Cable news loves American weapons.
Whether it’s Tomahawk missiles.
Tomahawk missiles.
Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Or the “mother of all bombs.”
MOAB, also called the
“mother of all bombs”
The “mother of all bombs”
TV news is saturated with images of American firepower.
They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.
But cable news’ fixation on bombs and missiles
isn’t just mindless entertainment.
It sanitizes violence
and makes it harder to think critically about
why America uses deadly force,
and what happens when it does.
If you watched even five minutes of cable news last month,
you probably saw this.
It’s the Pentagon’s footage of Tomahawk missiles
being launched at a Syrian airfield from US destroyers.
You couldn’t watch a segment about Syria without seeing them,
even if they were just playing in the background.
They were on Twitter, too, where news networks just
published the Pentagon’s footage
unedited and without context.
There’s a reason those clips got
so much airtime on news networks.
On a very basic level,
it’s about attracting eyeballs and having something to look at.
Would you rather watch Tomahawks taking off,
or would you rather watch Brian Williams?
This is Deborah Jaramillo.
She wrote a book on the way news networks
covered and packaged the Iraq War,
and she argues that cable news’ fixation on images of weapons
is essentially about keeping us entertained.
If we have CNN, and MSNBC, and Fox,
and they’re all showing the same news,
they need to differentiate their product.
How do you keep viewers watching?
You have a good narrative and you have spectacular visuals.
You saw that happen after the US dropped
the “mother of all bombs,” the MOAB, on Afghanistan.
Forget the puny explosion of a single Tomahawk missile,
today, the “mother of all bombs.”
Tons of impressive military footage, fancy animations,
and segments explaining how the bomb works.
One study found that CNN aired almost an hour
of MOAB test footage in the six hours after the story broke.
You could almost hear the Team America theme song
playing in the background.
America, fuck yeah!
Coming again to save the-
Jaramillo saw a lot of this kind of thing during the Iraq War,
like when CNN developed special graphics
to teach viewers about different types of weapons.
They called these graphics
Baseball cards!
That’s what we call them here, baseball cards.
It’s got 120mm cannon, three machine guns.
Now, I know what you’re thinking:
A. Anderson Cooper hasn’t aged a day.
And B. Who cares?
Of course cable news is going to talk about weapons in war time.
The problem is, when corporate media sees weapons as a product,
they run the risk of sanitizing and even glamorizing tools of violence.
You can see this most clearly from NBC’s Brian Williams,
who fawned over the use of Tomahawk missiles
like he was trying to sell them.
We see these beautiful pictures.
I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen,
“I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.”
But the truth is,
he wasn’t the only one giddy about the use of force.
CNN, a news network, basically ran
an infomercial for Tomahawk missiles.
This is the newest version of the missile.
Tomahawk can fly 1,000-plus miles.
Each Tomahawk weighs about 3,500 pounds,
so when 60 of them are fired toward Syria,
that was about 210,000 pounds of firepower.
So it swims and it flies.
Swims and it flies.
The same thing happened with the MOAB:
segment after segment about how powerful the bomb was
and how it worked.
This is such a heavy bomb, such a large bomb.
Frightening weapon, it makes a lot of noise.
You would want to terrify your enemy, shock and awe.
And Fox News might as well have been doing body shots
the day after the bomb dropped.
That is what freedom looks like:
that’s the red, white, and blue.
Well one of my favorite things is watching bombs drop on bad guys.
The problem is compounded when news networks
invite ex-military guests to talk about weapons on air,
framing the discussion around how we engage in violence,
rather than why.
General, walk us through what is this thing
and how much damage can it do.
It will collapse caves, it will blow up things.
And it’s guided to the target by GPS.
So it’s accurate.
Oh, it’s precision accurate.
If you’re alive afterwards,
you’re going to have perforated eardrums and a lot of trauma.
The use of military analysts to explain the weapons
is a way of giving us the military’s point of view
and getting us to think in terms of strategy
rather than in terms of people.
You’ve probably noticed by now that all these clips
of America’s arsenal at work have something in common:
no dead bodies.
You see the Tomahawk’s launching,
but not the casualties they caused.
You see the MOAB exploding,
but it’s test footage from over a decade ago.
We have video we’re showing of the testing of the bomb.
That’s not an accident.
Cable news has an incentive to not show
the dead bodies that American weapons create.
They don’t want to alienate audiences,
so even when they’re dealing with something
that’s very uncomfortable, like killing people overseas,
they don’t have a financial incentive to show us
really disturbing things when those disturbing things
directly impact us or the way we feel about ourselves.
Which helps explain why networks use graphics and animation
so much when talking about weapons.
Like this 2003 CNN clip showing how a bunker buster bomb works.
You see crates and barrels being destroyed, but
There are no animated figures being blown to bits, right?
Further removing viewers from the actual
lethal consequences of these weapons.
Now, I know by this point, I probably sound like
an anti-war, tree-hugging beta male,
YUP.
But this kind of coverage should worry you
even if you think these specific strikes were justified.
We can’t make informed decisions about
if and when to use military force if cable news
is selling us a glamorized version of what violence looks like.
If we’re focused on weapons and focused on
how mighty our military is, then we’re not thinking
about the consequences.
We’re not thinking about what happens when
those weapons actually hit their targets.
When you see someone like Brian Williams
fawning over Tomahawk missiles,
he’s not being a monster.
He’s showing what happens when tools of violence
become disconnected from their real consequences.
When corporate media treats weapons like
a product to be packaged and sold for higher ratings.