Us Media: a Blessing or a Curse for War on Terror?

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in USA, September 11, 2001, as the U.S.-led retaliation was building up, various news media were reporting the “propaganda battle”, on both sides, even using those words. (For example, in UK, there was the Channel 4 news that mentioned it at least once on October 8, 2001 in their 7pm broadcast, while Sky News said similar things on October 9, 2001 in their 10:30pm broadcast.)

The effect was to suggest that while Bin Laden's propaganda was to incite hatred, convince the Muslim world of his views and give his perspectives to the West, the western propaganda was to retaliate and correct those misleading aspects. Sure enough, Bin Laden's views were misleading, inciting hatred etc, but the assumption that the west's propaganda was in response only and in a way honest is misleading to the public in general. Throughout history all sides have used propaganda to gain support from the masses. Even if the west is right to address the acts of terrorism, the propaganda that is also used by the west should remain in one's mind so as to be aware of whether or not appropriate policies are being carried out.

Researchers in the area of communication studies and political science have found that American understanding of the war on terror is directly shaped by how the mainstream news media reports events associated with the war on terror. Others have also suggested that press coverage has contributed to a public confused and misinformed on both the nature and level of the threat to the U.S. posed by terrorism.

Many journalists in the mainstream would not admit or claim to practise self-censorship and may insist that the coverage is broad. However, one of the most famous media personalities in American news, Dan Rather of CBS has admitted that there has been a lot of self-censorship and that the U.S. media in general has been cowed by patriotic fever.

Among the themes promoted by the media there are the following concepts:

Freedom, emphasizing to the world America's role as a beacon of freedom for the world.

Prowess, demonstrating “the overwhelming and increasing industrial and military strength of the United States”

Peace-loving, by also being admired as a peace-loving nation, differentiating itself from a violent and disruptive Soviet Union

Promoting nuclear and other scientific advances

Religion as a propaganda asset, as for decades, “religious tradition was viewed as a valuable asset that could be exploited to achieve American ends”. This included Saudi Arabia's conservative interpretation of Islam, as “an important asset in promoting Western objectives,” including anticommunism, in the Middle East.

Propaganda strategies developed in tandem with war plans will include those arguments explaining and defending U.S. actions that have the widest popular appeal. As has become the rule for U.S. military operations, information will be controlled and filtered by the Pentagon. In Iraq, some will welcome an overthrow of the present repressive government, even if brought about by a foreign invasion; the U.S. government will do what it can to ensure that this reaction monopolizes news coverage. The administration has reason to be confident that a passive opposition party, a pro-war mainstream press, all the apparatus of news manipulation available to the government, and a public and mass media predisposed to view the motives of their country in a favorable light, and to hope that their sense of insecurity will be lessened by an attack on a designated enemy, are likely to ensure that a U.S. invasion of Iraq will be judged a success - at least in the short term.

Mainstream reporting of the war on terror has frequently contained factual inaccuracies. In some cases, the errors go uncorrected; moreover, when corrections are issued they usually are given far less prominence than the initial coverage containing the errors. Another common feature is that mainstream reporting has tended to concentrate on the more violent areas of Iraq, with little or no reporting of the calm areas.

All the above mentioned facts prove that media have failed to perform its main function thus misleading the huge number of people conserning the existing situation and the necessity of military attacks. While leaders like Tony Blair, George Bush etc make emotional appeals, speeches and even questionable claims, it is the media's jobs to remain critical, even in times of national sorrow, so as to be sure that the public receive as diverse a view as possible, to help ensure appropriate and accountable policy measures are made. This forms a crucial backbone to a functioning democracy. Instead, there has been hardly any critique of comments made by Blair, Bush and others, in the aftermath of the attacks even though many aspects of what has been said has been very controversial from some respects.

“If you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress”: Barack Obama and the New Path

Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States and the nation's first African-American president. He succeeded Gorge W. Bush and brought a new impulse in all the aspects of life of the Americans. The Obama’s presidential campaign was held under the slogan “Change we can believe in”. It all starts with the home policy – that’s the first step before making any significant steps on the international level. Obama made health care one of the centerpieces of his campaign, as he talked about the need to make it more affordable and accessible to everyone. The next change was made concerning the main aspects of the foreign policy. Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first president to take office in the Age of Terrorism. He inherited two struggles — one with Al Qaeda and its ideological allies, and another that divides his own country over issues like torture, prosecutions, security and what it means to be an American.

The state can’t exist in isolation from the outside world. Especially if we are talking about the most powerful and influential countries. American presidents are often accused of being opaque or inconsistent in foreign affairs, but President Obama may be the first to be downright perverse, antagonizing our strongest allies, while trying to appease our most dangerous adversaries. But in many respects, Obama seems likely to preside over a restoration of the bipartisan consensus that governed foreign policy during the cold war and the 1990s, updated for a post-9/11 world.

“It is time to turn the page,” he declared in the speech he gave in Washington in August 2007. He said that “America is at war with terrorists who killed on our soil; we are not at war with Islam.” He criticized claims of “unchecked presidential power” and vowed “to close Guantánamo, reject the Military Commissions Act and adhere to the Geneva Conventions.” He said “that means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, no more national-security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime” and “no more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.”

Last September Obama canceled U.S. plans to build missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, just as Russia had demanded. Worse yet, as Examiner Columnist James Jay Carafano noted, Obama also refuses "to fully modernize America’s nuclear weapons" while Russia uses its oil wealth to update its weapons. Thus, Carafano says, "our aging inventory is increasingly less usable and reliable. The continuing erosion of a credible deterrent force will only invite aggression."So, whether poking friends or coddling foes, Obama is inviting trouble for the United States and its allies.

Even as he pledges to end the war in Iraq, Obama promises to increase Pentagon spending, boost the size of the Army and Marines, bolster the Special Forces, expand intelligence agencies and maintain the hundreds of US military bases that dot the globe. He supports a muscular multilateralism that includes NATO expansion, and according to the Times of London, his advisers are pushing him to ask Defense Secretary Robert Gates to stay on in an Obama administration. Though he is against the idea of the United States imposing democracy abroad, Obama does propose a sweeping nation-building and democracy-promotion program, including strengthening the controversial National Endowment for Democracy and constructing a civil-military apparatus that would deploy to rescue and rebuild failed and failing states in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

While setting a one-year deadline to close Guantánamo and formally banning the interrogation methods that had already fallen out of favor, he left the surveillance program intact, embraced the Patriot Act, retained the authority to use renditions and embraced some of Bush’s claims to state secrets. He preserved the military commissions and national security letters he criticized during the campaign, albeit with more due-process safeguards. He plans to hold dozens of suspected terrorists without charges indefinitely. And he expanded Bush’s campaign of unmanned drone strikes against Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Troop levels in Afghanistan are set to triple on his watch.

All the above mentioned facts show only the relative changes in some aspects. Nevertheless, it’s obvious that President Barack Obama "declared an end" to his predecessor's "war on terror" and began to heal the US reputation abroad when he ordered the Guantanamo Bay prison to close which was a huge and courageous step. Still, Obama's foreign policy, in fact, looks a lot like Richard Nixon's in the latter years of Vietnam, which sought to scale down another foreign policy doctrine — containment — that had gotten out of hand. And Nixon's experience offers both a warning and an example: pulling back from your predecessor's overblown commitments can be vital. The risk is that it can make you look weak or immoral, or both.