Book Review: The Battle for the Mind: War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication

Abstract

The Battle for the Mind: War and Peace in the Era of Mass Communication. Gary S. Messinger. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011. 293 pp. $80 hbk. $28.95 pbk.This book provides an introduction to a crucial current issue-the growing importance of journalism, public relations, and communication media in war and peace-essential background these days for journalists, journalism scholars, and their students. In fact, as the author demonstrates throughout the book and concludes in his last sentence, war, peace, and mass communication are now inextricably interwoven.Wars are no longer territorial; they are now ideational, fought largely over issues of religion, politics, race, or ethnicity. They are battles for the mind, not for places or things-a war fought only for oil, for example, would bring worldwide condemnation unless couched in some other rationale. Thus, communication is a growing part of the arsenal of war and increasingly essential to peace.Historian Gary Messinger, currently an administrator at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, develops his thesis chronologically, starting in 1850 and ending with wars in the aftermath of 9/11. This is more a history of mass media than of war or peace, showing how the changing technology of communication has altered warfare, as much if not more than the changing technology of weapons.Covering nearly 160 years of history in 250 pages makes The Battle for the Mind necessarily an introductory outline; the basic framework largely will already be known to most of those who will read this book. But it's in the details-the connections among media, war, and peace-that this book makes an important contribution to our understanding.As a short work covering a lot of territory, the book sometimes misses crucial matters in historical development. By starting in 1850, it totally ignores the eighteenth century, although there were already important signs of what was to come during the American Revolution, when active pursuers of a war with Britain formed Committees of Correspondents to compose press releases sent to colonial newsletters to agitate public opinion for war.Messinger also skips lightly over the last half of the nineteenth century, devoting only two paragraphs to the Civil War, ignoring the significant influence of antislavery newspapers, books, and pamphlets as well as the efforts of Abraham Lincoln to control the press. It shortchanges the rise of mass-circulation newspapers and magazines in the 1880s and 1890s as tools for war or peace, and it devotes less just a few sentences to the Spanish-American War, making no effort to deal with William Randolph Hearst's use of his newspapers to promote, or perhaps start, the war.But as the technologies of mass communication evolve, Messinger shows, these changes affect war and peace. …