The essence of propaganda is repetition. The frequencies of certain assumptions blend into a kind of white noise, with little chance for contrary sounds to be heard or considered. In the United States, the dominant media discourse and standard political rhetoric about the country’s military role in the world are like that.
Excerpted from War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, by Norman Solomon. Copyright © 2023. Published by and available from The New Press. Used with permission.
The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in the mass media.
Even when conventional wisdom ends up concluding that a war was unwise, the consequences for journalists who promoted it are essentially nil. Reporters and pundits who enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion were not impeded in their careers as a result. Many advanced professionally. In medialand, being pro-war means never having to say you’re sorry. Journalists who have gone with the war program are ill-positioned to throw stones from their glass houses later on; the same holds true for media outlets.
The interwoven media and political establishments stay within what are mutually seen as the bounds of serious discussion. That is especially true of basic war choices. Members of Congress and top officials in the executive branch are acutely sensitive to the reporting and commentary in major media, which in turn are guided by the range of debate at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. The right of the United States to militarily intervene in various countries is rarely questioned. Nor do the dominant political and media elites express much concern about the consequences for people living in countries where the United States is making war.
Omissions—what we don’t see and hear—might be the most pernicious messages of all. When routinely included in media, some types of images and themes are magnetic, drawing our attention and whatever thoughts go with it. At the opposite pole, what’s omitted pushes thoughts away, providing tacit cues as to what isn’t worth knowing or seriously considering.
In media frames, the routine exclusion of people harmed by U.S. warfare conveys that they don’t really matter much. Because we rarely see images of their suffering, hear their voices, or encounter empathetic words about them, the implicit messaging comes through loud and clear. The silence ends up speaking at high volume: Those people hardly exist. They are others. They are not our concern. They don’t particularly matter, while our country is causing their misery.
Opponents of war often contend that anti-war sentiment would grow if news media were to clearly show war’s devastating effects. To the shame of major U.S. media outlets, such coverage is sparse to the point of standard journalistic malpractice in relation to American warfare. The impeding factors include self-censorship, desires for career advancement, and concerns about job security, amid pressures from nationalism, commercialism, and professional conformity.
Yet news reporting certainly guides public outlooks. And it mixes with realms of punditry, politics, culture, and entertainment to sustain the continuity of a warfare state. The huge gaps between what actually happens to people in war zones and what we get from the mainline American media are long-standing. Those gaps numb the public and usually protect the political establishment from facing an anti-war upsurge at home. Even when the carnage was at its height in Vietnam, as war correspondent Michael Herr later wrote in his book Dispatches, the U.S. media “never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of course was really what it was all about. The most repulsive, transparent gropes for sanctity in the midst of the killing received serious treatment in the papers and on the air.” He added that “the jargon of Progress got blown into your head like bullets”—and after wading through the deluge of war-related news stories, “the suffering was somehow unimpressive.”
Dynamics varied with later U.S. military interventions, from the quick lightning strikes into Grenada and Panama in the 1980s to the long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. American media coverage was not monolithic, and as the Internet emerged, it provided other pathways for information. The secret “Collateral Murder” video from Iraq, officially filmed one day in July 2007 and made public by WikiLeaks in 2010, got to millions of people online. Yet mainstream news outlets still dominated the content and tenor of war coverage reaching the vast bulk of the U.S. population. On the whole, media coverage did little to convey, visually or descriptively, much less viscerally, what war “was all about.”
No wonder, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan kept going, peace activists yearned for realistic images in news outlets to help turn the militaristic tide. But the barriers in place have included the big flaws in illusions that a media technology could, as the cliché goes, bring war into your living room. The inherent limits of an inanimate device conveying the terrifying chaos of warfare are enough to refute the idea. “What do we see,” media analyst Mark Crispin Miller asked in 1988, “when we sit at home and watch a war? Do we experience an actual event?”
“In fact, that ‘experience’ is fundamentally absurd. Most obviously, there is the incongruity of scale, the radical disjunction of locations. While a war is among the biggest things that can ever happen to a nation or people, devastating families, blasting away the roofs and walls, we see it compressed and miniaturized on a sturdy little piece of furniture, which stands and shines at the very center of our household. And TV contains warfare in subtler ways. While it may confront us with the facts of death, bereavement, mutilation, it immediately cancels out the memory of that suffering, replacing its own pictures of despair with a commercial—upbeat and inexhaustibly bright.”
Even when glimpses and voices of war horrors break through to cause some emotional comprehension among viewers, readers, and listeners, the context of that breakthrough can point conclusions in any number of directions. The moral of the news story and the imagery does not occur in a vacuum. The meaning of the suffering and the belief in the best response to it will be bounded by perceived context; when a photo shows a relative weeping over a bloodied corpse, or when video shows a serviceman carrying a wounded comrade toward a helicopter, the picture might be powerful—but the conceptual frame around it will largely determine the most powerful received message. If the viewer believes that the U.S. war effort is a just and heroic cause, seeing such images of anguish and sacrifice might reinforce a belief in the need to win the war and support America’s brave warriors in the process.
Egged on by rhetoric from Washington, news outlets stoke hero worship of U.S. soldiers engaged in warfare. Glorifying them for serving their country is accepted as a media duty. The U.S. troops and their commanding officers loom large, while the people they kill and wound have no stature. This pseudo-journalistic fidelity to the nation’s armed forces and their missions, usually implicit, rises to the unabashed surface at times of military mobilization.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the accolades were unequivocal from the outset. Avuncular CBS journalist Charles Osgood called the bombing of Iraq “a marvel”; his network colleague Jim Stewart helped set the tone by extolling “two days of almost picture-perfect assaults.” The network’s anchor, Dan Rather, saw no need to hide his enthusiasm from viewers as he shook hands with the First Marine Division’s commander and said, “Again, General, congratulations on a job wonderfully done!” Rather was simply harmonizing with the media chorus while voicing avid support for the massive bombing that was central to the Gulf War, dubbed “Desert Storm” by the Pentagon, a brand—almost hinting at an act of God—frequently and cheerfully parroted by U.S. news media, as though the Pentagon had harnessed a force of nature.
The media embrace of the upbeat branding and wild fervor for the Gulf War was hardly reduced by grisly photos that showed the remains of Iraqi children who died when an errant American missile struck a Baghdad shelter and killed 408 civilians. Most of the people who died in the attack were burned alive. Days later, NBC’s Today Show co-host Katie Couric informed viewers that Operation Desert Storm “was virtually flawless.” Meanwhile, critics of the war were personae non grata in televisionland. A study by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting found that during the war only one of 878 on-air sources who appeared on ABC, CBS, and NBC nightly newscasts represented a national peace organization.
On the TV networks, with rare exceptions, war victims were not to be seen and war opponents were not heard.
-------------
Editor's note: Due to an editing error in the print version of this article, it was not clear that the quote from Mark Crispin Miller continued through the subsequent paragraph. That has been corrected in this version.