The Role Of Global Media In Manufacturing And Dissolving Enemy Images

The systematic construction of enemy images through mass media is about a century old, and we can name the inventors.

Wellington House (1914–1917). Britain's War Propaganda Bureau, run out of an unmarked building in London, was the first industrial-scale operation to engineer enemy perception in a democratic society. The directors — Charles Masterman among them — recruited the biggest novelists of the age (Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Thomas Hardy) to produce pamphlets, illustrated books, and articles depicting Germans as barbaric, subhuman, or demonic. The Bryce Report of 1915 catalogued German atrocities in Belgium — many fabricated, some exaggerated, a few real — and was translated into thirty languages. The goal wasn't to inform. It was to make American entry into the war emotionally inevitable. It worked.

The Creel Committee (1917–1919). Once the US joined the war, the Wilson administration created the Committee on Public Information, headed by journalist George Creel. Within eighteen months it had produced 75 million pieces of propaganda, trained 75,000 "Four Minute Men" to deliver patriotic speeches in theaters, and established the template that Edward Bernays — Freud's nephew and the so-called father of public relations — would later translate into commercial advertising. Bernays himself said the quiet part out loud in his 1928 book Propaganda: "The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society."

Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (1993–1994). RTLM was the most efficient genocide accelerant of the twentieth century. It broadcast Tutsi-dehumanizing content for months — calling them "inyenzi" (cockroaches) and "inzoka" (snakes) — read out the addresses of people to be killed, and played upbeat music between kill orders. The ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) convicted three of its operators in 2003 of direct and public incitement to genocide. The court's finding matters: media, by itself, with no weapons, was ruled a genocidal instrument.

Contemporary domestic enemy-making. The "enemy within" frame is older than Fox News or MSNBC or any specific outlet, but cable news perfected its 24-hour variant. A 2019 study in the American Political Science Review by Martin and McCrain found that when Sinclair Broadcast Group acquired local TV stations, coverage shifted measurably toward national political conflict and away from local reporting, and viewers' ideological positions polarized. The mechanism isn't ideology. It's the attention economy.

Why does this work? Because the human brain evolved in small groups where knowing who was "us" and who was "them" was a survival skill. The amygdala processes outgroup faces differently than ingroup faces — studies at NYU (Phelps et al., 2000) and Harvard (Cikara et al., 2011) have repeatedly shown heightened amygdala activation and reduced medial prefrontal cortex activity (the region associated with perceiving others as having minds) when subjects view dehumanized outgroups.

The dehumanization effect is measurable. Harris and Fiske's 2006 fMRI study at Princeton showed that when subjects viewed images of homeless people or drug addicts — categories their culture had coded as subhuman — their medial prefrontal cortex barely activated. They were, neurologically speaking, not seeing people. They were seeing objects.

This is the substrate the propaganda exploits. The brain already has a template for "not fully human." Media decides what gets poured into it.

The same neural architecture that makes dehumanization possible makes rehumanization possible. And we have a hundred years of evidence for what works.

Parasocial contact. Schiappa, Gregg, and Hewes (2005) coined the "parasocial contact hypothesis" — the finding that sustained media exposure to a specific, named, individuated member of an outgroup reduces prejudice toward the whole group, even without real-world contact. This was how Will & Grace shifted American attitudes toward gay men in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It's how Parts Unknown shifted attitudes toward Iranians, Palestinians, Vietnamese, Congolese. It's how The Great British Bake Off accidentally became one of the most effective integration arguments in Britain by casting Muslims, Hindus, immigrants, and pensioners as neighbors who bake together.

Specific storytelling over statistics. Paul Slovic's research on "psychic numbing" shows that the more people are affected, the less we feel. One dying child mobilizes the world. A million dying children is a policy matter. This is why the photograph of Alan Kurdi — one drowned Syrian toddler on a Turkish beach, September 2015 — did more to shift European public opinion on refugees in 72 hours than four years of statistics. Not because numbers don't matter, but because the human moral system runs on faces.

The contact principle, applied at scale. Gordon Allport's 1954 contact hypothesis — that prejudice reduces under four conditions (equal status, common goals, cooperation, institutional support) — was originally meant for in-person contact. Modern meta-analyses (Pettigrew & Tropp, 2006) confirm the effect across 515 studies and half a million participants. What media does, at its best, is simulate the conditions of contact at civilizational scale.

Here's where we face the current crisis honestly.

In 1983, 50 companies owned 90% of American media. By 2012, that was six. Globally, the picture is similar: a handful of corporations — Disney, Comcast, Paramount, Sony, Tencent, a few others — own most of the entertainment and news machinery 8 billion humans consume. Consolidation isn't abstract. It means:

- Local news collapse. Since 2005, more than 2,900 US newspapers have closed (Northwestern's Medill School, 2024). "News deserts" now cover 200+ counties with zero local coverage. When local news dies, people fill the gap with national partisan content. The enemy image thrives in the vacuum.

- Foreign bureau collapse. The major American networks had bureaus in dozens of countries in 1980. Most have a handful now. Coverage of other countries is done by flying someone in for a crisis, which means "other countries" only appear in the American media diet as disasters — reinforcing the enemy-image default.

- Algorithmic amplification of outrage. Facebook's own internal research (leaked by Frances Haugen in 2021) showed that its 2018 algorithm change, which prioritized "meaningful social interactions," systematically amplified content that produced anger and moral outrage because those were the emotions that produced the most engagement. The company's researchers flagged it. Leadership kept it. This is not a bug. It's the business model.

If we were serious about Law 1 — we are human — media would look structurally different. Not in the content of any single story, but in the incentive architecture. Some of what works, historically and currently:

- Publicly-funded, independent broadcasters. The BBC's World Service, NHK World, Deutsche Welle, and ABC Australia reach hundreds of millions of people with content insulated (imperfectly but substantially) from corporate ad pressure. Countries with strong public media consistently show higher rates of knowledge about foreign affairs and lower polarization (Aalberg et al., 2013, in European Journal of Communication).

- Cooperative models. The Associated Press is owned by its member newspapers. Reuters operates under a Trust structure designed to protect editorial independence. These aren't perfect, but they resist the enshittification curve because their incentive isn't shareholder return.

- Solutions journalism. The Solutions Journalism Network has trained thousands of reporters to cover how problems get solved, not just how they explode. Studies (Curry & Hammonds, 2014) show readers of solutions stories feel more informed and less hopeless — and hopelessness, it turns out, is a precondition for accepting enemy-image narratives.

- Long-form direct-from-source media. Podcasts like Rough Translation, documentaries like Fire of Love or For Sama, YouTube channels run by people in the places being covered — these bypass the middleman and let the specificity through. The whole logic of dehumanization requires that the target not speak. Direct-from-source breaks it.

Before you believe, forward, or feel moved to action by a piece of media about any group, run these four checks. This isn't a trick to make you apathetic. It's a trick to make you accurate.

1. Is the group named as a category or as specific individuals? Categories flatten. Names don't. 2. Whose voice tells the story — theirs or someone else's about them? The gap between those two is where the enemy image lives. 3. What emotion is this content engineered to produce? If the answer is outrage, fear, or contempt, you're downstream of an ad-tech algorithm, not a journalist. 4. Who profits from me believing this? Not cynically — just honestly. If the answer is a political campaign, a weapons manufacturer, a cable network, or a billionaire's portfolio, adjust accordingly.

1. The enemy audit. Pick one group you've noticed yourself hardening toward in the last year. Spend two hours consuming media made by that group — not about them. Not a political figure. Ordinary people. Filmmakers, cooks, workers, musicians. Write down what shifted. If nothing did, note that too.

2. The specific-human search. Next time a news story names a category — "migrants," "protesters," "settlers," "rioters," "Chinese," "Russians" — go find one specific human in that category and read or watch something they made. Not about the news event. About anything.

3. The incentive trace. Pick one piece of outrage content from your feed this week. Spend 20 minutes tracing who owns the outlet, who advertises on it, what the algorithmic amplification pattern looks like. You won't always get to the bottom. The practice is the point.

4. The direct-from-source diet. For one week, replace one media source with a direct-from-source alternative (local journalist from the region, in-country podcast, first-person documentary). Track whether your sense of the world gets more accurate or less.

5. The story you're telling. Audit your own output for the last month — texts, posts, conversations. Where did you flatten a group? Where did you repeat an enemy image without checking? This isn't for guilt. It's for calibration.

- Bernays, Edward. Propaganda (1928). - Schiappa, Gregg, & Hewes, "The Parasocial Contact Hypothesis," Communication Monographs (2005). - Harris & Fiske, "Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low," Psychological Science (2006). - Pettigrew & Tropp, "A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2006). - Slovic, Paul. "Psychic Numbing and Genocide," APA Science Brief (2007). - Martin & McCrain, "Local News and National Politics," American Political Science Review (2019). - Haugen, Frances. Testimony and leaked Facebook Files, US Senate (2021). - Medill School of Journalism, The State of Local News (annual, Northwestern). - International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Nahimana et al. judgment (2003). - Bourdain, Anthony. Parts Unknown (CNN, 2013–2018).

The fact that we can manufacture enemies is not the problem. The fact that we currently get paid to do so is the problem. Change the incentive, and the same tools that made us enemies to each other can make us legible to each other. The machinery isn't evil. It's pointable. Point it.