War at the Remote

By Norman Solomon, AlterNet. Posted June 18, 2007.

It's a popular notion: TV sets and other media devices let us in on the violence of war. "Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens," President Bush told a news conference more than three years ago. "I don't. It's a tough time for the American people to see that. It's gut-wrenching."

But televised glimpses of war routinely help to keep war going. Susan Sontag was onto something when she pointed out that "the image as shock and the image as cliche are two aspects of the same presence."

While viewers may feel disturbed by media imagery of warfare, their discomfort is largely mental and limited. The only shots coming at them are ones that have been waved through by editors. Still, we hear that television brings war into our living rooms.

We're encouraged to be a nation of voyeurs -- or pseudo-voyeurs -- looking at war coverage and imagining that we really see, experience, comprehend. In this mode, the reporting on the Iraq war facilitates a rough division of labor. For American media consumers, the easy task is to watch from afar -- secure in the tacit belief we're understanding what it means to undergo the violence that we catch via only the most superficial glances.

Television screens provide windows on the world that reinforce distances. Watching "news" at the remote, viewers are in a zone supplied by producers with priorities far afield from authenticity or democracy. More than making sense, the mass-media enterprise is about making corporate profit in sync with governmental power.

Exceptional news reports do exist. And that's the problem; they're exceptions. A necessity of effective propaganda is repetition. And the inherent limits of television in conveying realities of war are further narrowed by deference to Washington.

Styles vary on network television, but the journalistic pursuits -- whether on a prime-time CNN show or the PBS "NewsHour" -- are chasing parallel bottom lines. When the missions of corporate-owned commercial television and corporate-funded "public broadcasting" are wrapped up in the quest to maximize profits and maintain legitimacy among elites in a warfare state, how far afield is the war coverage likely to wander?

While media outlets occasionally stick their institutional necks out, the departures are rarely fundamental. In large media institutions, underlying precepts of a de facto military-industrial-media complex are rarely disturbed in any sort of sustained way -- by the visual presentations or by the words that accompany them.

"Even if journalists, editors, and producers are not superpatriots, they know that appearing unpatriotic does not play well with many readers, viewers, and sponsors," media analyst Michael X. Delli Carpini commented. Written with reference to the Vietnam War, his words now apply to the Iraq war era. "Fear of alienating the public and sponsors, especially in wartime, serves as a real, often unstated tether, keeping the press tied to accepted wisdom."

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Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."

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