When global media don’t ‘play ball’: the exportation of coercion

The face of journalism has changed massively as a result of the 2001 attacks in the United States and that nation’s self-styled ‘war on terrorism’. Those changes have been chronicled in recent collections,1 and more will surely follow, but I would like to use this journal debut to describe a ‘post 9/11’ phenomenon simultaneously too veiled and too hegemonic to have received much notice from academy or industry commentators. While American and British ruling elites2 are exercising unprecedented control over international representations of their policies, analysis of the systematic ‘new spin’ is sparse. The new propaganda and coercion are clearly integral to US foreign policy, but the extent to which they are coordinated and sanctioned is often unclear; less ambiguous is how brutally effective they have become.