The phrase the power of the press is used often, but what exactly is the power of the press? Since the beginning of news reporting, its been known that what actually gets into the news reports is monitored and carefully picked by higher authorities. What isnt widely known, however, is that the media can use specific wording and phrases that, on the surface, look like normal news coverage, but are actually a technique of the media to control the images people see and the words they hear and read. From this, people then form their ideals, but are these actually ideals of those people if the media from which they based them off of was controlled to begin with? It is the power of the press to control and manipulate the publics ideals by what is released in the media. In childhood, its evident from the start that the parents are the ones who hold the power. As the child grows and develops, the parents show him that they are in control by correcting the things he does wrong and by making it clear that they know more than he does about life. Until the child is old enough to create his own ideals of what is right and what is wrong, the parents shape his ideals for him. As the child grows older, however, the parents relinquish this hold on him and allow him to form his own ideals of the world around him. But as he ventures out in the world, is he actually forming his own ideals, or is he still being shaped by an even larger, more powerful source? In George Orwells Shooting an Elephant, Orwell suggests just that; one can form his own ideals, but they will either be changed by the media (symbolized in his essay by the Burmese natives) or constructed from what the media provided in the first place. In the essay Orwell tells of when he was an Indian Imperial Police officer and was made responsible for taking care of an elephant that was destroying the Burmese town. On a daily basis, Orwell was perceived as an intruder upon the Burmese land by the natives, but on this day, he is momentarily worth watching (Orwell 337). Taking up an elephant rifle, Orwell went forward to do something about the elephant, though he wasnt sure exactly what that would be. He didnt want to kill the elephant, but now that he held the rifle, he felt that the Burmese had the power and were forcing him along: Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowdseemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind [The leader] becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the natives, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the natives expect of him (Orwell 337).Orwells perspective was that because the Burmese expected him to shoot the elephant, he had no other choice but to do so. His own ideals of how shooting the elephant was wrong were overcastted by the Burmese media, who urged him along and condoned the death of the elephant. It is not evident whether or not the natives were aware of their power over Orwell. The media as we know it today, however, did realize its power over the people and that it had the ability to manipulate what the public saw in order to control their ideals on specific subjects. In his essay From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of Americas Wars, H. Bruce Franklin explains the growth and changes of media in the United States and how it broadcasted to the public what was taking place in the wars. Before the Civil War, media was limited to paintings, lithographs, woodcuts and statues which gave the public an image of a glorious saga of thrilling American heroism from the Revolution through the Mexican War (Franklin 385). But as technology progressed, and the dawn of twentieth-century image-making (Franklin 389) arose, the American media wanted to do more than glorify the efforts of the militaryit wanted to get the public to support it whole-heartedly. The most important photographic images were movies designed to inflame the nation, first to enter the war and then to support it, Franklin explained (389). In 1919, for example, a man named Billy Mitchell put out movie reels of American planes bombing German warships. This spectacular media coup implanted potent images of the warplane in the public mind, and Mitchell himself became an overnight national hero as millions watched the death of great warships on newsreel screens. Mitchell was a prophet. The battleship was doomed. The airplane would rule the world (Franklin 391). Though it was definitely a biased view, this showed that the manipulation of images could shape the way the public viewed the war. This sort of manipulation was used as a means of propaganda or advertising. Advertisements are made in hopes that it will sway people to think in a certain way or want in a certain way, therefore making sales or gaining more support. One case of this that appeared on a large scale is fleshed out in the documentary Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land. The film tracks the American media coverage as opposed to other nations coverage of the conflict between Israel and Pakistan. When context is omitted, newspaper readers and television viewers have a very skewed understanding of the conflict (Murphy 1). As Americans watched news broadcasts covering the story, the message was conveyed that Israelis were always retaliating, while Palestinians were provoking, when in fact, the Palestinians were only reacting to the illegal occupancy of the Israelis in their country. Facts such as the illegal occupancy were left out of the media coverage in America, but not the coverage in other nations, the documentary explains. Again, Americans received warped images conveyed to them through the media of their country. It has only been in the past few years that people have begun to really speak out against the biases in the media and have taken action to inform others of the phenomenon. The surfacing of controversial photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison was the first real taste Americans received of the war and occupation in Iraq. After months of fluffed news coverage of the happenings over seas, the American public finally got a view of reality--and was dumbstruck by it. If these sort of actions were taking place, what else could be happening that the public has had hidden from them? A recently released documentary, About Baghdad, is being screened around the world and addresses the issue of the unreported views of the Iraqi people, themselves. After a screening of the documentary, one of the producers, Sinan Antoon, states, Most of [the viewers] realize that they were lied to and important information and a more accurate and pluralistic representation of the whole issue was lacking before. People are eager to listen to Iraqis and to see them as three-dimensional beings (Farah 1). Antoon says that the Abu Ghraib prison scandal drew the final straw for any Iraqis who still had hope that the American occupation was going to be beneficial to them. Brandon Crocker, a conservative writer for The American Spectator, finds the Iraqi response to the scandal to be hypocritical: Arab governments and the Arab press that expressed no outrage at Saddam Hussein's torture chambers, rape rooms, and mass graves, have, of course, found a lot of outrage to express about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by Americans. These are the same Arab governments and Arab media that accuse the United States of not being "even-handed" in our dealings trying to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians. (1)If Crocker watched About Baghdad, he would see that the Iraqis did, in fact, oppose Saddam Husseins methods. This, of course, was not reported in the American media, just as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was reported with heavy bias, which Crocker would have seen from the Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land documentary. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are among the most recent media releases that have shown how the media controls exactly what people see and therefore controls the ideals people have created from that. Throughout history, the media has manipulated and shaped how the public views the happenings of the world and has left them with only the ideals which the press wanted them to have in the first place. The power of the press is not to share the truth about everything; it is the power to control what everyone thinks about everything.
Works Cited
Farah, May. Rev. of About Baghdad, pro. Sinan Antoon. The Daily Star. 30 June 2004.
Franklin, H. Bruce. From Realism to Virtual Reality: Images of Americas Wars. The Brief Arlington Reader. Ed. Nancy Perry. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004. 384-400.
Murphy, Maureen Clare. Rev. of Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, dir. Bathsheba Ratzkoff & Sut Jhally. The Electronic Intifada 26 March 2004.
Orwell, George. Shooting an Elephant. The Brief Arlington Reader. Ed. Nancy Perry. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2004. 334-339.
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