Mass media as risk-management in the “war on terror”

From “embedded reporters” and round-the-clock images of Old Glory, to live broadcasts of the “shock and awe” bombing campaign and the toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, the role of the mass media in the “war on terror” was central and pervasive. Although a flurry of recent scholarship examines the nexus of these two subjects (Chapter 23 in this volume; Kuypers 2006; Martin and Petro 2006; Schechter 2003), few have situated their analysis within larger theoretical frameworks that could explain a diverse array of related phenomena. In what follows, I sketch such a model, which operates on the premise first proposed by Giddens and Beck that many of the seemingly unrelated yet formidable problems facing the human community are in fact calculated, manufactured risks deemed acceptable by economic and political global leaders and generated by a small nexus of interlinked processes (Beck 1992). I further argue that the partnership of the mass media is essential to the effective functioning of this global process. Specifically, the objective of this chapter is to better describe and explain the behavior

of the mass media during times of elevated societal risk, in this case the “war on terror.” The empirical object of this investigation is media coverage during the period immediately after the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 and the “end of major combat” on 2 May 2003. The assumption motivating the choice of this empirical object is that the relationship between the media and the state, especially its military and political components, fundamentally changed after 9/11. Preliminary data suggest that the traditional boundaries, rules of objectivity and balance, and roles of each institution were fundamentally shaken, resulting in a media system much less adversarial, more compliant, and even partisan than before. Finally, I consider the utility of Giddens’ conception of social structure and ideology to shed additional light on the role of the mass media in global social systems. Furthermore, the activities of the media during the war on terror surveyed below point to the possibility that a model of media as managers of the risks of globalization might be a valid and valuable sociological framework.