book reviews |
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Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a tough, sceptical and truly independently minded media that could see through the lies and half-truths of the government, and which, crucially, was not be afraid to expose those lies and half-truths? It would be nice, but unfortunately though any faith in the idea must surely be very hard to sustain in the aftermath of the Iraq War. In this country (the UK), as in the US, the media did not even so much as ask the question as to whether the central premise upon which we were taken to war in 2003 – I refer to the claim that Iraq had chemical and biological weaponry primed to attack us – was even so much as an exaggeration, let alone ask whether the government might actually be lying. Instead, with the honourable exception of a handful of sceptical journalists and commentators, the vast majority of the media in both countries simply regurgitated the lies of their governments. The public meanwhile may be said to have been conned into supporting the war. These are the concerns at the heart of Laura Strazzanti’s worthy, but ultimately unconvincing study of the marketing of the Iraq War: Did the Media Sell War as a Product? For Strazzanti, the media function not as a servant of the people or as a watchdog guarding against the abuse of power, but as a ‘megaphone of the government’s interest’ (quoting from the Abstract). Her explanation as to why to the media should act in this way draws upon Herman and Chomsky’s much cited (1988) ‘propaganda model’, combined with observations about how the techniques learnt on Madison Avenue to sell advertised good and services were adopted by the Bush Administration to ‘sell’ the invasion of Iraq. To briefly recap for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar with it, the ‘propaganda model’ proposes that the concentration of media ownership in fewer and fewer hands, the media’s reliance on advertising for much of its income, its reliance on official sources for information, its fear of incurring the wrath of the government and big business, and the pervasive ‘ideological’ atmosphere of anti-communism, all combine to filter out dissenting viewpoints and the kinds of news stories that would pose discomforting questions for the government and their corporate allies. As a model it is widely cited and has often been criticised. For the purposes of this review however, I have little to add to that debate except to note that the model articulates a rather static understanding of the workings of the media. Herein lies a conundrum that Strazzanti ought to have addressed. If ‘manufacturing’ popular ‘consent’ was as simple and as predictable as Herman and Chomsky would have us believe, why then would governments need to resort to ‘Madison Avenue’ techniques in order to beguile the public? This could have been one of Strazzanti’s great insights. Unfortunately however, she fails to make it. Moreover, in attempting to transpose an awareness of ‘Madison Avenue’ techniques onto the ‘propaganda model’ Strazzanti could have made some very interesting refinements to the model by bringing an element of dynamism to what is, as I say, a rather static understanding of the workings of the media. Beyond that, her descriptive account of how the Bush Administration applied the lessons learnt from Madison Avenue to sell the war is often remarkably brief. The principles of market segmentation (identifying the section of the ‘market’ you wish to target), positioning (the matter of meeting the supposed desires of your customers), synchronisation (ensuring a co-ordinated message), and meeting your market’s expectations, are dealt with in less than two pages each. If anything though, Strazzanti’s take on the persuasiveness of the propaganda campaign that we were subjected to in 2002 and 2003 is even more problematic. Early on in her thesis Strazzanti states that is her intention ‘to show how the [US] government actually managed (and manipulated) an entire nation’s perception of the key issue of foreign policy’ (p.11 emphasis added). Then, on the following page, she asks, ‘What are the mechanisms involved in ‘brainwashing’ an entire nation?’ Is public opinion really that malleable? A cursory glance over several decades worth of social science research dating back to the 1940s, ought to have been enough to sow the seeds of doubt as to whether ‘propaganda’ can really be said to have such an irresistible and overpowering influence on human cognitions. Even some of Strazzanti’s own evidence undermines these assumptions: She cites polling data showing that even at the start of the invasion 22 percent of the American public thought that the invasion of Iraq was the ‘wrong decision’ (p.70). Thus the claim that the ‘entire nation’s’ perceptions of the crisis had been manipulated really doesn’t stand up. Further to that, let us not forget that the levels of opposition to the war were much higher in other countries, including belligerent countries like the UK. Publics are simply not that easily manipulated. If that sounds like a more optimistic note to end on, we need to bear in mind that the Iraq War still happened, and it happened despite widespread public opposition. From this we must draw the equally sobering conclusion that governments do not necessarily need the full support of their publics to wage illegal and fraudulent wars. No doubt the media has a role to play somewhere in all this, and serious questions still need to be asked about the lack of investigative journalism when it really mattered the most. Unfortunately however, this book fails to address those questions in a satisfactory way. References: Dr. Ian Taylor © the war and media network, 2011
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