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4 - Covering the War on Iraq

The Pragmatics of Framing and Visual Rhetoric

from Part I - Conflict Discourse in Newspaper Reporting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 April 2022

By
Ahmed Sahlane
Edited by
Innocent Chiluwa
Innocent Chiluwa
Affiliation:
Covenant University, Nigeria
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Summary

Mainstream pro-war news media reporting of the 2003 Iraq War was highly sanitized in a way that reduced war coverage to a cinematic spectacle. The picture that was painted by the coalition mainstream media reporters was of a war free of images of suffering, destruction, dissent, and diplomacy, but full of sophisticated US weaponry, chivalrous “heroism” and militarist “humanitarianism.” The US control of news media framing (through censorship and embedding systems) shielded viewers from the “realities” of the battlefield through recourse to maneuvering “avoidance” strategies, such as the “dehistorization,” “depersonalization,” and “decontextualization” of the unfolding conflict. By muting dissenting voices, the pro-war coalition media frames manufactured an “interpretive dominance” that was inextricably structured in hegemony and social control.

Keywords

mediaIraq warframingargumentationprotestdiscoursevisual photographrhetoricorientalism
Type
Chapter
Information
Discourse, Media, and Conflict
Examining War and Resolution in the News
 , pp. 93 - 116
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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