Herbert Schiller

The triumph of image over reality and reason is the theme of this book. New communication technologies have made possible the transportation of images and words in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world. We thought we witnessed the Gulf War as we sat, mesmerized by the imagery. But the studies from the many countries assembled

Hidden from public sight and mind today are invisible crises that threaten our democracy and existence more than the crises we know about?or think we know about. These invisible crises include the promotion of practices that drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; cults of violence that desensitize, terrorize, and brutalize; the growing s

Hidden from public sight and mind today are invisible crises that threaten our democracy and existence more than the crises we know about?or think we know about. These invisible crises include the promotion of practices that drug, hurt, poison, and kill thousands every day; cults of violence that desensitize, terrorize, and brutalize; the growing siege mentality of our cities; widening resource gaps and the most glaring inequalities in the industrial world; the costly neglect of vital institutions such as public education and the arts; and media-assisted make-believe image politics corrupting the electoral process. Deprived of sustained attention but bombarded by eruptions of surface consequences (often presented as unique events stripped of historical context), people ar bewildered, fearful, angry, and cynical. The contributors to this volume?exploring such unattended crises, analyzing why they are hidden, and focusing on the increasing concentration of culture-power that keeps them from view?maintain that a profound general crisis of social vision, public communication, and representative government underlies all of the invisible crises.

THE TRIUMPH OF IMAGE over reality and reason is the theme of this book. New communication technologies have made possible the transportation of images and words in real time to hundreds of millions of people around the world. We thought we witnessed the Gulf War as we sat, mesmerized by the imagery. But the studies from the many countries assembled for this book suggest that it was not the war in the Persian Gulf that we witnessed but rather imagery orchestrated to convey a sense of triumph and thus to achieve results that reality and reason could never have achieved. The book offers contributions from thirty-five authors in eighteen countries, including short samplings from the media of several regions. The authors explore the social, economic, and political context of media coverage in their countries, the domination of one image in most of them, and the struggle for alternative perspectives. The authors probe the dynamics of image-making and pose some challenges for the future as well as provide us with a unique glimpse of how the world outside of the United States (as well as many Americans) viewed the war in the Persian Gulf and how the dynamics of image-making and information control operate. Triumph of the Image will be useful to scholars and students in communications and mass media, international relations, political science, cultural studies, propaganda, censorship, and contemporary history as well as to the general public.