If the elections are to determine who among the ruling classes are to misrepresent the electorate for a given period of time, the media’s job is to ensure that the process goes on smoothly, without inconveniencing anyone too very much.

Such could be a broad summary of Karl Marx’s understanding of what went on in the name of democracy in his times. Centuries later, for all the increased awareness, have things indeed changed much?

Across the entire democratic world, one can hear the sigh of the helplessness of the voters, particularly so at the time of the elections.

That the alternatives, including the one avowedly deriving from Marx himself, turned into nightmares is a different issue altogether. But clearly history teaches us the democratic machine is manipulated by various sections for their own selfish ends and the media happily plays along.

When Media Goes To War is a painstaking study by Anthony Dimaggio, well-known U.S. commentator, to demonstrate that the U.S. media is not at all objective as it preens to be and that it tends to serve the interests of the government at any given point of time. The book is replete with graphs, meticulous count of the number of times an issue is covered, and so on. But are such indeed required to prove the obvious, some might wonder. Well, the book is presumably addressed to the U.S. readers, many of whom could be nursing an illusion that their media is a disinterested purveyor of news.

U.S. scenario



And even though the study is confined to the U.S. scenario, most of the points should be widely applicable.

The media anywhere plays a vital role in constructing the world that people see, and in influencing which issues the public focuses upon. More so in the U.S., where mainstream newspapers and TV channels virtually set the agenda. Noam Chomsky, the celebrated rebel intellectual, has, time and again, sought to drive home the point that the American mass media serves as a form of “thought control in a democratic society,” with major news organisations systematically bending the truth to support the status quo.

Chomsky’s study, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media” (co-authored with Edward S. Herman), did kick up some dust when it was published (1988), but quickly the dust settled down, and few mainstream scholars advert to it, Dimaggio regrets and goes to extraordinary lengths to show Chomsky and Herman were indeed right with the projection of their “propaganda model.”

He deals with a number of issues, but the case of The New York Times is indeed illuminating. The liberal newspaper refused to advocate withdrawal from Iraq until well after the 2006 elections. In a July 2007 editorial, the newspaper claimed that it had put off advocating withdrawal for sometime (for two years earlier the tide of public opinion had turned against the war), preferring “to wait for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilise the country afterward.”

The prestigious cable news provider CNN did not interview a single anti-war protestor or activist between June 2006 and April 2007. The closest to an anti-war voice aired was that of Lawrence Korb’s. He was a former Defence department official, and he was blaming the Bush administration more for failing to ensure National Guard troops were fully prepared before deployment and didn’t take any moral position.

Indeed rarely does the U.S. media admit the culpability of the successive administrations on any front. Mostly criticism stems from the fact that the intervention has failed to deliver the goods, whatever they might be.

The entire western media was crowing raucously when the Soviet empire was dismantled, but who is to take the responsibility for the after effects? Some leading U.S. economists have conceded their way of restructuring heaped a lot of avoidable misery on the people. But to this day no mainstream media acknowledges that they had gone about a very wrong way whether it was Iraq or Soviet Union.

But government officials seem to delude themselves that they are indeed gods deciding the destiny of the mankind. One of them is quoted as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality —judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” Waves might not have receded on Canute’s orders, but most in the media tend to withdraw in frightened silence.

Forget the media houses, even the reporters are willing to defer to such arrogance, for all their much-vaunted independence. They are more concerned with gaining access to officials than with questioning the legitimacy of their statements. Gaining access rather than holding their feet to the fire seems more important to them, complains bitterly Dimaggio. That is a phenomenon familiar to reporters around the world. Time and again they kill stories in order to retain the goodwill of those in power.

Even otherwise reporters, hailing as they do essentially from middle classes, internalise the middle class values of a patriarchal system.

So between the proprietors who have their own agenda and reporters who are all too willing to turn a blind eye to many wrong-doings in the name of the community or country, fat chance truths inconvenient to the rulers reach the public at large.

However, based on his own limited surveys, the author of the book under review claims that most Americans reject any imperial role for their country, something generally taken for granted, both within the U.S. and outside. He maintains that the people are “capable of forming views independently of elites, and this reality offers hope for democracy at a time when the control of political information is so thoroughly dominated by official sources.” Well even in the media, things do happen, unmentionables are mentioned, and the undesirable are thrown out, even if to be replaced by worse characters sometimes.

So some day, some day … Anthony Dimaggio should be hoping.

WHEN MEDIA GOES TO WAR — Hegemonic Discourse, Public Opinion and the Limits of Dissent: Anthony Dimaggio; Aakar Books, 28 E, Pocket IV, Mayur Vihar Phase I, Delhi-110091. Rs. 795.