War mongerers have long known that making meaning of warfare is firstly a matter of discourse and that the act of warfare is as much a battle over producing, protecting, and pummelling truths than it is of vaporising bodies.
If, as the adage goes, truth is the first casualty of war, then surely discourse is the weapon.
But munitions and meaning have long been bedfellows. From Pope Urban II’s 1095 speech at Clermont launching of the first crusade through to George W Bush’s (2002) speech at the Whitehouse declaring a war on terror – the task of convincing people of the need and reason to go and die en masse in the name of some cause or other has been intimately bound in the use and control of discourse.
The ability to control discourses depends on the ability to control the media – be it people, paper, or powerlines – that move discourses. It is not good enough to have a message taxied – you must own and control the vehicle in which discourses ride.
Pope Urban II controlled the sermons of the day; Queen Elizabeth, among other regulations, commanded a royal monopoly on printing services; Hitler simply took over control of newspapers, magazines, books, public meetings and rallies, art, music, movies, and radio. Saddam Hussein ensured all legal media outlets were state controlled; and Chinese media are still predominantly centrally controlled.
Throughout the West, these overt, centralised forms of controlling and dominating the media for military purposes, or for the purpose of militarising bodies politic, are now much more diffuse yet no less effective and overwhelming. In true combat style, the military has camouflaged itself within the very fabric of contemporary society. From embedded journalists and the mobile communication systems they use, to the Hollywood movies they’ll return to – the military is there – not merely influencing our mediated lives, but infiltrating and pervading them.
The infusion of the military into the world’s largest finance companies (General Electric, General Motors); telecommunications companies (Siemens, Texas Instruments); media organisations (News Limited, AOL/TimeWarner); manufacturers of aeroplanes (Boeing, McDonell Douglas), household appliances (Samsung, General Electric); and automobiles (General Motors, Rolls Royce, Mitsubishi, Daimler-Benz) is, in a market-based global village, an infusion of militarised ideals into each and every one of us.

Take the arms trade – it engages in product placement par excellence. Like any product in the consumer economy, the arms trade needs promotion. Trade fares and branding initiatives fulfil part of the promo needs of companies like Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, but perhaps their most cost effective and arguably most influential form of promotion is through you and I – through our media consumption. We are the foot soldiers of the bomb business. The high tech pictures we eagerly await are a slick and effective marketing tool of the military-meaning complex.
According to defence industry consultants, weapons manufacturers “should be able to sell [at least] three times more of any weapon system that has been proven in combat than if you haven't seen it in combat." The mass media channels like CNN are ostensibly running advertisements for the biggest financial sector of the global consumer economy – for free! At the height of the Iraq battle new weapons were being featured and fetishised in non-stop television coverage, providing the kind of publicity that helped fuel a surge in international arms sales after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Here we strike a paradox along the supply line of meaning. In seeking to make sense of and bare witness to the coalition invasion, we inadvertently fuel sales of military hardware. Our very fascination with the meanings of conflict bankrolls the growth of its means. This is no accident, nor is it an inevitable post-modern marketplace collision between media and the military. On the contrary, it is a result of the progressive and deliberate cross-pollination of news media, entertainment media, promotional media, and the military into a mediated and omnipresent military-meaning complex.
The latest move to command discourse comes in the form of the post-Vietnam embedded journalists. The embedded journalists who accompanied specific U.S. military units in Iraq were from media outlets that were hand picked by the United States military for reasons, one can only assume, related to their politico-military leanings.
The embeds, chosen as far back as November 2002 after training at “journalist boot-camps”, have created what some refer to as a caste system of journalism – giving preference to those that accompany troops and freezing out correspondents operating independently. The ideology of these media-brahmins is best summed-up by Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defence for media operations. When asked what the embedded journalists should bring to Iraq, he answered, "We require a lot of good, common sense."
One might extend this expectation of “common sense” beyond a toothbrush and flack jacket, and into the interpretation and representation of events themselves. The media outlets chosen by the US military are the primary manufacturers, and the factories of “common sense” – Fox, CNN, BBC, CBS, MSNBC. These are the ideological powerhouses of our globalised world. It is in the interests of the oligopoly they serve that the “common sense” notions of war are propagated. Why else would not only Rupert Murdoch, but all bar one of the editors of his major agenda-setting news media be pro-war!?
Some links are obvious. NBC is owned by GE, GE makes the most sophisticated engines for military assault craft on the planet. (In their words they “provide the necessary power and reliability for any military application”.) It is in the interests of GE, to maintain the status quo promulgated by “common sense”. And it just makes sense for a station like CNN – that stakes its reputation on being the first on the scene with the most comprehensive war coverage – to maintain a cosy relationship with the military.
And perhaps we can read the murder of two journalists, Jose Couso, a cameraman with Spanish network Tele 5 and Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk, at the Palestine Hotel, and the consistent targeting of Al Jazeera offices in Iraq and Afghanistan as a lethal lesson in the “common sense” requirements and punishments of the media-war order? Unfavourable reviews of the latest military meaning complex Blockbuster, (the name of a bomb used to destroy large parts of cities since WWII) end in more than funding cuts or tightened ownership rules – they end in a fade to black beneath the rubble of a TV station.
You are either with the US or you are with the terrorists. It is media concentration by annihilation. Mergers and acquisitions; competition; backroom political deals – bah! All too slow and cumbersome when compared to a tomahawk missile.
Having successfully achieved its latest territorialisation of the global media straits, it’s “anchors away”! US news hosts Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings are to be beamed into Iraqi homes on the all new Freedom TV channel. Amongst other seemingly colonial-styled goals, the channel aims to ‘teach the Iraqi people about the four basic freedoms of a democratic society, as outlined by President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941.’
With Arabic subtitled press briefings from Rumsfeld, Fleischer and crew along with some of the most filtered news/infotainment on the box starring celebrity presenters and glitzy dramatism, the military-run station will certainly remind Iraqis that this is what democracy looks like – cheekbones, foundation, and steaming piles of
bullshit.