Communication Commons^™

Seeing Is Believing: How The U.S. Government And American News Networks Spun The Iraq War, Sarah Schenter

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The American public was doubly deceived into compliance with the Iraq War – first by the government, then by the news media, which disseminated and amplified the Bush administration’s misleading rhetoric and accepted as fact the “evidence” of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq that was used as the main justification for going to war. This paper first provides a background history of the role of American news media in armed conflict up until the Iraq War, starting with the Revolutionary War. The media was a powerful political actor ever since the beginning of United States history. With the evolution …