War and the Media: Essays on News Reporting, Propaganda and Popular Culture. Paul M. Haridakis, Barbara S. Hugenberg, and Stanley T. Wearden, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009. 265 pp.
A collection assembled under such a broad title might invite doubts as to coherence. Yet the editors, all of Kent State University, have meaningfully coordinated a thoughtful, critical volume of twelve U.S.-focused case studies. Part I focuses on images of war from music, photography, film, and animation, World War I to Vietnam. The theme of Part II is institutionalized propaganda of both world wars, covering advertising, comics, government discourses, and public relations. And Part III considers the effects of news coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The editors observe that how each new medium is enlisted in war plays a unique role (Brett Lunceford’s conclusion envisages cyberwar implications for impeding enemy communications, including psyops, intelligence, and viruses). In Part I, Richard Lee shows how protest songs provided information about the Vietnam War that was not regularly reported yet spread rapidly even without heavy media airplay or exposure. Koji Fuse and James Mueller apply fantasy theme analysis to Clint Eastwood’s movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. In the narration of Flags, we are all fallible; images are only part of reality; and the individual is insignificant compared to the mission. In Letters, Japanese are also human; the Japanese who have experience in the United States are benevolent and civilized, and only those Japanese who were indoctrinated by Japanese propaganda are suicidal maniacs. The authors note that Eastwood paradoxically projected the American viewpoint in disguise of a Japanese one.
In his essay, Wesley O’Brien traces “ghosts of Vietnam” in combat films released in the 2000s. These demonstrate a progression from personalized heroism to heroism thwarted and finally to heroism destroyed. In Three Kings, for example, heroism is not predicated on national allegiance, but on personal morality. We Were Soldiers repositions the hero’s allegiance by foregrounding familial and fraternal bonds. The myth of the American soldier in Jarhead becomes a “conflation of unconsummated sex and unconsummated heroism.” In Redacted, U.S. soldiers are not protectors but abusers; redemption will be possible only in the “epiphany that the cause was unjust.” Where In the Valley of Elah is utterly despairing—a symbol of freedom, the American flag, is inverted into a symbol of desperation—Stop-Loss offers impoverished redemption through the hero’s near disavowal of a country whose alienating characteristics are also those that keep him from disavowal. Rekha Sharma studies how Hollywood war cartoons mocked Hitler’s “master race,” even while perpetuating racial divisions at home. She cites the later Chuck Jones series, Road Runner and Coyote, and others, as self-conscious Cold War propaganda. Long after the wars that inspired them, recent cartoons continue earlier ideological work even while furnishing resistance through satire.
In Part II, Kathleen German examines the promotional short film Autobiography of a Jeep, which transitioned the Jeep from military vehicle to mass civilian production by playing on transcendent value clusters of optimism, comradeship, and loyalty. James Kimble and Trischa Goodnow analyze the U.S. Treasury’s 1942 War Victory comics and their role-model characters as vehicles for persuading youth to purchase war stamps, emphasizing the many possible ways they could fund the purchase of stamps and trade them for war bonds. Roy Schwartzman compares and contrasts Nazi Germany’s Der Kampf and America’s War on Terror—both framed social policies as constant battle. Schwartzman explores how the “construction and deployment of a specific frame … establishes the bounds of logically allowable responses.” Der Kampf linked racial theories to differentiation between peoples and the need for all-out struggle. But America’s War on Terror “never set the terms of the everyday citizen’s contribution to the struggle,” and, “without consistent tangible objectives or enemies (it) … became an assault on phantoms.” Its narratives proved internally inconsistent and unsustainable. Alternative frames, such as criminal justice, would likely have worked better.
Burton St. John assesses the lessons of World War I for journalism and public relations. Journalists and the public became increasingly aware that propaganda had contaminated news reporting. Edward Bernays’ writings on public relations helped counteract this with the notion of “pro-social truths.” The construction of “objectivity” as something realized by “facts contextualized by experts” led to professional journalism’s “unanticipated synergy with propaganda.”
Examining coverage of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars in Business Week, Forbes, and Inc., Karen Stout concludes that “stories of large corporations garnering huge contracts were ignored and obscured” as were “stories of corruption and greed that have inflated war costs.” These business magazines “obscured and … concealed war profiteering,” and erroneously downplayed projections that the wars would be long and messy. David Weiss applies critical linguistics to a single story in the Albuquerque Journal, demonstrating how a medium that supposedly represents the community as a whole uses linguistic strategies such as transitivity; inanimate, abstract or organizational subjects; modality; transformations and passivizations, to falsely imply war consensus. M.F. Casper and Jeffrey Child consider whether television stories of the Iraq War that featured embedded reporting enhanced parasocial interaction and perceived realism. Their controlled experiments demonstrated higher parasocial interaction for embedded reporting, which possibly serves as a recruitment tool. Terri Patkin studied journalist and audience perceptions of the media blackout of the story of Prince Harry’s deployment to Afghanistan. Differences of perception related to the different orientations of the two groups toward the process of newsgathering. The overall impact of the blackout was to transform perceptions of Harry from celebrity to hero.
The book provides successful examples of different methodological approaches, but also highlights the need for meta-theorization in the field of war, media, and propaganda.
OLIVER BOYD-BARRETT
Bowling Green State University