Archive Article” Iraq Back In The News. 7 Aug 98.
December 23, 2008

Iraq is back in the news again this week. There are renewed concerns about a confrontation over the international inspection of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. What are the lessons for the mass media arising out of these periodic confrontations?

The World Association for Christian Communication is an organization of corporate and personal members who give high priority to Christian values in the world’s communication and development needs. It is not a council or federation of churches. The majority of its members are communication professionals from all walks of life. The World Association has just published a booklet, edited by Philip Lee, on The Media and the Persian Gulf: Lessons Unlearnt. The booklet is very significant because of the increasing importance of the mass media.

The mass media have usually only been looked at as simply a means to an end. In other words, they were the way of transferring data, information, knowledge or wisdom to a large number of people. But, as Richard Keeble points out, media manipulation has become a central military strategy. What counts is not just what you do but how you communicate to others what you have done. There is a new type of conscription: people are conscripted through the mass media to participate in the war. Instead of boot camps, they are watching television in their homes. This is a safer form of war for them.

President Eisenhower in 1961 coined the term “military-industrial complex” to describe the links between the US armed forces and industry as both having a vested interest in maintaining the US’s new high level of military expenditure. I think that we ought now to call it now the “military-industrial-mass media complex”.

There is, incidentally, a broader challenge here for all organizations, including those not at all involved in warfare. The world is now becoming increasingly media-centric with more forms of communication than ever before. People are accustomed to an increasing and a greater diversity of communications. Internet, radio

BROADCASTing through the Net and television through the Net are all examples of the new multi media. But people are not so much being informed by the mass media as being entertained by it. People now have more access to information but they are not necessarily any of the wiser for it. Philip Lee reports that the mass media’s infatuation with new military technology in the 1991 Gulf war was very misleading. Television coverage of the so-called “smart bombs” failed to bring home to viewers that in fact only 7 per cent of the weapons were so-called “smart bombs”; the rest were the conventional high-explosives. Another way in which viewers were misled is that television coverage suggested that the weapons were very accurate. They were not. 70 per cent of the all the bombs dropped missed their targets. In other words, in the new multi media era, people still need some good old fashioned scepticism and common sense. Truth is still the first casualty in war.

BROADCAST ON FRIDAY AUGUST 7 1998 ON RADIO 2GB’S “BRIAN WILSHIRE PROGRAMME” AT 9 PM, AND ON AUGUST 9 1998 ON “SUNDAY NIGHT LIVE” AT 10.30 PM.