Forged over the course of a century, the connections between war and media run long and deep. As this book reveals, the history of war and its telling has been a battle over public perception. The selection of which stories are told and which ignored helps justify past battles and insure future wars. Narratives of protest and pain, defeat and suffering, guilt and abuse struggle to be heard amid the empowering myths of war and heroism.
As Robin Andersen argues, the history of struggle between war and its representation has changed the way war is fought and the way we tell the stories of war. Information management, once called censorship and propaganda, has developed in tandem with new media technologies. Now, digital imaging creates virtual battlefields as computer-based technologies transform the weapons of war. Along the way, images on nightly news, on movie screens, and in video games have turned war into entertainment. In the grip of virtual war, it is difficult to realize the loss of compassion or the consequences for democracy.
Praise for A Century of Media, A Century of War:
Robin Anderson has plumbed the depths of U.S. media history to engage the controversies of today: war vs. peace, propaganda vs. journalism, deceit vs. dissent. Her book shows how media and propaganda have become as indispensable to war as guns and bombs. Indeed, that media propaganda must be deployed first (and last, to pave the war for the next war). As patterns of official deception and media amplification repeat themselves drearily throughout history, readers also see the recurrent bravery of maverick, un-embedded journalists. And we're heartened that engaged scholars like Andersen are patrolling the intersection of media and war.
-- Jeff Cohen
founder of FAIR and author of "Cable News Confidential"