The Battle for the Mind: War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication by Gary S. Messinger (review)

Gary Messinger's goal in this synthetic work is to provide an overview of mass communication's impact on war and peace in the last two centuries. This is an enormous subject, and Messinger ranges admirably from Britain to the United States, Japan to Spain. The book encapsulates much of what we know about how the press, film, radio, and newer forms of mass communication have shaped war and efforts to end war. The first five chapters cover 1850 to 1945, focusing primarily on Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. The last three take on the cold war and the post-cold war world, bringing in the Soviet Union but otherwise narrowing to an American focus.

This is a generally useful book, but those looking for a rigorous argument about the relationships between war, peace, and mass communication will be disappointed. Messinger's opening conceit—his dream that mass communication can bring about both a successful movement to end war forever and a form of warfare involving no physical violence—is unsubstantiated by the book's contents, which chronicle countless instances in which mass media have had little or adverse effects on peace efforts. How do we make sense of the strange fact that as mass communication has increased so too has the scale of manmade mass death? The stories Messinger tells belie his insistence that "the media have always had the potential to help people transcend hatred and imagine a less violent world" (p. 130). The potential is certainly there but so seldom realized—the question is why not.

To begin to answer this question, one would have to take into account how the idea of mass communication has shaped not only conveyance of news about war but the very theory and practice of war, how "hearts and minds" have come to matter tactically as much as politically—for instance, early aerial bombardment was conceived as mass communication, an attempt at using violence to break morale. If mass media came into their own in World War II, bringing the front home, it was also in that war that the line between home and war front entirely broke down: there is a connection between mass communication and total war.

There is also a connection between mass communication and the coeval emergence of modern forms of state secrecy. Messinger dutifully chronicles post-World War I cynicism about mass media, but the deeper roots of that tradition of suspicion—from the eighteenth-century English working classes to J. A. Hobson's critique of jingoism—and the post-World War I implications of that long history remain beyond his purview. Without that story, it is impossible to grasp how and when mass communication has furthered peaceful ends versus violent ends.

Media exposure helped nuclear deterrence, Messinger argues, but then why did it fail to spread awareness of the Holocaust? If the Abu Ghraib scandal produced a decline in voter support for the war, why did the Iraq war go on? Why did media attention to Tibetan protests during the China Olympics fail to affect Chinese policy? Messinger acknowledges that the media can decrease our sense of the reality of military violence. He even recognizes that from the outset war helped newspapers sell, and yet he insists that the media will ultimately bring an end to such violence.

The book suffers somewhat from its near-exclusion of Africa, Latin America, and much of Asia, which at times wreaks havoc with Messinger's Western focus (e.g., his confidence that until 9/11, "frequent criticism [of the United States]" was "outweighed by praise" [p. 215] renders that event incomprehensible). The last two chapters narrow onto high-level American politics—unfortunately given the rise of non-elite-controlled forms of mass communication in precisely that period.

In sum, this is a good introduction to mass communication's coverage of war...