Why the Commercial Mass Media Reports War but Not Peace
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 6 Jul 2026
David Adams | Transition to a Culture of Peace – TRANSCEND Media Service
1 Jul 2026 – As I write in this month’s CPNN bulletin, “the commercial mass media is filled with stories about wars and the threat of wars around the world and they are not reporting news for peace.’” Why is this?
When I wrote my History of the Culture of War almost 20 years ago, it seemed that the answer was simple. The state itself had become the culture of war, and to justify this cultue, they used the commercial mass media to convince their voters that they had a foreign enemy against which it was necessary to prepare for war.
Today, this remains evident in countries where the mass media is directly controlled by the state, for example, Russia and China.
In the United States when it was waging the Vietnam War, the CIA embedded agents in all the major mass media to make sure they maintained that Vietnam was an enemy that needed to be attacked. This was revealed In 1975 and 1976 when the US Senate held hearings presided by Senator Frank Church. As the account in Wikipedia says “In 1977, the reporter Carl Bernstein wrote an article in the Rolling Stone magazine, stating that the relationship between the CIA and the media was far more extensive than what the Church Committee revealed. Bernstein said that the committee had covered it up, because it would have shown ’embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.’”
Bernstein published in Rolling Stone because he was not able publish his article in the major commercial media. What he said is that the CIA had placed agents in all these media to control its reporting about war and peace. When this fact came out in the hearings, they were closed to the public and kept secret.
Are there still CIA agents in the American mass media today? We don’t know, but it is no longer so necessary because the major commerecial media are now owned by billionaires who are themselves invested in the military-industrial-media complex.
As Paul Krugman states in one of his recent substack articles:
“. . . great wealth has been used to corrupt the media. Elon Musk bought Twitter, not as a financial investment, but to turn it into the right-wing fever swamp it has now become. Larry Ellison, America’s second-richest man, purchased CBS basically to destroy it as an independent news source and convert it into Fox News 2.0, a goal he is achieving — and he is now on track to do the same to CNN.”
The same is happening in other countries.
In France, a recent report by the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) coalition and Reporters Without Borders states the following:
“Six industrial groups now control the majority of France’s national media landscape. Bolloré’s Vivendi empire is the most prominent example, and it encompasses CNews, Canal+, Europe 1, the Journal du Dimanche, Paris Match, and Prisma Media – France’s largest magazine group. . . . Bolloré’s empire also stands out for his support for politically contentious, extreme views, and direct interference over newsroom editorial policies, raising concerns over the mainstreaming of far-right ideas within the French media landscape.”
Similarly, “Mexico’s booming media industry is controlled by some of the richest businessmen on earth.”
I suppose that this concentration of media power in the hands of the military-industrial-media complex is occurring in many other countries, but I have not conducted a survey.
In general, all this makes all the more necessary that alternative media such as CPNN can continue to give us the slow news of peace.
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Dr. David Adams is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment and coordinator of the Culture of Peace News Network. He retired in 2001 from UNESCO where he was the Director of the Unit for the UN International Year for the Culture of Peace. Previously, at Yale and Wesleyan Universities, he was a specialist on the brain mechanisms of aggressive behavior, the history of the culture of war, and the psychology of peace activists, and he helped to develop and publicize the Seville Statement on Violence. Send him an email.
Go to Original – decade-culture-of-peace.org
Tags: Alternative Media, Corporate Media, Culture of War, Mainstream Media MSM, Peace Journalism, War Journalism
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