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Lorenzo's
Random Musings
. . . about Chaos,
Reason, and Hope

 

The American Mass Media Put Itself At The Service Of The State
(Christiane Amanpour and Nicholas von Hoffman, Index for Free Expression, 18 September 2003)
the war was mostly mirage, something that evidently escaped the notice of the hundreds of correspondents sent to cover it. What one overheated television reporter compared to the Battle of the Somme was little more than what in Los Angeles they call a drive-by shooting. . . . It is only a mild exaggeration to say that American service personnel in Iraq were in greater danger from absent-mindedly-driven Coca-Cola trucks than from the opposing army, which had less firepower than that deployed by the police department in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. . . . The news that there was no war because the other side was paid to take a family leave day was picked up by Fred Kaplan, one of the best military journalists about, who published these good tidings on the internet in Slate magazine on 20 May � and there the story died. . . . None the less, the proposition that the Iraqi military had been paid to take a dive was supported by occasional puzzled dispatches filed out of Baghdad in the days immediately prior to the commencement of the bombing, reporting that no preparations for war were visible. No sandbagging, no evacuations, no mobilisation of air-raid wardens or medical personnel were evident. Here was a capital city of five million people under threat of imminent invasion and bombardment and it was business as usual. . . . If it wasn�t a war, then what was it? Probably something akin to a turkey shoot. The press duly and diligently reported on the tens of thousands of bombs dropped on the Iraqi military. What got skipped over was that the turkeys could not or would not shoot back. . . . It is the tales of heroic derring-do in the face of a completely defenceless opponent that cause the cynical to cock a suspicious eyebrow. We can only speculate as to why so little was made of the battle-free nature of the conflict. At least three reasons suggest themselves. . . . 1) The lazy intellectual torpor afflicting not a few American journalists. . . . 2) The embarrassment print and broadcast media would face if they were to tell their publics: �Whoops! That war, those heroes, those bloodcurdling, tear-jerking scenes we have been entertaining you with for weeks on end � well, it didn�t happen.� . . . 3) Although you might conclude that the United States government would have a motive to step forward and claim for itself a humane, non-lethal, non-destructive kind of warfare, that�s not the reputation which the fire-eating, Israelised bellicists in the Pentagon want. The public relations policy pursued in those precincts is the old Roman one of oderint dum metuant. In short it�s fear, not love, they seek to inspire. . . . In that spirit Rachel Corrie, a young American woman making her non-violent protest by being killed standing in front of a rampaging Israeli bulldozer in Gaza, was a one-day story. . . . In contrast there is Private Jessica Lynch . . . Thanks to the foresight of the military, an army TV cameraman was brought along lest these heroic doings go unrecorded. For several days afterwards Jessica and her friends dominated all the US news channels. It remained for Canada�s Toronto Star to discover that there were no guards preventing Private Lynch from leaving the hospital, only a group of non-fiendish Iraqi medics doing their best to heal her wounds. The paper wrote that �the so-called daring rescue was essentially a Hollywood-style stunt�. . . . However much war may depress advertising and ruin the news budgets of the big media corporations, it gooses the ratings and it makes stars of the on-air performers. And heroes, too. HBO ran the movie Live from Baghdad, a full-length docudrama glorifying war whoredom. War packaged as a reality show played around the clock on the news channels as the journalistic war profiteers promoted themselves and their careers. . . . Seldom has ambition revealed itself as vividly as it did in the glistening eyes of the reporters, their happily agitated voices, their perturbed, gulping deliveries, the stagy bathos concealing their erotic delight in the cannon�s comforting boom and the machine gun�s reassuring chatter. Simply put, the American mass media put itself at the service of the state. . . . History tells us that when the United States went to war in the twentieth century, American journalism was among the first to enlist. . . . A belief persists that the mass media parted company with the government over the Vietnam War, but it didn�t. From the start the media backed the Vietnam War to the hilt, only occasionally arguing with the government over the best way to win it. . . . If George Bush said �it�s a war� or said �it�s a dinosaur�, that�s what the media saw and that�s what the media said. . . . Most American mass media most of the time contain little or no foreign news. All but a couple of hundred of the nation�s thousands of radio stations broadcast no news at all, literally not a word. In peacetime, television stations and newspapers, with perhaps 25 exceptions, skip coverage of events abroad. . . . American CNN is bubble-head news. It is an unwatchable gallimaufry of crime, scandal, tear-jerker reunions and the like. In peacetime the functions of mass media are advertising, entertainment and inculcating the norms and opinions that a nation, terrified of disunity, wants in its people. . . . This could even be said of such top-notch media as the New York Times, which often functions as an American Osservatore Romano, the semi-official publication of the government and the leading elites and power groups outside government. To the practised reader there are days when the Times�s front page looks more like a bulletin board of leaks and announcements from major private and public institutions than a newspaper printing independently gathered information. . . . It is the third, less widely reported uproar involving Judith Miller, a star foreign correspondent, that is causing consternation. In the lead-up to the invasion and afterwards, Miller was the principal Times correspondent writing about weapons of mass destruction. . . . Her copy has been an unending warning that the Iraqis were ready, willing and able to let loose a nightmare of carnage on an innocent world. Since other, less prestigious publications and much, if not most, of television take their cue from the Times, her stories solidified the conviction that these weapons existed and were aimed at the American heartland. . . . It is reasonable to assume Miller�s work played no small part in building popular support for the war in the face of scepticism almost everywhere else. Long before her weapons of mass destruction hit the page, Miller�s critics, mostly other foreign correspondents and think-tankers, had come to believe that she is less of a reporter than a conduit through which powerful people and institutions get their side of the story out. . . . Their suspicions about Miller were confirmed when it popped out that her main source for her weapons stories is Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi exile with a troubled past whom the White House and the Pentagon once hoped to govern their newly conquered territory. It also came out that at least one of her stories concerning WMDs had been all but dictated and edited by the army before Miller sent it to the Times, which put it on its front page. . . . No major news organisation evinced doubts that the famous �smoking gun� would be found, and now that it is turning out to be a dribbling water pistol, the subject is passed over everywhere in near silence. . . . Only one United States senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, fully, completely and unqualifiedly opposed the invasion of Iraq. . . . Ham-handed propaganda movies like the odious Saving Private Ryan are taken to be historical truth by the great unwashed and by the editorial writers. The country is soaked in false, inaccurate, distorted and self-adulatory histories. Thanks to these media, America is coming to see itself as the dissed democracy of generosity, goodness and valour which is met by ingratitude, spite and envious hatred, the natural consequence of being better than everyone else. . . . George W Bush has a four-person team doing for him what the 1930s movie maker Leni Riefenstahl did for Adolf Hitler, that is prepare backdrops heavy with symbolic meaning for presidential appearances. The pledge of allegiance has become a tool of social intimidation. One is pressured to recite it in the classroom, on the athletic field, at theatrical events and at the commencement of every kind of meeting. . . . The singing of the national anthem is incessant. Athletic events begin with an �Oh, say can you see� and are interrupted midway for a rousing chorus of �God Bless America�. The country is taking on a hue and tone reminiscent of the authoritarian state. As it does so, the distinction between patriotism and militarism is getting blurred.

posted by Lorenzo 9:56 AM