Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1 Introduction
evoke sympathy from readers. This, in turn, serves as the justification for bellig-
erent policymaking against the perpetrators. However, people who suffer at the
hands of US allies and client states—the unworthy victims—“merit only slight
detail, minimal humanization, and little context that will excite and enrage”
(p. 35). For instance, mainstream media reports about the murder of a Polish
priest by communists in 1984 were “generous with gory details and quoted
expressions of outrage and demands for justice” (p. 39). Meanwhile, coverage
of the killing of 100 religious victims in US client states in Latin America was
“low-keyed (and) designed to keep the lid on emotions” (p. 39)—even though
many of the victims were US citizens.
The propaganda model tends to assume homogeneity of opinion among the
policymaking elite. But that is not always the case. Bennett’s indexing theory
posits that “news is ‘indexed’ implicitly to the range and dynamics of govern-
mental debate” (1990, p. 103). In other words, if officials have a singular view
on a (foreign) policy issue, that is what the media would report: but if there are
differences of opinion, those too would enter the media coverage. Moreover,
the media could reach out to non-official sources “when those voices express
opinions already emerging in official circles” (1990, p. 106). But the indexing
theory views all political elite as potentially wielding the same degree of influ-
ence on news. In contrast, Entman’s (2003) cascading activation model differ-
entiates between the influence exerted by different levels of elite power. In this
model, policy preferences of the administration—specifically, the President,
White House and state and defense departments—“cascade” down to mem-
bers of Congress, other officials, and experts and further down to journalists
and news organizations, who then express it in the form of news “frames” that
are received by the public. Although there is potential for differences of opin-
ion to creep into news framing at each level of the cascade, Entman argues that
“the ability to promote the spread of frames is also highly stratified”—with
lower levels requiring “extra energy” to push new ideas upward (p. 420).
These theories have found extensive empirical support (Aday 2017). A study
of media reporting on Venezuela found the propaganda model to shape not
just an “overwhelmingly negative” news coverage but also “a highly antagonis-
tic newsroom culture that sees itself as the ‘resistance’ to the Venezuelan gov-
ernment and its purpose to defeat it” (MacLeod 2020, p. 273). Another study
concluded that, in line with the indexing hypothesis, leading US news organi-
zations framed the Abu Ghraib prison abuse in Iraq as an “isolated case … per-
petrated by low-level soldiers” rather than a reflection of the administration’s
“policy of torture”—despite “evidence and sources” available to support the
alternative framing (Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston 2006, p. 467). Reese
and Lewis’s (2009) interpretive analysis of the coverage of the so-called War on
2 Research Design
Iran
Topic 7 Topic 2
5% 6%
Topic 8
Topic 10 12%
33%
Topic 3
Topic 1 21%
23%
f igure 5.1
Topic proportions in news coverage of sanctions against Iran
North Korea
Topic 8 Topic 7
1% 13%
Topic 6 Topic 2
42% 16%
Topic 5
28%
f igure 5.2
Topic proportions in news coverage of sanctions against North Korea
Venezuela
Topic 4
35%
Topic 9
65%
f igure 5.3
Topic proportions in news coverage of sanctions against Venezuela
3 Yes, President
One set of common keywords across several topics was “president,” “trump,”
“obama,” “administration,” “white,” “house,” and “secretary” (Table 5.1), suggest-
ing that news coverage of sanctions, irrespective of topical focus, was oriented
around the US administration and its senior officials. A closer look at the use
of these keywords in the documents showed that President Donald Trump and
his top administration executives, such as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo,
Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, and National Security Advisor John
Bolton dominated the coverage. A frequently employed phrase was “U.S. offi-
cials say (or said)”—indicating that news reports relied heavily on statements
and information obtained from interactions with US officials as their primary
news sources. In contrast, non-official sources, including foreign policy experts,
analysts, and scholars outside the government, ngo s/n po s, and human rights
activists, appeared to be sidelined.
As a result, the news coverage did not simply reflect an implicit alignment
with “U.S. interests” (specifically, US interests as defined by administration
officials) but blithely relied on US interests as the rationale for foreign policy
decisions. For instance, cnn (2019) quoted Bolton speaking about the political
crisis in Venezuela: “Now is the time to stand for prosperity and democracy in
Venezuela … We think stability and democracy in Venezuela are in the direct
national security interests of the United States right now.” And Washington
Post (2017) reported, “President Trump is expected to announce next week that
he will ‘decertify’ the international nuclear deal with Iran, saying it is not in the
national interest of the United States.”
Only one topic from each country included the names of Iranian President
Hassan Rouhani (Topic 10), North Korean leader Kim Jong-un (Topic 6) and
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro (Topic 9). Importantly, these topics
simultaneously included references to US allies within these countries or in
their respective regions, such as Saudi Arabia and Israel (Topic 10), South Korea
(Topics 6 and 7), and Venezuela’s “acting president” Juan Guaidó, an opponent
of Maduro (Topic 9). These mentions were part of a related news frame—the
delegitimization of the leadership of sanctioned countries on the grounds
that it was not conducive to US interests or those of its allies. Simultaneously,
table 5.1 Topic model of news coverage of sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and
Venezuela
table 5.1 Topic model of news coverage of sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and
Venezuela (cont.)
the coverage amplified the need for supporting pro-US opposition figures like
Guaidó. For instance, Wall Street Journal (2019a) reported on Venezuela, “With
much of the country deeming Mr. Maduro’s leadership illegitimate, the US, the
European Union and a host of countries across the Americas have urged him
to cede power to the National Assembly.” The delegitimization of leadership,
in turn, served as an excuse to justify sanctions—such as Trump’s sanctions
against PdVSA, the Venezuelan state-owned energy company (Topic 9).
Within our sample, references to regional and global allies also allowed the
media to portray US sanctions as an international enterprise. Indeed, “inter-
national” emerged as a common keyword across many topics, being used
commonly across the coverage in phrases such as “international security
problem,” “international sanctions,” “international agreement,” “international
him cling on. The West has consistently underestimated his determination and
lack of scruples.” And Fox News (2018) claimed about nuclear talks with Iran,
“They’ve already said they’re not going to have anything to do with the renego-
tiation. They’ll be backed up by Russia and China…”
Second, Russia and China’s stance vis-à-vis the sanctions against these
countries was framed as an example of the challenge they posed to American
hegemony in global affairs. A Wall Street Journal (2017) article, titled “China’s
World: Trump Walks Dangerous Line with Beijing on Two Fronts,” referred to
North Korea as a key site of competition between the United States and China.
Another article in the same newspaper, titled “Iran Courts Russia, China To
Defy U.S.,” discussed the competition between the United States, Russia, and
China for sway over Iran (Wall Street Journal 2019b).
USA Today (2017) reported that after the UN Security Council approved
US-sponsored sanctions against North Korea, China “pressed for a start of six-
party talks involving North and South Korea, the United States, China, Russia
and Japan”—but the proposal was rejected by the United States. The article
quoted multiple US sources, including Jay Lefkowitz, a former US special envoy
on human rights in North Korea; Susan Thornton, acting assistant secretary
of state for the region, and Harry Kazianis, director of defense studies at the
Center for the National Interest; to emphasize US skepticism toward China.
Juxtaposed with the supposed effectiveness of US sanctions, China’s proposal
was portrayed as dubious, with Kazianis saying, “We have no reason to believe”
in China.
Since the mid-1990s, scholars and pundits have spoken of a “new Cold War”
between the United States on the one side and Russia or China, or even a Sino-
Russian axis, on the other (Legvold 2014; Schoen and Kaylan 2014; Shambaugh
1995). Whether or not a new Cold War is ongoing, the talk of global competitors
who, directly or through regional proxies, threaten American interests plays a
key role in building domestic support for an ever-expanding military budget
(Soroka 2003), much of which ends up in the coffers of the defense industry.
Critical and feminist scholars have argued that the US military-industrial com-
plex should in fact be called the “media-military-industrial” complex, drawing
attention to the key role the American media plays in “manufacturing consent”
for such expenditure (Herman and Chomsky 2002; Kumar 2006; Vavrus 2013).
Media coverage of sanctions, as our analysis indicates, bolsters this narrative,
framing the United States as locked in a competition with powerful rivals on a
global scale that threaten its interests as well as its values—being authoritar-
ian themselves and simultaneously propping up “illegitimate” totalitarian and
anti-US regimes such as those in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela.
6 Conclusion
Indeed, coverage remains pliant only to the extent that elite policies main-
tain this hegemony. The media become more unfriendly to the administration
when its policies are deemed to be undermining American preeminence—as
happened during the Trump years, especially vis-à-vis North Korea and Iran.
Both indexing theory (Bennett 1990) and cascading activation (Entman
2003) allow for the possibility that differences among policymakers can lead to
the coverage becoming less pliant and more diverse. We argue that the media
challenge the administration’s line as a means of bringing policymaking itself
“back on track.” In other words, it is when the administration appears to be
failing in its responsibility of upholding US dominance through ill-advised pol-
icymaking that the media take it upon themselves to prop up policy alterna-
tives—although they still rely on sources from the policymaking world, such as
opposition figures and foreign policy experts, to do so (see also, Shahin 2021).
If the coverage of sanctions appears to be of a piece with coverage of con-
flicts, it is because both sanctions and conflicts are part of this larger enter-
prise. Both serve their respective functions in preserving US hegemony—and
so does their respective media coverage. That is why, while denouncing the
leadership of US adversaries like Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela as authori-
tarian and therefore illegitimate, and supporting sanctions as well as threats of
war against them, US media’s coverage of autocratic allies like Saudi Arabia is
quite the opposite. Few questions are raised when the administration provides
military aid or sells weapons worth millions of dollars to such nations—weap-
ons that are often used against their own populations (Kumar 2018).
This chapter began with the normative concern that elite influence over
media coverage puts paid to the expectation of media’s independence in a
democracy. Our analysis, however, renders the question of media indepen-
dence moot. The media emerge as not simply influenced by but instead as
an integral part of Mills’s (1956) power elite, with the same interests—and the
same commitments—as the political, military, and corporate brass.
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