National mythology and media coverage: Mobilizing consent for Canada's war in the gulf

Abstract

Although Canada joined the United States, Britain, France, and Italy in taking up offensive combat roles in the Gulf War, it was a most reluctant warrior. Canadian mass public opinion and elite opinion (as measured by newspaper editorials) showed fragile and readily reversible support for Canadian military participation. Support depended on the presence, particularly in television network news, of a portrait of the conflict that cast it as a mythological replay of World War II, in which Canada went to war with Britain and France, without the United States, in support of its League of Nations obligations, to emerge victorious and thus rid the world of Hitlerian atrocities against defenseless British, European, and Jewish civilians. To feature this combination of actors playing their historic roles in news stories on the Gulf required the Canadian government to mount a major program of opinion and media monitoring and management and to alter the timing and content of Canadian policy to keep it within the bounds of the 1939–1941 myth. This opinion monitoring was aided by a Canadian media community with little knowledge of military matters and a reliance on newsbeats focused on those countries highlighted in the 1939–1941 myth, by Iraq's succession of tailormade atrocities against Canadians and their friends, and the willingness of the United States to conduct the war in a way that met the specifications of Canada's 1939–1941 myth.

Key words:

• Canada
• media
• myths
• opinion
• Persian Gulf conflict
• television