The American News Media: The New Face of Propaganda

In chapter 6 of the textbook, Practices of Looking, Cartwright and Sturken discuss the restrictions of media content and the media blackout during the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003:

“The U.S. Military has systematically limited the activities of reporters and photojournalists in war zones since the Persian Gulf War of 1991.”

The chapter also explores how the U.S. military was instrumental in restricting reporters by implanting them in certain platoons and patrols among other things. This example shows how media coverage and reports can be used as forms of propaganda and how factual reports of what is really going on in the region can be manipulated to misrepresent information to the American public.

In the past two decades, the news media has become a 24 hour cycle, which made it much easier for the misinformation about the Iraq War to be spread. News channels such as CNN, MSNBC, FOX and others fell under the umbrella of the media blackout. What the media blackout entailed was that all the news channels had to obey the gag order due to “security” concerns. While some of these “security” concerns were legitimate such as protecting the locations of army bases and US and allied soldiers, other concerns have made it difficult for reporters to do their jobs. The video I have analyzed is from CNN, and features Howard Kurtz and CBS News reporter Lara Logan discussing the “negative” coverage of the war in Iraq. In this video, there is no audio to be heard or images to be seen concerning the factual situation of what is going on in Iraq which can be safely said that the gag order was well in effect at the time this interview was conducted.

In this interview with CNN's Howard Kurtz, Lara Logan appeared to defend why she was reporting “negatively” on these stories of the US Army losing control of the region and how the military has been making it increasingly difficult to for her and other reporters to do their jobs due to “security” measures in the region. In the video, Logan does not only criticize CNN and other news outlets for not reporting factually on the war in Iraq; she questions the nature of the restrictions the military has imposed on any news coverage. Logan says that US soldiers and innocent civilians were being killed because of the US military presence trying to control the region.

Logan also revealed that there were so many reconstruction project stories being played over and over on CNN in order to reassure the American public that the war effort has been successful so far and the troops had been successful in stabilizing the region. During this time, CNN's news coverage of the Iraq War consisted mostly of reconstruction efforts and projects located in one or two villages in the region, while there was little to no coverage about Iraqi civilians and US troops being killed in the bombings. CNN is not the only network that has done this, but this video exemplifies the point that Cartwright and Sturken discuss, which is the issue about deceiving the public at large and withholding information. In this video, Howard Kurtz is using a form of propaganda by disagreeing and arguing with Lara Logan in order to “reassure” the American viewer who is watching this video and doing so by discrediting Logan, even if what she was saying was factual.

This media blackout had lasted until 2006 when the public outcry became overwhelming and the public wanted to know what was really happening to the troops and people in Iraq. Not much has changed since the public outcry for factual reporting, but the stories coming from Iraq appear to be more balanced in their “negative” and “positive” coverage. This is propaganda at its purest form. This tactic plays to both sides that people have taken concerning the war and reached a compromise in order to lead the public to believe that the media is not controlled by the government and that what they are seeing is fact.

-Maricruz Gonzalez