Hey...I have to write this report about how a certain topic is represented in various media...poetry, art, fiction, non-fiction, etc... I am having the damndest time finding how Media's Effect on Society's View of War is represented in these. Not a cool topic to have gotten! Does anyone have any ideas for finding this stuff?

WW2 posters?

Oh yeah, forgot to mention, it has to be 1950s-to-present. So that rules out WW2....

Nizzam.

It's not as difficult as you imagine. Read up on McCarthyism, how the Vietnam war was televised etc. I don't see how it could be any more obscure than any other topic.

Well, I have to find art ABOUT how the media affects society's view of war. It can't all be media THAT affects society's view of war. :/

What about a hippie poster that says something about eveyone believing the gov/media hype about *insert controversial subj here* ?

That could work...I'll have to look around for something like that....anyone else have ides for where to look for this kind of stuff?

Maybe you could try political cartoons.

Be sure to include the coverage of the first Gulf War ("war as entertainment"). And the present one, for that matter.

Ohhh, Political cartoons, I hadn't thought of that...great idea, thanks.

Yeah, some of my references and examples include those books that nbc and cbs put out about their coverage of Gulf War Reloaded....it is pretty interesting stuff...or would be if I didn't have to write a report on it.

Look for stuff about reporters being imbedded with military units, going on patrols with soldiers and being in combat, getting shot at, stuff like that. Compare that to Korea where the reporters hung out behind the lines.

In Vietnam, cameras allowed for the first live reporting of the war.

Easy. Off the top of my head, here are some stubs of information to start from:

Look at the footage from the first Gulf War. Endless amounts of IR footage of Maverick and Hellfire missiles slamming into T-72's, BMP's, and bunkers. Fighter pilots taking off of carriers, flashing a big thumbs up or v-sign at the camera. Armoured columns kicking up dust as they cross the desert. Streams of tracer rounds coiling into the night over Baghdad. Does it actually ever show any human suffering? Anyone getting maimed, mutilated or killed?

There's the publicity stunt that really back-fired for Saddam. Him holding a young British (?) boy, one from the families working for oil companies living in Kuwait who were taken hostage in 1990. This was shown on networks, except the kid looked positively terrified of Saddam. Google for "Stuart", "Saddam" and "Gulf War". You should get a hit.

There was also a probable chemical warfare plant that got hit during the Gulf War, but a sign reading "baby milk plant" (!) was hastily erected and shown to journalists who were invited as a ploy for sympathy. The ruse was shoddy and it wasn't hard to see through at all.

Then there's also the famous footage of the pelican soaked in oil that was shown. Turned out eventually that the oil-soaked pelican wasn't even filmed in the Persian Gulf.

Remember a few years ago, before the Second Gulf War started? Major US news networks showed footage, supposedly of the Taliban or Baathist-Iraqis (I can't honestly be bothered to remember which) testing Biological/Chemical agents on dogs. You think it wasn't deliberately leaked in order to gain public support among American pet-owners? Don't you think the US has tested chemical weapons on cute furry animals in labs too, which was, of course, conveniently not mentioned?

The term "ethnic-cleansing" was invented for the Balkan crisis in the 1990's.

From the Vietnam War, there's the famous Eddie Adams photo and the news footage of the man in the Saigon street being executed with a snub-nosed revolver by a police-chief. It shocked American audiences who found it revolting. However, this is a) common practice for what happens to spies in war b) the man was connected in a massacre of the police chief's family the previous day. After the war, when the man moved to the US, he recieved many death-threats once people found out who he was. Eddie Adams spent the rest of his life trying to mend the ruined reputation of the guy.

I recently did some stuff on representation in iraq, and how the media represented war to the public.

I had to write a small piece to go with my presentation, its about how the media represents the iraq war, i'll just paste the whole thing in here, with a bit of luck you can get some info or ideas out of it.

Wow, this is a big help. Thank you very much, you guys!

"You provide the pictures and I'll provide the war."

Or something.

Alright, I have one more request....if anyone can off the top of their head give me a work of fiction which deals with or at least references the media affecting a population's view of a war, that'd be a big help. I'm sure there's plenty of books about it...I don't read enough to know any, though.

Anyone read a book like that and remember the title?

1984.

Oh my goodness, would you believe that 1984 was published in 1949?! That suck so much!

Wag the Dog film

catch-22 book.