Conglomeration, New Media, and the Cultural Production of the "War on Terror"

In February 2003, national and local news outlets ran a story about a Connecticut man who wrapped and sealed his entire house with plastic and duct tape in response to warnings and advice from the Department of Homeland Security. Symptomatic of the more general "duct (tape) and cover" ethos ubiquitous throughout post-9/11 U.S. society, the story provided an interesting context of reception for the screening of Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, and Pierce Rafferty, 1982) in my course on war and the media. Indeed, students were quick to point out the uncanny similarities between 1950s Cold War paranoia and the current cultural anxieties surrounding the "war on terror." The Bush administration's rhetoric prompted the New York Times to point out the "eerily similar" comparisons to the McCarthy years,¹ and President George W. Bush went so far as to invoke the ultimate Cold War signifier of the mushroom cloud in his speech "outlining the Iraqi threat."²

With the capture of Saddam Hussein, Gulf War II, as Time magazine called it,³ provided the denouement for the Gulf War miniseries begun by George W. Bush's father. At the same time, although the president has announced the end of the "hot" war in Iraq, he has also prepared the U.S. public for an endless "war on terror." In the post-9/11 era, the mainstream media have uncritically embraced the Bush administration's Orwellian nightmare of civil and human rights abuses, militarism, isolationism, and anti-intellectualism,⁴ while also actively promoting the "war against terror" for ratings and profit. The currently unprecedented level of concentration of media ownership in the hands of a few transnational conglomerates and the existence of a military-industrial-media-entertainment network⁵ further facilitates the implementation of a Cold War logic of "us" against "them" in the context of the Manichean rhetoric of good versus evil (doers).

Although a great deal of media attention was given to criticism by Hollywood celebrities of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the film divisions of the major media conglomerates expressed their eagerness to become part of the war effort from the outset. Variety reported in October 2001 that "government intelligence specialists [were] secretly soliciting terrorist scenarios from top Hollywood filmmakers and writers" through "a unique ad hoc working group"⁶ at the Institute for Creative Technology at the University of Southern California. Its members were U.S. Army officials and writers and directors of Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), MacGyver (ABC, 1985-92), and Delta Force One (Joseph Zito, 1999). In a November meeting with presidential adviser Karl Rove and executives from all the major media conglomerates, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti, reminded participants of the global scope of his industry's media imperialism: "We are not limited to domestic measures. The American entertainment industry has a unique capacity to reach audiences worldwide with important messages."⁷

In the wake of 9/11, Valenti announced that Hollywood would not be making films that portrayed Islamic terrorists so as to prevent a backlash against "the decent, hard-working, law-abiding Muslim community in this country."⁸ Hollywood had already done its ideological work in this regard by showing racist, essentialist, and Orientalist representations of Arabs and Islam for decades.⁹ Indeed, the limited repertoire of images of and narratives about Arabs and Islam before and during the "war on terror" has served to keep much of the U.S. public ignorant about Arab and Islamic culture, thus paving the way for the dehumanizing and demonizing of the "enemy" as part of the inexorable march toward the hot and cold wars on terror. And although the film industry claimed it would absent representations of terrorists, the television production divisions and networks within the media oligopolies have regularly depicted terrorism in both news and entertainment programming.

In an attempt to garner popular support for its existence and budget in the post-Soviet and pre-9/11 era, the CIA actively solicited and nourished intelligence- related TV and film...