The blindness of contempt is more hopeless than the blind-
ness of ignorance; for contempt kills the light which is ignorance
mereley leaves unignited.
– Rabindranath Tagore, East and West, 1922
Norms and values, as well as information, are transmitted to audiences in overt and covert ways via the news media. In the event of a conflict, the news media, with its growing ability to define 'reality', is all too often expected to take on the task of creating public consensus, of contributing its patriotic bit. This means abandoning a questioning stance and highlighting certain issues at the expense of more uncomfortable ones that go against the dominant script. In order to project unity, rhetoric about national and cultural identity gets revived, even invented, in order to stimulate feelings of homogeneity within groups, and to identify the enemies as 'they'. While this phenomenon holds true in much of the western ('international') media's coverage of global events, it was particularly evident in the weeks leading up to the war in Iraq, with the underlying elite consensus structuring facets of the news, choosing subjects and framing issues in a manner that consequently limited what the public read/saw in the name of news.
The mainstream (and overwhelmingly corporate) media in America under-reported the massive and unprecedented anti-war protests seen all across the world, including in the US. Once the war broke out, this popular opposition went even more under-reported in the Anglo-American media. Biased towards elite actors – the 'newsmakers', as the media constantly reminds us – this omission was justified in terms of the lack of formal political opposition, with US Democrats and British Conservatives backing their respective governments in the war on Iraq.