Covering the War on Iraq: The Pragmatics of Framing and Visual Rhetoric

What is it about?

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.

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Why is it important?

This study shows how Western news media framing of the US-British run-up to war against Iraq is a clear testimony to a systemic biased coverage. The rhetorical strategies deployed by pro-war media outlets/ newspapers to de-historise and de-contextualise the conflict show that Western media share responsibility for the instability in the Middle East. The use of Orientalist textual/visual rhetoric is a mere “discourse of domination, both a product of subjugation of the Middle East, and an instrument in this process” (Halliday 2003, 200). The US mainstream media in building a pro-war ‘consensus’ (by marshalling linguistic and visual arguments that intertextually resonated with the ‘war on terror’ rhetoric) was countered by anti-war media, which challenged the US ‘Master frame’ by arguing that brute force and daylight ‘plunder’ (dressed up in moral grab and in the language of a ‘noble ideal’) were part of a long Anglo-American colonialist tradition of sexualised and racialised political violence in the Middle East.

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