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What role did American media play in forming public opinion surrounding…

- - - - “...what distinguishes America most fundamentally is the absence of debate on the president’s policy among Democrats in Washington. In other countries where leaders supported President Bush, there was a vigorous debate, with party leaders articulating cogent arguments against jumping to pre-emptive war. In the US, nothing of the sort occurred” (Huber 397). :<3:
      - “Byrd’s speech and his opposition to President Bush’s policy drew little attention. The arguments were not supported by other democrats in the Senate, and given Byrd’s isolation from his party on the issue, the remarks were not taken seriously by the media, which virtually ignored them” (Huber 398). :<3:
      - “The opposing viewpoints that did appear were most often the opinions of Iraqi officials and journalists. When domestic skeptics did appear, their opinions were isolated and marginalized, Domestic skeptics were virtually non-existent on Fox News. The oppositional viewpoints expressed in CNN...were buried amongst a multitude of opinions in support of Powell...Opinions such as [these] were available, but the television media rarely used them” (McLeod 131). :black_flag:
      - “A study of two weeks of media pre-war coverage concluded that the networks were ‘megaphones for official views’ in which 26 per cent of all sources were current or former officials, leaving little room for independent and grass-root views” (Najjar 20). :snail:
      - “...driven by ideals that place high value on credible, verifiable information, journalists favor official sources who tend to frame an issue in a way that is congruent with political leaders; these sources speak in a tone that tends to reinforce the position of government leaders rather than challenge it” (Bennett, Schudson in Hatcher 1). :tophat:
    - - “Journalists largely believed Powell’s contention regarding al-Qaeda operations in Iraq...When journalists reiterated elements of Powell’s speech, they rarely, if ever, treated his contentions as anything other than established fact” (McLeod 123-124). :black_flag:
      - “...the issues are complex and deserve debate by our political elites. This debate has unfolded in other countries - even in ones like the UK and Australia, where as in the US the threat of terrorism is significant and there exists a large conservative party that is traditionally viewed as ‘the party of defense.’ In those countries, citizens heard alternative arguments from their political leaders. As a result, they hardly lined up willy-nilly behind their ‘party of defense’ or in favor of a narrow focus on ‘dead or alive’ at any cost” (Huber 403). :<3:
    - - Claim #4 - The Bush Administration had direct control of how the war was portrayed in American media.
        
        “In peacetime the mass media inculcate the norms and opinions that a nation wants in its people. In wartime they become the means by which the government instructs the populace” (von Hoffmann 1). :vs:
        
        “Presidents might therefore make themselves or their surrogates available for media interviews, deliberately craft speeches and specific ‘talking points,’ carefully choose the environment in which they communicated with the public, and limit journalists’ access to adverse information, all in a highly strategic attempt to promote the administration’s perspective” (Coe 308). :cookie:
      - Alternative Perspective
        
        The internet provides a range of perspectives represented throughout different media outlets so the American public had no reason to be misinformed.
        
        “There is a certain set of information, a set of sources to which we are subject or which we seek out, that provides us with information about the world and shapes our political world view. That political world view, in turn, leads us to believe that the information and set of sources we are accessing are really all we need to know; that nothing else falls outside of that scope, or if anything does fall outside that scope, it is not particularly reliable, meaningful, or important. This yields a self-referential process that reinforces itself: our world view, whatever that is, leads us to believe that the set of information we are getting is all we need to know, which in turn reinforces our world view” (Greenwald 827). :green_cross:
        
        “Many assume that the topic of this essay - namely, what the media does to ensure that knowledge is limited in a democracy - is almost an obsolete topic, because with the Internet and the proliferation of multiple other sources, it must no longer be the case that we are forced to rely upon a very small and homogenous set of sources...The problem, though, is that the only way one will do so is if one believes there is actually a reason to do it. In order to be sufficiently motivated to seek out such information, one must believe there is certain information that we either are not getting or are being somehow impeded from accessing; or conversely, that the set of information we do get from the American media and the dominant corporations that control media discussions provide a basically full and truthful picture of the world. If we do not believe that set of information is complete or distorted in some way, there will be little reason to use the Internet or other tools to seek out other information” (Greenwald 828). :green_cross:
        
        “The American political experience itself enhances the general tendency to resist the idea that our political dialogue is substantially manipulated or controlled. We are taught from an early age that free speech is our core political value, that in our culture all political ideas are aired, that everyone can say what he or she wants, that we have robust political debates. Bolstering this belief is the fact that if you turn on the television, 24 hours a day, at any time, and you flip through the cable news channels, you see a variety of intense political argument. This creates the impression that we are constantly exposed to a wide and unrestricted array of views within our established media” (Greenwald 829-830). :green_cross:
        
        :...media coverage of the conflict in Iraq faced unprecedented challenges from Arab media like Al-Jazeera, which provided a different perspective by reporting what the embedded journalists did not” (Salih 83). :smiley:
        
        “...global news events are instantaneously observed by media who, with the aid of technology, make information immediately and transnational” (Hachen in Hatcher 2). :tophat:
        
        Conclusion
        
        The media greatly impacted how Americans viewed the US conflict with Iraq.
        
        “In public discourse, the verdict is in: Bush’s strategic communication were a triumph. As Fritz and colleagues put it, because of a ‘quiescent media...the administration's sales campaign was a stunning success’” (qtd. Coe 307). :cookie:
        
        “...the administration ‘worked hard and with the connivance and complicity of the media [...] to transform the historic concept of the ‘Fourth Estate’ into what commander Tommy Franks called a ‘fourth front’ in his war plan’” (Schechter qtd. in Najjar 23). :snail:
        
        “...media outlets had the capacity to play a more critical role, but to varying degrees chose not to” (Kull et al. 593). :skull:
        
        Bibliography
        
        McLeod, Douglas. “Derelict of Duty: The American News Media, Terrorism, and the War in
        Iraq.” Marquet Law Review, vol. 93, issue 1, 2009, pp. 113-137. EBSCO. Accessed 11 Jan. 2017. :black_flag:
        
        von Hoffman, Nicholas. “In the War Whorehouse.” Index on Censorship, vol. 32, issue 3, Jul. 2003, pp. 1-8. EBSCO. Accessed on 10 Jan. 2017. :vs:
        
        Greenwald, Glenn. “Limiting Democracy: The American Media's World View, and Ours.” Social Research, vol. 77, issue 3, 2010, pp. 827-838. EBSCO. Accessed on 11 Jan. 2017. :green_cross:
        
        Huber, John D. “Sleepwalking Democrats and American Public Support For President Bush’sAttack on Iraq”. Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and DemocraticTheory, vol. 10, issue 3, Sep. 2003, pp. 392-407. EBSCO. Accessed 16 Jan. 2016. :<3:
        
        Salih, Abdel Rahman Abdalla. “The Media and American Invasion of Iraq: A Tale of Two Wars.” Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research, vol. 2, issue ½, 2009, pp. 81-90. EBSCO. Accessed 10 Jan. 2017. :smiley:
        
        Coe, Kevin. “George W. Bush, Television News, and Rationales for the Iraq War.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, vol. 55, issue 3, Jul. 2011, pp. 307-324. EBSCO, doi: 10.1080/08838151.2011.597467. Accessed 22 Jan. 2017. :cookie:
        
        Filipink, Jr., Richard M. “Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War - by Michael Isikoff and David Corn and The Fall of the House of Bush: The Untold Story of How a Band of True Believers Seized the Executive Branch, Started the Iraq War, and Still Imperils America's Future - by Craig Unger.” Peace and Change, vol. 34, Issue 3, Jul. 2009, pp. 270-275. EBSCO, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-0130.2009.00555.x. Accessed 22 Jan. 2017. :sunflower:
        
        Kull, Steven, et al. “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War” Political Science Quarterly (Academy of Political Science), vol. 118, issue 4, 2003/2004, pp. 569-598. EBSCO. Accessed 22 Jan. 2017. :skull:
        
        Najjar, Orayb. “The American Media and the Iraq War at its Tenth anniversary- lessons for the Coverage of Future Wars”. International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies, vol. 8, issue 1, 2014, pp. 15-34. EBSCO, doi: 10.1386/ijcis.8.1.15_1. Accessed 16 Jan. 2017. :snail:
        
        Hatcher, John A. “Unnamed and Anonymous Sources: Did They Shape the Debate Over Invading Iraq?” Global Media Journal: American Edition, vol. 10, issue 17, 2010, pp. 1-39. EBSCO. Accessed 21 Jan. 2017. :tophat:
      - Claim #5 - The Bush Administration took several steps to ensure that Americans were presented with the 'right' story of what was happening.
        
        “Many were the fairest-looking but least aptly conscientious people in American journalism - men and women aptly described as war whores. They were the on-camera personalities, their American flag lapel pins glittering, who whooped and hollered as they and the military went a-romping through the Iraqi desert” (von Hoffmann 2-3). :vs:
        
        “In an attempt to control and guide the media, the Pentagon introduced the concept of ‘embedded journalists’, in reference to the reporter who were traveling with the American and British troops, and who had to adhere strictly to the rules set by the military...However, the media’s coverage of the war has clashed on many occasions with the Pentagon’s perspectives and plans” (Salih 84-85). :smiley:
        
        "In the lead-up to the invasion and afterwards, Miller was the principal Times correspondent writing about weapons of mass destruction...It also came out that at least one of her stories concerning WMDs had been all but dictated and edited by the army before Miller sent it to the Times, which put it on its front page” (von Hoffmann 4-5). :vs:
        
        “When questions began to arise about why no WMD were found and why the violence was continuing, the administration first sought to spin events through selective leaks and the exploitation of the embedded media in Iraq” (Filipink 271). :sunflower:
        
        “Some management by the military appears to have been designed to make journalists feel close to events, even though they were far away, while others deliberately blocked their view, by ‘disappearing’ the dead and wounded on both sides of the war” (Najjar 20). :snail:
        
        “The embedding of 600 reporters with the troops ensured that those reporters were sympathetic to the subjects with whom they shared those hardships” (Najjar 22). :snail:
        
        “...media coverage from reporters who were embedded with troops...is more favorable in tone toward individuals and the military” (Pfau et al. in Hatcher 7). :tophat:
    - - “As most Americans had no first-hand experience that they could use to make up their minds regarding al-Qaeda connections and WMDs in Iraq, they were largely dependent on how these issues were portrayed in the media” (McLeod 119). :black_flag:
      - “History will remember well that America went to two different wars through its invasion of Iraq. Heavily armed forces supported with rockets, tanks, lazar-guided missiles, and jet fighters fought one war: the other was a fight of different kind, which was war in the media” (Salih 85). :smiley: