Weapons of Mass Persuasion:
Marketing the War Against Iraq
By Paul Rutherford
University of Toronto Press,
226 pages. $19.95
I want Paul Rutherford's book to be wrong. Here's why: In the concluding paragraph, about the way the Iraq war was covered, especially by mainstream television in the United States, he writes: "Democracy was overwhelmed by a torrent of lies, half-truths, infotainment, and marketing. Who can doubt that these tools will be deployed once again when the next chapter in the story of permanent warfare gets written?" Who indeed?
Rutherford, a professor of history at the University of Toronto, essentially argues that the war was a commodity, a package co-produced by the Pentagon and newsrooms, and that this commodity was "processed and cleansed" so that it would have as much mass appeal as possible. What makes his argument particularly dispiriting is that the marketing was so predictable.
In March, 2003, a CBC colleague and I interviewed several foreign correspondents, and one of them, Maggie O'Kane of The Guardian, foresaw that the predominant images of the conflict would be high-tech graphics of military hardware, as well as embedded journalists pretending to be soldiers doing fluff interviews with real soldiers. The one thing we wouldn't see, she added, would be dead bodies. How right she was: We saw, courtesy of that ridiculous, multimillion-dollar press centre in Doha, smart bombs hitting their apparently bloodless targets. We saw, via U.S. network television, a stupefying array of weapons graphics, all encoded in the very male jargon of techno-speak and, of course, underscored by pounding music.
The cinematic packaging of war was matched by another editorial skin graft, that of reporters becoming soldiers. I lost count of how many times embedded reporters used the pronoun "we" rather than "they" when talking about U.S. and coalition troops. However, I cannot forget Walter Rodgers of CNN breathlessly exclaiming that being inside a tank was like being inside the belly of a dragon. It was something of a relief, then, to come across Rutherford's chapter The Phallic Dimension, as it brought the masculinized language of the war's coverage into the useful context of the psychosexual. The chapter could have been retitled Boys With Toys, and draws a startling parallel between collapse of the Twin Towers and the fall of Saddam's statue, as though the latter event could restore the national libido destroyed in the first.
The statue's fall was stage-managed by the U.S. military, and had much in common with the stories that came out of so-called Centcom in Doha. It was there that the military premiered the Jessica Lynch fiction to a wide-eyed media. It was there that the Pentagon spoon-fed journalists with video clips and explanations of its own choosing, and it's tempting to lapse into cynicism, as perhaps Rutherford does, and conclude that the only major discourse surrounding the war was controlled by the military superpower that waged it.
However, not all media, not even all U.S. media, took the Pentagon's view lying down. For me, the turning point in the way the press went from compliant to defiant came when Michael Wolff, the media critic of New York Magazine, asked the magically dull Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks what the point of being in Doha was, since the officials never really answered any questions. The reporters' gallery erupted into applause. Rutherford doesn't mention this anecdote and I wish he had, because it's an emblematic riposte to his powerful thesis: that reality always has a way of escaping spin, and that journalists can on occasion get it right, even during the war.
Take, for example, one journalist from The Washington Post, whom Rutherford incorrectly identifies as Walter Branigin. His actual name is William Branigin, but there is more at stake here than a mere misprint. Rutherford criticizes the phenomenon of embedded reporters the way many others have, saying that it amounts to being co-opted. However, as Rutherford points out, Branigin reported a checkpoint disaster in which a breach of procedure led to U.S. troops killing a carload of civilians. The Pentagon's version was that procedure was followed. But Branigin's account won the day.
The point is that embedding journalists isn't the problem; it's the context in which embedding occurs. As John Roberts of CBS put it, embedding gives you a very vivid perspective on a very narrow slice of the war. The corollary is that the wider an agency's perspective, the better its coverage. And getting that perspective is more valuable than the despair to which Rutherford's argument seems to lead.
However, this book is crucial reading for anyone interested in the way the Iraq war was presented to the public. Lies, half-truths, infotainment and marketing will surely come our way the next time war drums start pounding again. Let us hope that when that moment arrives, we won't be overwhelmed.
Greg Kelly is a producer with CBC News: Sunday, and was one of the producers of the documentary Deadline Iraq: Uncensored Stories of the War.