Tina it was one of the nicknames Margaret Thatcher received during her iron and lead tenure. It was the acronym of There Is No Alternative (there is no alternative), the phrase he used when he wanted to impose his position without having to reason it out. Presenting things as inevitable is a tricky dialectical resource, because it places the other at the disadvantage of having to defend a proposition that has already been profiled as unrealistic, utopian or naïve. Militarism knows a lot about using this technique to defend its unsavory multi-million dollar investments. And the media are often too complicit and let Tina score a goal between our legs.
This is what emerges from a Media.cat study with some relevant conclusions. After studying a long sixty articles on the escalation of armaments in recent months, published in a series of media (including the ARA, but there are only statistics of the whole), it turns out that 78% of the pieces they can be seen as favorable to militarization. Three-quarters of the news articles (thus excluding opinion pieces) have only government or expert sources in favor of rearmament and confrontation. Even more: the concept “there is no alternative” appears in 49 of the articles studied. Journalism feeds on conflict and opposing forces: we are drawn to narratives that present a clash and a resolution. But this can inadvertently lead us journalists to feed the expensive militarist game by assuming that the only possible order is through a sinister cross-network of nuclear warheads pointing at each other. “Give peace a chance” Lennon sang. Journalists, who are mostly pacifists, could make it their own.
