If you are inclined to see the presence of an American flag pin on an anchorman’s lapel as a mark of jingoism, or if you really think a craven establishment media colluded with a dark-hearted White House to beat the drums of war, etc., in the months preceding the Iraq invasion, you’ll probably scoff at the idea of a pacifist media. Surely the American media are the corporate handmaiden of the warrior class, a simpering enabler of bellicose neocon nut-jobs.
But the question is an interesting one. Pacifists believe that conflict can be avoided if people will only refrain from fighting. One still seesthe “War is Not the Answer” bumper stickers that began appearing everywhere minutes after the United States attacked the Taliban in 2001 — weirdly, often on the same cars that bear those touching, faded “Free Tibet” stickers.
In the pacifist worldview, violence emerges from provocation. If people will stop behaving aggressively, violence will melt away. And even if certain people persist in their aggression, certain others ought never respond in kind.
Does this sound so different from the way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is customarily reported? How about the frequently publicized claims that the presence of American troops in Mesopotamia only inflames the situation, provoking the ire of nationalist Iraqis who, if we’d please leave, would beat their swords into satellite dishes? Or, to go back a bit, consider the subdued reporting of the gruesome murders of American contractors working in Iraq versus the orgiastic media coverage of the pig piles at Abu Ghraib.
In a slim, fierce new book, “Media Madness: The Corruption of Our Political Culture,” author and social critic James Bowman casts disquieting light on the media narratives with which we have all, more or less, become comfortable.
Bowman points as Exhibit A to the great American journalistic shibboleth of “objectivity.” All journalism students venerate the concept. Most news organizations consider it their animating principle. For Bowman, this pretense of objectivity is the very fountainhead of a dangerous conceit that distorts the thinking of people in the mainstream media.
Journalists “really believe that they have, simply by being journalists, an Olympian ability to detach themselves from partisanship and see things are they truly are,” Bowman says. “Indeed, they see themselves as not only being above the partisan divide but also the international one. They therefore imagine that, having transcended party and nationality, they are ideally placed to criticize America’s conduct in the world.”
Are they? Of course not: Journalists are no more “objective” than anyone else. How we see the world determines what we see. And while Bowman regards the profusion of bloggers and other new media as a healthy development, he is grim on the legacy of the mainstream media’s 40 years of unabated self-congratulation. For one thing, he says, the habitually simplistic media rendering of complicated ideas has spread deeply into American political culture.
“From ‘torture’ to electronic eavesdropping to global warming to campaign finance, issue after issue is converted by the media from difficult to easy by being moralized and so turned into a simple matter of right and wrong,” Bowman argues. “This allows the media to take sides themselves — by pretending that there are no genuinely partisan matters involved but only basic decency.”
Which brings us back to the question of whether pacifism lies behind contemporary war reporting; whether the implication of innumerable news stories, analyses and op-eds is that if we would only put our Humvees into reverse, all the Iraq unpleasantness might just go away.
The Democrats seem to believe it. John McCain doesn’t, and neither does Bowman: “History shows us no way of choosing not to fight, so long as there is still fight in the enemy, except for surrender. There are some among the opponents of President Bush who are unafraid of this word — the rest prefer the rather comical euphemism of ‘redeployment’ — because they think that surrender would only be his surrender and not America’s. It is a vain expectation.”
Examiner Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. Her Examiner column appears on Thursdays.
