All the President's Media: How News Coverage of Sanctions Props Up the Power Elite and Legitimizes U.S. Hegemony

A substantial body of scholarship, emerging over decades, links U.S. media coverage of international affairs to foreign policy objectives. This is disturbing because it not only brings into question the supposed independence of the media as an institution—a basic normative expectation in a democracy—but also because people depend primarily upon the media for learning and forming opinions about foreign affairs. In this study, we look at 10 years of news coverage of U.S.-led economic sanctions against three adversaries—Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela—in major print and broadcast media. We contend that the coverage not only serves the interests of what Mills (2000/1956) called the power elite—the country’s political, corporate, and military brass—but also reinforces the legitimacy of U.S. hegemony in global politics.