Media Propaganda During the Iraq War
After the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 the citizens of the United States were devastated and in utter shock. Looking back to the aftermath, I clearly remember news channels being flooded with images of the falling towers and the men involved. One interesting idea that came to my mind was that when my thoughts were flooded with all this information, I did not even think about questioning any of the statements made by the media or the Bush administration.
In this country, there are only five major news production companies responsible for distributing information to the people. When looking at the relationships between corporations and the government it becomes quite clear how stories can be one sided. Noam Chomsky, an American philosopher explains how the media is filtered six times before it even reaches our eyes in a theory called the propaganda model(In the Figure Below). As we allowed the Bush administration to march into war, false information and heavy propaganda was used in order to receive consent of the U.S. citizens to declare war on an innocent country.
Of course, one of the most famous and important phrases at the time of war was “weapons of mass destruction”, used by the Bush administration over and over again. This was used to describe the type of weapons the Iraqi regime had in their hands, but we later found out these weapons did not exist. Although information as such were stated under oath, the statements were easily disowned.
With the help of the media, the Bush administration was successful in feeding false information into a country filled with fear. A few years after the attacks, researchers found that many Americans still had misconceptions about the events in the ongoing war, yet the war still remains to be one of the biggest expenses for the U.S.
The impact on the victim county was even larger. After these events, the image of a whole group of people was ruined. As we connected terrorism with the Iraqi nation and with most of the middle east, Hollywood films started backing up these ideas. Often using characters from the middle east as terrorists or suicide bombers, they reaffirmed the ideas of the American citizens about the Iraqi people.
What is even more wrong is that the images of the people of the middle east dehumanized the victims. We start to see people as savages or evil entities, allowing the U.S. army to invade an innocent country. We rarely see images of the suffering people of Iraq because of the media filters, and if we do, we justify what is happening with the false information used by the one-sided media and the government.
The suffering citizens of Iraq desperately need change.
