Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception: How the Media Failed to Cover the War on Iraq (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781591021735)

There were two wars going on in Iraq--one fought with armies of soldiers, bombs, and fearsome military force. The other was fought alongside it with cameras, satellites, armies of journalists, and propaganda techniques. One war was rationalized as an effort to find and disarm WMDs--Weapons of Mass Destruction; the other was carried out by even more powerful WMDs, Weapons of Mass Deception.Veteran journalist and media watcher Danny Schechter, a former ABC and CNN producer, monitored and now analyzes the cheerleading for a war in which reporting was sanitized, staged, and suppressed. The author of Media Wars: News at a Time of Terror, The More You Watch the Less You Know, and News Dissector, brings an insider's knowledge based on thirty years in journalism with an outsider's perspective to critiquing media coverage. Throughout the war he was "self-embedded" at Mediachannel.org, the world's largest online media issues network.Schechter's insightful, wide-ranging critique of the American media's war coverage targets the way in which a virtual merger between the Pentagon and the media produced a war spectacle that the American public was primed to see, media collusion in the campaign to discredit the UN, "rightwing liberation theology" as war propaganda, the cozy relationship between news anchors and retired officers hired as military analysts, the controversies over Peter Arnett and Geraldo Rivera, the looting of Baghdad, the lack of media focus on civilian casualties, the disparities in coverage between U.S. and foreign media, and more.Schechter's disturbing indictment of the major media as purveyors of infotainment instead of news will serve as a wake-up call to journalists, media critics, and everyone who cares about a well-informed citizenry as the basis of democracy.

Author: Danny Schechter
ISBN-10: 1591021731
ISBN-13: 9781591021735
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Language: English
Published: 10/01/2003
Pages: 286
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.29lbs
Size: 9.22h x 6.40w x 0.95d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/15/2003 pg. 77
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2004 pg. 42