"An important and timely collection that exposes the breadth and depth of the media manipulation threatening U.S. democracy."--Douglas Kellner, University of Texas at Austin

The New Republic airbrushed a Hitler mustache on Saddam Hussein. CNN reporters described the bombing of Baghdad as "fireworks on the Fourth of July." The Pentagon fed prepackaged programs to the TV networks. Veiled Arab women became icons of an exotic culture. These are some of the ways the media brought home the war in the Persian Gulf as a national spectacle.

Looking to old and new technologies for mass communication-from CNN to comic books, from international news agencies to tabloids, from bomb sights to the Super Bowl-the essays in this collection show the ways in which public information is shaped, packaged, and disseminated.

The contributors include Venise T. Berry, Victor J. Caldarola, Dana L. Cloud, Tom Engelhardt, Cynthia Enloe, H. Bruce Franklin, Daniel C. Hallin, Kim E. Karloff, Michelle Kendrick, Margot Norris, Lauren Rabinovitz, Leonard Rifas, Therese Saliba, Ella Shohat, Holly Cowan Shulman, Mimi White, and Robyn Wiegman.

Susan Jeffords is the director of Women's Studies and a professor of English at the University of Washington. She is the author of Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (Rutgers University Press) and The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Lauren Rabinovitz is an associate professor of American Studies and Film Studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Points of Resistence: Women, Power ,and Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema.

o Shows how the media shaped public understanding of the Gulf War

o Explains how the media responds to a social crisis

o Highly readable

o Analyzes new relationships between war and culture