Chapter 13 Irish Media, Iraq and the Charge of Anti-Americanism

The charge of anti-Americanism is, in short, an essentialising device to regu-late political difference. It seeks to deny the possibility of a hybrid political identity, to propagate the myth of a unified America, and to fix public dis-course on a closed range of positions. The enduring symbolic power and authority of the anti-American trope, what Said (1991) might describe as its false universalism, have been lamented by many. Yet, in accordance with the propagandised imperatives of wartime (Nohrstedt, Kaitatzi-Whitlock, Ottosen and Riegert, 2000: 384), some commentators predictably sought to reduce international media and political discourse about the 2003 Iraq war to the terms of this emotive label. This chapter considers the charge of anti-Americanism as part of a gen-eral investigation of how the Iraq war and diplomatic crisis were represented in a specific sample of Irish1 media texts. It is not arrogating itself as a chronicle of all the interesting Irish media coverage; nor is it claiming to be a compre-hensive discourse analysis of the selected texts. Instead, the focus is on those aspects of the texts – within the particular sample – that help illuminate the constructivist grounds of the anti-American charge. This chapter addresses three interrelated concerns: how the selected Irish media texts represent the Iraq war and diplomatic crisis; how the selected media texts represent the spectrum of anti-war/pro-war stances; and what characteristics of the media coverage leave some Irish media open to the charge of anti-Americanism from other media actors. The current articulation of the anti-American charge in an Irish media context can be seen as part of the fallout of a post-September 11 shift in US journalistic culture that seeks to align – more transparently than before – ‘certain preferred discourses of “patriotism ” and “professionalism” ’ (Zelizer and Allan, 2002: 15), renounce the ‘pretence ’ of journalistic ‘objectivity ’ (or at least a particular interpretation of the objectivity principle)2, and brand any resistance to elite propaganda discourse as an elite discourse in its own right. It is exemplified by the Sunday Independent journalism of Eoghan Harris (see below), who indicts both The Irish Times and RTE3 for their ‘consisten