Sign in or 
Share this
War Coverage & the "Media Virus" that Afflicts It
by Nashwa Gewaily
A “media virus,” according to Douglas Rushkoff, the media and culture critic who coined the term, is “any idea that uses the momentum of the media to spread itself” (Metzger 53). Consideration of this concept is an apt starting point in analyzing the way in which the media’s appetite for succinct sound bites and catchy buzzwords has led to the seamless incorporation of certain words and phrases that reinforce the Bush administration’s framing of the war in Iraq through news coverage.
According to linguist and liberal political advocate George Lakoff in Don’t Think of an Elephant!, language that evokes a political frame “comes out of the White House, and it goes into press releases, goes to every radio station, every TV station, every newspaper” (4). While the extent to which this is true is disputable, the underlying notion of the viral spread of politically loaded terminology through the news media is exhibited in a case study of articles related to the Iraq war found in the nation’s three most widely read newspapers, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times. Analysis of a sampling of such language – specifically, the “war on terror,” “Islamic terror,” and descriptions of January’s troop “surge” (versus “escalation”) – indicates that news media have accepted and projected certain frames that corroborate Bush’s fashioning of the war.
Methodology
Using Lexis-Nexus and ProQuest search engines and the online editions of the newspapers, every instance in which the terms were invoked in the 3-month period of August 12, 2007 to November 12, 2007 was counted individually, including those used multiple times within one article. The study was limited to news items, arts reviews, features, and sections not categorized as editorials or opinion columns, with the intention of citing only cases in which objectivity is theoretically expected. Only stand-alone uses of the word or phrase were tallied, excluding its usage within a longer quote or direct paraphrase. The findings were then divided according to the number of times each term was used without indication of its political or official nature versus the number of times they were qualified with “so-called” (or similar clarification) or enclosed in quotation marks.
Analysis
“War on Terror”
The Wall Street Journal was the only newspaper to use “war on terror” sans quotation marks each time, while USA Today quoted it once out of nine times (11%), and The New York Times five times out of 26 (19%). The absence of the official context of the phrase in The Wall Street Journal and the frequent, though inconsistent, reference in the same manner in USA Today and The New York Times is suggestive of the acceptance and continued propagation of a paradigm of current affairs crucial to the administration’s narrative. Many adherents to Bush’s logic that “people who do not believe there is a war on terror are ‘either disingenuous or naïve’” might support the use of the phrase. However, though military operations and initiatives as the government officially presents them are undeniably newsworthy, a press that is ostensibly independent of the government breaches this fundamental principle when articles presented as straightforward fact cite a “war on terror” but fail to qualify it, and thereby aid its conceptualization as a common-sense interpretation of the nature of the war.
In No Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11, author Lisa Finnegan addresses the necessity of “what the president and his top officials say” to be reported as well as “analyzed, clarified, and debated;” and contends that “when the president declared a ‘war on terror,’ the American media allowed him and his administration to frame the issue without asking for a definition of a war on terror or terrorism” (15). If this is taken to be an accurate assessment, this sampling could then be interpreted as a linguistic failure to question the parameters of such a war, particularly as it relates to government attempts to form associations between 9/11 and the Iraq war.
“Islamic terror”
Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal employ the term “Islamic terror” in their Op/Ed pages, with The New York Times also incorporating the phrase into news articles, but its placement and time frame lies outside the scope of this study. USA Today was unique in that it used “Islamic terror” four times, each time in its news sections and as an unquoted label, demonstrating that this rhetoric has found its way into the nation’s top mainstream print media to varying degrees as a legitimate descriptor.
Some analyses of the term itself discredit it, such as a Kuwaiti government-commissioned study of Western media that claims “the terms Islamic or Muslim are linked to extremism, militant, jihads, as if they belonged together inextricably and naturally.” In commentary that appeared in The Guardian titled “The Label of Catholic Terror Was Never Used About the IRA,” religious scholar Karen Armstrong similarly made a case against the implication in the term that terrorism is inherently Islamic, arguing that “we need a phrase that is more exact than "Islamic terror". These acts may be committed by people who call themselves Muslims, but they violate essential Islamic principles.”
Others argue that the term is accurate, including Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, who denounced the fact that “in four Democratic debates, not a single Democratic candidate said the word 'Islamic terrorism,'" voicing a concern that this “is taking a political correctness to extremes." “Those who like the Republican candidates' choice of language say it reflects the reality of who threatens America the most,” according to a Wall Street Journal article, which cites the view of one member of the public: "Everybody ought to call an ace an ace."
There’s an argument to be made that such contentious choice of words should be reserved for editorials and columns that are clearly opinion-oriented, rather than present as fact labels that echo terminology repeatedly invoked by Republican officials and conservative pundits who have “an obvious reason to say that same phrase -- if you believe that we are careening toward a war of civilizations and your aim is to inflame,” as commentator Joe Conason would assert. The potential effect of striking a chord of fear against an ambiguous force arguably “also distorts the true nature of the problem, and solutions such as the Patriot Act, do not receive the scrutiny they deserve, thereby, giving governments the freedom to conduct war or take punitive action for purposes that have little to do with the real threat” and “lets governments off the hook too easily by not forcing them to more precisely define the "enemy," as author Enver Masud maintains.
Troop “Surge” vs. “Escalation”
Following Bush’s announcement of his intent to deploy a “surge of 20,000 U.S. troops” to Baghdad in January 2007, the plan was typically cited as such by Republicans and alternatively, as an “escalation” by Democrats. Reporting by USA Today during the time frame of the study cited a “surge” 17 times, indicating a quotation six times (35%), and an “escalation” twice, with neither instance quoted; and The New York Times used “surge” 45 times, with 27 as quotes (60%), and “escalation” without quotation three times. The Wall Street Journal differed in that it never described an “escalation,” but cited a “surge” 58 times, indicating a quote 24% of the time.
The few instances in which an “escalation” was described without attribution warrants consideration – as Lakoff concedes, the term is charged, due to its echoes of Vietnam, and because “in escalation, when the prospect of losing is 'unacceptable,' de-escalation is unlikely. The deeper the commitment of troops, the harder it is to get those troops out.” However, the reference to increased troop levels framed in line with the administration as a “surge” far eclipsed alternative language. Lakoff holds that “to use the word ‘surge’ is to subscribe to Bush's misleading frame,” and although no end date was given, “the word 'surge' indicates a short-term increase in force that has an effect and naturally goes back to its previous level.” Such pointed terminology is a clear-cut example of conservative strategist Frank Luntz’s theory of the power of “positive” and “negative” language as articulated in the PBS documentary The Persuaders as “words that work,” or, in other words, that resonate with the public in a way that favorably conceptualizes a product or policy.
Buzzwords in Context
Though labels such as the “war on terror” are regularly denounced by liberals such as John Edwards as merely “bumper sticker slogans” designed to justify the Iraq war, others such as Luntz play down the cognitive effect of politically charged, carefully chosen language, pointing to the “screamingly obvious: Some policies and ideas really are more popular than others – no matter how they are articulated. Language is tremendously important…but it’s not everything”(3). When it comes to “biased words that seep unchallenged into mainstream media coverage of politics,” however, as articulated by The Nation’s Dean Powers, “most editors agree that political buzzwords obscure meaning and tend to mislead--and that authentic reporting requires constant vigilance.”
Sources:
Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? New York: Oxford University
Press US, 1999.
Finnegan, Lisa. No Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11. Westport: Greenwood
Press, 2006.
Lakoff, George. Don’t Think of an Elephant! Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004.
Luntz, Frank. Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear. New
York: Hyperion, 2007.
Metzger, Richard. Disinformation: The Interviews. New York: The Disinformation
Company, 2002.
|
NashwaG |
Latest page update: made by NashwaG
, Sep 15 2009, 3:00 AM EDT
(about this update
About This Update
Edited by NashwaG
view changes - complete history) |
|
Keyword tags:
Nashwa Gewaily
war on terror
More Info: links to this page
|
There are no threads for this page.
Be the first to start a new thread.
