Transcript Consuming War - McMaster Faculty of Humanities

Consuming War
Weapons of Mass Persuasion
April 4,
2008
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Consuming War
Media is commodified
Media is a vehicle for
wartime propaganda
War Coverage is framed like
movie genres
Consuming Media
• The press operates like a
market
• Sorting through media is
central to democracy
• Wars are ugly, scary and
largely hidden from the
public.
Methodology
• Purpose: “to investigate how
consumers of Iraq war made
meaning and what some of these
meanings were.”
• Focus Groups
• Toronto Area
Propaganda
- a set of messages intended
to influence the opinions and
behaviours of large groups of
people
-used frequently by
governments during times of
war
Media and Wartime
Propaganda
Washington Goes
on the Offensive
• Manipulation of Language
• Every War needs a brand
• The public's interpretation
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuRjX7S
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The Role Of the Press
• Objective journalism?
-Weak reporting
-Embedded journalists
-Panel of "experts"
-Incomplete coverage
Iraq War: Appearing
as a War made in Hollywood?
• The panels accounts of what they saw were
“peppered” with specific references to
recent movies:
•
Ex. Wag the Dog, Terminator 3, Three
Kings, Star Wars, Star Trek
• Iraq the movie was actually a series of
stories, some tragic, some comic, and some
triumphant, appealing to a range of tastes.
Breaking War Down by Genre
1. Adventure:
•
“ …this is appealing to what I call the Joe Lunchbox
type”
2. Sci-Fi:
• “hideous” weapons that he might soon launch.
•
“…the great unseen, unknown peril that lurks on the
other side of the sand dune”
•
“…I mean it’s Star Wars, no question about it, this
push-button warfare. It’s quite unbelievable.”
3. Action:
“…I guess my big surprise was all this yakking about fire
power and shock and awe and stuff…and how little actual
hitting and damages there was.”
Breaking War Down by Genre
4. Human Interest
“..The passion for the human-interest story was
one of the worst things about public affairs
coverage in the modern age.”
5. Comedy
• “…The Iraqi minister who became like the knight
in the Monty Python skit who continues to fight
on when he’s lost all his limbs.”
•
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bAPJBcKqZF4
Consumer Voices=
Practicing Democracy?
• Interviewees were voracious consumers of the news
media
• Created defense mechanisms against the onslaught of
propaganda and infotainment.
• The impact of the war media was always mediated by
their views, their prejudices, their tastes, the
ways the navigated through the torrent of images
and sounds.
• The ways the individuals extracted meaning from the
welter of infotainment and propaganda showed the
very kind of competence essential to democracy
Recap
 Media is commodified
 Media is a vehicle for
wartime propaganda
 War Coverage is framed like
movie genres
That’s a Wrap
• In using a panel, did Rutherford
prove that the media has a strong
hand in shaping opinion about the
war?
• How could the study have been
improved? (Biases? Limitations?)