Social Text 96
from
Enemy Voice
Jonathan Sterne
. . . Since the earliest radio legislation in 1910 and 1912, the U.S. government has given the military priority over the airwaves. In World War I, this lead to a near shutdown of civilian broadcasting. During World War II, this led to the elimination of call-in shows that were believed to provide a possible medium for th enemy forces to pass along coded messages. Thus Condoleeza Rice’s concern regarding the threat of bin Laden’s voice aims to situate him in a long tradition of American enemies. Her appeal to bin Laden’s charismatic power evokes old ideas concerning leaders and crowds–that the crowd will blindly follow the leader, whose charisma will whip them into a kind of frenzied obedience. It also nicely follows the “third person effect,” the belief that the media content will affect other people more than it will affec the analysts making the “effects” claim. W. Phillips Davison, in his classic article outlining the idea, shows how politicans, censors, military strategists, and academics all base important decisions on their beliefs about how media content will affect other people differently than it affects themselves. . . . The bin Laden tape was simply the latest in a long series of platforms to prop up these ideas about the political effects of enemy speech. At the same time, these entirely conventional ideas about mass communication were used to domesticate and “make sense of” his November 2002 tape, to establish protocols for behavior and responses to it.