Tuesday, October 01, 2002

Speeding Up the Disinformation Cycle   In thinking about the difficulty Bush is having communicating about the war on terror, I feel the Internet may come to play the same role today that television played in Vietnam.   During Vietnam, it took years for the government’s lies about the nature of the war to be fully exposed.  The power of the anti-war teach-ins that I remember was that again and again, speakers pointed out the disparity between actual American actions—targeting civilian villages, assassinations of Viet Cong suspects, and the publicly defended reasons for going to war.  The disconnect was so great that even people like Walter Cronkite were forced to reexamine how they were fed information, and to question the official line.   The Pentagon’s response, perfected in the Gulf war and to some extent in Afghanistan, was to physically keep journalists out of the war zone, so they literally could not get independent stories.    In the current war on terror, the Internet plays a key role in reworking stories as the facts change.  Examples include the changing view of Jose Padilla, the failure of the government to mount a case against the Yemeni men arrested in upstate New York, the flip-flops on whether Al Qaeda has any connection with Iraq, and the recently discovered non-smoking gun of not-uranium being not smuggled in Turkey.   In each case, the rapid dissemination of new information through the Internet forces the mainstream media to keep up with the revisions.  Without the Internet, many of the original stories would stand with only small or minor retractions.  Also, the Internet gives millions of people access to papers around the globe- so a story or opinion in the Guardian in the U.K. is widely repeated in the U.S.    My view is that the more democratic and open nature of this communication makes it harder for governments to manipulate the story-line on the war, and as a result, an anti-war movement can emerge faster and with more open support.   So popular support for the war should evaporate, no?   But television is the 800 pound gorilla in the media jungle—and TV stories play on emotions, not facts.  It was riveting television that caught us up in the emotion of 9-11.  And it is the television images that the government tries hardest to manipulate.  However, I think the fragmentation of the television universe into multiple channels and the proliferation of other electronic types of information weakens the ability of governments to maintain a monolithic story line.    In the Palestinian conflict, the presence of television crews is one of the main weapons the Palestinians have to make their case internationally, and it is why some right wing Israeli supporters savage the U.S. media outlets that extensively use this footage.  We should expect the same battles to erupt over television coverage in Iraq. 10:10:30 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:30:21 PM.