The press is always seen as a weapon of war by officials, and it is so seen by the Pentagon and the Bush administration today. Reporters and editors obviously feel that, and the pressures that flow from it in all sorts of complex ways. Whether consciously or not, it's striking how such perceptions shade and limit even individual stories, alter small language choices, and the nature of what passes for evidence. In the context of Iraq, the testimony of refugees may not be much valued in the American press, for instance, but the testimony of generals is. And so, to give a simple example, when Bradley Graham of the Washington Post reports on a “surge of detainees” from recent U.S. operations in Fallujah and elsewhere that is “putting stress” on U.S. prisons in Iraq and “providing the biggest test yet of new facilities and procedures adopted in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal this past spring,” who does he quote on the subject – don't worry, we can handle it, all is going well – but Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commandant of Guantánamo (of all places) and the man who reputedly brought “Guantánamo methods” to Abu Ghraib before the torture and abuse scandal broke. None of this is even mentioned, of course; nor, unlike in the stories from Grozny, do we hear from any of those detainees who might have recently passed through Abu Ghraib and had the enviable chance to see movies there or use its library. (“For the most cooperative prisoners, there are movies and a library.”)
Read Graham's report for yourself. If you believe it, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to sell you. Try then to imagine a similar piece, written without question or quibble, about the Russian equivalents of General Miller in either Afghanistan or Chechnya. So it goes.
[NOTE: The sources for quotes used throughout this piece are:
Two leading quotes: Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 4908 – Afghanistan Day, March 10, 1982; and “father” of the Russian H-bomb and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov, addressing the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies as Soviet Troops withdrew from Afghanistan, quoted in Coll, Ghost Wars, p. 177.
Composite Afghan paragraphs: James Rupert, “Dreams of Martyrdom Draw Islamic Arabs to Join Afghan Rebels,” Washington Post, July 21, 1986; Ronald Reagan, “Statement on the Situation in Afghanistan,” December 27, 1981, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (Washington: Federal Register Division, National Archives and Records Service, General Services Administration); Leslie Gelb, “Officials Say U.S. Plans to Double Supply of Arms to Afghan Rebels,” New York Times, November 28, 1984; Joseph Kraft, “The Afghan Chaos,” Washington Post, March 12, 1981; Orrin G. Hatch, “Don't Forget the Afghans,” New York Times, November 22, 1985; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars; Amnesty International, “Afghanistan: Making Human Rights the Agenda,” November, 2001; William Branigin, “Feuding Guerrilla Groups Rely on Uneasy Pakistan,” Washington Post, October 22, 1983.
Composite Grozny paragraphs: Daniel Williams, “Brutal Retreat From Grozny Led to a Killing Field,” the Washington Post, February 12, 2000; Michael Wines, “In the Remains of Grozny, the Remains of Living,” New York Times, December 4, 2001; Sharon LaFraniere, “Despite Russian Assurance of Safety, Chechen Capital Lives Under Siege,” Washington Post, June 25, 2001; LaFraniere, “Chechen Refugees Describe Atrocities by Russian Troops,” Washington Post, June 29, 2001; “Chechen Horror,” Boston Globe, February 29, 2000.]
1. For the source of each of these quotes, see the end of this chapter.—Ed.
1. New York: Penguin Press, 2004.
THE EDITORS' GLOSS: This enlightening contribution from two thoughtful scholars at the Center for Media and Democracy might come as a shock to those who are fortunate enough not to have to watch much television. This chapter, adapted from their book, Weapons of Mass Deception, is a stark look at the ditto-head, “no-spin” culture of neocon broadcasting, along with some interesting research and a few telling statistics, the most important of which might well be this from the Gulf War I era: “The more TV people watched, the less they knew …. Despite months of coverage, most people do not know basic facts about the political situation in the Middle East, or about the recent history of U.S. policy towards Iraq.” The study quoted also revealed “a strong correlation between knowledge and opposition to the war. The more people know, in other words, the less likely they were to support the war policy.”
On February 17, 2003, the British Guardian ran a revealing piece about print coverage in the English-speaking world outside the U.S. Its secondary headline said it all: “Rupert Murdoch argued strongly for a war with Iraq in an interview this week. Which might explain why his 175 editors around the world are backing it too.” What the Guardian and Stauber and Rampton pieces highlight is a problem that has long been lamented by media “watchdogs” but ignored by the general public. People think they're getting “news” offered by independent, “fiercely objective” reporters. What they actually get is spin and, worse, a wholesale endorsement of the government's position, rather than a candid look at the pros and cons of government policies.
There is a bright spot, though. The Guardian piece reported that in at least one of Murdoch's papers – the relatively tiny Papua New Guinea Courier Mail – a voice of some sanity was heard as America and Britain marched to war in February 2003. “The UN inspectors have so far not found any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. How can a civilised country attack another country without any proof of misconduct?” What a breath of fresh air!
Unfortunately it was just a letter to the editor.
CHAPTER
33
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Air War
………
John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton
THE NEWS MEDIA offer two basic services to people who are trying to understand the world: information gathering and information filtering. For people who are trying to change the world, the media provide a third essential service: publicity. These days, the service of information gathering has been supplanted to a significant degree by the Internet, where it is now possible to access information and opinions instantly about a wide range of topics from a virtually infinite choice of sources. The task of filtering all that information, however, has become more important than ever. The broadcast media claim that they deserve the attention of their audiences because their information is produced by professional journalists with expertise and ethical standards that enable them to separate the wheat from the chaff.
In reality, each media outlet filters the news according to a set of priorities and biases that are often not disclosed to its audience. The FOX News Network, for example, pretends to offer “fair and balanced” reporting in which “we report, you decide.” To see what this means in practice, read the following excerpt from a “fair and balanced” interview conducted by Bill O'Reilly, who calls his program, The O'Reilly Factor, a “no spin zone.” On February 24, 2003, O'Reilly interviewed Jeremy Glick, whose father was one of the people killed on September 11.1 Unlike O'Reilly, Glick opposed the war in Iraq and had joined with thousands of other Americans in signing a public declaration to that effect. For space reasons, we have edited the exchange, but this excerpt will give you the flavor:
O'REILLY: You are mouthing a far left position that is a marginal position in this society, which you're entitled to.
GLICK: It's marginal – right.
O'REILLY: You're entitled to it, all right, but you're – you see, even – I'm sure your beliefs are sincere, but what upsets me is I don't think your father would be approving of this.
GLICK: Well, actually, my father thought that Bush's presidency was illegitimate.
O'REILLY: Maybe he did, but …
GLICK: I also didn't think that Bush …
O'REILLY (cuts him off): … I don't think he'd be equating this country as a terrorist nation as you are.
GLICK: Well, I wasn't saying that it was necessarily like that.
O'REILLY: Yes, you are …. All right. I don't want to …
GLICK: Maybe …
O'REILLY (cuts him off again): I don't want to debate world politics w
ith you.
GLICK: Well, why not? This is about world politics.
O'REILLY: Because, number one, I don't really care what you think ….
GLICK: But you do care because you …
O'REILLY (cuts him off again): No, no. Look …
GLICK: The reason why you care is because you evoke 9/11 …
O'REILLY (cuts him off again): Here's why I care.
GLICK: … to rationalize …
O'REILLY (interrupts again): Here's why I care …
GLICK: Let me finish. You evoke 9/11 to rationalize everything from domestic plunder to imperialistic aggression worldwide ….
O'REILLY: You keep your mouth shut when you sit here exploiting those people …. You have a warped view of this world and a warped view of this country.
GLICK: Well, explain that. Let me give you an example of a parallel-O'REILLY (cuts him off again): No, I'm not going to debate this with you, all right.
GLICK: Well, let me give you an example of parallel experience. On September 14-O'REILLY: No, no. Here's – here's the …
GLICK: On September 14 -
O'Reilly cuts him off several more times; whatever happened on September 14, Glick never gets the chance to say.
O'REILLY: Man, I hope your mom isn't watching this.
GLICK: Well, I hope she is.
O'REILLY: I hope your mother is not watching this because you – that's it. I'm not going to say anymore.
GLICK: OK.
O'REILLY: In respect for your father …
GLICK: On September 14, do you want to know what I'm doing?
O'REILLY: Shut up! Shut up!
GLICK: Oh, please don't tell me to shut up.
O'REILLY: As respect – as respect – in respect for your father, who was a Port Authority worker, a fine American, who got killed unnecessarily by barbarians …
GLICK: By radical extremists who were trained by this government …
O'REILLY: Out of respect for him …
GLICK: … not the people of America.
O'REILLY: … I'm not going to …
GLICK: … The people of the ruling class, the small minority.
O'REILLY (to his producer): Cut his mike. I'm not going to dress you down anymore, out of respect for your father. We will be back in a moment with more of THE FACTOR.1
Reasoned debates between people with opposing views can provide a useful way of clarifying and understanding the issues that separate them, but viewers who watched The O'Reilly Factor came away with no better understanding of the respective worldviews of Glick and O'Reilly than they had before watching the show. As O'Reilly stated, he doesn't really care what Glick thinks, and he assumes that his viewers don't care either. Why have him as a guest at all, then? Because what the program is really offering is not discussion but entertainment – the voyeuristic, sadistic thrill of watching someone get beat up, just like a bullfight or World Wrestling Smackdown. O'Reilly's viewers understand this point implicitly. On the day of the broadcast, FreeRepublic.com, a conservative web site, received postings from O'Reilly fans who gloated over the exchange with comments including the following:
“O'Reilly wanted to kick that little punk's ass!”
“I was waiting for Bill to punch him out. What a piece of crap Glick is.” “It was very entertaining.”
“Bill should have $itch-slapped that punk-@ss fool.”
“His family will never know how lucky they are that it was O'Reilly only telling him to shut up. Had it been me or my husband, I think America would have been witness to a murder on-air and few juries would have convicted us!”2
Of the 219 comments posted to this discussion thread (not counting comments that were deleted because the moderator considered them excessive), 31 advocated subjecting Glick to some form of actual physical violence or humiliation. For O'Reilly and his fans, television is a form of combat – specifically, the “air war.” This fact is implicit in O'Reilly's description of his program as “no-spin zone” – a deliberate reference to the “no-fly zones” that U.S. jets imposed over Iraqi airspace. As O'Reilly himself has said, a “no-fly zone” and a “no-spin zone” are “the same thing. Violate the rules, get shot down.”1
The Patriotism Police
Bill O'Reilly's fan club at FreeRepublic.com represents the “ground war” that accompanies his air war against “liberal media bias.” The ground war – grassroots organizing and pressure – is directed by well-funded organizations such as the Media Research Center (MRC), a conservative “media watchdog.” MRC has an annual budget of $7.8 million – roughly ten times the budget of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the most prominent media watchdog on the left.2 MRC sends out daily email alerts to its list of more than 11,000 followers, detailing the alleged thought crimes of media figures such as Dan Rather and Peter Jennings, encouraging the followers to rain complaints onto networks that fail to toe the correct line on Iraq and other issues. In the wake of 9/11, this lobbying took on new intensity. The New York Times reported in September 2001 that TV networks were “increasingly coming under criticism from conservatives who say they exhibit a lack of patriotism or are overly negative toward the government.” As MSNBC president Erik Sorenson told the Times, “Any misstep and you can get into trouble with these guys and have the Patriotism Police hunt you down.”3
Other attacks on the press have come directly from the Bush administration. After television personality Bill Maher made remarks following 9/11 that were perceived as critical of past U.S. bombing campaigns, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told journalists that Americans “need to watch what they say, what they do. This is not a time for remarks like this; there never is.”4 In response to complaints about restrictions on civil liberties, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified before Congress, characterizing “our critics” as “those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty; my message is this: your tactics only aid terrorists – for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America's enemies, and pause to America's friends. They encourage people of good will to remain silent in the face of evil.”1
Dennis Pluchinsky, a senior intelligence analyst with the U.S. State Department, went further still in his critique of the media. “I accuse the media in the United States of treason,” he stated in an opinion article in the Washington Post that suggested giving the media “an Osama bin Laden award” and advised, “The President and Congress should pass laws temporarily restricting the media from publishing any security information that can be used by our enemies.”2
FOX Network owner Rupert Murdoch has brilliantly exploited the current political environment, in which even extreme nationalistic rhetoric is accepted and popular, while liberals and critics of the White House are pressured to walk softly and carry no stick at all. In addition to FOX, Murdoch owns a worldwide network of 140 sensationalist tabloid newspapers – 40 million papers a week, dominating the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia and New Zealand – all of which adopted editorial positions in support of war with Iraq.3 In the United States, his New York Post called France and Germany an “axis of weasel” for refusing to support Bush's war plans and published a full-page cover doctored photo with the heads of weasels superimposed over the faces of French and German ministers at the United Nations.4 In France, his paper distributed a story calling French President Jacques Chirac a “worm,” illustrated by a large graphic of a worm with Chirac's head.5
This sort of imagery has historical precedents. Author Sam Keen, who examined the iconography of war in his 1986 book, Faces of the Enemy, notes that during wartime, countries frequently produce cartoons, posters and other art that attempts to dehumanize their enemies by “exaggerating each feature until man is metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect …. When your icon of the enemy is complete you will be able to kill without guilt, slaughter without shame.”1 The use of this extreme imagery against erstwhile allies simply for refusing to endorse the U.S. war push represented, in sym
bolic terms, the Murdoch media's interpretation of the Bush doctrine that “if you are not with us, you are with the terrorists.”
At MSNBC, meanwhile, a six-month experiment to develop a liberal program featuring Phil Donahue ended just before the war began, when Donahue's show was cancelled and replaced with a program titled “Countdown: Iraq.” Although the network cited poor ratings as the reason for dumping Donahue, the New York Times reported that Donahue “was actually attracting more viewers than any other program on MSNBC, even the channel's signature prime-time program, Hardball with Chris Matthews.”2 A different story appears, however, in an internal NBC report leaked to AllYourTV.com, a web site that covers the television industry. The NBC report recommended axing Donahue because he presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives.” It went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”3At the same time that Donahue got the heave-ho, MSNBC added Michael Savage to its line-up, who routinely refers to non-white countries as “turd world nations” and charges that the U.S. “is being taken over by the freaks, the cripples, the perverts and the mental defectives.” In one broadcast, Savage justified ethnic slurs as a national security tool: “We need racist stereotypes right now of our enemy in order to encourage our warriors to kill the enemy,” he explained – a fairly straightforward summary of Sam Keen's thesis.4
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