An intensely competitive world media may make propaganda difficult if war breaks out in Iraq

Former director-general of the BBC, John Tusa, once said that journalists must constantly guard against becoming outriders of political authority. As the world prepares for the US invasion of Iraq, the role of the media is being hotly debated in a variety of websites and newspapers with the US media being roundly criticised for becoming “a mouthpiece of the Pentagon and the White House”. The fact that Nightline’s Ted Koppel recently said that it was the duty of newsmen not to reveal facts until ordered to do so by the military, the fact that the television network ABC recently admitted that it knew of the killing of five Al-Qaeda suspects in Yemen but waited for four days before it received a clearance from the Pentagon to broadcast the news, the fact that the massive anti-war protests of February 15 in cities across the globe did not receive the sort of treatment they deserved, have all been used to build the case that after September 11 the US mainstream media is seen to directly serve what is termed American “national interest”.

Yet there is raging debate on war in the European press, particularly in the British media, with columnists accusing Rupert Murdoch’s publications of echoing the proprietor’s pro-war bias, and papers from the Murdoch stables, by contrast, calling the Continentals an “axis of weasels”. A British correspondent has written that the current media scenario is identical to that of the Gulf War of 1991, when Yankee newsmen anxious for journalistic immortality bitterly fought for places in the “war pool” and arrived in the desert trying to look like General Montgomery. The transatlantic divide on the war is clearly mirrored by a transatlantic divide in the media.