A politics professor urges us to go beyond the standard news sources to stay better informed.

by Marty Brownstein

All wars generate misinformation, deception, and outright lies. Those who wage wars inevitably feel compelled to channel, to influence, and, yes, even to control the perceptions of their civilian populations, their uniformed fighting forces --- and huge audiences around the world. That the "fog of war" has once again descended on us is no real surprise, but our current fog is certainly distressing enough to warrant some major defogging strategies.

Worse yet, a global community made hypervigilant by the ghastly events of September 11 is in danger of being denied the full range of what it needs to know by mediators of experience --- that is, mainstream media. All-news television channels, in particular, seem bent on recycling the same conventional perspectives and images so relentlessly that CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC seem to blur into one cloud of stale thinking. Readers of this column who feel that they are attaining true news triangulation by surfing among "the big three" should heed Humpty Dumpty’s dictum: "Anything I say three times is right."

The current war in Afghanistan is especially difficult to "read" apart from re-mediation. That isolated nation is almost entirely impermeable to our eyes and ears. This war is being conducted, quite intentionally, far from most reporters, and even farther from most television cameras. This alienation of perspective is, however, only the latest and most ominous in a trend that began heavy-handedly in Vietnam. Management of war news has gotten progressively more subtle and effective through American military involvements in Grenada, Panama, the Persian Gulf, and, most recently, Kosovo. In each successive intervention since Vietnam, those who conduct war have restricted journalists with more success --- and sadly, journalists have accepted their restraints with diminished outrage.

In the time since the attacks, critics have been urged to "watch what they say." Dissidents who attempt to penetrate the fog through serious colloquy or humor have been chastised severely. Several newspaper editors have already been fired for challenging the new orthodoxies of this war, and war mobilization has already curtailed the ability of Congress to voice much critique. The Bush administration, in an effort to employ the symbolism of arousal, has too often resorted to tinny, stale rhetoric about "evildoers." Nuance and subtlety seem already to be casualties of war.

Minds can rot all too easily within this miasma, and perhaps even worse, attention to the full gravity of this crisis may be induced to wander. It is now urgent to reactivate all of the strategies for gaining full, three-dimensional knowledge that alumni of Ithaca College have been taught to apply in life. This is no time for you to drift through the news; you must seize control.

For starters, stop surfing by force of habit through news sources that replicate each other. Be sure to include public television, C-Span, and even Scola (a nonprofit, educational satellite service featuring news from dozens of countries around the world: www.scola.org) as you seek what you need to know. Do not limit your news search to TV; be sure to read a range of newspapers and magazines, and be sure that your range is inclusive. Seize the opportunity to use the Internet exhaustively, particularly with a keen eye for international news sources, and be aggressive about following the trail of websites to unfamiliar and potentially fresh mediators of your experience. Don’t confine yourself to immediate news; include in your reading some of the excellent new books on war and terrorism just now being published.

While there is some incentive now to be a total news junkie tuned in to updates every hour, you must also seek time to reflect more deeply. I advocate strongly that you shut down your information reception for some part of every day. Your daily walk or that hour with Mozart will prove very helpful in restoring perspective to your battered senses.

This is likely to be a very long conflict. You must use every tool at your disposal to penetrate the fog and to channel the informational din that threatens to overwhelm even the most earnest and well-intentioned citizen of the news. Be vigilant in your epistemological self-defense!

Marty Brownstein is an associate professor of politics; he has taught at Ithaca College since 1970. His essay "After the Earthquake," about the election of 2000, appeared in ICQ 2001/no. 1.

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