

During the First Gulf War, the most important sources of news were the networks, and CNN's cable and satellite services. Since that time, CNN has been joined, as we have seen, by Fox News and MSNBC, and in terms of popularity these have overtaken the traditional networks as news sources. CNN had acquired a somewhat liberal image during the First Gulf War, largely on account of the fact that it maintained a correspondent (Peter Arnett) in Baghdad during the war; Arnett's reporting of civilian damage provided a counterweight to greatly exaggerated U.S. claims about the precision of its bombing. Arnett's role in that war did a great deal to promote the CNN brand around the world, and also to introduce the notion of dedicated, global news channels. During the 1990s, Fox News and then MSNBC competed with CNN news coverage for domestic U.S. cable subscribers. Fox News soon established itself, in the words of one media watchdog, FAIR, as a "central hub of the conservative movement's well-oiled media machine". FAIR described the Fox News founder and President, Roger Ailes, as "one of the savviest and most pugnacious Republican political operatives in Washington". Ailes, of course, ultimately reports to a boss, Rupert Murdoch, likewise known for right-wing views that the mogul is prepared to push through his own media. The strongly right-wing tilt of U.S. television has boosted the ratings for Fox, and in struggling to repair the damage this has done to their own ratings, competing networks have followed suit. As FAIR concluded, the result is "skewed center-to-right media spectrum made worse by the refusal to acknowledge any tilt at all."

What are the implications of all this for the reporting of the U.S. invasion of Iraq? The rationale for invasion related to the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, and the Administration's perceived need to protect the U.S. in particular, and the world in general from further such attacks. No conclusive evidence was ever provided that the regime of Saddam Hussein was in any way involved with the attacks of 9-11, but those attacks became a pretext for intensification of U.S. aggression against Iraq. In the aftermath of 9-11, the Administration adopted the policies of a right-wing faction of the Republican Party that had formed in 1998 under the title Project for a New American Century, and which urged upon the Administration the argument that the U.S. must aggressively assert its role as the world's only superpower, in part by redefining the politics of the Middle East, but more broadly through a strategy of "total spectrum dominance" (TSD), encompassing the right to pre-emptive and even nuclear pre-emptive strike in defense of U.S. interests and global security. TSD became formal U.S. government policy in the summer of 2002. Many foreign policy experts and advisors have linked such a strategy to U.S. interests in the control of the world's remaining oil supplies, in Central Asia and the Middle East as in other parts of the globe, including South America and Africa. In addition to U.S. interests in gaining preferential access to sources of oil for U.S.-associated oil companies, there are issues about competition between the dollar and the euro for currency command of oil trade, and the possible leverage that control over oil supplies might give the U.S. in its relation to other major, possibly rival powers, such as China. In the context of Iraq, specifically, it would become apparent that yet additional interests might be at work, such as interests in contracts for the rebuilding of those parts of Iraq that the U.S. invasion had helped to destroy, conceivably extending to complicity in pillage and plunder of historical and cultural artifacts. Critics had previously expressed concern about ties linking former and present oil, energy and defense industry interests (via companies such Bechtel, Carlyle, Enron, Halliburton, Harken, and Peabody) to individual members of the Administration, including the President, the President's father (former president W.H. Bush), the vice-president Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and many of those others whose political power derived from what some believe to have been improper, possibly illegal shenanigans in Florida during the Presidential election of 2000.

The war coverage of U.S. television networks may be symptomatic of a congruence of a right-wing tilt in the mainstream media with a strongly right-wing government, in the context of a foreign policy that, arguably, has been illegal and immoral and, furthermore, a policy from which many members of the Administration might stand to benefit financially, thus accentuating what for some observers constitutes an odor of possible criminality.

In as much as there was a strongly right-wing agenda at work in this foreign policy, the U.S. television news channels lent themselves as the equivalent of propaganda vehicles for that agenda in a variety of ways. First, as we have seen, they adopted a framework of interpretation that seemed impervious to the possibility that the invasion could be anything other than completely justified. Secondly, long before the war actually began, and throughout the tortuous debates within the United Nations, they beat the drums for war in a manner seemingly designed to create a public expectation of the inevitability of war and a thirst for war as entertainment spectacle (in turn increasing numbers of viewers and enhancing advertising revenue). Thirdly, they lent themselves in many ways to manipulation by the U.S. Administration and by the U.S. Armed Forces. They complied with a strategy ("embedded reporting") whose very name smelled of propaganda and complicity, and with a system and location of army press relations in Qatar that was even further removed from the reality of war than is customary in such circumstances. Fourthly, reporting focused on such issues as weapons, the fighting spirit of U.S. forces, and military progress, to the exclusion of larger issues of legality and at the expense of adequate attention to the anti-war movement worldwide, and to enemy and civilian casualties. Fifthly, as research sponsored by the Pew Foundation demonstrated early on, their sources of information drew heavily from personnel who either were part of, or who had recently had close ties with the U.S. military machine and defense industry.

What were the main consequences of such a structurally one-sided approach? As is customarily the case with media reporting, the first profound loss was of context. Rarely, if ever, did networks examine the complex history of U.S. relations with countries in the Middle East and with Iraq in particular. Newspapers picked up on unsavory contacts between the U.S., Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein before the first Gulf War when, even though the U.S. was aware of Hussein's use of chemical weapons against the Iranians, the U.S. continued to support Iraq without question or scruple, while Rumsfeld negotiated pipeline rights on behalf of Bechtel. Such grey areas were of little interest to the networks, and even less were they inclined to explore mysteries behind the causes of the first Gulf War: e.g. had Hussein been lured into an occupation (of Kuwait) as a pretext for U.S. attack and humiliation of Iraq? A neglected but important aspect of context had to do with the future of oil supplies in general, and the necessary investment that would be required to shift the world from gasoline fuel to hydrogen fuel-cell based or other alternatives. In his 2003 state-of-the-nation speech, Bush promised $1.7 billion, over five years, for development of alternative sources of energy. In the scatter of relevant press comment immediately following the speech, experts were quoted as saying that the full cost of converting the nation to hydrogen fuel-cell technology would approximate to $500 billion. Yet Bush committed the U.S. to an immediate expenditure of over $70 billion in order to conduct the war itself, and doubtless a much larger sum of money for a period of extended occupation and rebuilding, while maintaining a staggering network of military bases around the world. The implications of these figures and the gigantic financial interests affected (notably including oil extraction and refinement, automobiles) won scarcely any sustained interest within the mainstream media, even though such issues were surely critical to an adequate understanding of the events unfolding. A third significant area of context downplayed by television news was that of neoconservative imperialism associated, as we have seen, with Project for a New American Century, some of whose proponents had close associations with the state of Israel and whose policies seemed to some critics at least as much in line with those of Israel as with those of the US. One might go further to say that U.S. foreign policy towards Iraq could scarcely be understood without a fuller understanding of 9-11, but here the media merely sustained the silence that they, both television and print, had stubbornly maintained in face of the many disturbing mysteries that persist in relation to this tragic event.

Other consequences of media coverage - less momentous, perhaps, but for many viewers irritating - were uncritical television news acceptance of Administration lies (e.g. the use by Colin Powell of absurdly makeshift British intelligence reports; his use of fabricated evidence concerning Iraqi acquisition of uranium from Niger), of the contradictions between the claims of the Administration about alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the deep reservations of U.N. nuclear and biological weapons inspectorates as to whether Iraq possessed any such weapons or in any way constituted an immediate threat (such doubts only increased in the weeks and months immediately following the war). Misinformation from the battlefield was relayed immediately and uncritically, and often not revoked even when discovered to be wrong. This included claims in the first hours of war that Tariq Aziz had been captured and was being interrogated in the north of Iraq, and a string of claims, later found to be groundless, to have found evidence of weapons of mass destruction. Television news was guilty of the purist form of hypocrisy in using language that was by implication critical and demeaning of efforts by the Iraqis to defend their country against foreign aggression. They compounded such hypocrisy by sympathetically airing complaints that the Iraqi State Television had breached the Geneva Convention by televising U.S. POWs, even though the previous day U.S. television news programs had continually shown pictures of Iraqi POWs. Some network anchorpersons and spokespersons, by implication, urged the U.S. military to strike Iraqi State Television, in breach of the Geneva Convention. Blind to their own, patently obvious, propaganda functions on behalf of the Bush administration, they dismissed Iraqi State Television (as well as Al Jazeera and most other Arab sources) as evil "propaganda." Talk of civilian casualties was muted, as was mention of coalition destruction of electricity and water supplies - damage to civilian infrastructure that was gravely threatening to the health and lives of the civilian populations and also likely to have been in breach of the Geneva Convention, which calls for protection of civilian populations. Events such as the rescue of Private Jessica Lynch, and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Central Baghdad were likely to have been highly staged events, yet disseminated to the world by U.S. media as symbolic evidence of U.S. resilience, and of U.S. "victory" in capturing the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, a myth that was undermined almost as soon as it had been created.

None of this should surprise anyone who has studied network coverage of the previous Gulf War. Based on Douglas Kellner's 1992 study The Persian Gulf TV War, I identified the different behaviors attributable to compliant co-option of corporate media by the U.S. state for propaganda purposes. The first such behavior is conduiting, the uncritical feeding of Administration spin to media audiences. Kellner wrote that "the networks dutifully and immediately reported whatever the Bush administration and Pentagon chose to tell them," a process that revealed the networks "to be mere transmission belts for the Bush Administration," and exacerbated by network restriction on discussion to a narrow range of sources and "expert" commentators, closely related to the Administration or Pentagon.

Obfuscation of cause is fundamental to both wars. For television, the 1991 war began with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, thus excluding America's share of culpability. This culpability was reflected in U.S. indications to Iraq of U.S. neutrality in Iraqi-Kuwaiti disputes; U.S. corporate side-drilling from Kuwait of the Iraqi Rumaila field; and U.S. failure to suitably admonish Iraq during the period starting from the CIA's warning of a likely Iraqi invasion up to the invasion itself. Missing in 2003 was adequate contextualization with reference to the hitherto secret agenda of the Project for a New American Century, and the gathering crisis of "peak oil" (i.e. the beginning of the end of world oil supply) as among the "real" but officially undisclosed and un-discussed reasons for war.

Cheerleading refers to the unwarranted enthusiasm for Administration positions, thus compromising media claims to objectivity and its capacity for critical reflection. According to Kellner, "the lack of critical voices during the first weeks of the crisis disclosed the timidity, narrowness, and fundamental subservience of the mainstream media." Big Lies in 1991 included the "conduiting" of Pentagon assessments that Iraqi troops were preparing to invade Saudi Arabia. In 2003 the "Big Lies" are likely to be that Iraq posed any kind of serious threat to the U.S. or anyone else, least of all in connection with weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq was in any significant way linked to the 9-11 attacks of 2001. In 1991 as in 2003 there was undeserved bragging on behalf of the Patriot missile (which shot down at least two "coalition" planes in 2003). Most effective of all was the (misleading) selling of both wars as high-tech "precision" wars. In both wars, the no alternatives approach of the networks gave viewing publics little evidence of the existence of alternative options to U.S. force, reinforcing Administration policy of blocking diplomatic solutions.

Omissions and underplaying of events that might undermine Administration spin, assured that the antiwar movement was rarely seen or heard in mainstream media events, even though in both wars the movement was in fact well organized, large, and vocal. In both wars we witnessed, while television news ignored, the damaging implications (for civilian health, and the environment) of the use of weapons made from depleted uranium. Examples of crude propagandizing included Saddam-as-Hitler metaphors, and the personalization of both wars as a conflict between Saddam (first name) and Bush (last name) (Senior and Junior). Both times, television promoted a war culture that was primarily male, simultaneously encouraging sexism and militarism. Kellner noted that the "media generally fail to adequately contextualize historical events, tending to simplistic explanations that omit complexity and history" (p. 92). Such poor contextualization in 1991 ignored the broader framework of the Middle East, its vast oil resources, the U.S. contributions to the militarization of the region, and the goal of targeting Iraq's military arsenal (rather than Iraqi troops in Kuwait). Kellner further noted the Pentagon's interest in testing weapons in combat as well as in securing budget increases. To control reporters, in the first Gulf War, the press was denied direct access to the troops. Instead, journalists were organized into carefully controlled "pools". In the second war, reporters were encased ("embedded") in particular units, granted very limited and very dependent perspectives on the broader picture. Reporters who earned the displeasure of the Administration or of their own media employers, including on both occasions Peter Arnett in Baghdad, were ridiculed or sanctioned. Several journalists were killed by coalition fire (including journalists at the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, which was fired upon by a U.S. tank commander who later told the Guardian newspaper that he had been given no information that the Palestine Hotel was principal location for the international journalistic community), and the U.S. offered contemptuously little protection to "independent" journalists. Other features included coverage of the war as "infotainment." The audience was positioned to watch the events as dramatic entertainment and to cheer for victory.

I believe the war of 2003, in itself and in terms of media coverage, must be related back to the events of 9-11, and the way in which those events were, or were not, covered by U.S. mainstream media. Had they been more adequately and aggressively covered, I maintain, the Administration would have faced a tougher uphill battle in pushing its agendas in Central Asia and the Middle East and would have encountered a much less timid and naí¯ve Congress, media, U.S. and world public. A dimension of particular concern is the specter of possible incompetence, criminal negligence or even collusion on the part of elements of government. Some 18 months after the event, the Bush Administration appointed an independent commission to explore the causes and implications of 9-11. The Kean Commission sits as I write. Its critics worry that the chair has had business associations with the family of Bin Laden, and that the commission's financing is far less generous than that made available for an earlier inquiry (instantly convened) into the NASA shuttle disaster. We shall see. Suffice to say that in my investigations so far, I have identified a variety of ways in which, following 9-11, the media (and I focused principally on the print news media) became party to the propaganda aims of the Administration in the weeks and months immediately following 9-11. I identified seven main dimensions of media complicity in propaganda:

(1) participation in public mobilization, through use of slogans and icons of national pride and a vocabulary of "war";
(2) vilification of an unambiguous culprit to cultivate popular hatred of the enemy;
(3) omission of reference to other possible culpable agents;
(4) exceptional support for Presidency and Administration, and marginalization of issues concerning the 2000 election;
(5) neglect or manipulation of history to marginalize references to events or processes that might undermine support for the war. This item included (a) marginalization or softening of instances of U.S. state sponsored terrorism, invasion or covert intervention; (b) superficial analysis of non-US perceptions of U.S. foreign policy; attribution of anti-U.S. perspectives to Muslims and Arabs; (c) sparing references to: U.S. interests in Central Asia; the roles of Enron, Carlyle and Unocal in defense and energy related issues impacting on U.S. relations with the Middle East and Central Asia; U.S. financing of the Taliban; (d) downplaying of evidence of pre 9-11 advance warnings, and of pre 9-11 Administration plans to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban; (e) omission of reference to controversies concerning previous possible instances of U.S. war by provocation or fabrication, including the Spanish-American War in 1898, Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s, or the first Gulf War in 1991, extending to the implications for interpreting 2001 of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003; (f) underplaying of Bush and other Administration interests in war-related defense, oil and energy industries; (g) passive treatment of negative Administration impacts, 2000-2003, on international agreements concerning nuclear weapons, environmental protection, the International Criminal Court, and biological terrorism;
(6) abandonment of journalistic curiosity, with respect, for example, to the failure of standard operating procedures for air defense on the morning of 9-11; estimates of WTC casualties; security agency claims not to have penetrated terror networks; and massive pre 9-1l speculative financial bets that should have been monitored by security service software, and
(7) a variety of strategies of censorship, self-censorship and intimidation of media dissenters.

Many years ago, in their book "Manufacturing Consent", Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky provided us with intellectual tools we can use to understand collusion between government and media. Their "propaganda model" included the nature of media ownership (and the financial interests of owners), the power of advertising over content, standard journalistic procedures (e.g. focus on events rather than processes or background), fear of flak (e.g. fear of being sanctioned by loss of access to key, authoritative sources), and shared ideologies between journalists and the elite. This is a strong and useful model. Yet in the face of the extent of such collusion as we have seen through the First Gulf War, 9-11, and now in 2003 the second Gulf War, I wonder if it goes far enough, and whether there might exist more insidious elements even than those that Herman and Chomsky identified back in 1988. Whether or not that might be so, there are depressing implications in all this for the state and meaningfulness of America's own democratic system, and the vulnerability of both U.S. media and politicians alike to the power and inducements of huge corporations and vested interest. In the context of U.S. Administration claims to be carrying the torch of democracy to the Middle East, tragedy does indeed become inseparable from farce.

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