Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

[KoKo]

Seven Years of Wartime Propaganda

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* Conservative pundits’ claims that the media does not devote enough attention to U.S. successes in Iraq are highly circumspect, for a number of reasons. The continued high levels of violence in Iraq in 2008 prohibited reporters from travelling freely throughout the country to cover the “good news” that critics claim exists. The Pew Research Center cites the continued “basic security concerns limited the scope of their reporting,” as a recent Project for Excellence in Journalism survey revealed that a “full 57 percent of those journalists reported having local staff in Iraq murdered or kidnapped” in 2006.
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* These problems continued during the surge and post-surge periods. The Committee to Protect Journalists deemed Iraq the “deadliest nation” for reporters in 2008, for the sixth year in a row. As Reuters reported during late 2007, “Nearly 90 percent of U.S. journalists in Iraq say much of Baghdad is still too dangerous to visit, despite a recent drop in violence attributed to the build-up of U.S. forces.” Long committed to the notion that the U.S. is fighting a “humanitarian war” in Iraq, journalists would likely relish the opportunity to report how great the Iraq situation has become. There’s only one problem: Iraq is not safe enough for reporters to travel in without being murdered, mutilated, or kidnapped. Despite this constraint, it is not true, as pundits suggest, that the media does not report on reconstruction in Iraq. A brief survey of the Lexis Nexis academic database finds that a story addressing reconstruction in Iraq appeared in the New York Times, on average, once every three days in January of 2009. A longitudinal examination from 2003 to 2009 finds that, in this six year period, reconstruction was addressed in thousands of news stories in the paper. This is all the more impressive a propaganda victory for the government considering that literally no reconstruction has actually taken place in the country.

* Claims that the mainstream media distorts the violence in Iraq are certainly correct, but not in the way that conservative pundits claim. The American press has systemically ignored, marginalized, or buried deep within their pages casualty reports indicating that hundreds of thousands, perhaps over one million Iraqis died during the occupation. What little reporting has been done on casualties focuses more on American lives. An analysis of the 2003-2005 period finds that the New York Times covered American casualties three times more than Iraqi civilian casualties. When violence against Iraqis has been reported, it typically portrays the victims of violence as the result of the actions of insurgents and militias, rather than also as the result of American bombing. This practice, contrary to conservative punditry claims, allows for the U.S. to be framed in a positive light, as a force fighting against civil war and sectarian violence, rather than one that is destabilizing Iraq through its own bombings (which are estimated to have killed tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands). Furthermore, when the media does report casualties in Iraq (in this case American ones), its reporting is heavily dependent upon the lead of the government itself. According to one study, 75 percent of the stories filed on American casualties in the New York Times from 2003 to 2005 were based exclusively on press releases from the Department of Defense. Statistically, the study showed that, as the DOD increased its press releases on casualties (during months when larger numbers of Americans were killed), the New York Times responded to increased DOD releases by increasing its own reporting on American deaths. During times when the DOD put out fewer releases, the New York Times responded accordingly by reducing its coverage. Coverage of violence, then, is heavily influenced by the government’s own actions and agenda.

This study has merely skimmed the surface of the bi-partisan deceit that drives media and political rationalizations for the war. Fortunately, most Americans seem to have rejected these defenses as opportunistic and manipulative. Whether the American public will be able to effectively hold the Obama Presidency to its pre-election promise to quickly end the war in Iraq is uncertain. One thing, however, is clear. If the public doesn’t place continued pressure on this administration, the U.S. will likely remain in Iraq for many years to come.
Anthony DiMaggio the author of the newly released: Mass Media, Mass Propaganda: Understanding American News in the “War on Terror” (2008)

http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio02272009.html