The Media and GI Joe

How the press gets the military wrong -- and why it matters.

Chris Bray from the February 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

Ring any bells? It's important not to make too much of Unrestricted Warfare, a book that mostly centers on technological sabotage. The authors have also explicitly and repeatedly said that they were examining possibilities, not calling for action -- and they aren't central figures in the Chinese military.

"It was written by a couple of colonels," Meese says. "I'm a colonel, and no one listens to me."

The point is that the ideas were out there. Stephen Sloan, a professor of political science at the University of Oklahoma, got even closer to the thing with a July 1998 paper written for the Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College.

"As a result of the introduction of commercial jet aircraft, we have witnessed the emergence of 'Non-Territorial Terrorism' -- a form of terror that is not confined to a clearly delineated geographical area. In a very real sense, terrorists now have the capacity to engage in what could be called low-intensity aerospace warfare. They have at their disposal what are for all practical purposes human intercontinental delivery systems composed of skyjackers, and terrorists who are carrying out operations thousands of miles from their base of operations."

And so it's interesting to note the trend of coverage emphasizing the surprise of the U.S. military at the September 11 attacks. The reality is that, as much as the specifics surprised the military, the general outline of a domestic terror attack designed to produce enormous casualties is not something that came shuttling out of the clear blue sky. In fact, there's a trail through yesterday's news that suggests an effort by those within the national security establishment who saw the threat developing to spread the alarm -- and to push the inert body of that same establishment in the direction of meeting it.

Time, for instance, reported this in December 2000: "If you build it, they will come -- some other way. And they're probably going to come some other way, anyway. That appears to be the bottom line in U.S. intelligence community thinking on the vexed question of missile defense....And the bad news is that, while America will have no rival on the battlefield, it will be increasingly dogged by unconventional enemies against whom technological superiority isn't the same guarantor of victory." They did, in fact, come some other way, just about nine months later.

The attempts to sound an alarm were more often ignored, though, and then some. In June 2000, a national commission formed by Congress released a major report warning that terror attacks from overseas were increasingly likely. But Bruce Shapiro, a contributing editor at The Nation, was too smart to fall for the idea that terrorists might ever attack the U.S.; he cleverly broke down the truth about the report for readers of the online magazine Salon. The headline read, "The hyping of domestic terrorism: Why a new report on the threat of international terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is a con job."

The news stories you saw in the wake of the attacks alleging that the institutions of U.S. national security entirely failed to foresee their possibility were sometimes written by the same people who wrote the earlier stories describing -- in some cases dismissing -- the warnings. It's a fair guess that there are some awfully frustrated people in the military and intelligence communities right now.

But a posture of surprise in the face of widely available facts isn't really all that shocking, since it has a very particular utility to both the government and the media. It is, at just this moment, a comfort, and one that can be meshed neatly with the other popular media fictions about U.S. military potency. If they didn't see it coming, then the problem is one of foresight and the faulty prescience of a bunch of desk jockeys, rather than operational power. The eggheads in intelligence dropped the ball, but the warrior types are ready to make up for it.

But what does it mean if we did see it coming, and still couldn't stop it?

"We're in a period in which journalists are playing cheerleader," Herbert Gans tells me, a few days into the bombing campaign against Afghanistan. "It happens in the early stages of every one of these things."

Gans has taught sociology at Columbia University for 30 years; his most significant contribution to the understanding of the values of mainstream journalism took up 13 years of his early career, spanning most of the Vietnam War and beyond. Off and on, from 1965 to 1978, Gans set up camp in the newsrooms at Time, Newsweek, and two television networks, watching as editors and reporters considered which stories to cover. His book on the subject, Deciding What's News (1979), remains a landmark in understanding how information moves through media.

News organizations, Gans wrote, "conceive of the nation in anthropomorphic terms," so that news about crisis becomes primarily a test of "character and moral strength." With that emphasis on the health of the body, then, "American foreign news is ultimately only a variation on domestic themes" -- of sickness, diagnosis, and cure.

Gans echoes that idea today. "All wars are always domestic stories," he says. "They're about our boys fighting."

If war news is about our boys, then the media-driven view of what our boys are like -- of what they can do, and how -- becomes a central question in our understanding of war. If someone attacks us, and we respond with military force, what happens?