Other countries' wars and the media

 

According to this article in the New York Times, Trump’s decision to bomb Iran was taken in part because Israel’s attacks were playing so well on Fox News.

“The president was closely monitoring Fox News, which was airing wall-to-wall praise of Israel’s military operation and featuring guests urging Mr. Trump to get more involved. Several Trump advisers lamented the fact that Mr. Carlson was no longer on Fox, which meant that Mr. Trump was not hearing much of the other side of the debate.”

It should not be surprising that populist figures like Trump, and earlier Johnson in the UK, should pay a great deal of attention to coverage by their favoured media organisations. They are both creatures of the media: Johnson as a journalist, Trump as a TV celebrity. As a result it is perfectly plausible that a war pursued by an ally playing well in the media should make someone like Trump want to join in on their side.

Many associate the word ‘propaganda’ with state control of the media, but there is no reason beyond ideology why its use should be limited in this way. A standard definition of propaganda is selective or biased information that is spread in order to influence people’s opinions in a particular way. It is clear that any media organisation can produce propaganda. That propaganda can be aimed at a general audience, or it could potentially be aimed at just an elected elite or indeed just one particular leader.

The ideal most media organisations say they try to live up to is to present all the relevant facts to their audience so that the audience can make up their own minds. Of course no media organisation can ever present all the potentially relevant facts and arguments, so selection is always required. The key distinction is whether selection takes place according to criteria like importance or relevance, or whether selection is based on the impression that this will leave with the audience. I can imagine how Israel’s strikes on Iran were portrayed on Fox News: plenty of favourable adjectives (‘successful’, ‘daring’), exaggeration of the threat ‘eliminated’, ignoring civilian casualties and so on. Here is a more detailed account.

In a post written during the Covid pandemic I labelled media like Fox News, or most of the right wing press in the UK, the ‘direct propaganda media (DP media)’. My reason for doing so was because so much of the media class prefers to pretend that these organisations are just like the rest of the news media except they have a more pronounced political stance. They are not. [1] The DP-media don’t produce news in the same way as the rest of the media do most of the time, but instead they produce propaganda. They select what information they provide in order to influence or flatter the opinion of their audience. Whether they do this because that is what their audience wants or because they want to alter what their audience thinks is another matter (I’m sure both are involved), but for whatever reason they try to avoid providing information that might challenge the views of their audience or the media’s owners.

Fox News knows how much Trump watches them, and that they therefore have considerable influence on him. Whether they slanted their coverage of Israel’s attacks on Iran with this in mind I have no idea, but the possibility shows why confining propaganda to something the state does is so misleading. In many of the advanced economies currently run by or containing right wing populists, the media that supports those leaders are run by independent agents (they are part of the dominant plutocracy), and they will attempt to influence the leader’s decisions just as the leader’s advisors or donors do.

Populist leaders are well aware of the power the media has to influence public opinion. That influence is often publicly downplayed or denied by those in the media and elsewhere, but I have written extensively in the past about the accumulating evidence of its power (e.g. here for the US. For something more recent on Fox see here). The power is far from absolute, but it is significant enough for any populist to want to do what they can to get this media onside. This may involve granting favours to media outlets that support them and penalising those that do not, as Trump obviously does but which Netanyahu did for Channel 14, a television organisation accused by lawyers within Israel of letting pundits and guests call for war crimes, including genocide, against Palestinians.

While the behaviour of the DP-media in war time is similar to its behaviour pretty much all of the time, the behaviour of the rest of the media covering other countries’ wars can seem quite different to its normal behaviour. While it is often called the ‘non-partisan’ media, during the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people this media has been anything but non-partisan, particularly in the US but also in the UK [2].

Analysis of coverage in the first six weeks of the current Gaza conflict in three leading US newspapers indicated a “gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices”. On US television Sunday talk shows, guests were far more likely to be pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian. Evidence suggests this bias comes primarily from the media companies rather than the views of the journalists who work in them.[3]

This is why in that earlier post I called the media that wasn’t involved in producing propaganda the ‘manufacturing consent media (MC-media)’. I argued that both the MC-media and DP-media were involved in selecting information. Where the DP-media selected information in favour of a particular viewpoint within an economic, social and political system, the MC-media selected in favour of that existing economic, social and political system. [4]

Of course any categorisation of this kind is inexact, but I felt these descriptions made more sense than references to some media being non-partisan, when clearly the non-partisan media is quite capable of being pretty partisan on some issues. In particular, given the US political elite’s support for Israel and its extensive supply of arms and money, such bias would be the natural outcome of a media in the business of manufacturing consent. Anti-Palestinian bias in the US media is after all quite longstanding.

That foreign policy, and particularly wars, is an area where the MC-media feels it needs to encourage consent is hardly surprising considering that media’s coverage of the Iraq war. As Paul Krugman notes, anyone willing to face the facts could see that the US government was lying about the war, but the media overwhelmingly backed the government rather than exposing the lies.

According to Pew in April this year a majority of Americans had a negative view of Israel. (For a survey for some Western European countries, see here.) Does this indicate a failure by the media to manufacture consent? It certainly shows that the power of media bias is limited, particularly when set against views of death and destruction in Gaza, which are readily available on social media. What it cannot tell us, of course, is what this polling would have shown if US coverage of the conflict had been more balanced. However, looking at manufacturing consent as only about public opinion may be too narrow. It may also function as a means of harmonising elite opinion.

As the alleged influence of Fox coverage on Trump shows, media coverage can influence the opinions of the political elite just as the political elite can influence the media. Once we see those who run the media as independent agents rather than just enforcers of some status quo, then biased media coverage can not only reflect the position of the political elite, but it can also contribute to political elite views.

While for issues involving wars and some other areas the differences between the MC-media and DP-media may seem to be small, there remains a huge difference elsewhere between the two groups. Take Trump’s claims after the 2020 election that he had really won. The MC-media treated those claims on their merits, merits which increasingly tended towards the non-existent. Newsmax, by contrast, saturated its coverage with election denialism. We now know, thanks to the Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit, that Fox News then panicked, and started slanting its coverage to what it thought its Trump supporting audience wanted to hear. It could do that, in a way the MC-media cannot, because it is in the business of producing propaganda rather than news. 

[1] The pretense, at least in the UK, that the DP-media are news organisations helps the DP-media to often dictate what the rest of the media does, particularly through confected outrage. How else, for example, can what a rapper said at Glastonbury dominate news headlines for two days while there is no end in sight for daily starvaton and slaughter in Gaza?

[2] In the UK, for example, compare and contrast a headline in an Israeli newspaper with one from the BBC here.  

[3] In the UK BBC staff have also complained about its coverage.

[4] One way of describing this is that the MC-media controls the Overton window of views that are considered acceptable or unacceptable.