War Propaganda

Robin Andersen

Fordham University

War propaganda fuses international and domestic processes in communicating one or more nations as the ‘Other,’ as worthy en masse of death and mutilation. During the twentieth century, as examples from Britain, Germany, and the US indicate, domestic as well as international media propaganda became essential for planning and engaging effectively in combat against other countries. In World War I, governments employed verbal and visual strategies that effectively influenced mass public opinion in favor of war. Since then, technological media developments and advances in communication design have been employed to promote positive attitudes toward war, albeit with varying effectiveness. Terms such as ‘public diplomacy,’ media campaign, information management, ‘stagecraft,’ spin, and even ‘militainment’ have also been deployed to characterize ever-evolving propaganda strategies.

Wartime rhetoric includes linguistic and visual strategies that either obscure the human costs or present the loss of human life as acceptable (→ Linguistics; Propaganda, Visual Communication of). Phrases such as ‘smart bombs’ assure that only military targets will be destroyed; the identification of images of dead and wounded civilians as ‘enemy propaganda’ denies their reality; and ‘collateral damage’ presents human destruction as a legitimate and inevitable by-product.

When historical frameworks are used to shape news of war, certain war events may be turned, very questionably, into transferable reference points, yet others may stay untouched, almost untouchable. Many US news media equated the 9/11 terrorist attacks with the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack that drove the US into World War II. Historical references to the danger of appeasing Hitler (in the infamous 1938 Munich summit) placed Afghanistan, Iraq, even Iran, within the context of the ‘Good Fight’ of World War II. Yet during the build-up to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, no mention was made in US news media of the standard brutalities of actual military interventions, to well-documented massacres by US troops such as No Gun Ri in the Korean War and My Lai in the Vietnam War, or to the fact the US was forced to withdraw from Vietnam.

War rhetoric nurtures fear and hatred, rendering reasoned discussion less compelling. Society generally punishes unlawful violent behavior, so that mobilizing collective hatred of an enemy requires blocking out peacetime inhibitions. In promoting state-sanctioned violence the enemy’s actions must be defined as so far outside the bounds of tolerance that negotiation is absurd. War must appear to be the only defense against a menacing, murderous aggressor. The demonized enemy is no longer recognizably human, and can be killed with impunity. Such narratives of exclusion provide the necessary psycho-political context for war.

The cognitive, linguistic, and visual communication strategies that fueled World War I were designed in a variety of ways. In conjunction with → censorship, the repetition of carefully designed messages helped fuel the public’s fear and hatred, and to drag out the conflict over four years, with many millions of dead and maimed. The linguistic and conceptual devices used almost a century ago are still recognizable today. Ambiguity must be eliminated, replaced by definitive assertions. The world is divided between ‘our civilized way of life’ and ‘their barbarism.’ A simple ‘binary of good and evil’ facilitates mass consensus. War propaganda asserts that conflict is caused by the inherent evil of the enemy, not by historical injustices, failed diplomacy, competition for economic resources, or global inequities. The Third Reich, emerged from the ashes of World War I, brought new and even more effective forms of war propaganda to live (→ Propaganda in World War II).

New hybrid formats blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction; the latter, referred to as ‘militainment,’ being employed by the US media and military to represent war. Militainment and ‘stagecraft’ are attempts to control the meanings of war through fictional formatting, information management, and media choreography. After 9/11, Pentagon officials met with Hollywood producers and directors and requested they join the fight against terrorism. They collaborated on such films as Behind Enemy Lines, a story validating unilateral US military action, and ABC’s Profiles from the Front Lines, a ‘reality show’ about the Afghanistan war (→ Reality TV).

References and Suggested Readings

1. Andersen, R. (2006). A century of media, a century of war. New York: Peter Lang.
2. Brewer, S. (2011). Why America fights: Patriotism and war propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Knightly, P. (2002). The first casualty: The war correspondent as hero and myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
4. Lasswell, H. D. (1927). Propaganda techniques in the World War. London: Keagan, Paul, Trench.
5. Rampton, S. & Stauber, J. (2006). The best war ever: Lies, damned lies, and the mess in Iraq. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
6. Welch, D. & Fox, J. (eds.) (2012). Justifying war: Propaganda, politics and the modern age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Watergate Scandal

Russ Witcher

Tennessee Tech University

The press played a major role in the beginnings of Watergate. In June 1971 the New York Times began publishing a series of articles that chronicled American involvement in the Vietnam War. The documents, leaked by former Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg, were basically a historical account of American participation in the conflict. President Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger convinced the president that to allow the leakage of such classified information without retaliation on his part would be harmful to ongoing secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, the Chinese, and the Soviet Union. The Nixon Justice Department sought and obtained an injunction against the New York Times and other papers that were running the series of articles. The US Supreme Court ruled that the government had not met the heavy burden of proof that continued publication of these Pentagon Papers would cause a direct and immediate threat to national security (→ Freedom of the Press, Concept of; Freedom of Information).

Nixon then ordered the creation of a White House investigative unit that would search for and stop further damaging leaks by government employees to the press. This unit eventually broke into Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in California (Ambrose 1989). Another intelligence-gathering operation was the break-in at the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC, in June 1972, where five burglars were arrested by the police. The incident eventually led to the exposure of White House complicity in the break-in and Nixon’s own involvement in the cover-up (Aitken 1993). The early reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post was an important factor in keeping the Watergate story alive.

The issue of whistleblowers is still alive in America, with the recent leaks of US wartime activity by Specialist Bradley Manning concerning the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and the release of classified information of domestic spying by the National Security Agency by a government-contracted employee, Edward Snowden. To what extent can secrets in wartime be maintained in a democratic society? That question has to be resolved ultimately, with the help of an independent press, by the judicial branch.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Aitken, J. (1993). Nixon: A life. Washington, DC: Regnery.
2. Ambrose, S. E. (1989). Nixon: The triumph of a politician, 1962–1972. New York: Simon and Schuster.
3. Nixon, R. N. (1978). RN: The memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset and Dunlap.

Web 2.0 and the News

Alfred Hermida

University of British Columbia

Web 2.0 is a term Internet entrepreneur Tim O’Reilly popularized to describe a stage in the development of the world wide web as a platform. It refers to a set of technical changes that facilitate the creation, dissemination, and sharing of digital content. Web 2.0 frames users as collaborating in the production, shaping, and distribution of → news and → information, rather than passively consuming content that others create (→ Computer–User Interaction; Interactivity, Concept of). Web 2.0 provides the infrastructure for potentially geographically dispersed individuals with common interests to connect and collaborate via the Internet without any central coordination. The new generation of Internet services and devices, often called → ‘social media,’ includes blogs, wikis, social networking sites, web applications, mashups, and folksonomies. Web 2.0 is a relatively new and underdeveloped concept in communication and journalism research. Studies to date indicate it has affected the news media in three broad ways.

First, Web 2.0 extends the notion of a participatory media culture. During major news events, users have taken on roles once reserved for professional journalists (Newman 2009). The terms used, often interchangeably, to refer to the activity of users who gather, report, analyze, and share news and information include ‘participatory journalism,’ ‘user-generated content,’ and → ‘citizen journalism.’ Participatory media reduce the hierarchy of owners, producers, and audiences and undermine the journalists’ control of gatekeeping. In the first decade of Web 2.0, news organizations strictly circumscribed opportunities for users to participate in news production. The mechanism most often adopted was audience comments on stories (Singer et al. 2011). Users may contribute raw news material and comment on finished journalistic products, but journalists retain editorial control. The online mechanisms reproduce past practices, such as letters to the editor or radio call-in programming.

Second, the news media are incorporating the ethos of Web 2.0 into journalistic practices on an ad hoc basis (Singer et al. 2011). In collaborative initiatives, or ‘pro-am’ journalism, professional journalists work with users to cover stories or topics, supplementing existing news gathering and enhancing output (‘social news’). Networked, distributed, and real-time services such as → Twitter are influencing the dissemination of news. New social media allow immediate sharing of short fragments of data. First reports routinely come from those on the scene rather than from professional journalists. Immediate services such as Twitter may compress → news cycles, particularly in countries with high levels of Internet connectivity and mobile telephony. Social media may also potentially speed up the spread of rumors or wrong information. Newsrooms face pressures over what to report and when, shifting from being first to instead curating and verifying content (Newman 2009).

Third, Web 2.0 blogs and other social media focus on openness, connection, and sharing. The news media have widely adopted blogging by journalists, who see the conversational, informal, and often personal format as a way to connect with audiences and demonstrate transparency. Journalists have similarly incorporated Twitter into their daily routines as a way to share content, develop relationships, and build community. The use of social media has led to a debate over journalism ethics, particularly over how these media blur the professional and personal (→ Ethics in Journalism). Newsrooms have set editorial policies for social media due to concerns about trust and credibility (→ Journalists, Credibility of). Research so far indicates that journalists are adding social media tools to fit their existing norms and practices.

For the audience, sharing and discussing news can now take place online through social networks. In some settings, exchanging links and recommendations is a form of cultural currency in social networks (Purcell et al. 2010). A large segment of the audience then relies on their electronic social network to alert them to news of interest. But social networks may limit the breadth of information people receive. On Web 2.0, audiences appear to consult multiple sources on multiple platforms (Purcell et al. 2010). Social recommendation may extend the reach of news content and drive traffic to it. Websites of large, mainstream news organizations include social networking functionality to let users share links (Singer et al. 2011), impacting business models based on delivering large, aggregate audiences to advertisers (→ Media Economics).

References and Suggested Readings

1. Gillmor, D. (2004). We the media: Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
2. Newman, N. (2009). The rise of social media and its impact on mainstream journalism. Working Paper, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. At https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/documents/Publications/The_rise_of_social_media_and_its_impact_on_mainstream_journalism.pdf, accessed August 28, 2014.
3. O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. At http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html, accessed August 28, 2014.
4. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosenstiel, T., & Olmstead, K. (2010). Understanding the participatory news consumer. At www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News.aspx, accessed August 28, 2014.
5. Singer, J. B., Hermida, A., Domingo, D. et al. (2011). Participatory journalism in online newspapers: Guarding the Internet’s open gates. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.

Women in the Media, Images of

Lana F. Rakow

University of North Dakota

Images of women in the media have presented a serious problem and challenge to feminist activists and scholars concerned about women’s status in societies. In the US in particular, but also in other parts of the world, the type, quality, and number of images of women in various fictional and nonfictional → genres (in film, television, → advertising, and magazines especially) have been well documented since the 1970s.

Research History

Consistently, such research documents women’s subordinate status to men, demonstrated by their key absences (such as in the → news) and attention to physical appearance or domesticity (such as in commercial advertising; → Sex Role Stereotypes in the Media).

However, other feminist approaches to media have raised challenges about the theoretical and political shortcomings of a focus on ‘images.’ Consequently, more sophisticated understandings of the relationship between mass media, reality, and racial, global, political, and economic structures have taken hold in feminist communication scholarship (→ Reality and Media Reality; Media and Perceptions of Reality). Nonetheless, analysis of women’s media images in countries around the world has been important in efforts to make changes for women (→ Feminist and Gender Studies).

In the US, the scholarly and systematic documentation of women’s media images was among the first concerted efforts on behalf of women by women media scholars. The approach got its impetus from the dominant approach of the field concerned about the effect of messages on audiences, as well as from liberal feminism. Researchers accumulated empirical evidence that women were absent, denigrated, and devalued throughout much of the mass media, supported by the theoretical work in Tuchman et al. (1978). Tuchman’s concept of “symbolic annihilation” in the book’s introduction is still used today, although in at least one case appropriated to dissect racial and gender power axes. Molina-Guzmán (2010) uses “symbolic colonization” to analyse white mainstream media’s use of the Latina body.

Early research, which typically focused on white women, consistently demonstrated that in programming aimed at women, domestic responsibilities were shown as the natural fulfilment of women. On the one hand, media content directed at men often displayed women as sexual enhancements of male power. The ‘sexualization of women’s images’ began in the mainstream mass media in the 1960s, in what many feminists considered a co-optation of the women’s movement. Contemporary manifestations of the problem are suggested by the alarming rise of eating disorders in girls and young women, signaling that men’s surveillance of women in media content may result in women’s self-surveillance to achieve a particular shape and look. A recent study of Israeli women revealed, however, that at least some women consider themselves discerning enough not to be affected by images in media content, although they think other women are not (Barak-Brandes 2011).

New Orientations in Research

Early images research has been criticized for undertheorizing both gender and media in their economic and cultural contexts. The approach has been wedded to a liberal social theory that accepts the current commercial media system while arguing for only limited reforms (i.e., making representations of women ‘more realistic’). Socialist feminists pointed out that the economic system and the power of ownership and production must be accounted for to produce a sufficient critique of the media. Other feminists have pushed for changes that would give women access to the means of production and representation (→ Commercialization: Impact on Media Content).

Further, the images approach undertheorized the relationship between media and reality. The mirror-image relationship between reality and media texts assumed by the approach is based on the premise that reality exists outside of human meaning. Postmodern feminists challenged the position with a constructivist rendering of both social reality and gender (→ Media and Perceptions of Reality).

Undertheorizing gender and media also had the consequence of ignoring key relationships among women along ethnic and racial lines. While white women often were portrayed as madonnas or whores, Native American women were shown as beautiful Indian princesses or unattractive squaws (Bird 1999), African-American women as mammies or matriarchs (Collins 1990), Chicana/Latina women as Spanish noblewomen or beautiful cantina girls (Fellner 2002), and Asian/Asian-American women as sexually servile geishas or powerful dragon ladies (Kim 1986; → Feminist Media Studies, Transnational).

International Comparisons

While research on images of women has been primarily a US liberal feminist project, women around the world have found political and theoretical value in examining and challenging women’s images in media systems. The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, identified a strategic objective in its platform for action to promote non-stereotyped portrayals of women in the media. A number of media-monitoring projects developed to document problems and changes in representation.

While there are notable similarities in women’s images in many countries, there also are important differences, as demonstrated in a study of sexual advertising content (Nelson and Paek 2005). These differences dispel the assumption there is a universal image and meaning of ‘woman’ across countries as well as within them. Barbara Sato’s interpretation of the new woman that emerged in Japan between the two world wars, confronting previous notions of women as gentle and meek with a new urban femininity, shows how images of women can be used to explain and manage periods of social change (Sato 2003).

By attending to larger political, economic, and ideological meaning systems, more sophisticated notions of both ‘images’ and ‘women’ have extended and enriched the important work begun by liberal feminist scholars. An edited volume by Carille and Campbell (2012) captures a range of approaches now embraced under the images research rubric. Contributions tackle women’s representations in various parts of the globe (Pakistan, India, China, Bulgaria), of racial and sexual minority identifiers (Black women and lesbian women), and of different genres (film, advertising, news, and new media).

References and Suggested Readings

1. Barak-Brandes, S. (2011). ‘I’m not influenced by ads, but not everyone’s like me’: The third-person effect in Israeli women’s attitude toward TV commercials and their images. Communication Review 14(4), 300–320.
2. Bird, E. S. (1999). Gendered representation of American Indians in popular media. Journal of Communication, 49(3), 61–83.
3. Carille, T. & Campbell, J. (eds.) (2012). Challenging images of women in the media: Reinventing women’s lives. Lanham, MD: Lexington.
4. Collins, P. H. (1990). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.
5. Fellner, A. M. (2002). Articulating selves: Contemporary Chicana self-representation. Vienna: Braumuller.
6. Kim, E. (1986). Asian Americans and American popular culture. In H.-C. Kim (ed.), Dictionary of Asian American history. New York: Greenwood, pp. 91–114.
7. Molina-Guzmán, M. (2010). Dangerous curves: Latina bodies in the media. New York: New York University Press.
8. Nelson, M. R. & Paek, H.-J. (2005). Cross-cultural differences in sexual advertising content in a transnational women’s magazine. Sex Roles, 53(5/6), 371–383.
9. Sato, B. H. (2003). The new Japanese woman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
10. Tuchman, G., Daniels, A. K., & Benet, J. (eds.) (1978). Hearth and home: Images of women in the mass media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Women’s Communication and Language

Kandi L. Walker

University of Louisville

Women’s language and communication research can be traced back to a 1664 report that cited differences in speech forms of ‘Carib’ women and men. This research was the beginning of a fruitful area of study looking at language use, speech styles, and communication strategies associated with women.

Early research on women’s language and communication focused on linguistic aspects of language, mainly concentrating on sounds (e.g., phonetics) and syntax (→ Linguistics). The more systematic interest and dichotomy of sex role- and gender-related aspects of language and communication came much later (→ Rhetoric and Gender). With the influence of the feminist movement in some parts of the world, a serious interest in women’s language and communication research materialized. Thus, in these countries research concerning women’s language and communication became apparent from the 1970s.

Robin Lakoff’s publications have often been deemed the foundational work of describing feminine speech style, illustrating the significant relationship between language and gender. Lakoff identified a number of characteristics in women’s speech patterns (hedges, super-polite speech, tag questions, speaking with intonation emphasis, empty adjectives, hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation, lack of sense of humor, direct quotations, a special lexicon, rising intonation in declarative statements). Although criticized for labeling women’s language as varying from the norm, Lakoff’s research has had great heuristic value in current communication, linguistic, and gender studies.

From Lakoff’s work, three influential perspectives emerged with regard to women’s language and communication. Researchers from a “sex-role perspective” believe there are innate similarities and differences between women’s and men’s language and communication. For “feminist researchers,” women’s language and communication are analyzed in relation to issues of power (or lack thereof; → Gender and Discourse). Researchers from the “gender-as-culture perspective” argue that similarities and/or differences found between women’s and men’s language are a creation of performing gender.

References and Suggested Readings

1. Bonvillain, N. (2006). Women and men: Cultural constructs of gender, 4th edn. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
2. Lakoff, R. (2004). Language and woman’s place: Text and commentaries, rev. edn., ed. M. Bucholtz. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
3. Wood, J. (2005). Gendered lives: Communication, gender, and culture. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.