Democracy, War and the Media - Uneasy Bedfellows All Round
Recent international wars and the often spectacular ways in which the established media is covering them, have given media researchers ample opportunity to see whether technological developments are giving us the opportunity to have a closer experience of democracy.
It is logical to assume that new technology empowers us all. To have a better idea of what is going on in the most inaccessible of situations is believed to contribute to our sense of involvement and enhances our democratic rights. Hyper-modern communication technologies are extremely useful in providing the ordinary citizen with greater access to more, faster-paced and better researched news and news background information. The greater our freedom of information the more of a say we feel we have. And the better our lives become - right?
New insights in the role of the media’s empowerment by high tech equipment started with the first gulf War in Iraq, the coverage of which was totally dominated by CNN. When the US set out to police the world some more in Somalia other broadcast stations were better prepared, and Sarajevo became known as the internet reporting war. The latest struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq witnessed a total press-friendly war, with journalists of all mainstream and some alternative media свч печи Severin with their noses bang on the action.
As the war in Iraq, cleverly branded “Operation: Iraqi Freedom” by the US government, is not likely to be ending this year and as troops in Afghanistan are also not anywhere near leaving, the debate is focused on whether interventions were based on facts rather than misleading accounts of what was happening on the ground. The media, accusing the government of spin doctoring its actions beyond what is healthy, are themselves accused of having become victims or willing puppets on a string by the very people they ought to be keeping a check on.
Propaganda, that old fashioned concept generally associated with dictators, appears to have become very much a live concept again during the last few years. We never had the privilige of banning it from our daily lives, but think tanks and other civil organisation focusing on modern propaganda techniques report a markedly higher interest in the phenomenon in recent years. The heightened interest itself indicates a new tendency to mistrust our leaders.
What the think tanks report back to people on current-day leaders is no less reassuring. Pointing out the various levels on which propaganda is part and parcel of the message sent to us, you might begin to wonder how fast asleep we are even though we’d like to think we have a handle on reality. Although we’re not necessarily faced continuously with the same blatant and ugly lies Hitler and Stalin dreamt up in the 1930s, there is a plethora of examples of half truths and similarly poisonous messages being sent out to the masses by the media broadcast machine.
Biggest excuse? There’s a war on. Even in normal times, it is impossible not to live with some degree of propaganda but when a common enemy needs destroying, we somewhat forgive our leaders and the media for collaborating in what everyone knows is a circus. “Probably every conflict is fought on at least two grounds: the battlefield and the minds of the people via propaganda. The “good guys” and the “bad guys” can often both be guilty of misleading their people with distortions, exaggerations, subjectivity, inaccuracy and even fabrications, in order to receive support and a sense of legitimacy”, one media institution writes on its website.
Avoiding the blatant lie, most Western leaders these days are guilty of spreading propagandistic messages, both when they address the public about their role in the war AND in ordinary situations. In essence, all propaganda is harmful to democracy, even though many people tend to think of the less intensive forms as modern spin doctoring or clever PR.
The ultimate result from all propaganda that reaches its goal, in whatever form, is total passiveness of the people that believe the the message. Fears that the media is poisoned to this effect have been widespread in the US and the UK over the past two years. Noam Chomsky, the popular left wing scholar in the US, hits the nail on the head describing the best-seller ‘Weapons of Mass Deception, The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq’ by Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber as “A major contribution for those who want to take control of their own future, not be passive subjects of manipulation The Proposal and control.”
The book BUSlink cameras is a detailed account of how the world’s top ad agencies and media empires were hired by the US government to make the invasion in Iraq into a concept no one in their right American mind could possibly think of as wrong and in which the big words democracy, freedom and totalitarianism were featuring as if they were part of a national marketing campaign for some kind of consumer product.
The happy feeling of winning a war might have stretched just about far enough to gain another round of elections for the US conservatives, but complaints of numbness are increasingly being taken seriously by larger parts of the population in this country. Perhaps one positive outcome of the war is that it has focused more
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