Seeing Through the Media

The New Republic airbrushed a Hitler mustache on Saddam Hussein. CNN reporters described the bombing of Baghdad as "fireworks on the Fourth of July." The Pentagon fed prepackaged programs to the TV networks. Veiled Arab women became icons of an exotic culture. These are some of the ways the media brought home the war in the Persian Gulf as a national spectacle. Looking to old and new technologies for mass communication-from CNN to comic books, from international news agencies to tabloids, from bomb sights to the Super Bowl-the essays in this collection show the ways in which public information is shaped, packaged, and disseminated.