Weapons of Mass Destruction? Or, of Mass Deception? Media in Iraq War and After

The close relationship, a symbiotic one, between the media and the government of the day has long existed. In the run up to the Iraq war and afterwards, the Bush Administration and legislators in the US and UK exerted enormous pressure on the global media so that it lost all semblance of its independence, swallowing wholesale the bogey of bio-terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. This affected the entire structure of news gathering, production, portrayal and dissemination. In this ‘culture of fear’ in the age of ‘New World Disorder’, the primary victims of the ‘mass deception’ or ‘mass illusion’ produced by this nexus of policymakers and the media were law and democracy. At a time when a the media is being drawn once again to create a new ‘terror, Iran, the role that it has played in the recent past should be clearly understood.