Media misplaces its allegiance

Mainstream media takes a stance against America

By Sunthosh Madireddi
From the October 2006 Print Edition

Victory: It may seem like a simple goal, but it is what the United States military strives for in every battle and every war. The ability to hold up the Stars and Stripes in the face of the enemy’s white flag signifies the preservation of our country and the perpetuation of cultural values imbued by Old Glory.

During most wars America has fought, there has been one crucial determinant for victory on the battlefield. Most military pundits think that it appears only through the lens of military strength. If this were true, then the history of warfare would have been quite different. The ragtag Revolutionary army of the United States should have lost to the mighty British Empire, and the American superpower should have been able to defeat the guerilla army of Vietnam. Yet that was not how history has played out. What’s missing is the role the media has played in portraying those wars.

The media has all the power of a loaded gun, whose firepower is more potent and its effect longer lasting than any military armament. The media has long been considered the primary influence of troop and civilian morale, responsible for casting the war as a struggle between good and evil. War has traditionally been seen as a rallying cry for media outlets to forsake traditional journalistic cynicism embraced during peacetime in favor of a tone more sympathetic to the impending national danger.

This media playbook governing journalistic protocol during a time of war was created in large part by Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. During the late 1890s, Hearst and Pulitzer imbued their tales with sensationalist dogma that guided U.S. foreign policy to intervene on behalf of the Cuban independence movement against the Spanish Empire. Though Hearst and Pulitzer were accused of propagating "yellow journalism," their front pages were littered with stories that revolved around Cuban virtue and Spanish brutality. The front pages were replete with tales of emaciated Cubans herded into concentration camps, leading to the deaths of countless thousands of Cubans. The intervention of the United States into the Cuban conflict was not cast as an imperialistic venture or a capitalist enterprise, but in the context of Cuban liberation from the shackles of their Spanish masters.

During World War II, stories urging American unity abounded, not reports of American firebombing or brutality. From the 1890s onward, the media has adopted a special supporting role during wartime, a role that was been forsaken in the aftermath of 9/11.

September 11 has come and past. The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have come and gone. The Taliban has been overthrown, Saddam Hussein and his tyrannical Baath party have been overthrown, and Democratic elections ensued in both of those countries. Constitutions have been forged, national unity governments have been forged, and women for the first time have been elected as popular representatives. The positive repercussions of U.S. intervention in both Iraq and Afghanistan have been countless, but the media has chosen not cast the spotlight on such developments.

Since the start of the war in Iraq, the media has chosen to popularize isolated incidents of human-rights violations by Americans. Since May 1, 2004, The New York Times has posted 32 successive front-page articles on the Abu Ghraib abuse scandal and countless more focused on the leaking of classified anti-terrorism tools. In November 2005, the Times exposed secret CIA prisons overseas. In December, the Times blew the whistle on the government’s covert NSA wiretapping program. Both of these classified operations have been attributed by British intelligence agencies as being crucial to the uncovering of the terrorist plot to blow up 10 commercial airliners over the Atlantic Ocean. American television is replete with images of carnage and destruction befitting the bill of a Michael Moore propagandist tirade, not the responsibility of a national media in wartime. Many media outlets could be effectively dubbed "Al-Jazeera West" as a result of the similar message both media outlets espouse: that America is an authoritarian imperialist power sacrificing blood for oil.

The media criticism of this administration has recently been ratcheted up by a new British TV docudrama, "Death of a President." The docudrama was created by a British film company regarding the effect of the war on terror. The TV docudrama premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September. As the name suggests, the docudrama features a dramatic moment set in October 2007, when President George W. Bush is gunned down by a sniper after a public address at a hotel in Chicago.

Peter Dale, the head of Channel 4, which will air the program, recently issued a statement defending the controversial film, as a "thought-provoking critique of contemporary America." The film has been written and directed by Gabriel Range, who has a history of making fictional documentaries surrounding historical realities. Eric Staal of the group Republicans Abroad in London issued a statement saying, "We’ve seen from early in [Bush’s] presidency the extremes that the political Left are willing to go to vilify him. This takes this vilification to a new and disturbing level. It is an appalling way to treat the head of state of another country." The White House spokesman issued his own take, claiming that the film "did not dignify a comment."

Several questions pop into mind upon seeing the repugnant still of Bush’s assassination in the TV docudrama. Is the drama a fictional what-if or a twisted leftist fantasy coming to fruition on the television screen? Whatever the motives behind the docudrama, it remains part of a leftist media crusade to vilify the American government. The media would like to draw parallels between the Bush administration and Orwell’s 1984, using the terror threat as a smoke screen to set up a police state.

To reiterate, the media can be described as a "loaded gun" that has always served as a vital weapon in past wars. However, the question at stake is whether it is a weapon America will be able to project outward against its enemies or one that will be pointed back at us, bleeding America dry of its will to fight and its will to stand up against external threats.

The independence of the media is crucially important, and government should keep its hands off the media’s business. The media, however, should uphold its tradition of supporting a noble war effort. Are we so naive that we believe that the firebombing of civilian centers in Tokyo and Dresden was morally right during World War II? Are we so misled that we believe that the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were morally right? These acts today would be seized by the media as proof that the general war was a moral abomination, forsaking the larger goal of the war against fascism in Europe and Asia. The media in past wars exempted the government from denunciation of singular human-rights abuses, because journalists kept their minds on the larger war effort and the grander ideological struggle afoot. The media has traditionally kept up its sympathy for the country’s war effort. Unfortunately, this is missing today.

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