War coverage was tightly controlled by the military, limited to rotating pools of accredited reporters, closely monitored by a military attache.57 The major media accepted this censorship with few complaints. NBC anchor Tom Brokaw was downright sympathetic: “Officers remember Vietnam and, in fairness to them, some got burned.” So “understandably” they didn’t want the press “to cause the same damage again.”58 New York Times managing editor Joseph Lelyveld was equally accommodating: “The First Amendment gives us the right to publish just about anything. It does not give us the right to go just about anywhere.”59 Thus he ignored both ordinary logic and the body of constitutional law that say the right to publish is closely connected with the right to have access to newsworthy locations and sources.
It remained for small dissident media like the Nation, the Guardian (NY), Harper’s, and Pacifica Radio News to sue the government, claiming that the military’s censorship violated the First Amendment. The mainstream press not only refused to join the suit, it gave the case scant coverage.60
The worse censorship came not from the military but from the press itself, in its one-sided and ideologically loaded coverage and commentary.61 News organizations punished those few who deviated from the official line. As noted in an earlier chapter, NBC president Michael Gartner suppressed footage on the destruction of Basra and forbade Jon Alpert, a twelve-year stringer for NBC who shot the film, from ever working for the network again. San Francisco Examiner columnist Warren Hinckle was suspended for three months for being too critical of Bush s war. Several radio talkshow hosts and local newspaper editors were fired or forced to resign because of criticisms they raised about the war.62
The media played down the human costs of the war. There were continual replays of on-target bombings, but no replays of the many missiles that missed their targets. The military emphasized the precise “surgical” nature of the aerial and artillery strikes. Indeed, the attacks were surgical in that they systematically destroyed the industrial life-support systems of Iraqi society. However, over 90 percent of the bombings involved free-falling gravity bombs that hit anything standing or moving with a total of 85,000 tons of explosives, or the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs.
A great superpower used its tremendous technological might to pound a small nation into submission, and the media gave the event a positive framing. Here was a clean war with no visible casualties. A Newsweek cover headline actually read: “THE NEW SCIENCE OF WAR, HIGH-TECH HARDWARE: HOW MANY LIVES CAN IT SAVE?”63 Few Iraqi dead and no American dead were shown on television or in newspaper photos. Tens of thousands of retreating Iraqis were massacred by allied bombers but news pictures showed only wrecked vehicles. When representatives from several dissident publications went to the major photo services for more graphic shots, there were none to be found. The clerks had been instructed to destroy any photographs showing dead bodies.64
At no time during the war did the major media estimate the number of Iraqis killed. As with Vietnam, Grenada, and Panama, only American lives counted. NBC commentator John Chancellor concluded: “The most important thing to be said” about the war is that “there were very few casualties.”65 But the London Sunday Times quoted “senior Pentagon officials” who concluded that “as many as 200,000 Iraqis may have died in the Gulf war.”66 This report was ignored by the US media.
Iraqi losses were briefly revealed when CNN’s Peter Arnett produced footage from Baghdad of hundreds of deaths caused by the US aerial destruction of a civilian bomb shelter. But the mainstream media quickly dismissed the incident. NBC’s Tom Brokaw was insistent: “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm’s way.”67 CBS correspondent Ron Allen shrugged it off: “Iraq is trying to gain sympathy.” After giving us a brief glimpse of the Baghdad casualties, a “MacNeil-Lehrer” commentator dismissed them as “heavy-handed manipulation.” CBS’s Mark Phillips intoned: “Saddam Hussein promised a bloody war, and here [is] the blood.”68
US forces consistently violated the Geneva Conventions in their unrestrained aerial attacks on civilian populations, on fleeing troops, and on facilities necessary to sustain civilian life, such as hydroelectrical systems, water treatment plants, residential neighborhoods, and the like. The media never correctly labeled these attacks as war crimes, preferring to gloss over them with military euphemisms like “surgical strikes,” “collateral damage,” and “target-rich environments.”
If there were war crimes, the press would have us believe they were committed exclusively by Iraq. One of the media’s favorite propaganda horror stories was of Iraqi soldiers pillaging Kuwaiti hospitals and tossing 312 babies from incubators. The Washington Post carried references to this fantasy some ten times during the Gulf crisis.69 Only after the war ended did a few newspapers passingly acknowledge that the atrocities never happened. Buried on an inside page of the Post in the middle of a long article was a one-sentence quote from a Kuwaiti doctor indicating that the incubator story was false. The Times offered a hedging two-sentence retraction toward the end of a long article: “Some of the atrocities that had been reported, such as the killing of infants in the main hospitals shortly after the invasion, are untrue or have been exaggerated, Kuwaitis said.”70 Of the various television networks only ABC briefly acknowledged the falsity of the incubator atrocities.71
US pilots were viciously beaten and tortured while prisoners of war—or so the news media had many of us believing. Pictures of captured pilots, whose faces showed signs of bruises and cuts, were repeatedly run in the broadcast and print media. “TORTURE AND TORMENT ... HOW WILL THE CAPTIVES FARE UNDER IRAQ’S BRUTAL TREATMENT?” is how Newsweek headlined its cover story.72 We were repeatedly reminded that such mistreatment was a war crime. Thus were the roles of victim and victimizer reversed. Pilots, who perpetrated criminal acts by raining death and destruction upon civilian populations, were themselves depicted as victims of war crimes. In rare instances, traces of the truth could be found, as in the passing comments buried in a Washington Post story: There were “no indications that any [US captive] had been tortured,” and the Red Cross observed “all prisoners in rather good shape.”73
The media began reporting some of the human costs, after the war was over and only when Hussein could be designated the culprit. Saturation coverage was given to the plight of fleeing Kurds stranded on mountainsides. New York Times columnist Leslie Gelb wrote about “Iraqi forces slaughtering Kurds and Shiites.” And NBC’s John Chancellor charged that Hussein was “slaughtering his own people.”74 Neither Gelb nor Chancellor nor any other major commentator had used “slaughter” to describe the far more ferocious war waged by President Bush against the Iraqi people.
PASSING MENTION OF THE TRUTH
US pilot Jeffrey Zaun—whose bruised face was repeatedly displayed by the media as evidence of Iraqi war crimes—revealed after his release that most of his wounds were self-inflicted in an attempt to disfigure himself and thus avoid being put on television by Iraqi authorities. Zaun also voiced regrets about the human costs of the war and his role in the bombings. This sensational revelation was ignored by just about all the mainstream media. It took the Washington Post (June 11, 1991) more than three months after Zaun went public to finally run its first honest headline on the subject: “EX-POW ZAUN DESCRIBES SECOND THOUGHTS ON WAR, FLIER BRUISED HIMSELF HOPING TO AVOID TV.” The New York Times (June 10, 1991) carried a brief AP dispatch buried on p. B4, captioned: “U.S. PILOT SHOT DOWN IN IRAQ REGRETS HUMAN COSTS OF WAR.” But a Times editor must have had second thoughts; the following day the report was rewritten and headlined: “AMERICAN FLIER SHOT DOWN IN IRAQ RECOUNTS HORRORS AFTER CAPTURE.”
Well after the war was over, the dying continued. A United Nations mission reported that living conditions in Iraq were at crisis level:
Nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country. The recent conflict has wrought near-apocalyptic resu
lts upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has, for some time to come, been relegated to a pre-industrial age, but with all the disabilities of postindustrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology.75
The report went on to describe horrendous conditions of hunger, disease, and death. These sensational findings received slight mention, if any, in the US press. The United Nations had once more become an invisible organization.
After a trip to Iraq, a Harvard study team reported in June 1991:
Without electricity, water cannot be purified, sewage cannot be treated, water-borne diseases flourish and hospitals cannot cure treatable illness.
Therefore, the increased incidence of mortality and morbidity [and] the deterioration of the medical system are linked to the destruction of Iraq’s electrical power system in the Gulf war.76
This finding, too, was largely ignored by the media. ABC and the Washington Post briefly reported that cholera threatened in Iraq.77 But little explicit mention was made about the health crisis.78
Richard Haas, a special assistant to President Bush, noted that during the Gulf war, television was “our chief tool” in “selling our policy” at home and abroad.79 Indeed, the White House and the Pentagon should have paid the mainstream press for the way it reported the crisis. The press gave almost no attention to what critics said were the real reasons for the war: to protect the interests and profits of the oil cartels, to beat another Third World nation into economic submission, to boost the military budget and obliterate talk of “peace dividends,” to drive the savings and loan scandal off the evening news, and to bolster President Bush’s image as a bold and courageous leader.80 Lacking critical information and argument to the contrary, the public rallied around the troops and treated the war as a just undertaking.
Vietnam, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq: Whenever leaders choose to make war, the press joins up. In 1923, referring to an earlier war, British journalist Philip Gibbs wrote: “We identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field... . There was no need of censorship of our dispatches. We were our own censors.”81
Propaganda Themes
Most news biases are so consistent and political in nature as to suggest that they are the outcome of influences larger than the imperfect efforts of individual reporters. Regardless of who is involved in manufacturing the news, one can detect persistent themes in how the mainstream press presents our country’s role in the world to us. Here are some of those themes.
AMERICAN VIRTUE AND “ANTI-AMERICANISM”
The press sometimes will criticize US foreign policy as “ill-defined,” or “overextended,” but never as lacking in virtuous intent. To maintain this image, the news media say little about the US role in financing, equipping, training, advising, and directing the repressive military apparatus that exists in US client states around the world, little about the mass killings of entire villages, the paramilitary death squads, the torture and disappearances.1
The brutality does not go entirely unnoticed. But press reports are usually sporadic and sparse, rarely doing justice to the endemic nature of the repression, rarely, if ever, showing how the repression functions to protect the few rich from the many poor and how it is linked to US policy. Thus when Time magazine devoted a full-page story to torture throughout the world, the US came out looking like Snow White.2
Following the official line, the national media will readily deny that the United States harbors aggressive intentions against other governments, and will dismiss such charges by them as just so much “anti-American” propaganda and as evidence of their aggressive intent toward us. Or the media will condone the aggressive actions as necessary for our national security or implicitly accept them as a given reality needing no justification.
For instance, in 1961 Cuban right-wing emigres, trained and financed by the CIA, invaded Cuba, in the words of one of their leaders, to overthrow Castro and set up "a provisional government” that “will restore all properties to the rightful owners.”3 Reports of the impending invasion circulated widely throughout Central America, but in the United States, stories were suppressed by the Associated Press and United Press International and by all the major networks, newspapers, and newsweeklies. In an impressively unanimous act of self-censorship, some seventy-five publications rejected a report offered by the editors of the Nation in 1960 detailing US preparations for the invasion.4 Fidel Castro’s accusation that the United States was planning to invade Cuba was dismissed by the New York Times as “shrill ... anti-American propaganda,” and by Time as Castro’s “continued tawdry little melodrama of invasion.”5 When Washington broke diplomatic relations with Cuba in January 1961 (after Castro started nationalizing US corporate investments and instituting social programs for the poor), the Times explained, “What snapped U.S. patience was a new propaganda offensive from Havana charging that the U.S. was plotting an ‘imminent invasion’ of Cuba.”6
Yet, after the Bay of Pigs invasion proved to be something more than a figment of Castro’s anti-Americanism, there was almost a total lack of media criticism regarding its moral and legal impropriety. Instead, editorial commentary referred to the disappointing “fiasco” and “disastrous attempt.”7 Revelations about the full extent of US involvement, including the CIA training camp in Guatemala, began to appear during the post-invasion period in the same press that earlier had denied such things existed. These retrospective admissions of US involvement were discussed unapologetically and treated as background for further moves against Cuba.8 Perspectives that did not implicitly assume that US policy was well-intentioned and supportive of democratic interests were excluded from media commentary.
The media dismiss conflicts that arise between the United States and popular forces in other countries as manifestations of the latter’s “anti-Americanism.” During the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, when ABC asked an “expert” whether being a Shiite Muslim meant being “anti-American,” he replied that it did.9 Over footage of Muslim crowds chanting “God is great,” ABC commentator Frank Reynolds voiced what he supposed was their real meaning: “hatred of America.” Similarly, CBS’s Walter Cronkite spoke of “Muslim hatred of this country.”10 When thousands marched in the Philippines against the abominated US-supported Marcos regime, the New York Times reported, “Anti-Marcos and anti-American slogans and banners were in abundance, with the most common being ‘Down with the U.S.-Marcos Dictatorship!’ ” n A week later, the Times again described Filipino protests against US support of the Marcos dictatorship as “anti-Americanism.”12
OPPOSITION TO US POLICY = SICKHEADED ANTI-AMERICANISM
For decades the United States gave military aid to dictator Somoza of Nicaragua, who, in turn, opened his country to US corporate investors on terms most favorable to them. The Sandinista popular rebellion overthrew the dictatorship and sought to change Nicaragua’s client-state status, a course that brought them into conflict with Washington. But writing in the Boston Globe (May 8, 1985), columnist William Shannon explained it all this way: “[The Sandinistas] hate America. This is understandable given their limited education and their years spent in exile, in prison, or in the hills battling what they perceived as an American-backed dictatorship.” Shannon rules out the possibility that “what they perceived” might have had a basis in reality. By leaving unmentioned the role the US played in supporting the Somoza regime, he can reduce the Sandinistas anti-imperialist policy to an anti-Americanism, an ignorant subjective attitude caused by too little education and too many embattled experiences. Why else would anyone feel unfriendly toward US policy?
After noting that the Ethiopian revolution of 1974 “grew out of a general despair with prevailing conditions, without much ideology behind it,” the Washington Post concluded the revolution had an “anti-American thrust.”13 More accurately, the revolution might have been called anti-feud
al and anti-imperialist. Protests in Mexico, Argentina, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other Latin American nations against CIA counterinsurgency have all been reduced by the American press to expressions of “anti-Americanism.” The same description was applied to the protests in England, Germany, and other Western nations against the placement of US cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe during the early 1980s.
The mainstream media begin with the unexamined premise that US foreign policy is above reproach (except for operational criticisms as to its efficacy). Therefore, if masses of demonstrators and rioters in other countries denounce that policy as imperialistic and oppressive, it can only be because they suffer from “anti-Americanism,” that is, they have an inexplicable hatred of America and Americans. “Anti-Americanism” is treated as an irrational hostility toward the American people rather than a possibly justified hostility toward the imposing and oppressive nature of US policies. By that view. West Germans did not dislike us for putting nuclear missiles on their soil, rather they opposed the missiles because they disliked us.14 The press ascribes the opposition directed against US policies to some kind of nationalistic prejudice within the protestors and thus ignores the substance of the protest.
THE NONEXISTENCE OF IMPERIALISM
While Washington policy-makers argue that US overseas intervention is necessary to protect “our interests,” the press seldom asks what “our interests” are and who among us is actually served by them. As we have seen in regard to Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and other cases, “defending US interests” usually means imposing a client-state status on nations that might strike a course independent of, and even inimical to, global corporate investment. This is rarely the reason given in the national media. Rather, it is almost always a matter of “stopping aggression,” or “protecting our national security,” or punishing leaders who are said to be dictators, drug dealers, or state terrorists.
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