Buying the War and the Need for Unbiased Media Sources

In  his poem “Essay on Criticism” (1709), Eighteenth-Century British poet Alexander Pope opined, “Of all the causes which conspire to blind/ Man’s erring judgment, and misguide the mind,/What the weak head with strongest bias rules,/Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools”(201-204). After having viewed Buying the War, a video from PBS’ Bill Moyers Journal series, I am convinced that Pope’s connection between bias and pride is at work not only in Moyers’ video, but in the mass media as a whole.  This paper explores the PBS video first from the perspective of two communication theories—McCombs’ and Shaw’s agenda-setting theory, and Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence theory—and then investigates the question as to the possibility of 21^st-century unbiased media sources.

            The video presents a twofold argument. First, in regards the Bush regime’s call to arms in Iraq, the mainstream media bought the war. Second, after having bought the war, the media was complicit in selling the war to the American people by either acts omission or submission. The media’s buying of the war can be framed within the purview of Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence theory, while the media’s complicit selling of the war can be framed within the purview of McComb’s and Shaw’s agenda-setting theory.

With respect to the media’s buying of the war, the video presents testimony from several journalists who, in retrospect, remain aghast at their seeming inability to question the Bush administration’s fuzzy connection between the Al Qaeda-led terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Saddam Hussein regime’s supposed possession of weapons of mass destruction. Testimony is provided claiming that with the onset of the Reagan administration, the White House Press Corps ceased to be probing news hawks, who once pecked at the President to reveal truths to the American people. The video claims that this fall into silence reached epic proportions not only within the White House Press Corps, but also ubiquitously across the thresholds of the mainstream media as the Bush administration sought to sell the War in Iraq.

From the perspective of the spiral of silence theory, Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann would first frame the media’s silence in terms of conformity and fear of isolation (Griffin, 2009, p.373). The theory helps to explain how pressure to suppress information operating from the White House down among the ranks of the media led to suspension of an opinion about the war that members of the media might believe is in the minority.  Hinging her theory on the conformity research of Solomon Asch (Griffin, 2009, p.373), Noelle-Neumann might argue that members of the media simply did not want to look like Lone Rangers. Instead, with the exception of Knight Ridder, they complied with the majority behavior of silence, if not opinion.

With respect to the media’s complicit selling of the war to the American people, the video presents damning testimony from Dan Rather, who describes how the media—when faced with a decision of how to report on Collin Powell’s report to the United Nations in 2002--failed to look at the facts, but rather became so caught up in the mystique of Collin Powell’s credibility as a persuasive speaker that they concluded if Collin Powell says there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, it must be so. And, so the media either through acts of omission or submission helped to sell the war to the American people.

Let’s see how this process might look within the framework of the agenda-setting theory. McCombs & Shaw first hypothesize that the media “have the ability to transfer the salience of issues on their news agenda to the public agenda” (Griffin, 2009, p. 359). In part, this power of transference happens because of the limited availability of news sources.  People need to get their news from somewhere. They get it from news agencies. So people tend to believe what they read, see, or hear from the news agencies. In short, news agencies are trusted. Because of this trust, the media holds great power over the views of the American people. McCombs & Shaw might argue that this power can be used to frame (Griffin, 2009, p. 364) the issue of prospective war by connecting it to patriotism, or images of doom such as “smoking guns in the form of mushroom clouds.” In this way, the media not only tells us what to think, but they tell us what to think about (Griffin, 2009, p. 364).

After having watched the video, I am not so much shocked at the Bush administration’s selling of their war agenda. After all, as veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus reports in the video, all administrations sell their own agendas. The Bush administration was simply the most clever at doing it. I am more shocked at the American people’s naïveté in buying what they read in the news. The video illustrates the propensity of news agencies to set agendas and to gag themselves with silence.  What the video does not address is how the news agencies are themselves prone to political and ideological bias.  To witness, I found myself asking just how objective PBS, Bill Moyers, and the likes of Dan Rather and Phil Donahue can be when they are reported to hold liberal stances on issues, and have been known to hold views on issues that stood diametrically opposed to those of the Bush administration. Either side may be right or wrong. The point is that when a news program that itself is known to promote liberal ideology fills its dais, so to speak, with like-minded individuals, one has to question the authenticity of the information. So this paper ends with a disturbing question: Is any media-generated information free from the stain of bias?

References

Griffin, E. (2009). Communication: A First Look at Communication (7th ed.).
          Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill. (Original work published 1991).

Pope, A. (1709). An essay on criticism. Retrieved September 25, 2011, from
          http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/607/.

Public Broadcasting System. (2007, April 25). Buying the war [Video file].
          Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html.