Coverage fought between competing newspapers and television adapts the 'assassination news cycle'. [64] The first stage misrepresents the unfolding situation as something else, then shifts to Americanizing questioning ("why?"/"never again"), which generates moral outrage, thus fuelling propaganda. [65] "Through a process of monopoly control and distribution, repetition, and media escalation," argued Michael Parenti about Yugoslavia war reportage, "the media achieve self-confirmation, that is, they find confirmation for the images they fabricate in the images they have already fabricated." [66]

The connection between "grand narratives", media escalation and moral outrage was highlighted by photos of emaciated refugee camp detainees at Omarsika and Trnopolje, taken by Penny Marshall and Ian Williams of British Independent Television News (ITN). [67] Apocalyptic metaphors and stark imagery are stock items in war reportage, [68] and a single image impelled the U.S. public to support NATO intervention and air-bomb raids on Serbian forces. Moeller noted that "the footage was repeatedly shown and with few exceptions (U.S. News and the Chicago Tribune, for example), all the elite media gave the picture prominent placement." [69] In a highly publicised British libel lawsuit, ITN sued Living Marxism over allegations that Marshall had 'staged' the image, and the magazine was effectively bankrupted. [70] U.S. reportage "demonized images of Milosevic and the Serbian people," [71] Parenti claimed, featuring rhetoric about "rape camps" and "ethnic cleansing." [72] The media connected "Kosovo" and "mass-graves," thereby supporting ethnic Kosovar Albanians; by 1999 the graves had still not materialised, [73] nor would NATO clear unexploded cluster bombs, which Noam Chomsky claimed was a prosecutable war crime. [74] But the problems facing journalists were beyond ideological differences: "the media can't "gear-up" for genocide," Moeller noted, [75] and news editors fought over what situational definitions constituted 'genocide'. [76]

"Who Elected You And Your Camera?" [77]

In studying how the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Star used AP wire stories to report on the South Caucasus and Bosnian conflicts, Karim H. Karim found that they used 'pogrom' instead of 'ethnic conflict.' [78] Taking Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations geopolitical framework [79] to its conclusion, Northern journalists "have found the religious strife a convenient narrative device to explain conflicts whose historical and sociological roots are complex." [80] This is Karim's 'Jihad Model': "a field of meaning that holds Islam to be a primary Other and a religion that promotes the use of violence." [81]

Howard Bloom suggested that these narrative devices result from writers responding "to the world with a kind of herd instinct." [82] Carolina Acosta-Alzuru and Elizabeth P. Lester Rousahanzamir found evidence of Bloom's hypothesis when studying media coverage of the Falklands War/Malvinas conflict (also a North-South conflict), which began when Argentina 'invaded' on April 2, 1982 and surrendered on June 14, 1982. Using discursive strategies to uncover 'hidden' polysemic meanings, the authors studied the "newspapers of record" from each country: The New York Times (U.S.), El Mercurio (Chile), Excelsior (Mexico), and El Universal (Venezuela). [83] The authors concluded "in all four countries, the newspapers analyzed presented a version of the events that was compatible with the country's already committed diplomatic position." [84]

During the Gulf War, Philip Taylor (Institute of Communication Studies, Leeds University) recorded the global television output. Taylor was critical of the "hotel warriors" who covered military briefings "as infotainment." The independence of Gulf War reportage had been compromised by the military pooling system, since the press reporters were attachedhence relianton troops. Taylor concluded that the sports metaphors "helped to sustain public support" and that "the real war was being fought between soldiers, in a brutal way, far from the prying eyes of the media." [85]

Taylor's assessment is echoed by Chuck DiCarrio, a veteran journalist and CEO of the Aerobureau Corporation. [86] Surveying the post-Cold War milieu, DiCarrio concluded that along with Alleyne's three strategies (diplomacy, psychological operations and military force), "the media becomes a prime player in international affairs" [87] and the extension of hegemonic power.

"'Push-button Death' Meets 'The CNN Effect'"

If Peter Arnett wrote the conflict's ur-text, [88] then the Gulf War's patron saint was surely J.G. Ballard, whose 1960s novels prophesied the intersection of McLuhan's media, Virilio's vectors and the audience's psychological estrangement from "institutionalised disaster areas." [89]

Ballard depicted the Gulf War as 'push-button death', likening the Allied bombing campaign against Iraq as an arcade video-game (ironically, the U.S. Army is using video-game technology in soldier training to simulate combat situations). [90] The disorienting effect for Ballard was that "the entire war was a vast demolition derby in which almost no one was hurt and which might even have been fun." [91] McKenzie Wark described the conflict as "Telesthesia, or perception at a distance." [92]

But Ballard's reaction wasn't theoretical: Colonel John A. Warden II (the Gulf War air planner), applying Vallely and Aquino's MindWar model and techniques learned from Operation: Just Cause in Panama (December 20, 1989), first targeted the Iraqi strategic defence and radar systems, then knocked out the primary command and telephone systems, "imposing shock on the entire Iraqi system." [93] Command-and-control structures had merged with media so that "the information loop can be completed simultaneously." [94]

Gulf War journalists attempted to exorcise their demons, after the conflict, by focusing on the Anfal (Iraqi extermination of ethnic Kurds), and acknowledging their role in disseminating disinformation to the U.S. populace. [95] Yet these very criticisms, "even the good ones, are part of the same matrix of relations that produced the spectacle of the Gulf War in the first place," McKenzie Wark argued. [96] These arguments project blame onto nefarious entities, shielding journalists from their own ethics and moral engagement with wider society. And they ignore the historical co-evolution of global media institutions with military-information initiatives.

"CNN supplanted transnational news agencies and shortwave radio stations," Mark Alleyne noted, [97] effectively supplanting the New World Information and Communication Order. [98] Cultivating a peace-activist image, CNN's Ted Turner had been subtly influencing U.S. foreign policy, such as through the Goodwill Games between America and Russia, [99] and founding the Nuclear Threat Initiative, "whose goal is to curb the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons." [100] Although CNN had the only phone when the U.S. destroyed Baghdad's telephone system, it's not well known that they spent $22 million covering the Gulf War. [101] Tom Engelhardt discovered that, in the War's aftermath, CBS 'downsized' its news department and NBC lost $55 million, thus creating an environment for poor international news coverage. [102]