Portraying Libya: the «Free Media» and the «Common Vision»
Sergei Shashkov
Strategic Culture Foundation
The task of the media is to portray situations in line with the powerful decision-makers' needs rather than to reflect reality.
The media have long evolved into a kind of auxiliary warfare, and, in terms of their impact, now almost rank with weapons of mass destruction.
The West maintains a number of media-related institutions which, in the majority of cases, are integrated into defense or security agencies, serving to feed carefully tailored information to the audiences and to influence the public opinion. Part of their mission is to instill robotically unwaivering support for military campaigns including bombings and occupations of sovereign countries while justifying tolerance, oftentimes temporary, in dealing with others…
The corresponding techniques are being permanently refined. The contrast between the former information campaigns — those which paralleled the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia in 1999 and preceded the «democratization» of Iraq in 2003 - and the current one around Libya highlights the impressive progress made by media technologies along with the striking buildup of cynicism over the relatively short period of time…