Triumph Of The Image: The Media's War In The Persian Gulf, A Global Perspective

by Herbert Irving Schiller, Hamid Mowlana (Editor), George Gerbner

The triumph of image over reality and reason is the theme of this book. New communication technologies have made possible the transportation of images and words in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world. We thought we witnessed the Gulf War as we sat, mesmerized by the imagery. But the studies from the many countries assembled for this book suggest that it was not the war in the Persian Gulf that we witnessed but rather imagery orchestrated to convey a sense of triumph and thus to achieve results that reality and reason could never have achieved.The book offers contributions from thirty-four authors in eighteen countries, including short samplings from the media of several regions. The authors explore the social, economic, and political context of media coverage in their countries, the domination of one image in most of them, and the struggle for alternative perspectives. The authors probe the dynamics of image-making and pose some challenges for the future as well as provide us with a unique glimpse of how the world outside of the United States (as well as many Americans) viewed the war in the Persian Gulf and how the dynamics of image-making and information control operate. Triumph of the Image will be useful to scholars and students in communications and mass media, international relations, political science, cultural studies, propaganda, censorship, and contemporary history as well as to the general public.

269 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Schiller warned of two major trends in his prolific writings and speeches: the private takeover of public space and public institutions at home, and U.S. corporate domination of cultural life abroad, especially in the developing nations. His eight books and hundreds of articles in both scholarly and popular journals made him a key figure both in communication research and in the public debate over the role of the media in modern society. He was widely known for the term “packaged consciousness,” that argues American media is controlled by a few corporations that “create, process, refine and preside over the circulation of images and information which determines our beliefs, attitudes and ultimately our behavior.” Schiller used Time Warner Inc. as an example of packaged consciousness, stating that it “basically dominates publishing, cable television, recordings, tapes and filmmaking.”