Debate: War as Reality TV - Part 3

Debate: War as Reality TV? - Part 3

Dwayne Comments

Dwayne Winseck
Debate: War as Reality TV?
Hosted by the Media Awareness Network

Hi Bill,

I'll take it that this is as good a time as any to start with some comments regarding the role of the media during war. The first thing that I'd like to say is that it is crucial that we realize that it is hard to make definitive statements regarding the coverage that we've seen so far and much of what we come to know will only emerge in dribbles over a long time after the war ceases and the public mind turns to other matters. I think the key now though is to recognize that caution is the order of the day but also to recognize that the media are at the centre of this conflict rather than merely the channels through which images and information about it are provided to people.

This is an important point and I think it goes to the heart of the 'style' of Bill's story as well as some of the claims he raises there about the prospects for a highly visualized and entertaining war to sideline the more standard stuff of television schedules and popular culture. As I tried to think about what I'd do today during our email exchange it seemed to me that there are two quite important things that come out of these aspects of Bill's story, i.e. its 'style and feel' as well as its discussion about what to expect.

As for the style, the very down-to-earth approach of Bill's reporting on this event is very recognizable. On the one hand, this is just an easy trick used by writers everywhere to provide a hook upon which complex events can be made into easily digestible ideas for a broad audience. Looked at positively, this link between the media coverage of the war and its impact on the TV schedule relates an extra-ordinarily complex event with something almost all of can relate to: our favourite TV programs.

Yet, while this may translate hard to understand realities into things we can all understand, it also reminds me of the observations of an early media theorist whose ideas were largely developed around the relationship between media, war and democracy. This theorist was Walter Lippman and Lippman suggested that in modern times an ever broadening range of events that had consequences for our lives was taking place beyond our experience. In this gap between the consequences for our everyday life and a 'complex reality' often swirling around war and conflict and 'high politics' beyond our grasp, stood the expert and their vehicles—journalists and the media—helping to make sense of the far-off and unfamiliar and to bring them into the homes and ability of 'the masses to understand.'

For this, Lippman argued that 'conventions'—familiar assumptions and already existing habits, commonsense and popular knowledge—were crucial hooks that media professionals could use to at least help vast audiences get an inkling of what was going on while the real experts were actually the direct participants in the events and who would ultimately make the decisions that mattered.

In a funny kind of way, Bill's article works just like this. It appears to talk to us in the familiar vernacular of everyday life, but in essence trivializes the event, people's relationship to it, as well as his own role in it.

The problem here, though, is that while Bill's article 'talks to us like a friend,' it actually holds our capacities to comprehend the events, let alone the idea that we might be able to do anything to influence them, in low esteem. This is a real problem when numerous public opinion polls and other attempts to find out people's understanding and opinions with respect to the war in Iraq and the preceding push for disarmament have consistently shown strong opposition to the war, only very qualified support for it as well as a strong desire for more knowledge and opinions about it.

This striving to know and rough and ready attempt to provide a 'moral compass' to those who operate the machines of world diplomacy and war are remarkable in the sense that they indicate a refusal to take the easy road, to merely defer to conventions and delegate authority to the experts and so on.

By reducing the war in Iraq to the impact on what we'll watch on TV avoids all of this and people's very real attempts to take their responsibilities as members of a public and not just an audience seriously, in essence trivializing the real world of democracy for the virtual one of the screen, whether the screen is showing Survivor or War.

The hook between war and trivial consequences is also notable in the sense that it invites us to stay squarely within the framework of what Lippman—who was actually a supporter of hooks and conventions and held a restricted view of people's ability to understand the 'real world—called 'limited democracy.' 'Limited democracy' is mainly a way of describing 'really existing ones' where people vote once every four years or so and possess some general sense of world events but largely go about their day to day trivial affairs while the complexities of the 'real world' are taken care of by the experts.

The fact that people are heating up the wires on the Internet, talking about the issues around the war in the Middle East, searching for new information and insights on what is going on, and remain extremely skeptical about the stated rationale behind US policy and the connections between terrorism and war, even in the US, suggests that there is a real disconnect between the 'culture of democracy' and what is happening in the 'official institutions' of 'limited democracy.' Bill's article suggests that we ignore the former and shore up the declining popular support for the latter.

Beyond this there is another line of thinking that can be usefully developed by taking the connections between war, the media and popular culture more seriously. It's very interesting that in fact media coverage of the war is not displacing 'regularly scheduled programming,' as Bill predicted, but actually being buried in and politicizing it deeply.

Last night's Oscar awards were a great example. Many have decried the trivialization of war by turning it into a kind of video game, where the gore, guts and blood streaming down street gutters into sewers is displaced by smart bombs. I think there's probably something to this, but there's also something very different to this war and what is going on in the media and popular culture.

Part of what's going on is related to what I said above about the fact the people are not content to be rather inert and passive spectators and recipients of what the experts and 'powers that be' tell them. They are actively engaged in trying to figure things out and highly skeptical.

Indeed, some of this is coming out in a sense that there is something absolutely corrupt and fraudulent about the current state of politics in the US and this can easily be seen in the swirling conspiracy theories surrounding 9/11 and US foreign policy in the Middle East and with respect to Iraq. I'm not suggesting that we accept such conspiracies, but I do think that their volume and intensity shows more than just a curiosity about what's going on and the existence of a rather strong current—stronger than just the whacko militiamen and survivalists groups that have long flourished online and in the bushes of Idaho—and in fact shows that a vastly large number of people within the US are circumspect about their own government. The criticisms of US foreign policy outside the ring of conspiracy theorists and the US in general I think is far sounder but still points to a huge issue regarding the lack of legitimacy that currently attaches to US initiatives on the world stage.

While conspiracy theories are on the fringe of popular culture and the musings of the mad, last night's Oscars made it clear that war will not displace the mainstream of popular culture but is increasingly becoming buried in it and ratcheting up its politicization several degrees. Thus, in last night's Oscars, Michael Moore's characteristically strong denunciation of US policies and rationales for war abroad and inculcation of fear and a security state at home as based on contrivances and fictions was immediately followed by the doyen of Hollywood and its foreign charge d'affairs, Jack Valente.

Valente is Hollywood's man in Washington and in the diplomatic offices abroad, relentlessly trying to slay the barriers to American culture adopted in countries from Canada to Korea. His introduction of a more conventional range of documentaries nominated for an Oscar and his presentation of that award to the producers of a documentary on 9/11 that faithfully follows the US government's current rationale for its lockdown on homeland security and excursions abroad immediately after the radical documentarian Michael Moore was no coincidence.

The examples along these lines are already lengthy and growing daily, showing that the media have not only trivialized war through the sanitized imagery of video games but are now central actors in far reaching political and military events whose boundaries in time and space are far from clear. A cursory list of the merging of war, media, popular culture and politics would have to include at least the following:

Cheryl Crowe's performance at last month's Grammys where her forced climb down from wearing an anti-war t-shirt to a similar message on the strap of her guitar temporarily broke through the veneer that popular culture is not political and that somehow both the media and popular culture are independent of the tensest and most fractious issues of world geopolitics and war.
Richard Gere, Martin Sheen and others participants in war marches and anti-war messages and their quick rebuke by the lacks of martial arts supremo Claude van Damme reveal the same thing.
Oprah's attempt to address her audience's desire for greater knowledge and context by bringing in a middle-eastern scholar and others to explore larger contextual issues has also netted her in the vortex of those who wish to stridently enforce the conformity to 'official policy.'

But probably more important than the way that popular culture and the media have been politicized by those who would oppose the lockdown on the homeland and the war in Iraq are the formal incorporation of the media and popular culture into the US administration and military. Just a few examples to illustrate:

Pro-war demonstrations organized by the largest rock and roll station owner in the US, Clear Communication. Clear's 1200 stations have not only been turning rock and roll away into an adjunct of government and military, they've been providing ample coverage of such demonstrations as news. This is the manufacturing of events and also, by the way, part and parcel of what Lippman referred to approvingly as the attempt to 'manufacture consent.' The hook is there—rock and roll and protests—now the key is to steer them in more pliable directions.
Meetings between lead officials of the Bush administration and Hollywood designed to accelerate the flow of films with a 'patriotic theme' into theatres near you and smaller, sillier, but still worrisome things, such as erasing images of 'the towers' from films scheduled for release, as if somehow the airbrush will do to public memory what everything else cannot.
The design of the military 'news briefing studio' in Doha, Qatar by one of the leading Hollywood set designers, bringing, as the designer recently said, the public communications efforts of the military age up to speed with the modern practices of Hollywood.
The acceptance of media organizations of Pentagon/Department of Defense 'pooling' and 'embedding' arrangements that position journalists within military units, privatize 'freedom of expression' by requiring journalists and media organizations to sign private contracts with the Pentagon that tie them to certain conditions regarding news reporting. Whereas similar practices at least raised a significant legal challenge on First Amendment grounds in Gulf War I, a more compliant media have not taken even this token step on this occasion.

On the one hand, this extra-ordinary politicization of popular culture reveals an interesting truism about the relationship between the media and war that needs to be appreciated and explored a great deal further: namely, that the media are generally conservative and tend to follow the broad contours of official government military policy during times of conflict unless there is a great deal of fragmentation among elite opinion as well as among the culture as a whole.

This is certainly the case currently as any honest reading of both public opinion as well as informed commentary on the subject illustrate, both within the US and outside it, particularly outside it. The original understanding of this connection between the relationship between media and the war was put forward by Dan Hallin with respect to media coverage of the Vietnam War and I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in understanding current events go have a look at that work.

So, the extra-ordinary politicization of popular culture right now is incredibly important and must not be minimized by simplistic references to the consequences of war on minor things like TV schedules. This is incredibly important and must be recognized and given prominence so that there are not mistakes that support for this war is anything but extra-ordinarily qualified (in the US) and largely lacking elsewhere. To minimize or trivialize the politicization of popular culture at this time would give a false illusion/delusion of consensus where there is none.

For Canadians, this is particularly important, because it becomes part of the evidence and cultural foundations for a view that can help to support and justify a strong opposition to the US war on Iraq and post 9/11 hysteria without being button holed by the powerful forces in this country that would like to use one of their favourite 'conventions' to suppress dissent and limit democracy: that criticism of the US is petulant and born of an infantile nationalism.

It is the convention that tries to impose an infantilism on Canadians who seek to understand and critique the world around them, including their own systems of power, and to position the majority of Canadian citizens as the pupils of the expert few who would like to blindly line up all citizens in salute so as to ensure that criticism doesn't interfere with the bottom line.

Lastly, just as crucial as pointing out the lines between politics, the media and war have blurred far beyond turning war into a video game, it is also crucial to realize that the alignments between the media, military and governments that are now taking place cannot be squared with any theory of democracy. Trips to Hollywood by Bush Administration grunts, press pools and embedded journalists, a military press briefing office designed by Hollywood's finest, and rock concert/prowar protests organized by the largest radio broadcasting chain in the US point to tightening and more formal ties between the US media, military and government.

Sure, retired US military officers and members of various governments have been on the boards of directors of US media since Henry Luce and the formation of Time magazine shortly after the turn of the 20th century. Those ties remained last time I looked just over a year ago. Now they appear to have become organized at an even more formal level and in ways that are even more committed.

Well, folks, this has turned out much longer than I imagined. There's much more to say, but I'll leave that for later.

Cheers,

Dwayne