The Media, the War, and An Empire's Crossroad
By now we all know how the Bush Administration maneuvered to prevent news organizations from covering the return of coffins of fallen soldiers so as to not upset the American public and dilute its support of the Iraq war. We also know by now how the consolidation of main stream media (MSM) news coverage — and we’re not talking here of just Fox News stations — has cooperated far too readily and far too often with the Bush agenda for Americans to get any unvarnished, representative picture of how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are actually playing out; or to clearly understand how the “surge” is “succeeding and not succeeding in terms of the stated reasons for deploying the Bush-Petraeus tactic in the first place.
The Iraqi government is still fractured and anarchic but you are unlikely to get that picture from the MSM. Many in the media still seem reluctant to be too critical of the Bush policies lest the paper or TV station or news magazine be accused of “unpatriotism.” We also know how open, obvious, and shocking it was that few if any of the networks covered the recent media-military-experts exposé by the New York Times. Recall that the story described and named the names of the networks (virtually all) which were snookered by the Pentagon and the Bush Administration into and hiring and interviewing retired military experts who, in reality, were carrying programmed water for the Military Industrial Complex and the Administration’s war effort. The networks effectively buried the exposé of this propagandistically horrific story of how the administration drummed up and kept the enthusiasm bubbling for both the invasion of Iraq and the continuing war effort. Perhaps that’s what comes from there being too few independent television cable and broadcast news organizations left after the wave of media consolidations enabled by the FCC. Perhaps that’s what comes when the principal conglomerates are either owned by corporations which are part of the Military Industrial Complex, like G.E.’s NBC-Universal media component, or are unabashedly wedded to the Republican Party because of its business sympathies, like Fox News Corp.
Given this narrowing breadth of news perspective, not to mention the dwindling number of “real news” holes and investigative journalists in so many metropolitan newspapers, if one wanted a fuller picture, one had to go to online to foreign or alternative news sources to get any semblance of detailed coverage of this media-military expert sham (or any other, for that matter). Corrections were made and these photo-fingered military experts are nowhere to be seen now, which is good; but an absence of any MSM mea culpas is bad. Real bad. The fact that 70% of people say they get their news principally from TV makes this scenario even more disturbing.
But how have the other non-news mass media, like film, handled both the war coverage and how the administration sold or mis-sold the war? During WWII, Hollywood was closely cooperating with the government in producing war films, training and theatrical, which encouraged the American war effort, generally demonized the enemy, praised the lord, and helped pass the ammunitions to the fighting men and women. WWII, remember, was the last “good” war.
As for Iraq 2 war, there have been over a dozen movies and documentaries released over the past few years, well after the 1999 release very successful dramedy, Three Kings, the George Clooney headliner about Iraq 1 war and its aftermath. Most have been critical of this Iraq 2, its effects both “over there” and “over here” and of how the government has treated veterans of that war. Some examples are: In the Valley of Elah a melodrama about a war vet gone missing after returning stateside, and how it affects his family; Grace is Gone which concerns a road trip taken by a man (John Cusack) whose soldier-wife has been killed in Iraq and her death’s impact on the family; Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, looks at how the Adminstration sold the war to young men and women, espeically minority men, via recruitment sleights of hand and sloganized jingoism, heroism and patriotism; The Kingdom, which implied the cozying up of an Administration with Saudi Arabia’s totalitarian House of Said, thereby increasing the Islamicist rage against America; Rendition, concerning false or sloppy imprisonment of foreigners or foreign born; Stop Loss, which took an emotional look at effects of a thinly stretched military and how questionable government policy involving returning American soldiers to war zones after their contractual commitments had been honored, affects the lives of soldiers and produces a shadow world for them and their families. Most recently there is John Cusack’s War, Inc. a blackly comic take on the first fictional, totally outsourced war and the dangers that reside therein (Blackwater and KBR jump to mind). In reality, we’re almost at that fictional, far-fetched point now in Iraq since we have more mercenaries in Iraq than troops, mercenaries who make much more than our soldiers do and are granted greater latitude to act with impunity.
All these films looked at different aspects of the war but all were essentially criticial of the war (no pro-Iraq war films come to mind) along a variety of dimenions including: the business of war, the politics of war, the constitutional shredding to deny habeas corpus to captive, alleged terrorists, and the capacity of our government officials to turn a blind eye to constituional provisions in the face of real or potential threats to our national security. Important also were the films Redacted and In the Valley of Elah because of their take on the brutalization of civilian populations in war zones and the brutalizaton of the soul and spirit of the brutalizing young Americans who later come home and find normal life, civilian life virtually impossible. Viet Nam spawned a number of films dealing with the psychologically difficult life after war, especially unpopular wars. Similar problems were experienced by Soviet Union soldiers after returning from a humiliating non-victory in Afghanistan.
Americans are increasingly opposed to the Iraq war (70% and counting). The fact is, though, that all of these films have languished financially at the box office, even given their small budgets. There are many reasons why people don’t go to a movie: they don’t like a film genre; it’s poorly advertised; bad reviews; unknown actors or other creative elements; limited distribution; it’s a niche film and the niche is too narrow; bad script; bad execution of a decent script, to name but a few. But with certain films and certain topics, especially films about war, especially an ongoing war, another reason emerges: the film cuts too close to home to be either funny or enjoyably exciting, like a Rambo outing. Except for The Green Berets, Vietnam war movies didn't start reaching the theaters until long after the war was over. Then they came in a rush of anti-war films like Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Birdy, and Born on the Fourth of July.
