US Media and the Road to War with Iran (1)

Thursday February 23, 2006

The following article is by Arash Norouzi an artist and co-founder of The Mossadegh Project

As the U.S. modifies the rationale for its preemptive invasion of Iraq, the U.S. mainstream media continues to pander to intolerant and partisan denominators vis-à-vis Iran. Despite massive government intelligence failures concerning the September 11, attacks, the heartbreaking devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the perversely flawed intelligence on non-existent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, major media outlets persist in rushing to judgment on the manufactured Iranian nuclear energy. It is a sickening display.

The irregular reporting is nothing new. American media, in complicity with the U.S. government, has waged a no-holds barred image war with Iran ever since it broke diplomatic relations following the Islamic Revolution. It is safe to say that approximately 99% of the U.S. media coverage of Iran over the past 25+ years has been negative, and of that, about 99% is of a political nature. Therefore, although politics is but one facet of life, Iran, its people, its culture, and its history are perceived almost entirely through a political vacuum. In this way, Iranians remain an abstraction in the American consciousness, perfectly situated for slaughter should circumstances desire.

The image war officially began in 1979, after large mobs of Iranian students and revolutionaries, demanding the U.S. extradition of the exiled Shah to Iran, stormed the U.S. “den of spies.” The spy hostages issue was a national obsession, prompting ABC executives to create a especially devoted TV program, named “The Iran Crisis: America Held Hostage,” to update Americans on the situation day by day. After the spy hostages were released, the program endured as the newly christened Nightline news program.

Incessant media coverage of the event contributed not only to American demonization of Iran, but helped wreck President Jimmy Carter's re-election ambitions. In fact, the prolonged debacle “probably cost Carter his presidency,” and acknowledged the power of the U.S. media to effect reality in a 2004 Nightline broadcast recollecting the hostage days.

Since the spy hostage problem was only possible because of the 1953 US-backed CIA coup which deposed popular Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the hated Shah. And yet, did you know that in all that time, all those years of covering Iran and the spy hostage hysteria – American leaders never once spoke of the 1953 coup, never once uttered the word “Mossadegh”?

In fact, Mohammad Mossadegh's name was mentioned only two [2] times in the Nightline history -- on July 11, 1988 as part of a report on the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 by the USS Vincennes and on June 18, 2003 during a panel discussion on Iran.

The one thing that the U.S. media are not talking about, because it somehow seems indelicate or impolitic or even inappropriate, is the simple fact of the matter that while the U.S. did not go to war because of Iraq's oil, America did, in fact, go to war because it is absolutely essential to the national interest, not only of the U.S. but also of the Europeans and of the Japanese, that the Persian Gulf remain stable. America has administrations going back to the Eisenhower administration and has been intervening in the Persian Gulf in one form or another. America overthrew the Iranian Prime Minister Mossadegh that is, the CIA did, precisely because it felt he was too close to the U.S. opposing Parties at that time and American leaders were afraid.

As long as America had the Shah of Iran there, he was our surrogate. In fact, you may remember the Nixon policy was that the shah would be our surrogate in the Persian Gulf. When the shah was overthrown, we shifted our chips onto the Saudi board, and then it became the House of Saudi that became our representative. The Saudis are indeed, troubled. The royal family of Saudi Arabia is in deep trouble. Therefore, we need to have a stable Iraq in order to guarantee a stable Persian Gulf, and the name of that game is oil. Nobody talks about that.

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Falling Down on the Job on Labor Coverage

Thursday February 9, 2006

The following article is by Peter Dreier, Professor of politics and Director of the urban and environmental policy program at Occidental College.

Union activists and allies are buzzing about The Times' critical four-part series on the United Farm Workers. But many wonder why the newspaper devoted so many words and resources to this front-page attack on the United Farm Workers but fails to routinely cover the day-to-day job conditions that workers face.

You can usually count on The Times to cover unions when they strike. When several major unions recently bolted to form an alternative labor group, the U.S. newspaper ran several stories about internal union disputes that led to the rupture and the possible consequences for the labor movement.

Two years ago, The Times' series on Wal-Mart's treatment of its workers and worldwide business operations won several top journalism prizes. But you'll search the paper in vain for similar coverage of the following labor issues:

• Where was The Times' exposure on the U.S. federal government's failure to regularly inspect mines and enforce mine-safety laws before the recent tragedy at the Sago mine in West Virginia?

• Where was the Page 1 takeout on the U.S. federal government's devastating budget cutbacks for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration that is the major workplace health and safety agency? And on n the Department of  the U.S. Labor's failure to adequately enforce wage-and-hour laws? Or on the current National Labor Relations Board, which lets companies that routinely violate labor laws and workers' rights, invalidate union organizing?

• Why aren't American media reporters regularly writing stories on the exploitative working conditions in the region's garment sweatshops, many of which operate within blocks of the paper's downtown offices? Shouldn't there be frequent stories on whether state and federal agencies are regularly inspecting these sweatshops and punishing employers who pay their workers less than the minimum wage or force them to work overtime without pay?

• Why doesn't The Times regularly cover the exciting efforts of such unions as Unite Here, the Service Employees International Union, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the California Nurses Association to organize hotel workers, janitors, security guards, grocery workers, nurses and other healthcare employees?

• Why doesn't The Times report on the responsible employers who work cooperatively with unions and treat American workers with respect, and contrast them to companies that spend enormous resources to undermine their workers' rights?

• Why relegate most union news to the paper's Business section? Indeed, since there are vastly more employees than business owners in Greater Los Angeles, why doesn't The Times create a Labor section?

Up until the 1980s, most major American newspapers, including The Times, had a regular labor reporter. Today, few papers, The Times among them, have even one reporter exclusively assigned to cover labor.

That may be a consequence of declining union membership. But The Times serves a metropolitan area that has become the U.S. capital of the working poor, where more than 800,000 workers are union members and where labor union membership is actually growing.

In fact, the paper should have several reporters covering labor unions and workplace issues full time.

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Media's War Images Delude Instead of Inform

Thursday February 2, 2006

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an American Columnist and U.S. media Critic.

The picture was perfect. It provided a moving portrait, an image that journalists called 'ICONIC'.  It was true to the moment. Yet the photograph was deceiving in a way that media images often are, showing audiences what's more apparent than real.

One day, during the second week of November 2004, millions of Americans saw the photo. Blake Miller's face was grimy, but his eyes were clearly visible. Wisps of smoke appeared to be rising from the long cigarette that dangled from his lips. At the time, Marines were fighting their way into Fallujah, and American news outlets went obscure in the subject. At age 20, Blake Miller suddenly became a famous model.

Blake Miller a wartime American soldier doing his grim duty. But his mother, from a small town in Kentucky, had this to say on the CBS show: "I'm proud and he may be an icon, but to me, he's my baby. He's my son. And I just want him home."

American Media outlets were eager for the icon, but not for too much reality. Overall, little of war's terrible fear and suffering and death was apt to come through news coverage.

Around the time of the November 2004 assault on Fallujah, Robert Acosta 21-year-old former U.S. Army specialist, who lost his right hand after a grenade landed next to him in Baghdad, said "A lot of people don't really see how the war can mess people up until they know someone with firsthand experience. I think people coming back wounded -- or even just mentally injured after seeing what no human being should have to see -- is going to open a lot of eyes."

But American journalists tend to be enthusiastic about providing icons. And it's unusual when one catched a media glimpse of what happens in human terms.

On the third day of 2006, when the man in the iconic photo returned to the CBS airwaves on "The Early Show," this time the mood was more somber. "Blake Miller made it home from the war,". But like many of his comrades, he wasn't able to completely put it behind him. While on duty during the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, Blake Miller suffered from symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and was granted an honorable discharge from the Marines.

Blake Miller described what had happened on board a ship when he heard a sailor imitate the noise from an incoming rocket-propelled grenade: Miller said "A guy was making a whistling sound. The sound actually sounded like an RPG "And without even knowing what I'd done until after it was over, I snatched him up, I slammed him against the wall, and took him to the floor. And I was on top of him."  

The real person Blake Miller, not the media icon, said: "I'm continuing my therapy. I continued up until the day I got out." And, speaking of other Americans who had fought in Iraq, he said: "The more and more I talked to them, the more I found out that there was a lot of Marines that were going through the same, similar emotions. And I mean, it's -- it's tough to deal with. I mean, being in Iraq is something that no one wants to talk about."

As an American soldier in an "iconic" photo, Blake Miller was newsworthy for a little while. But in sharp contrast to the media enthusiasm that greeted him back in November 2004, there was no major media coverage in the days after "The Early Show"  the CBS, revealed on Jan. 3 that he's suffering from posttraumatic stress. For the warfare state, he has outlived his usefulness.

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At Last, Good War Coverage

Thursday January 12, 2006

The following article is appeared on the Editorial of the Capital Times.

The Madison-rooted humorous weekly finished off the year with a headline that summed up the unspoken reality of 2005. The headline read: "U.S. troops draw up own exit strategy."

It appeared above an article that began: "BAGHDAD Citing the Bush administration's ongoing refusal to provide a timetable for withdrawal, the U.S. troops stationed in Iraq have devised their own exit strategy."

At the end of a year that saw the U.S. death toll in the war rise above 2,200, and the toll of wounded go to more than 10 times that number, there is still an assumption on the part of much of the media that the U.S. military is enthusiastic about this war. There is also an assumption that the withdrawal of U.S. forces would be difficult. Both assumptions are wrong, as any serious examination of recent events will confirm.

When Vice President Dick Cheney who is perhaps the most ridiculous cheerleader for the war, visited Iraq just before Christmas, he was confronted by the reality of frustrated troops. Even in the highly controlled context of a meeting between carefully selected soldiers and the vice president, the first comment to Cheney came from Marine Cpl. Bradley, who said, "From our perspective, we don't see much as far as gains. We're looking at small-picture stuff, not many gains."

Of course, Cheney was not listening because when he said, "We're in this fight to win. These colors don't run," not one of the troops clapped, not one of the troops cheered.

But some other officials have been listening, and recognizing the reality on the ground.

One of the few members of the U.S. Congress who went to Iraq and actually spent serious time with commanders and their troops, U.S. Representative. John Murtha, a Vietnam Veteran with close ties with Pentagon, changed his position from one of supporting the war to one of supporting a quick withdrawal.

So The Onion was not far off the mark with its imagining that U.S. troops in Iraq would want to devise an exit strategy.

Nor was The Onion's imagining of a plan to get the troops out of Iraq at a very rapid rate unrealistic. Indeed, one of the worst failings of most major media in the United States has been the acceptance of the Bush-Cheney line that there is no easy or smart way out of the mess they got American troops into.

Representative John Murtha's call was met with cries of complaint from arm-chair warriors in Washington. Yet john Murtha, a decorated Vietnam veteran with close ties to the Pentagon, has devised a plan to get all the troops out of Iraq in six months, and he echoes the view of many military strategists who say that the faster the U.S. forces and their allies leave, the faster Iraqis will step up to their responsibilities and the country will begin to stabilize.

So, as American people end another year in which the U.S. corporate media generally got the story of the war in Iraq wrong, they have to trust to The Onion for imagining dramatically more accurate coverage of the conflict than that from most of the major broadcast and cable television networks, talk radio and all too many newspapers.

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Just a Change of Masters for Iraq Press

Thursday December 29, 2005

The following article is by Julia Baird, an American Columnist and media Critic.

In a speech to the International Republican Institute, George Bush said democracies were built on common foundations and included fundamental rights: "First, all successful democracies need freedom of speech, with a vibrant free press that informs the public, ensures transparency, and prevents authoritarian backsliding."

The revelations that the US military troops have been paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories they wrote themselves are alarming.

This is not how one establishes a democracy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the US military has been working through a Washington defense contractor named the Lincoln Group, which translated their stories into Arabic, and peddled them to media outlets, offering to pay money and posing as freelance journalists or advertising executives. The stories were critical of insurgents, praised US attempts to restore democracy to Iraq and were mostly presented as independent, unbiased news reports. They have also been paying monthly stipends to some Iraqi journalists.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise that such footage are given free to television stations across America. Some stations played them without attribution. In 2002, the Pentagon closed the Orwellian-sounding Office of Strategic Influence, after stories ran in the press alleging they had developed plans to place false stories in the global media.

But the main reason these recent reports are such a shame is because the Iraqi dependent media will destroy the credibility of US efforts to train and support a free and independent media within Iraq, casting suspicion over any Iraqi journalists trained by, or working with, American corporate media.

Working conditions are difficult, and dangerous enough, for journalists in Iraq.

Recent research by a New York Times foreign correspondent, David Rohde, at Harvard University this year found that while the US spent (267.4 million dollars) in two years on media development in Iraq which is six times more than it has ever spent on this elsewhere - efforts to establish a free press have largely failed.

David Rohde, attributes this to the closure or banning of media outlets in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 by the Coalition Provisional Authority and Iraq Governing Council, a failure to train privately owned media, counter-productive attempts to influence coverage and a lack of security for journalists. According to Freedom House, a non-profit, non-partisan monitoring group, the rating of press freedom in Iraq has declined since 2003, largely due to "instability, escalating violence and unanswered questions about the power and role of new institutions created to regulate the media".

New York Times correspondent Rohde concluded that: "Two years after the invasion of Iraq, the country has not become the symbol of press freedom that American officials envisioned. Indeed, American policies, have curtailed the establishment of a free media in Iraq and undermined the broader cause of spreading true democracy in the Middle East."

Just a few days ago the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, was crowing about the success of the media campaign in Iraq, saying the hundreds of TV and radio stations and newspapers that sprang up between 2003 and 2004 were a "relief valve" for the Iraqis. It's true that this boom, along with the developing of satellite dishes and internet connections was a welcome precursor of the end of Saddam Hussein's rule.

But these privately owned companies are precisely those the US failed to support, when they chose to concentrate instead on reforming a large state-owned network.

There have certainly been historical precedents for this. One unnamed American military official told reporters that Baghdad's "Information Operations Task Force" has bought an Iraqi television station and newspaper, which have been running pro-US reports.

Bush was right - a vibrant, transparent free press is critical to the health of his false democracy in Iraq. It's also critical to the health of what is called democracy in the U.S.

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Bad News

Thursday December 22, 2005

The following article was taken from the Editorial of Boston Globe.

The Bush administration undermines the democracy when it trashes the principles of a free press. Reports in the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times on how the US government pays Iraqi journalists to write, and newspapers to publish, pro-American pieces without naming the source, exposing an ethical violation and disregarding the truth.

Then again, maybe it shouldn't be so surprising, given that the Bush administration has scorned open journalistic inquiry since its earliest days and has used the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Iraq war to claim national security as an excuse for secrecy of propaganda on US citizens.

This year the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the Education Department engaged in illegal ''covert propaganda" when it hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams, paying him 240 thousand dollar to promote the ''No Child Left Behind" law on his radio and TV programs.

The White House also provided media recommendations to Jeff Gannon, a conservative blogger with little journalistic training, to ask pro-Bush questions at news briefings.

While Washington politics might be considered one big propaganda machine in its promotion of various agendas, American people know the difference between spin and deception. 

Paying to have US government-written ''news stories" published in the Iraqi press takes deceit to a new level. The LA Times reported that some newspapers ran the pro-US pieces along with, and indistinguishable from, their own accounts of the war. Other papers labeled the pieces ''advertising" but did not say where they originated.

The Los Angeles paper reported that publications were paid as much as 1,500 dollars for running stories that had been translated into Arabic by the Lincoln Group, a Washington public relations agency that has a contract with the Pentagon. The New York Times reported that Iraqi journalists were paid to write stories, and that stories written by US troops included copyrighted material without attribution. One story, which lifted paragraphs whole from an Arabic newspaper in London, omitted a line critical of American re-enactment in Iraq.

The paradox of these pathetic efforts, is that Bush claims he is attempting to export democracy at the same time that his administration is humiliating the true news, making contempt of the free press that is a keystone of democracy. These are the tactics not of a free society but of tyrants such as the one Bush deposed in the name of freedom.

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American Corporate Media False Propaganda (2)

Thursday December 1, 2005

The following article is by Manuel Valenzuela, an American Journalist and media Critic.

News bits in the US lean towards those interests that will help the U.S. corporation achieve its goals of profit maximization, News reports are created not to be right but to have the highest ratings, which in turn means greater profit. The interests of the masses are ignored and exchanged for that debate which will fit the interests of the Economic and political elite minority. Today, growing reports of an economic recovery linger on the evening news, but can American citizens see it in their lives and in that of their friends and neighbors? No, but good economic news benefits the elite who depend on Americans wallets to fatten up theirs.

The American people have in essence been brainwashed into believing that by assenting to the will and opinion of the elite their lives will be made better. Unfortunately for them, their lives are made worse as the continued exploitation and subjugation of their class continues by the same entities they so fervently believe in. This is a system where the powerful few command the weak majority and where the most important decisions are made to the benefit of the elite at the detriment of the rest.

Manipulation of the U.S. masses has been made easy with the advent of television. Populations, made ignorant by pervasive and purposeful determents of education, naturally believe and blindly place their confidence in those "trusted" entities they watch on a daily basis. American citizens become numb to reality and its consequences, failing to analyze and question the actual world they reside in due to conditioning they have undergone since early childhood.

American people have been stupefied into believing the garbage blasted from the monitor. They have been trained to never question, always accept and to always flip the remote when their attention runs dry. American corporate media is but a business where profit is king and where the seeking of customers is of primary importance.

Hollywood-hero news is designed to distract American from real world events such as war and recession, keeping Americans minds pre-occupied and away from information that might wake their slumbering conscious. Yet real, pertinent and important news is given minor and oftentimes erroneous insight. Throughout the channel-horizon American people see the same news, headlines and marketing package.

In its never-ending campaign to control American public, corporate media instills fear into American daily lives. It has found a gold mine with the so – called war on terror, becoming yet another fear-mongering profiteer and looter of the American public.

The US government is now in the hands of the U.S. irresponsible leaders. The light that once shined so bright has disappeared in a fictional world of fright. The elite that pull Americans strings are becoming stronger, objective information is disappearing. The powerful few now control the nation’s media and its ideas, and soon their free will and freedom to think as well.

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American Corporate Media False Propaganda (1)

Thursday November 24, 2005

The following article is by Manuel Valenzuela, an American Journalist and media Critic.

Propaganda in the U.S. has never been more causeless than today. Hundreds of lies, misrepresentations and deceits being told to Americans by both American leaders and corporate media about battles, deaths, injuries, the resistance and security.

Bush administration who controls the corporate media controls the U.S. masses. Today, America’s media is controlled exclusively by fewer than a dozen multinational conglomerates and their many interests. American news corporations , AOL, Viacom, General Electric, Disney and others have formed a monopolized media oligarch that reaches into every American home and every citizen. These few omnipresent entities hold as paramount the belief in assuring for themselves perpetual loyalty from as many of the masses as possible.

Is it no coincidence Manuel Valenzuela further says, then, that the United States has become a nation whose masses no longer question authority or the propaganda that passes for news? Is it any wonder why Americans seem so ignorant as to what is being done to them and incurious as to what is happening in the world, readily and naively accepting as true everything that is spewed out of their televisions and newspapers?

Through the use of the television - the most influential instrument of control and propaganda in present day America - conglomerates can direct and sway American public opinion on virtually every subject they see fit. The television has become an opiate for the masses and a conduit from where conglomerates can dictate how society thinks, acts and evolves. Americans habits and ethics are manipulated, their ideas and beliefs distorted. Americans are trapped in the game of corporate capitalism played by a few elites whose economic interests.

Today few interests own the majority of the U.S. nation’s airwaves, newspapers, Internet access, print media and television stations. One company can in essence control everything one hears, sees and reads on a daily basis, Americans sources of information are being sold to wealthy multinational corporations.

The information that does not serve the oligarch interest is either suppressed by omission or attacked. American government and corporate interests, such as those prevalent in the U.S. occupation of Iraq, prevent realities and truths from surfacing. Instead, propaganda is disseminated that will distort and manipulate the masses into believing exactly what those in power want. American corporate media caters to military interests because in many instances they are part of the military industrial complex.

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After the Libby Indictment, the U.S Press is Acquitting Itself

Thursday November 17, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon an American media critic.

Hours after the indictment of Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheny's Chief of Staff, the lead editorial of the Times ended by declaring that "the big point Americans need to keep in mind is this: There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq." The Times Columnist Frank Rich referred to "Colin Powell's notorious presentation of Weapons of Mass Destruction 'evidence' to the UN on the eve of war."

And so it goes in the opinion section of the New York Times. There's now eagerness to blast the Bush administration for some aspects of false prewar propaganda -- while the newspaper continues to dodge its own crucial role in promoting that propaganda.

Many people have become aware that news articles by Judith Miller and other Times reporters were conduits for the administration's deceptive claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times has portrayed itself as a victim of misinformation, as though a conveyor of falsehoods has scant responsibility.

But bogus news reporting was not the only way that the Times helped to push the United States into invading Iraq. Despite its reputation as a strong opponent of going to war, the paper's editorial voice capitulated when it was needed most.

Let's reach down into the Orwellian memory hole and retrieve what the New York Times had to say -- in an editorial headline titled "The Case Against Iraq" , the day after what Frank Rich now calls Colin Powell's "notorious presentation."

The Times declared that Colin Powell "presented the United Nations and a global television audience with the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have."

The Feb. 6, 2003, editorial by the Times also proclaimed: "President Bush's decision to dispatch Colin Powell to present the administration's case before the Security Council showed a wise concern for international opinion.

And the Times editorial streamed that: Colin Powell's presentation was all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober and factual case against Saddam's regime."

For a "notorious presentation," Powell's performance at the UN got a rave review from a newspaper supposedly objecting to the momentum for war.

Now, while the New York Times is busily clucking at deceptive prewar maneuvers by Dick Cheney's office, the Times refuses to own up to how effectively the Cheney operation gained its support, from page-one stories about Weapons of Mass Destructions to editorials assisting Washington's war makers.

Meanwhile, a distinct rhythm of drumming for a war dance is audible in the present. Consider a statement that appeared a couple of inches close to the New York Times editorial declaring that "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq."

In an editorial The Times again categorically stated its false supposition as fact that:"Iran has a nuclear weapons program."

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Iraq Is Not Vietnam

Thursday November 10, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon an American journalist and the U.S. corporate media critic.

Many politicians and pundits have told us that "Iraq is not Vietnam." Certainly, any competent geographer would agree.

Substantively, the histories of Iraq and Vietnam are very different. And the dynamics of U.S. military intervention in the two countries while more similar than the American news media generally acknowledge -- are far from identical.

Iraq is not Vietnam. But the United States is the United States.

War after war, decade after decade, the U.S. news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.

From the U.S. media's deceptive reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the U.S. news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States.

In a country that claims to be, it matters what people think. The propaganda functions of the U.S. media are crucial for the war makers.

There are sensational news reports. What matters most is the routine coverage that bounces around the national echo chamber. Repetition is the essence of the U.S. propaganda. And the messages of the warfare state are never-ending.

Several decades ago, Dwight Eisenhower warned about a "military-industrial complex." He was the last US president to acknowledge its existence. The more that the military-industrial complex has gained strength; the less it has been acknowledged in media and politics.

Those annual reports are clear: War is very profitable for the U.S. companies. They expect more war, and that will mean an abundance of profits. On the other hand, a decrease of war would severely damage American public profits.

In the midst of what Martin Luther King called "the madness of militarism," today American people must demand real journalism and confront the manipulations of news media.

The lifeblood of a true democracy is the free flow of information for the body politic. American corporate media and inordinate government power are responsible for deadly blockages.

Those blockages are causes and consequences of a political culture that's oriented toward death. The priorities reflected in a routine U.S. military budget of half a trillion dollars per year are lethal. Pentagon firepower kills. So does economic injustice.

With repeated use of violence more massive than any other entity on the planet, Uncle Sam is the globe's dominant successive killer. This reality, that is so obvious to the most of the world is hiden by the U.S. corporate media.

The United States is the United States. But Iraq is not Vietnam.

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The Mindless American: A Tragedy In The Making

Thursday November 3, 2005

The following article is by Doug Soderstrom a psychologist in Wharton, Texas.

How the U.S. military has systematically abused and  tortured foreign detainees; How the U.S. government intentionally withheld evidence suggesting that an attack upon the United States by Al Qaeda had been eminent; How the US military has begun to wage war upon American soldiers themselves who, in good conscience, have come to believe that it is wrong for them to kill in a war that, according to international law, is illegal, How the United States has a sixty-year history of assassinating foreign leaders who have chosen not to support the government’s foreign policy goals, initiating the overthrow of duly-elected foreign democracies, while simultaneously supporting brutal authoritarian dictatorships all in order to fill the coffers of America’s military-industrial complex, an egregious imperialistic force with but one goal: To take command of the world economy. 

Given the election of George Walker Bush as the U.S.  president, America made it quite clear that it is pleased to have as its president a scoundrel, a true terrorist, one more than willing to bully the rest of the world, as opposed to having chosen a real man, one that humanity might embrace as a man of true character, an individual committed to doing what is best for the world rather than what is most profitable for those running the petrol, armament, pharmaceutical, and construction industries. Although Americans claim to be a Christian nation, having chosen George Walker Bush to be the leader of the U.S. is a scandal beyond belief, one that mocks the very name of Jesus in whom most Americans have been said to believe. 

Very few would disagree with the proposition that in Hitler’s Germany there was a determined effort to brainwash the people so they might support Mein Fuhrer’s efforts to conquer the world. However, what if one were to suggest that much the same is occurring in the United States of America, where there are determined efforts through the socializing influence of the U.S. schools, the government, the mass media, the churches Americans attend, even Americans parents, to pressure the young in believing just as Hitler that the U.S. has not only the right, but more importantly, through the use of military weapons, a divine responsibility to see that the world acquiesces to Americans needs and expectations. Just as Hitler in the 1930’s prepared his countrymen to accept the authoritarian control of the Nazi government, much the same may well be occurring in the United States. Just as Hitler indoctrinated his people to believe that Germany had the right to conquer the world, George Walker Bush “in the name of freedom and democracy” may well be inductrinating the American people to support his administration’s imperialistic drive to dominate the world. 

Behaviorally, it is clear that the U.S. citizens, from cradle to grave, are primed to conform to the dictates of those in power, instructed never to question the validity of what those who would like to take control of Americans lives have to say. 

And, of course, in the American society, the primary way most American are controlled, the way the vast majority of American are forced “to tow the line,” is through the ominous threat of being fired. Something like this: If you are interested in keeping your career on track, that you would like to keep your job, then you ought to consider the following in order to assure your employer that you deserve the right to keep your job; become a member of a social club (such as the Lions Club, the Kiwanis Club, or the Rotarians), be a good capitalist, and claimed to be a patriotic citizen bragging love his country. However, if, for whatever reason, an American were to on a consciously independent course , then he or she better brace for trouble, because there is a reasonable likelihood for being fired!

In America, there is a rule of thumb concerning the working world which basically says that those who do what they are told to do are likely to keep their jobs, whereas those who tend to think independently tend to buck the system, (tend not to do what they have been told to do) end up jobless, powerless, and left to fend for themselves on the mean streets of society. 

But why?  Why does such a thing occur? Why would American leaders do such a horrible thing to their citizens? The answer is quite simple: Knowing that knowledge is power; the secret is control, controlling the out flow of information, making sure that citizens know no more than they “are supposed to know,” making sure that they remain relatively uninformed, making sure that they are given “just enough” that they will go along with, peacefully accept, the premise that they are well informed, that they have a good idea of what is going on. It is necessary then that the government keep the people from learning the truth. Those in power may say that they want their citizens to be educated, to be well informed as to what is going on, however, such is simply not the case. Ask yourself this question: What happens to those of American teachers, preachers, philosophers, writers, journalists who do not “tow the official line,” those intent upon proposing alternate ways of looking at the world? And those who actively-participating antiwar protester and then see what happens. 

There are many American citizens who have illustrated the courage to risk their jobs, their careers, their reputations, their marriages, their wealth, imprisonment, and, in some cases, even that of their own sanity. But the sad fact is that for every hero out there, there are literally thousands of the U.S. citizens who yet, for whatever reason, detest men and woman such as those who have shown the moral gumption to put their lives on the line for no other reason than to make a stand for that which is right, a willingness to tell anyone, everyone who is willing to listen.

The most dangerous thing one can do is to tell the trut the sentence for which, one way or the other, is always death!

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A Latin American Voice to Counter Corporate Media

Thursday October 20, 2005

The following article is by Floyd J. McKay a journalism Professor at Western Washington University.

American Congressional leaders are all in opposition to the Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez's new satellite television station, Telesur, which has begun broadcasting four hours a day, financed by its host country and also by Argentina, Uruguay and Cuba.

Telesur hopes to be accepted regionally, and promises news through Latino eyes, produced by professional journalists from the region. 

So what? These broadcasters are two small voices in a world dominated by American voices, sounds and pictures, a pattern accelerated by satellite transmission.

Telesur, Iran's Arabic language al-Alam TV network and other non-Western broadcasters are trying to combat what media researchers call the "North-South flow" of news and images.  Cut to its basics, the theory says that news of "South" or developing nations is covered by Western or "North" media on the terms and standards of the "North" and then transmitted back to the "South," where it becomes the major news source for the locals.

So if a story breaks in, say, Venezuela, it is covered by the Associated Press, Reuters and CNN. Words and pictures flow to New York, London and Atlanta, and those stories are then beamed back into Latin America.

News values of the "North" rely heavily on conflict, drama, tragedy and violence. Television needs pictures with impact for the guy with the remote control.

Critics say this presents a skewed image of developing nations, both to the Western world and also to the developing world itself.  In the '70s and '80s, developing nations worked within the United Nations and with international agencies to modify this practice by putting out more "positive" news. The goal of developing homegrown news more sympathetic to non-American values and policies remains, and is particularly strong where the U.S. has thrown its weight around, either militarily, economically or politically. The Middle East is an obvious place, and so is South America.

The U.S. House reacted by author-izing broadcasts into Venezuela to ensure what it claimed"accurate news" is received there, but that's not likely to be any more successful than the U.S. Arabic stations in Iraq. The Senate hasn't acted.

Americans are accustomed to corporate media. But millions of American  people do not believe that corporate American media conglomerates are independent voices. American people might prefer, Hugo Chavez to Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News.

Dissident American journalists expresses their "great hope" that Telesur can present a genuine alternative to "the great American media corporations," and become "an essential alternative capable of representing fundamental principles of an authentic media: for truth, justice, respect and solidarity." Other journalists in the U.S. may agree too.

South American leaders have long been concerned about accuracy in U.S. media reports on the region. Now Congress is worried about Telesur's accuracy. Accuracy is often in the eye of the viewer, and if Telesur stomps on a few sacred American toes, then the U.S. Congress would find itself in the same position as Latino politicians have been in many times. That might not be all bad.

It is simply wrong to believe that only Americans can practice honest journalism and that only corporate-owned media can serve the people.

If Telesur turns out to be only a propaganda organ it will fail to penetrate beyond Venezuela, but if it proves to be more than that, it will give the region a new, Latin voice.

In either event, Congress has better ways to spend money than to try to set up another failed U.S. government competitor to indigenous media.

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The News Media and the Antiwar Movement

Thursday October 13, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an American Columnist and media Critic.  

It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. After the demonstration day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more obligatory back-page articles were typical in daily papers across the country. And over that weekend, many American TV news watchers saw little or nothing about the protests.

Hurricane Rita was clearly a factor. But even without dramatic natural disasters, the news media are ready, willing and able to downplay news about war -- and the antiwar movement -- for any number of reasons. Conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill or in newsrooms can tamp down media coverage of a surging movement. What's crucial is that the movement does not allow its momentum to be interrupted by the U.S. media treatment.

If "journalism is the first draft of history," the journalism of corporate media in the U.S. is usually the quickly top-down view of history that's told from the high places far removed from progressive movements. Media technologies and styles aside, what Americans are experiencing now from major U.S. news outlets is not very different from the coverage of the Vietnam War.

A persistent myth is that mainstream American news outlets were tough on the war in Vietnam while boosting the antiwar movement. And these days, after a summer of plunging poll numbers for President Bush along with the profoundly important media presence of Cindy Sheehan, many Americans seem to think that the U.S. news media have turned against the war makers in Washington. But overall the media realities are something else. Actual history should make Americans wary of any assumption that the press is apt to be a counterweight to militarism.

Media Scholar Daniel Hallin wrote in his excellent book 'The 'Uncensored War': The Media and Vietnam, that, "Vietnam was the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces yet not subject to censorship."

Daniel Hallin concludes that, "this did matter: in 1963, when American policy in Vietnam began to fall apart, American media began to send back an image that conflicted sharply with the picture of progress officials were trying to paint. It would happen again many times before the war was over. But those reporters also went to Southeast Asia schooled in a set of journalistic practices which, among other things, ensured that the news would reflect, if not always the views of those at the very top of the American political hierarchy, at least the perspectives of American officialdom generally."

Despite all the changes in the U.S. news media since the end of Vietnam War, a systemic filtration process has remained crucial. Strong economic pressures have played their role -- and have combined with powerful forces for conformity at times of war. Media analyst Michael Carpini has commented that: “Even if journalists, editors, and producers are not superpatriots, they know that appearing unpatriotic does not play well with many readers, viewers, and sponsors, Fear of alienating the public and sponsors, especially in wartime, serves as a real, often unstated tether, keeping the press tied to accepted wisdom."

Journalists in American newsrooms don't have to worry about being taken out and shot; the constraining fears are apt to revolve around peer approval, financial security and professional advancement.

Media Scholar Daniel Hallin who was Interviewed in early November 2003, with the Iraq occupation in the midst of turning into a large-scale war against a growing insurgency Media scholar Daniel Hallin compared American media treatment of the two wars and saw similar patterns. He said "As you begin to get a breakdown of consensus, especially among political elites in Washington, then the U.S. media begin asking more questions." In the case of the Iraq occupation, "the Democrats were mostly silent for a long time on this war, and when things began to bog down, they started asking questions. There were divisions within the Bush administration, and then the media starts playing a more independent role."

To a notable degree, American media reporters seem to await signals from politicians and high-level appointees to widen the range of discourse. Daniel Hallin commented that "American media reporters need confirmation that this issue is part of the mainstream political discussion in the U.S. Journalists are very keyed into what their sources are talking about. Political reporters define news worthiness in part by what's going to affect American politics in the sense of who gets elected the next time around. But it isn't absolutely only elites. It also makes a difference that polls show the public divided, and that there are problems of morale among soldiers in Iraq. But the first thing that the U.S. journalists look to is: 'What are the U.S. political elites debating in Washington?' That's what really sets American news agenda."

So, with the autumn of 2005 underway, what are the elites debating in Washington? With rare exceptions, they're debating how to continue the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

High-profile Democrats and even some Republicans like to regret "mistakes" and bad planning and the absence of an "exit strategy." The prevailing version of Washington's debate over Iraq still amounts to disputes over how to proceed with the U.S. war effort in Iraq. Top officials and politicians in Washington won't change that. The U.S. journalists echoing them won't change that but the antiwar movement must.

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The News Media Are Knocking Bush and Propping Him up

Thursday September 29, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an American Columnist and media Critic.

This month we've heard a lot of talk about American journalists who got tough with President George W Bush. And it's true that he has been on the receiving end of some fiercely negative media coverage in the wake of the hurricane . But the mainstream U.S. press is ill-suited to challenging the legitimacy of the Bush administration.

The largest U.S.  media institutions operate on a basis of enormous respect for presidential power. Major news organizations defer to that power even while venting criticisms.

Initially, when the lethal character of Bush's "leadership" became clear in New Orleans, the journalistic focus on federal accountability was quick to bypass the president.

Although Bush said at the White House, "to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility." But it was a classic hollow statement, meant to sound important and meaningless at the same time. More than a dozen of U.S. media paragraphs ran the story headlined "President Says He's Responsible in Storm Lapses," the New York Times reported: "In saying he took responsibility for any failures of the federal response to the storm, Bush stopped short of acknowledging that he or anyone else had made mistakes."

So, according to the Times headline, Bush said that "he's responsible" for "storm lapses" -- but, according to the article, Bush did not say "that he or anyone else had made mistakes." Got that?

Such tap-dancing evasions are small compared to what's on the horizon. Sure, American people can expect more outcries of condemnation from the nation's press. Many American news outlets have adopted a critical tone unmatched by previous coverage of the Bush administration. But one might read the editorials of virtually every daily newspaper in the United States and not find a single paper calling for the accusation or resignation of the deadly Bush-Cheney deeds, whether for deceptions about Iraq or failures to protect lives from Hurricane Katrina. By avoiding even the hint that President Bush and Vice President Cheney should be ousted from office, major news outlets are circumscribing public discourse and limiting the prospective remedies. Meanwhile, Americans hear about low-level resignations, official investigations and proposals for blue-ribbon commissions.

What happened to thousands of people in the path of  hurricane Katrina was the horrific result of criminal negligence that came from the top of the U.S. government. Is it too outlandish to suggest that the U.S. news media begin to discuss what kind of punishment would truly fit this crime?

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American Media Pave a Path to Enmity on Iran

Thursday September 22, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an Active Columnist and media Critic.

Major U.S. news outlets have claimed that. Iran’s nuclear activities were pernicious, because American statesmen in high places in Washington alleged so. It didn’t seem to matter much that the Washington Post reported: “A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon.”

One evening, hours after the Iranian government said it would no longer suspend activities related to enriching uranium for peaceful purpose, American news outlets were making critical declaration, amplifying the statements from French, British and German officials who were obviously under the influence of  the Bush administration. On television in the United States, a narrow range of talking heads by passed around the USA’s plentiful nuclear hypocrisies. Yes, although some of the officials in Washington and their allies accepted that, an Iranian restart of uranium enrichment activities would not violate the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, a Washington Post article claimed, the Iranian nuclear program was “built in secret over 18 years” and “the clandestine nature of the effort created deep suspicions in Washington and elsewhere about Iran’s intentions.”

In sharp contrast, no “suspicions” are needed about the nuclear activities of two of the U.S. allies, Israel and Pakistan. Both have produced atomic weapons. Unlike Iran, those two U.S. allies have refused to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty and do not submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

For good measure, the U.S. government announced plans to engage in cooperation on atomic energy projects with the Indian government, which has nuclear bombs and has also not signed the NPT.

So, the nuclear moralists in Washington have no problem with Israeli, Pakistani and Indian nuclear weapons, developed with scornful disregard for the Non-Proliferation Treaty. But the White House and talking heads of U.S. television are insisting that Iran has no right to do what the treaty allows.

The latest U.S. media uproar about Iran’s peaceful nuclear program is part of a dream of the neo-cons in Washington who have a ridiculous delusion about changing the system of government in Tehran.

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Will American News Media Help Bush Exploit the 9/11 Anniversary Again?

Thursday September 8, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an Active Columnist and media Critic.

For a long time, the last refuge of Bush was "patriotism." Now it's the nonsense phrased of "the war on terror."

President Bush and many of his vocal supporters aren't content to wrap themselves in the flag. It's not sufficient to posture as more patriotic than opponents of the Iraq war. The ultimate weapon is to exploit the memory of Sept. 11, 2001.

Next month, the fourth anniversary will provide the Bush administration with plenty of media opportunities to wrap itself in the 9/11 cover, and shoeing Iraq war critics as insufficiently committed to defending the United States. A renewed attempt to justify the war as a resolute stand against the supposing terrorism is well underway.

President Bush eager to pull out of a political drop, stood in front of National Guard members in Idaho and read from a script that was thick with familiar rhetoric: and said "Our nation is engaged in a global war on terror that affects the safety and security of every American. In Iraq, Afghanistan and across the world, we face dangerous enemies who want to harm our people, folks who want to destroy our way of life. As long as I'm the president, we will stay, we will fight and we will win the war on terror."

Such presidential rhetoric has become routine. And anniversaries of 9/11 are occasions when the White House ratchets up the spin.

President Bush proclaimed on Sept. 11, 2002 and said: "In the ruins of two towers, under a flag expanded at the Pentagon, at the funerals of the lost, Americans have made a sacred promise to themselves, and to the world. We will not relent until justice is done and our nation is secure. What our enemies have begun, we will finish."

At the time, the Bush administration was building its agenda for an invasion of Iraq. "That Bush wants the U.N. to compel Iraq to submit to weapons inspections, or face the consequences that ABC News reported. And though he did not mention Saddam by name ... the White House says he had the Iraqi leader in mind when he warned America's enemies.

That's an example of how the propaganda tag-team of government and media has conveyed implicit lies as actual facts. While talking about 9/11, Bush said: "What our enemies have begun, we will finish." And network reporting helpfully explained that "he had the Iraqi leader in mind." The absence of evidence didn't seem to matter much. On repeated countless occasions, such slick media maneuvers were able to convince a large portion of the U.S. population that Saddam was involved with the 9/11 attacks.

When the second anniversary came around, Bush went to Walter Reed Army Hospital and visited soldiers who, in the words of one TV network, were "wounded in the war on terror, both in Afghanistan and Iraq." The U.S. president's comments in front of cameras were carefully targeted: he said "We're going to a church service to remember the victims, pray for their families, victims of 9/11, 2001. Today, this afternoon, Laura and I are here to thank the brave souls who got wounded in the war on terror, people who are willing to sacrifice in order to make sure that attacks such as Sept. 11 don't happen again."

During that hospital visit, the U.S. commander in chief made a pitch for war without any foreseeable end: he said "As I've told the American people right after Sept. 11, 2001, this will be a different kind of war and this will be a long war. And we're fighting this war on a lot of fronts, the major front of which is now in Iraq."

Last year, Sept. 11 fell on a Saturday, and the president's weekly radio address gained unusual visibility. Relatives of 9/11 victims surrounded Bush in the Oval Office as he made his little speech, which, in the words of NBC News, engaged in "linking the war on terror to the war in Iraq."

And so the U.S. media siege has gone, to this day. With routine assistance from American media news coverage, the Bush administration touts the U.S. war effort in Iraq as a legitimate response to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. With the White House now anxious to hold up its sinking political fortunes, a vast amount of such propaganda is on the horizon.

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The National Security Act, Corporations, and the Media

Thursday September 1, 2005

The following article is by Sheldon Drobny, Co-founder of Air America Radio.

The U.S. National Security Act created the dishonorable spying network CIA and other covert agencies in the executive branch. It was passed in 1947 and signed by President Harry Truman who ordered the dropping of the two Atomic bombs on Japan. Allegedly the act was a post World War Two measure to counter the expansion of the Soviet Union. That was the U.S government’s official public announcement about the reasons for the Act and the U.S. media was in lock step in its reporting of this reason. However, Gore Vidal and many other astute writers and historians know that the official reason for the Act had nothing to do with its genesis.

Nowadays, that is 58 years later, the National Security State has changed into a horror for the United States people and the world. The inevitable fall of the Soviet Union that happened in 1991 was known by the CIA at the same time U.S president that Ronald Reagan was calling in the 1980s for massive weapons buildups to fight what he called the “evil empire”, a description that fits the U.S today. The sad part of all this is that the United States since the Second World War has maintained an open and covert policy of regime change and terrorism that has killed tens of millions of people throughout the world. The reason behind this terrorizing campaign is the influence of corporations and their economists on the operations of the U.S government.

American Businesses and rich people fund elections and they want their representatives to do their bidding. This is an institutional problem. Those in power have a tendency to lean toward self-interest as opposed to the public interest. The wealthier and more powerful the nation, the more it imposes the will of the wealthy elite upon its own citizens as well as other countries. 

The major American media are powerful companies some of which are conglomerates that have an interest in a wartime economy. General Electric Corporation owns NBC. General Electric is a major provider for the Pentagon and accordingly NBC has a major incentive to slant the news in favor of military expenditures. But, CBS and ABC have similar conflicts and they are equally as guilty. How can concerned American citizens cause these companies to respond and report the truth?

For instance John Conyers was not allowed a hearing room in the Capital to conduct his recent Downing Street Memo hearings. C-SPAN was unwilling to broadcast the Conyers hearing outside the Capital Building. The hosts on Air America Radio told their listeners to electronically sign a petition to C-SPAN demanding that they cover the event and within 24 hours 600,000 people signed the petition and Conyers got his hearing room and C-SPAN covered it. That is the power and influence that broadcast media has upon others and it is the formula for which all concerned citizens can influence the major broadcast media. The best way to motivate executives of the corporate media such as CBS, NBC, and ABC is to threaten their pocket books. These media giants are completely dependent upon ratings to increase their advertising revenue. If their ad revenue goes down, their profits go down. If the profits go down, the stock value goes down. If the stock value goes down, the executive stock options are less valuable.

The most recent underreporting of the news by ABC, CBS, and NBC has to do with the Karl Rove matter. In addition, these networks have not reported responsibly about the Downing Street Memo and the 9/11 attacks Commission deficiencies. If all American concerned citizens would pick a position to complain about to the network news divisions and email them about this, one can count on the fear and greed factor of the corporate executives to respond. American people who have group mailings have to send emails demanding that the U.S. network news divisions respond to their listeners. If everyone faithfully passes on the chain email, the networks will be barraged with millions of complaints. The fact is that the U.S. right wing has been organizing and implementing the current approach of the U.S. media for many years and it works.

So let all American citizens get busy writing to all their contacts to complain to the U.S. networks about their deceptive role and the unreported true events that have been hurting their country for almost 60 years. 

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The Influence of Fools

Thursday August 18, 2005

The following article is by John Atcheson, an American Active Writer whose features appear extensively in the Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun The San Jose Mercury News and The Memphis Commercial.

American citizens are angry, because for the last four years you’ve utterly failed to hold the U.S. leaders accountable to the truth.

Americans are angry, because when the U.S. journalists make impartiality, objectivity and balance, more important than accuracy, context and truth, then once again they are failing to fulfill the functions for which they were given U.S. First Amendment protections.

American people are angry because they believe that practicing journalism with integrity requires more of them than acting like a court stenographer; more than simply listening, recording, and printing. If the words American journalists are recording don’t confirm with the truth, if journalists don’t think, don’t challenge, and don’t dig for more information, then American politicians, being politicians, will tell ever bigger lies.

Americans are angry, because that’s precisely what’s been happening in the U.S. The press just puts together the he-said, she-said transcript and leaves the truth to someone else.

American people are angry because their President and his administration have taken advantage of the U.S. media malfeasance to construct a sophisticated Soviet-style propaganda machine that  spews out lies and deceptions.

Other administrations created spins based on some doubtful relationship to the truth. The Bush administration has completely severed the link and created instead, an infrastructure for telling lies. In a he-said, she-said news world, the U.S. press is at the mercy of any number of tactics and fake values debates designed to shut off inquiry and protect politics. And how is it that the U.S. mainstream press lets right wingers ignore truths and tell lies? Why is it left to Jon Stewart to show the epidemiology of talking points as they spread from the right wing think tanks working with the White House to Fox News, O’Reilly’s entertainment show, and Limbough’s Lying hour to ultimately infect the public discourse? Why is it that Stewart’s fake news show seems the only one capable of finding lies on tape and showing them to American people? There’s no shortage. There’s the U.S Vice President, Dick  Cheney and Secretary of State  Condoleezza Rice and the World Bank  Apointee President Paul Wolfowitz and even the U.S President George Bush himself telling us about meetings that didn’t happen; links that didn’t exist; weapons that weren’t there. And now Americans have notes from British intelligence revealing that as early as July , 2002 the administration was saying it was going to "fix" intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion.

Americans know that there’s a trail of memos justifying torture, extraordinary rendition and other jack-boot tactics that leads straight to the most senior levels of the Pentagon and the White House. One of them was signed by the U.S. sitting Attorney General when he was White House Counsel. But here’s what makes American people angriest. The U.S. press has allowed George Bush to fundamentally rewrite foreign and domestic policy under a cloud of deception, distortion, and deceit.

Iraq was never about Weapons of Mass Destructions, or al-Qaeda links or "immediate threats" but it was part of a broadly conceived and highly antagonistic neoconservative foreign policy.

Tax cuts were never about "citizens money," budget surpluses, budget deficits, or economic stimulus. They were – and are – part of a stealth attempt to "drown the beast", to shrink government by starvation.

The Clear Skies Initiative isn’t about protecting the environment, it’s about protecting energy companies.

The Healthy Forest Initiative isn’t about healthy forests, it’s about cutting down trees in new wilderness areas.

Social Security privatization is not about rescuing Social Security, it’s about killing it.

Now, it may be that Americans want a country in which the tax burden is shifted from corporations and the ultra-rich to families, workers and individual wage earners. Perhaps American citizens want to cut government services and gut environmental protections, and impose trillions of dollars of debt on Americans children and their children’s children. And it may be that we want a belligerent foreign policy in which they eschew the U.N.; reject treaties and alliances; unilaterally launch preemptive wars and encourage the resumption of a nuclear arms race by undercutting the Non-Proliferation Treaty with plans to develop new nuclear weapons. Heck, it’s possible that American people are willing to ignore real threats to their homeland such as enough unprotected lose nuclear material to make 40,000 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs. American people might even prefer to spend 300 billion dollars in Iraq, while the U.S. borders remain porous; American ports, schools, power and chemical plants remain unprotected; American first responders underfunded; and bin Laden roams free. But it’s doubtful. And that’s why George Bush and friends want to accomplish their objectives by a stealth attack on the sound media and the truth.

American people want an honest debate. There is an intellectual case to be made for smaller government, an unconstrained private sector, and an economy that is single-mindedly built around rewarding success and ignoring those who fall by the wayside. And there is a perspective that shares John Bolton’s vision of a US as having a responsibility to use its military might aggressively and unilaterally throughout the world. And its conceivable that there’s a case to be made for imposing environmental devastation and multi-trillion dollar debts upon American children.

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CNN At 25: "The World's Most Trusted Network" 

Thursday August 11, 2005

The following article is by Danny Schechter, a Columnist and News Dissector who tells his CNN story in "The More You Watch the Less You Know".

CNN went on the air twenty-five years ago. It has become a boring type media, more packaged than passionate with its prime competitor and its knowing enemy Fox News the new home of controversy. Fox as a competitor has surpassed CNN as “rebel”. Just look at whom the network chose to showcase in its anniversary week. Larry King Live was helping CNN celebrate its 25th Anniversary. Former US President George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara were its guests. Also former President Bill Clinton and Barbara Walters were interviewed by Larry King. Vice President Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney and Dan Rather were invited as well.

Early on, the Ted Turner, the CNN owner, and the white bread news team that he has assembled made sure that the CNN channel would religiously cleave to the center. But they attracted the ideological warlords of the right to sign on, big mouths like Evans and Novak and Pat Buchanan. For years, the left complained that the Crossfire show billed as a battle between right and left, had no one from the left on as a regular.

Larry King Live brought old-fashion big name celebrity exploitation on to center stage while the rest of the programming was careful not to shake any cages. CNN came to global attention in its coverage of the first Persian Gulf War of which their star correspondent Christianne Amanpour would write: "Behind our backs, behind the backs of the field reporters, field producers and crews, CNN bosses made a deal with the establishment to create a handcuffed and partial news reporting."

Peter Arnett, the star reporter at the time later took the fall for an investigative report on the use of nerve gas during the Vietnam War and was forced to quit, as he was again during the Iraq War when he was working for MSNBC and the National Geographic. When the producers later sued CNN claiming their reports were true, CNN insisted on a gag order as the price of a payoff. They did the same when Eason Jordan more recently was forced to step down for saying what was on his mind about the killings of journalists in Iraq. That is what they mean for freedom of speech.

Once it became a major corporate player, CNN began to act like one. As Ted Turner moved up into the suites of corporate power his role, as a media was less visible. It's not surprising in the climate of a frightened media that money, not mission is the only bottom line.

Riz Kahn, a former CNN International Newscaster in an interview for his film named ‘Weapons of Mass Deception’, complains that, “real international news is increasingly rare. It’s a real shame, actually especially for the so-called world’s most powerful nation.”

What are those expectations? Constantly updated and often inessential coverage of high profile crime cases and scandals? Acting as a megaphone for Bush Administration claims? Using the same "experts" and pundits over and over?

In a new book that shows how TV News often follows a "soap opera paradigm" to assure that coverage and story structure reflect corporate priorities and not the public interest, Niagara University Professor James Wittebols looks closely at CNN's coverage of the critical 2000 election. He identifies techniques that are designed to "keep audiences tuned it by conveying the urgency of the story" over its truthness. He writes "Such an approach means getting a complete and coherent account of the story takes a back seat to the emphasis on emotion and immediacy".

And finally, if you are looking for a network to challenge power, look elsewhere.

CNN has now become a centerpiece of a consolidated and corporatized news industry.

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American Big Media Interlocks with Corporate America

Thursday August 4, 2005

The following article is by Peter Phillips, a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization.

Mainstream media is the term often used to describe the collective group of big TV, radio and newspapers in the United States. Mainstream implies that the news being produced is for the benefit and enlightenment of the mainstream population namely the majority of people living in the US. Mainstream media include a number of communication medium that carry almost all the news and information on world affairs that most Americans receive. The Word media is plural, implying a diversity of news sources.

However, mainstream media no longer produce news for the mainstream population-nor should one consider the media as plural. Instead it is more accurate to speak of big media in the US today as the corporate media and to use the term in the singular tense-as it refers to the singular monolithic top-down power structure of self-interested news giants.

A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big American media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other. NBC and the Washington Post both have board members who sit on Coca Cola and J. P. Morgan, while the Tribune Company, The New York Times and Gannett all have members who share a seat on Pepsi. It is kind of like one big happy family of interlocks and shared interests.

Corporate media, an extension of its mother company, reports pro-business, pro-corporate and anti-labor position on a constant basis.

News bits lean towards those interests that will help the corporation achieve its goals of profit maximization, whether from pushing conservative, right-wing views it sees as paramount in securing allegiance. News reports are created not to be right out to have the highest ratings, which in turn means greater profit. The interests of the masses are ignored and exchanged for that debate which will fit the interests of the economic and political elite minority. Today, growing reports of an economic recovery linger on the evening news, but can American citizens see it in their lives and in that of their friends and neighbors? No, but good economic news benefits the elite who depend on Americans wallet to fatten up theirs.

Can Americans trust the news editors at the Washington Post to be fair and objective regarding news stories about Lockheed-Martin defense contract over-runs? Or can American people assuredly believe that ABC will conduct critical investigative reporting on Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq? If one believes the corporate media give people the full un-censored truth about key issues inside the special interests of American capitalism, then Americans might feel that they are meeting the democratic needs of mainstream America.

If American citizens believe, as increasingly more Americans do, that corporate media serves its own self-interests instead of those of the people, they can no longer call it mainstream or refer to it as plural. Instead Americans need to say that corporate media is corporate America, and that mainstream American people need to be looking at alternative independent sources for their news and information.

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Missing the Big Picture on Public Broadcasting System

Thursday July 28, 2005

The following article is by William Hoynes a Professor of sociology and Director of media studies at Vassar College.

American political conservatives have been targeting Public Broadcasting System for more than 20 years with a stream of public relations campaigns designed to rein in public broadcasting's independence and cut into its public and congressional support. Now they are back with more charges of liberal bias.

As the growth of cable TV ushered in the 500-channel universe, American public television had one key asset that could have made it distinctive that is: It was noncommercial, meaning that programming did not have to depend on audience ratings or please advertisers. Higher social values could drive the content.

But, nowadays instead, the American Public Broadcasting System has chosen to become increasingly market-driven. While it still is a home for quality educational programs, it is becoming more difficult to define how it is "noncommercial." Programming decisions are deeply intertwined with concerns about funding sources, audience size and demographics, and with a general desire to avoid offending vocal constituencies.

American Public Broadcasting System has extended its targeting of upscale viewers by emphasizing American young children and their parents as a core audience segment. As the market for children's media has exploded in recent years, Public Broadcasting System has cashed in on its loyal audience and reputation for quality educational programming. The growth of the U.S. Public Broadcasting System Kids franchise - and the interest among major national advertisers in sponsoring various Public Broadcasting System Kids ventures is the proof of the increasing focus at Public Broadcasting System on children as potentially valuable consumers.

In its defense, public television long has walked a tightrope, trying to avoid charges that it is biased or obsolete. When programming veered outside the mainstream - with programs, that were critical of U.S. foreign policy critics called Public Broadcasting System biased and argued that it did not deserve public funding.

In this no-win situation, Public Broadcasting System has turned to a market solution, converting public service into something to be packaged and sold to brand-loyal consumers. In working to leverage their brand, Public Broadcasting System employs the same strategies and uses the same brand-management advisers as the major commercial media. Public service often becomes little more than a slogan to rally the US troops at pledge time.

But is this really necessary? The idea of public television is far more popular than the ratings of its specific programs suggest. Public opinion surveys show that a vast majority of Americans support public television and are willing to pay for it with their tax dollars - even though American Public Broadcasting System audience has always been small and has declined in prime time by more than 30 percent since the late 1980s. People like to think that public television is valuable, even if they rarely watch it.

And there are plenty of long-standing questions the American public television still has to address. For example, public broadcasters have yet to find what it means to be "public" as opposed to commercial. Now more than ever, cable forces them to come up with an answer. How can they fulfill their founding mission, as articulated by the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television, to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard," serve as "a forum for controversy and debate," and broadcast programs that "help people see America whole, in all its diversity"?   

As the airwaves become more and more confused with commercial networks fragmenting the public into bite-sized, demographically specific audience segments, what better time for a network committed to serving America "whole"?

For starters, Public Broadcasting System needs to re-establish itself as noncommercial, which will, by itself, make the Public Broadcasting System viewing experience decidedly different. Quality programming is always expensive and difficult to produce consistently. But Public Broadcasting System can gain public support and build its audience by articulating an overarching programming philosophy that will clearly distinguish its offerings from the rest of television. An approach that emphasizes programs that challenge American people, not simply satisfy them, is something that Americans across the political spectrum could support. This kind of public television would be committed to presenting views from beyond insider circles. It would seek to stimulate dialogue, left, right and center, with programs that reach across boundaries of culture and class. It would be committed to engaging and challenging youth with programs by and about young people, and to enriching civic life across America with challenging programs on local issues.

Studies of public television over the last decade show that in contrast to conservative claims that public television routinely features the voices of anti-establishment critics, scholarly research shows that nowadays alternative perspectives are rare on the American public television, and are effectively drowned out by the stream of the conservative government.

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The War President

Thursday July 21, 2005

The following article is by Paul Krugman, an American Journalist and an Antiwar Activist.

America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the arrogance of the U.S rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own judgment. But after 9/11 attacks President Bush, with obvious enjoyment, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the U.S nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al-Qaeda into a war against Saddam.

In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, that "she has never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" but she made it clear that President Bush was the exception. And she was right.

Leading Americans wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of the so-called democracy, it would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And American troops won't be able to get out of that quagmire until they face up to the reality of how they got in. The Bush administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.

Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by making a false conjunction between his supposition of terrorism and non-existent Weapons of Mass Destruction. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Some segments of the American media declared that it was an "old news" that George Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that Weapons of Mass Destruction were just an excuse. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.

Still, some American journalists insist that they should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what they do now. But they're wrong: It's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the American administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.

On one side, the people who sold this war are still peddling illusions: that the insurgency is in its ‘last throes’ . On the other, there are moderates and even liberals intimidated, that believe: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.

American intellectuals need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led the U.S to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of Americans about patriotism.

The good news is that American people seem ready to hear the messages readier than the U.S media are to deliver it. Major American media organizations still act as if only a small, supposedly left-wing fringe believes that they were misled into war, but that so-called "fringe" now includes much if not most of the U.S population.

A Gallup poll taken in early April showed that, 50 percent of American people agreed with the idea that the Bush administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction.  In a new  poll, 49 percent of Americans said that  Bush was more responsible for the while 44 percent blamed Saddam.

Once the U.S media catch up with the public, American journalists will be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.

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Pliant American Press Behaving Like Pravda in Coverage of the U.S. President

Thursday July 14, 2005

The following article is by Linda McQuaig a Toronto-based Author and commentator.

If clear evidence emerged showing George W. Bush had written in his record that he had lied to the American people to justify his invasion of Iraq, would the U.S. media even consider that story? To an astonishing extent, the U.S. media have avoided scrutinizing this U.S. president, even after it became clear he'd launched a war in the name of disarming Iraq of weapons that did not exist.

The Bush administration and the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee blamed this on "faulty intelligence," an explanation the media have largely imitated.

The U.S Senate committee promised last summer to investigate what role the White House may have played in concocting the faulty intelligence but only after the presidential election. 

Once the U.S president was re-elected last fall, American Senate Committee Chairman, Republican Pat Roberts, simply canceled the promised investigation of the White House's role, insisting it would be "a monumental waste of time to replay this ground any further."

Roberts's decision to let the administration off the hook on Iraq was barely covered in the media.  Recently, some top-secret British government memos, leaked to the British press, have revealed that America's chief ally believed Bush's case for war was fabricated. Still, the U.S. media have barely considered this.

The British memos reveal the Bush administration had decided by April 2002 a year before Iraq invasion to use military force against Saddam. This contradicts Bush's insistence that war was only a last resort.

One memo, detailing a secret meeting chaired by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in July 2002, shows the Blair government considered that Bush's case about the dangers of Saddam's weapons "was thin" and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."  The memo also shows the Blair government realized invading Iraq would be illegal and hoped Saddam could be provoked into doing something to justify war against him. One plan was for U.S. aircraft guarding southern Iraq officially to protect ethnic minorities from Saddam to drop bombs in the hopes that Saddam would fight back.  The memo noted that "spikes of activity" by U.S. aircraft had already begun "to put pressure on the Iraq regime." British figures show that between May and August 2002, ten tons of bombs a month were dropped on Iraq. Still, Saddam failed to be provoked into war. 

In a televised address last week, Bush portrayed U.S. actions in Iraq as defensive, as necessary to protect America from another 9/11 attacks.

It hasn’t seen any mention in the U.S TV coverage of what the British memos reveal: that those with inside knowledge knew Saddam's arsenal posed no danger, that the intelligence was being "fixed" and that the U.S. dropped bombs to try to provoke a war while insisting it was doing everything it could to avoid one.  Instead, American media kept their focus on what the U.S president said in his speech and not what the truth is.   

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Voluntary Amnesia in the Service of War 

Thursday July 7, 2005

The following article is by Norman Solomon, an American Journalist and media Activist.

There seems to be an unstated motto for American media coverage of the Iranian presidential election. While a seriously discredited President Bush strains to do damage control about his past lies and present machinations on Iraq, the U.S. media coverage typically present his statements about Iran without so much as a smell of suspicion. A proven liar is treated by the U.S. media like a presumptive truth-teller!

The ambient noise of American media evokes history as an option Americans may choose to refuse. Americans are encouraged to mentally disconnect from relevant historic events.

Red-white-and-blue journalists don’t doubt that the past sins of Washington’s present-day foes are quite relevant today. So, it’s assumed to be incisive when reporters keep reminding news consumers that Saddam committed huge crimes such as mass killing of Kurds and the Shiite majority. But what about the fact that most of the worst of those crimes occurred while the United States was supportive of Saddam Baath minority regime? That question gets short shrift.

Likewise, while American viewers, listeners and readers are apt to be aware that in 1979 some revolutionary Iranians held American diplomats captive at the U.S. embassy in Tehran on charges of spying and held them for more than a year,  other historical facts tend to be hazy or entirely absent. That suits the White House just fine. From a Machiavellian standpoint, the best remedy for unpleasant historical facts is silencing about them.

Under diplomatic cover, U.S. intelligence operatives engineered a coup that brought down the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Muhammad Mussadiq in 1953 and re-installed the tyrannical Shah, who ruled with an iron and torturing hand until the Islamic Revolution triumphed in early 1979. Iranians have ample reasons to be extremely suspicious of the U.S. government. Yet major American news media scarcely acknowledge that the CIA-organized 1953 coup was a pivotal and destructive event in Iranian history.

From afar, history is optional. But there’s a direct line from the 1953 coup to the predicament that Iranians find themselves in today. Washington re-installed the Pahlavi dictatorship that gave rise to a revolution that founded the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While routinely omitting even a mere mention of such matters as U.S. support for the overthrow of a duly elected Iranian leader 52 years ago, American journalists have kept news coverage of Iran in a zone where history is always influenceable. Under such conditions of skewed reporting and  in contrast to claims from the Bush administration, the Iranian presidential elections this month have included important elements of democratic participation. In recent weeks, Iranians have publicly and intensively debated Iran’s domestic policies, with very significant differences between the presidential competitors. While American journalists often seem to be suffering from a biased selection in their reporting, many Iranians are acutely mindful of the need to understand their country’s real history and begin a more hopeful chapter.

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Demonizing News Media is Attempt to Divert Attention from Policy Failures

Thursday June 30, 2005

The following article is by Pat Youngblood, Coordinator of the Third Coast Activist Resource Center in Austin, Texas.

What to do if the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has sparked resistance in those countries because people generally don’t like being occupied by a foreign power that has interests in exploiting their resources American leaders know the answer they believe that, Americans have to Blame journalists.

That’s exactly what the Bush administration and its rhetorical attack dogs are doing with the “scandal” over Newsweek’s story on the desecration of the Quran at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo.

In a short item in its May 9 issue, Newsweek reported that U.S. military investigators had found evidence that U.S. guards had dishonored the Holy Quran to try to provoke prisoners. Meanwhile, after the original story ran, Afghan and U.S. forces fired on demonstrators in Afghanistan, killing at least 14 and injuring many others.

The conventional wisdom emerged quickly: and claimed Newsweek got it wrong, and Newsweek is to blame for the deaths. The first conclusion is premature and the second is wrong.

Detainees have made such claims, which have been reported by attorneys representing some of the men in custody and denied by U.S. officials. Newsweek’s retraction is ambiguous, suggesting they believe the incident may have happened but no longer can demonstrate that it was cited in the specific U.S. government documents, as originally reported.

Given the abuse and torture from sexual humiliation to beatings to criminal homicide, that has gone on in various U.S. military prison facilities, it’s not hard to believe that the Quran has been insulted. Given that last month U.S. officials pressured the United Nations to eliminate the job of its top human-rights investigator in Afghanistan after that official criticized violations by U.S. forces in that country, it’s not hard to be skeptical about U.S. motives. And given that even the human-rights commission of the generally compliant Afghan government is blocked by U.S. forces from visiting the prisons, it’s not hard to believe that the U.S. officials may have something to hide.

Until Americans have more information, definitive conclusions are impossible. But if one goes on a popular right-wing web site, he or she will find the verdict that administration supporters are trying to make the final word that: “Newsweek lied, people died.”

Yes, people died during demonstrations. But reporters outside the United States have pointed out that these demonstrations have not been spontaneous but were well-organized, often by groups of students. The frustration with U.S. policy that fuels these demonstrations isn’t limited to the Holy Quran incident, and to reduce the unrest to one magazine story is misleading.

So, why American leaders focus on the Newsweek story? It’s part of the tried-and-true strategy of demonize, disguise, and divert. Demonize the news media to disguise the real causes of the resistance to occupation and divert attention from failed U.S. policies.

The irony is that the U.S. corporate news media deserve harsh criticism for coverage of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- not for possibly getting one fact wrong, but for failing to consistently challenge the illegality of both wars and the various distortions and lies that the Bush administration has used to mobilize support for those illegal wars.

American people should hold the news media accountable when they fail to disclose the facts and   defend honorable journalists when they are insulted by the U.S. political leaders, who are eager to cover their own failures.

(12)  

Media is a Battlefield 

Thursday June 23, 2005

The following article is by Nancy Snow who has faculty appointments in the College of Communications at University of Southern California, and a Senior Fellow in the Center on Public Diplomacy also a media activist and media policymaker.

Those who view media as a movement know it firstly as a political economy of a few of cooperative capital interests that shut out public participation in deference to their sponsors; and  as a form of information apartheid that forces the masses into information servitude in the form of a mindless peanut gallery of submissive driven to distraction and/or addiction to irrelevant entertainment dribble; and thirdly coated in news values that are generally pro-war anti-humanistic, and anti-global. News media owners are genuinely scared that global civic masses will gain an awareness of how the media system operates against their public interest and health, which is why it is needed to approach media reform as a global public health and education campaign.

However, an absolute certainty is that the corporate media system is on life support and this dying patient's struggle is progressive media's opportunity to distribute alternative medicine. Consider the following "points of light" in the media landscape:

Whose media is it, anyway? Media owners are out of touch with their media consumers and this cuts across partisan lines and political ideologies. News values are top-down, eyeballs are leaving traditional media and opportunity exists to create new media in the vacuum of profit bleeding going on presently in the corporate media. American corporate media not working harder to inform the discouraged and disgusted marginalized many people who, if given the proper tools, are ready to take up arms against a system that misinforms more than it informs and educates.

Many journalists who got into the journalist profession for the right reasons and would like to do the right stories cannot find. Investigative reporting has dried up altogether or shows up in fits and starts. It costs too much at a time when newsroom staffs are being decimated, earns too little in an era when double digit profiteering in news returns is expected by owners, and isn't in public demand, or so say media owners. The embedded media message of American people is that this is our time, the public  wants and needs democratic, accountable, and critical media that bow down to neither American corporate nor government gods.

When you see/hear and read something in the media, you shouldn't be satisfied by forwarding your post to a friend. Americans must take the media reform fight to the corporate sponsors. It can take just a handful of letters to get sponsors worried about continuing to carry a program, so continue to write your letters to the editor and voice your opposition against media coverage but more important, voice your opposition to media underwriters and advertisers. Why dominate the media content conversation in America today and note very prominently on their website that "Advertisers, along with network executives, are the key decision-makers on American media, and they decide what options Americans will have in television programming.

Media democracy in America has a two-hundred-year history. The flowers of today's media reform movement bloomed from the seedling struggles of the people of the United States, many of whom were native peoples and new immigrants in search of a voice for their community. How many of Americans were aware that the first Chinese language newspaper began in the immigrant communities of America, not China? These media facts have been so forgotten that it inspires anyone to think Americans need A People's Media History of the United States. As one who teaches mass communications history and philosophy in the United States, the students are hungry for knowing this history but don't know it because American journalism and communication schools aren't teaching it. Very few schools offer independent media or media from a populist perspective. Popular majors are public relations, advertising, and other sponsored-media approaches to communication.

It's been said often that war is too serious to be left to generals alone. The same applies to the dominant American corporate media system now under challenge. Media reform is too serious to leave to the U.S. present media owners. These owners, like many generals, perpetuate zero-sum thinking of winners and losers, with those who own and sponsor the media viewed as winners and those who consume the media as losers. American Corporate media has lost too many battles as credibility, public trust,  to win the  media war.

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Quran Abuse Allegations: True or False?

Thursday June 9, 2005

The following article is by Jules Witcover who writes for The Baltimore Sun's Washington bureau.

The Holy Quran abuse and desecration at Guantanamo Bay is an undenyable story. Newly released FBI interviews with detainees in 2002 and 2003 include more accusations of such abuse, obligating the Pentagon to insist again that the charges are unsubstantiated.

Newsweek, which took its lumps for relying on a single anonymous source in reporting that the Holy Quran is abused by Guantanamo prisons guard something that had been confirmed by a Pentagon official, is saying nothing. With the American death toll there approaching 1,700, nearly 13,000 more wounded and many more thousands of Iraqis dead, the Bush White House is in a very weak position to call on Newsweek to be more responsible in reporting on detainee charges, the war and its calamitous consequences.

Responding to the bad publicity Newsweek, has revised its policy of relying on using single anonymous sources. The publication will permit them only when approved by senior editors, with a stronger effort to let readers know why each time the practice is allowed.

Not only did the phrase "sources said" incorrectly suggest there was more than one informant, but the word "source" doesn't give the reader any suggestion about whether the individual is reliable.

But the White House, in warning a news organization, sends a cooling message that indicates unjustified declaration of the American news media as a whole.

In sending it, the administration obviously seeks to undermine the credibility of all of the news media while continuing its policy of limiting access to information about U.S. casualties and what has been going on in American administered detention camps.

When an American news organization is supposed to make a mistake, it does more than discredit its believability with its readership or audience. Poor, sloppy or careless journalistic performance can convey a much broader impression of malpractice by the news media as a whole. With a heavy helping hand from this administration, readers can be convinced that a story that is in error on how it was obtained automatically disproves the accusation itself. White House strategists certainly realize this. When a reporting mistake is made, they have not hesitated, to seize on it to further undermine public confidence in a news business like this.

That clearly was true when CBS News clung to the 2000 campaign hoax that professed to prove President Bush had failed to fulfill its Air National Guard duties during the Vietnam War. When that hoax was disclosed, the White House used it to effectively obliterate the accusations against him.

Now, with the FBI files showing other Guantanamo detainees had made accusations of Quran abuse similar to Newsweek's as early as three years ago, that story suddenly has new legs in news-business talk. In the face of the overwrought White House criticism of the magazine's unwitting miscue, the obligation remains for Newsweek and its newsgathering colleagues to keep digging on the Holy Quran abuse allegations and accurately report their findings.

(10)  

The Real Challenge for Public Television

Thursday June 2, 2005

The following article is by William Hoynes Professor of Sociology and Director of Media Studies at Vassar College in New York.

Once again, American public television is in political trouble. Recent disclosures brought a Bush White House staffer on board to help draft guiding principles for the future of Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) .  In fact, political conservatives have been targeting Public Broadcasting Service(PBS) for more than 20 years with a steady stream of public relations campaigns carefully designed to restrict in what remains of public television's independence. Those who think that recent conservative claims provide any fresh evidence that Public Broadcasting Service leans left are missing the point. The resurgence of charges of a liberal bias at Public Broadcasting Service does more than undermine renewed efforts to provide stable public funding for public television. Stable public funding would help insulate public broadcasters from ideologically motivated political pressure-which is particularly important now that Corporation for Public Broadcasting, originally designed as a "heat shield" from political pressure, has become one of the principal sources of such political pressure. What's more, this on-again, off-again controversy directs public attention away from the far more consequential development of a market-savvy, "new Public Broadcasting Service."

This new Public Broadcasting Service is positioning itself to be a modern media enterprise for the 21st century. However, even as Public Broadcasting Service tries to define its niche in the new media landscape, there are plenty of longstanding questions about public television's identity that need to be tackled head-on. For starters, public broadcasters have always waffled about what it means to be public. And, now more than ever, the meaning of non-commercial broadcasting needs to be re-examined.

Most fundamentally, American public broadcasting system still has to struggle with how it can fulfill its founding mission-to "provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard," serve as "a forum for argument and discussion," and broadcast programs that "help Americans see America whole, in all its diversity." With the airwaves more cluttered and more commercial, and with the public fragmenting into bite-sized demographically-specific audience segments, public television's mission to provide free, universally accessible programming that is diverse and innovative may be even more valuable than ever before. In an increasingly commercialized media world, the past decade's expansion in television channel capacity and the explosion of the World Wide Web, paradoxically, only reinforce the need for the kind of citizen-oriented, non-commercial media that public broadcasting can be.

Contrary to the claims of conservative critics, scholarly research on Public Broadcasting Service shows that public television is not a haven for alternative perspectives, but is looking more and more like its commercial counterparts. Public television's public affairs programs include a remarkably narrow range of sources and experts. It is particularly noteworthy that stories about the economy are organized around the views and activities of corporate actors and investors. Indeed, concerns of the corporate and investment communities are the principal frame for most economic coverage on public television, making the perspectives and experiences of citizens, workers, and consumers seem indirectly related to the real economic news.

Instead of wide-ranging debates, the kinds that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, public television provides programs that are populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether it is corporate sources  who talk about stock pricesonly or government officials and Washington journalists who talk about political strategy), public television offers the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

This insider orientation makes it hard to identify what, outside of the one-hour length of the evening news and the documentary format, defines public television as innovative, independent, or alternative. Given the continuing growth of cable programs that feature a now-standard set of pundits and insiders carrying on familiar and sometimes overheated arguments, public television's elite-oriented discussions may have a difficult time engaging viewers because they are a toned-down version of the same format.

Public television can engage citizens by developing public affairs programs that are both substantive and distinctive, broadening the discourse beyond traditional elite voices, and making public television a more genuinely public institution.

In the digital age, despite the temptations of commercialization, public television can be a valuable, resource in America if its leadership takes seriously its founding mission to broadcast programs that include fresh perspectives, expand dialogue, and welcome controversy.                              

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Don't Blame Newsweek

The following article is by Molly Ivins, an American journalist and  human rights activist.

This is a revolting development. There seems to be a bit of a campaign on the right to blame Newsweek for the anti-American riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Islamic countries.

That the story about Americans abusing the Koran in order to anger prisoners has been out there for quite some time. The first mention of it was on March 17, 2004, when the Daily Independent of London interviewed the first British citizen released from Guantanamo Bay. The prisoner said he had been physically beaten but did not consider that as bad as the psychological torture, which he described extensively. Jamal al-Harith, a computer programmer from Manchester, said 70 percent of the inmates had gone on a hunger strike after a guard kicked a copy of the Koran. The strike was ended by force-feeding. Nonetheless, the incident raised several questions regarding the insulting behaviour.

Is this American? Is this Christian? What are Americans’ moral values? Where are the clergymen on this? Speak up,  speak out.

On Jan. 9, 2005, Andrew Sullivan, writing in The Sunday Times of London, said: "American people now know a great deal about what has gone on in U.S. detention facilities under the Bush administration. Several government and Red Cross reports detail the way many detainees have been treated. Americans know for certain that the United States has tortured five inmates to death. We know that 23 others have died in U.S. custody under suspicious circumstances. They know that torture has been practiced by almost every branch of the U.S. military in sites all over the world -- from Abu Ghuraib to Tikrit, Mosul, Basra, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Americans know that thousands of men, women and children were grabbed almost at random from their homes in Baghdad, taken to Saddam's former torture palace and subjected to abuse, murder, beatings, semi-crucifixions and even rape. All of this is detailed in the official reports. What has been perpetrated in secret prisons to 'ghost detainees' hidden from Red Cross inspection, Americans do not know. They may never know.”

Is this America? While White House lawyers were arguing about what separates torture from legitimate 'coercive interrogation techniques, the following was taking place: Prisoners were hanged for hours or days from bars or doors in semi-crucifixions; they were repeatedly beaten unconscious, woken and then beaten again for days on end; they were urinated on, kicked in the head, had their ribs broken, and were subjected to electric shocks.

Some Muslims had pork or alcohol forced down their throats; they had tape placed over their mouths for reciting the Koran; many Muslims were forced to be naked in front of each other, members of the opposite sex and sometimes their own families.

The New York Times reported on May 1 on the same investigation Newsweek was writing about and interviewed a released Kuwaiti, who spoke of three major hunger strikes, one of them touched off by the guards' handling copies of the Koran, which had been tossed into a pile and stomped on. A senior officer delivered an apology over the camp's loudspeaker system, pledging that such abuses would stop. Interpreters, standing outside each prison block, translated the officer's apology. A former interrogator at Guantanamo, in an interview with the Times, confirmed the accounts of the hunger strikes, including the public expression of regret over the treatment of the Korans.

So where does all this leave Americans? With a story that is not only true, but previously reported numerous times. So let's stop blaming "Lynch Newsweek" . Seventeen people have died in these riots. They didn't die because of anything Newsweek did -- the riots were caused by what American government has done.

America is guilty of torture. What are American people going to do about this? It's their country, their money, and their government. American Governors are doing this in peoples name. The statesmen elected to public office do what American citizens don’t expect them to do.

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The United States’ military budget this year equals that of the rest of the world’s put together. This is while all other US public services, such as health and education have had to make drastic cut backs to make up for its budgetary shortfall. The US president Bush has been forced to come up with a new social security pensions’ plan. To put it in layman’s terms, the plan involves gambling at least part of the US taxpayers’ state contributions on the stock market. The Bush administration insists that there will be a shortfall of one trillion dollars in the US state pensions’ schemes unless the plan is approved. The projected one trillion dollar pensions’ shortfall is just shy of three years’ worth of current US defense expenditure. What the US media has so far forgotten to mention is that should the US make a cut back of only 30 billion dollars annually in its military budget over the next ten years, one third of the shortfall in state pensions would be eliminated; add interest to the total sum saved and the required one trillion dollars for state pensions will be present and accounted for. So why doesn’t the US media opt to highlight this fact? Isn’t thirty billion dollars worth of cutbacks in the military better than leaving the public’s future security in the hands of volatile stock markets and banking? The US defense budget this year easily exceeds 330 billion dollars.

Scaremongering by the US media however, has already ensured the US defense contractors and industries enjoy a free run on the US budget. The US tax payer will pay anything it is asked for to spruce up its military, petrified of the imaginary threat lurking overseas. There are signs that such a trend is about to come to a dead end. The US military failed to meet its recruitment targets for the third time this month. The Iraq War has left an undeniable impression on the US public’s psyche. Scores of seriously maimed US servicemen returning from Iraq in stretchers, has made for very poor publicity with regards to a military career in the US armed forces. The US media never even attempted to justify the Iraq War, having already portrayed the campaign as a necessary evil. The Bush administration takes for granted the fact that over sixty percent of ill informed adult Americans still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. With the US public purse squeezed to pay for the Iraq War, it has been left for the so-called close US allies to reap the rewards of the campaign. Britain keeps a mere 8000 troops in Iraq and it has made back -by one unofficial estimate- over four times what it spent in the campaign to oust Saddam Hussein. The wisdom for keeping such freeloading allies while the US’ sons pay with their lives has also never been called into question by the US media.

The US media has never questioned the wisdom for keeping such unsavory and internationally reviled allies by successive US administrations. It is elementary knowledge for every adult that one’s friends reflect socially on oneself. Reaching out time after time to an imperialist has been like Britain with regards to projection of US foreign policy cannot possibly reflect well on the US intentions abroad. Calling the US an ally evidently makes beneficial sense for Britain; however the opposite can hardly be true judging by calumny that has befallen the US Army, economy, and public as a direct result of the Iraq War. Historic ties are all good and well, but the cost to the US reputation and standing for such friendship must at least be questioned by the US media, should it not? Could the world public be blamed for suspecting that Britain is attempting to join the “great game” once again via the backdoor at great US expense? The US public however is blissfully unaware of the sinister forces at work behind the scenes since the US media has been rendered impotent via Zionist sponsored news management. The ethnic, religious, cultural and political divisions between everyday folk around the world would not amount to a bag of beans had it not been for the well worked principals of media hype and distortion, forced down our collective throats around the clock from the moment we mature enough to try to perceive the world we live in.

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As much as we may view state sponsored mind control with abhorrence, it remains a prominent factor in our everyday lives. We live by what the media bring to our attention. We form opinions, develop likes and dislikes, and make our decisions according to what we learn. The media is tasked in any democratic order to present the facts as accurately as it is possible. Journalism must avoid jingoism, slogans, vilification and stereotyping in order to promote a healthy and peaceful social order worldwide. However, almost anyone remotely aware of the pace of events linked to US politics would confirm that the US media has only once managed to operate according to the rules: during the Vietnam War. Freelance journalism is blamed by the conservative camp in the US, to have been largely responsible for the loss of face and the humiliating defeat of US forces in South East Asia. Oriana Fallaci, an Italian born freelance journalist and author, was perhaps the most prolific for her times. In her book, “life, War and Nothing Besides”, she gave the most graphic account of the summery execution of a Vietcong sympathizer by General Lon, the head of South Vietnamese, Saigon Police force. The infamous photo of the execution appeared on the cover of her book.

It would be a near impossibility to have a book published these days whose contents so graphically denounce the US foreign policy and its practices. Nowadays most major publishers have been reeled in by big business in the West and forced to toe the official line. It is as if the Neo-Conservatives in the US have managed to turn back the time. Biased and manicured accounts of US military action, via reports by sanctioned journalists embedded with US forces, have replaced the raw sincerity of accounts given by people like Fallaci. However time itself, has moved on to besmirch the innocence of the 1960s and 70s era journalists, who believed wholeheartedly that their labor could serve to make for a better world. The propaganda apparatus of state control pitted against countless communities has moved quickly to protect its profits. The claim by the US media, that the Western world is more democratic than the rest is comical in a world where the true measure for passing judgment on governments is: which is least harmful toward its own citizens. George Orwell’s famous novel “1984”, clearly demonstrates that attempts to mislead public opinion via media distortion, constitute undemocratic acts.

Early entrepreneurs in the 18^th century deemed as unhealthy what they perceived as too much leisure time enjoyed by the general public. They proceeded to own a certain number of hours out of every worker’s day. Nothing symbolizes this fact more than factory clocks in our times. Factory clocks are there above all to remind workers that so many hours everyday belong to proprietors and management. This arrangement leaves precious little time for interest in events beyond the factory floor by the workers; similar principals apply to almost any other profession today. General public in the US is just too busy earning a living to care about people living elsewhere in the world providing the US government with precious opportunity to manipulate the news to its advantage. Governments have even gone further; some have prolonged overseas military conflicts so as to shift the focus from their poor domestic performance. Others have opted for war encouraged by their domestic defense industries’ lobby. State sponsored media distortion has covered for and justified to the public whatever tactic the US government has adopted over the years regardless of the misery caused elsewhere in the world.

The prime reasons for existence of co-called criminal or terrorist regimes throughout the world are unjust, biased and short sighted policies thought up by the Washington planners to cover for US fiscal excesses. In the make believe world of the US media distortion friends can turn into enemies overnight. Who knows how many other nations will have to be demonized, belittled, branded or sacrificed before big business in the US is satisfied. Since its foundation just over fifty years ago, Israel has fought at least seven major offensive military campaigns. It has led military invasions against all of its neighbors and continues its illegal occupation of the West Bank and the Golan heights. It possesses nuclear weapons and is not a signatory to the NPT. It has been involved in kidnappings, torture and assassination of its opponents. Israel has had over one hundred UN resolutions passed against it; strange how precious little is mentioned by the US media about the country that is evidently a total threat to world peace and security.

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Should all US’ adults recognize and put aside all the misconceptions, historical inaccuracies and prejudices induced in them from an early age, the world will begin to look like a totally different place to them all. Awareness of the full facts by any society is like a cankerworm, which eats its way through rotten pillars of injustice; the reason why perhaps that successive US administrations, have been so fearful of the growth of learned societies free of the taints of prejudice. Using Nazi Germany as a measure for evil may not be wholly accurate, after all genocide is nothing new. Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes murdered over ten million Persians in their campaign. The religious wars in Europe ended only after 45 percent of the total population of that continent had been wiped out. Seventy million Native Americans perished over twenty or so generations at the hands of European pilgrims. The question is how could a mass murdering nation’s offspring ever forgive their parents’ brutal acts? It is natural for all children to love their parents, but what if some parents are torturers, mass murderers or genocidal maniacs. What if those parents have committed horrendous acts of brutality against others? How could they be loved by their offspring? The answer is that a false world made up of misconceptions, historical inaccuracies and prejudices induced at an early age, must be created through miss education by mass media to eliminate the impact that such truths may have on the children’s psyche.

One UN estimate, puts the number of people killed worldwide since WWII, by wars that the US has been directly or indirectly responsible for, at thirty eight million souls. Looking through the kaleidoscope of Zionist sponsored US media; every single person killed was branded: a communist, a gook, a terrorist or an Islamic insurgent. The US media has been wrestling with the same stark choice as the Nazi propaganda machine; how could the offspring of the instigators of such tyrannical rule ever forgive their parents? The Nazis created a world for their children through mass media, in which all the evil that their henchmen did appear just, and all the selfless acts of bravery by the resistance in Europe and elsewhere looked like mindless terrorism. The US, a country that was conceived upon the genocide of Native Americans, a country that has dropped nuclear bombs on the civilian population of Japan, a country that has used chemical weapons on the civilian population of Vietnam, could not survive if its offspring viewed it for what it truly represented. To justify the brutal acts committed  by the US abroad, the US media simply had to create a make belief world: of good and bad, of the free world and communism, of democracy and dictatorship, of Christian and Muslim, of black and white.

There can be no explanations for the acts of torture and degradation inflicted on Iraqi prisoners by the US troops. However, those responsible will rejoin their communities back home, in time, not as war criminals but as local heroes. The very same US media machine has been teaching Americans that it is alright to torture the supposed enemy to death; that finishing off the “bad guys” in the worst possible way is ok. In most Hollywood films killing the supposed bad guys is the only conclusive surefire route to settling a disagreement or gaining satisfaction. The US public has been taught that torture is alright for as long as it is inflicted on some scary enemy. And via the same principals, the Abu Ghuraib torturers will walk the streets in their hometowns in Hicksville, USA, with their heads held high. Distortion of facts by the US media will continue despite all out efforts by international NGOs to awaken the US public to the effects US foreign policy and practices are having on the world at large. The US cannot afford to allow its own children to become alienated because of something as insignificant as the truth. The US media is fully aware that denial is one of the most elementary techniques to ease national guilt in the public conscience.

Denial in psychology and psychiatry is an ego defense mechanism that operates unconsciously to resolve emotional conflict and to allay anxiety by refusing to perceive the more unpleasant aspects of external reality. Freud described it as a primitive defense mechanism. It is considered maladaptive when it becomes delusional. The US public’s denial of the firm evidence emerging with regards to their government’s actions matches in intensity the Nazi denials of its death camps. The US public has evidently become delusional to the point where it refuses to face what it perceives as unpleasant aspects of external reality. The delusive state is apparent in US’ national behavior. Denial often leads to compulsive violence in people and violent military action continues to play a prominent role in the US foreign policy accordingly.

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In their haste to lead young minds stray around the world, the US media began to add political influences even to children's TV programs employing the same old sound, word and color association techniques. Major differences between the 1960's children's cartoon programs and those of later decades can be observed. In one cartoon, Iranian Navy invading ancient Greece has modern Iranian flags on their ship's sails. The Iranian sailors are depicted as you've guessed it: wild eyed bearded brutes, out to cause mayhem and destruction. This method in media distortion is of particular concern, since young minds are taught to fear certain flags, colors or ethnic stereotypes. We mentioned in our program last week that psychiatrists have discovered that persons who fear certain things in their childhood grow into adults who hate those same things. The technique sets a dangerous precedence for induction of racism, ethnic and religious hatred into young minds to be taken advantage of at a later date by unsavory elements in the US administration. Such media distortion can in theory produce a never ending supply of intellectually sterile generations who blindly back the US into any and all ill-conceived foreign adventures. This was also initially a program thought up by the Nazis to hook the German youth, from an early age, on Nazi doctrine.

The evolution of propaganda techniques from basic mud slinging matches to the realms of advanced psychology has been a total necessity in the US where countless disgraceful characters have been graced by the title of US president. US presidential campaigns are reliant on principals that have been induced in US children from an early age. US presidential campaign speeches are carefully drawn up to trigger fear factors induced in the public psyche. Scare mongering tactics have been years in the making thus by the US media, before they could be utilized to pave the way for US public approval of illegal US military actions abroad. Conjuring up images of reactionary brutal retards time after time, the US government has been able to trample all over international law at will, while encouraging its own allies to follow suit. All dissenting voices have been silenced and good argument has followed suit. Any government or nation opposed to US argument has been vilified so in theory the US must not be faced with any opposition abroad.

Enter technological advance in the form of the internet, and years of planning by the US media to assist their government in a mad quest for global hegemony begins to go to pot. US publicity planners' worst nightmares seemed to have come true for a short time. However, taking over entire server networks and silencing those opposed to US foreign policy via brute tactics has become the order of the day. Satellite TV stations who broadcast what is deemed anti-American are also taken off air with total ease by countries who claim to be the flag bearers of freedom and social liberty. Freedom of speech, one of the cornerstones of democratic social order has fallen by the wayside in the latest effort by the West to impose its own sets of values on the world public. Certain Western satellite stations broadcast programs in the full knowledge that they maybe offensive to other cultures; Pornographic images, misrepresentations and outright lies broadcast by certain US satellite TV stations must be tolerated by the rest of the world; and yet, the offended parties seem powerless to act against such cultural invasions. Should they even attempt it they are immediately subjected to the full fury of the US media's many tangled webs of lies while the US seems unable to tolerate a moment of criticism broadcast to its public by other nations.

Tolerance, another cornerstone of social democratic order is also in short supply by the self-acclaimed flag bearers of international democracy. All actions assumed by the US media tend to end in woeful double standards that have driven the world to near distraction. Double-standard journalism by the US media has been carefully cultivated to take advantage of all the propaganda techniques developed by the CIA over the years. The US planners have initiated disgraceful acts by successive US administrations resulting in human tragedies abroad and yet their media has made them appear like the ones wearing the white hats. History is recorded to ignore outrageous blanders made by the US.

(4)

The US media’s distortions take many forms in order to lead public opinion away from the facts, yielding the kind of results desired by the US foreign and domestic policy planners. A simple but effective method employed by the US propaganda apparatus, is also used in teaching language to young children. It is called word association. The US media go to many pains to ensure that every time Iran’s name is mentioned, the words terrorist, fundamentalist or Islamic extremist follow within the next two sentences. This simple technique conjures up unflattering images in the listeners minds of the country. Even when Iran has little to do with a news report on the Middle East, it receives a mention in a similar pattern. In the hours immediately following the 9/11 attacks, the US media kept reeling off a list of countries it considered responsible; Palestine, Iran and Syria featured prominently. For the US public busy with their daily chores and catching only glimpses of the news reports from time to time, these became the names that were associated with terrorism, death and mayhem. As it transpired however the culprits turned out to be Saudi Arabian dissidents. Saudi Arabia, supposedly one of the staunchest US allies in the Middle East has never been branded a supporter of international terrorism despite the fact that most terrorist attacks against American citizens in the Middle East in the 1990s were carried out by Saudi nationals.

Such baseless accusations would not go unpunished if they were to come from those nations opposed to the US foreign policy. However, the US media is given a free hand to vilify whomsoever any US administration chooses to view with distaste. A nation could very easily be set up by the US media to appear evil, purely to serve the US business interests abroad. Iraq is one recent example of the word association propaganda technique. Prior to the Iraq War the US media reports of the 9/11 atrocity were immediately followed with reports on Iraq and WMD. Repeated over time, over sixty percent of the US public came to associate Iraq with the attack on the Twin Towers paving the way for the illegal US invasion of the sovereign Middle Eastern nation in 2003. The technique proved so effective that most Americans believe to this very day that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11 atrocity. Word association technique, became a precise science at the hands of a the Nazis in WWII and was developed further into near art form by the US security apparatus, serving to demonize entire nations en route to their annihilation by the US hi-tech weapons. The US Media use a variety of techniques to distort facts, to discourage the US public from looking at the whole picture and create mass panic, when required to advance US’ foreign policy. 

Sound association is yet another technique developed by the US media to blight the unsuspecting public lives around the globe. It was realized early on by psychiatrists that hate was the most likely consequence of fear. During long-term research on child psychiatry a pattern came to the scientists’ attention; children who feared certain sounds grew up to become adults who hated those very same sounds. The US Marine Corps developed techniques for training its special units during the Vietnam War accordingly. It involved forcing them to listen to long hours of North Vietnamese music and speeches broadcast via loudspeakers, following which the marines were subjected to beatings and forced to carry out hard labor or menial jobs. Such training paid handsome dividends to the US military in actual combat in Vietnam. The US Marines would subconsciously slip into a murderous state of mind that increased their fighting prowess and resilience during combat. However, the massacre of Vietnamese civilians at “May Lai” demonstrated graphically that once conditions gave rise to the aggressive state of mind, the US troops simply could not stop killing. A watered down version of the technique was devised to be fed to the US public through mass media and movies.

Film scores in Hollywood movies were often altered to scare the public whenever a scene in any movie depicted the perceived common enemy of the US. Sounds that had been identified as unnerving to the human palette were introduced into the film score to leave a bad taste, as it were, in the film audiences’ mouths. Equally, when an actor playing the role of a US national hero appeared in any movie scene the background music softened into pleasing tones. The US television networks soon followed suit under US government directives.

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The toll of the dark side of 1960’s youth culture manifested itself in the following decade. The bleak undercurrent of drug culture came to public attention as youth idols of the 1960s such as Jimmy Hendrix and Janice Joplin died drug induced deaths. The situation had been getting out of hand for some time but as with most other issues it took the deaths of numerous public figures to bring the tragic reality of prevalence of drug abuse in Western society to the world attention. The US had been on a losing streak for two decades by that stage. The Soviets had won the space race and their athletes had become invincible Olympic champions, Vietnam War had proved a total disaster, the Watergate scandal had disgraced US’ politics, and as if to make matters worse one of the US’ staunchest allies in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, had been toppled in a popular Revolution in 1979. Then in a completely surprise move, Soviet Union landed its forces in Afghanistan at the request of the socialist government there. In retrospect, the ill conceived Soviet action proved to be just the kind of breathing space the US media needed to regroup and go on the offensive. The 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow was axed by the West in protest; but more importantly the focus of world media attention shifted to Afghanistan offering the US a much needed respite.

Another break for the US arrived via the storming of the US Embassy in Tehran. A group of revolutionary Iranian students broke into the building and detained its 55 American staff. The US media could not believe its luck. Not only could the US return -Magnificent Seven style- to its cherished and much touted role of assisting the politically oppressed people of the world, it could fully demonstrate that those opposed to its foreign policy abroad were no more than a bunch of brutal uncivilized hotheads who failed to respect even the very basic rules of humanity. From that moment on, all US-inherited Nazi rules of propaganda were brought to bear on Iran by the US media. All images of Iran on US television networks were shown in the worst possible light with disheveled so-called terrorists shouting slogans, vowing to destroy America. Iran, a country that had been known in the West for its rich history, culture and arts was transformed overnight into the land of Islamic extremism, hostage taking and terrorism. In the US, a Republican Candidate, Ronald Reagan, won the presidential election riding the back-to-grass-roots ticket. With President Reagan’s term came an unlikely operatic ensemble of voices from the far right of US politics.

Years of anti Iranian prejudice and preconception cultivated by the Greek-oriented Western education system came to the fore via Reagan’s motley crew. Where ancient Greeks had at least stopped at writing off entire nations as evil, the Reagan administration chose to go further; this was no longer a mud slinging match between opposing governments. Anything to do with Iran was portrayed as flawed. Nazi era camera tricks, propaganda slogans and political and military pressure techniques were all utilized against the Iranian nation. Anything that was wrong in the world became Iran’s fault. The US foreign policy’s decades of serious shortcomings and double standards leading to disaster were also blamed on Iran. Jingoism replaced firm political argument and reason. Sound bite replaced logic and in short Iran became the latest in a long line of unsuspecting victims of US media sponsored demonization. The US media’s tactic of vilifying the entire Iranian nation instead of its political leadership proved foolhardy in the years to follow, as more and more Iranian rank and file offended by the US stance, turned their backs, in protest at unjust claims and fabrications, on anything the US had to offer.

The US media was burning the very bridges that any US administration needed to cross in order to amend past mistakes. Armies of loony tune planners crowded the White House corridors to offer advice based on their jaundiced and prejudiced view of the world at large. A British advisor-possibly lost in an imperial daydream-went even so far as to suggest a 19^th century style naval blockade against Iran. Strangely enough, a Reagan administration threatened by losing face at the time unwittingly agreed to a partial blockade of the Persian Gulf, unleashing the infamous 1980s tanker wars in the straits of Hormuz.

(2)

The Soviet forces under Marshal Zhukov pushed into Berlin and after brutal urban warfare and hand to hand fighting, reached the Reichstag. Contrary to popular belief it was the Soviet flag that was first raised over Berlin and not the stars and stripes of USA. Two mighty armies with absolutely different ideologies, allied only through force of circumstance, would come to exchange blows over the next fifty years. The Cold War was conceived in such conditions. Following WWII, the US was desperate to neutralize what it viewed as the Bolshevik threat but it had no intelligence agents able to effectively counter communist operatives and Soviet expansion into Western Europe. The nature of the beast became apparent in such consequences; the US pardoned all German weapons’ scientists and took them back to USA to work on its own weapons programs. The US went even further; it began to recruit members of the dreaded Nazi intelligence service the Gestapo, since they were the only people who had up to date intelligence on all communist activities in Europe. The US was in effect making a mockery of all the claims made about the suffering inflicted on the Jews, Romany Gypsies and Slavs by the Nazis in their concentration camps. All aspects of the US’ illegal activities were kept from the world public via strict media controls.

While the world public was kept captivated with Hollywood’s tails of Nazi woe, the US government was busy shielding and recruiting Nazi criminals responsible for the genocide of millions. This set a dangerous precedence for all future US government activities. Gestapo operatives brought with them an entire range of techniques that were subsequently and promptly employed by the US against all regimes that were considered a threat to US Capitalism: the South American dirty wars, propping up of criminal regimes in the Middle East and fueling the flames of ethnic hatred in Africa, are to name but only a handful. CIA planners realized early on that the deaths of more than 52 million mainly adults in WWII had created a vacuum in the transfer of knowledge and experience to the younger generation worldwide. For the US plans to work this generation could only be given access to the version of events that helped advance US foreign policy in its Cold War against the Soviet Union. Multi-level psychological warfare plans were drawn up using the documents acquired from Nazi Germany. Nazi racial purity ideology was replaced with talk of freedom and democracy. Entirely new American sponsored stereotypes and labels began to target supposed new threats. The term red or communist replaced the frequent sound-bites of the Nazi racial superiority doctrine that had targeted its imaginary enemies: parasitic Jews, brutal Slavs and backward Africans.

However, certain Nazi sound bites simply could not be bettered. Those terms were kept and adapted to new scenarios. The term terrorist was one such mass media sound bite. As a propaganda tool the term terrorist could not be excelled. The word had terror at its heart -so to speak- while remaining vague enough to be implied to anyone in disagreement with US foreign policy. In 1950s, 60s and 70s’ South America, anyone labeled a communist, red or a terrorist ran serious risk of facing abduction, imprisonment, torture, disappearance or a summery execution by paramilitary death squads. No human rights were afforded anyone with socialist sympathies. If a person was unfortunate enough to be labeled a red, he or she would be viewed as having forfeited all rights to receiving humane treatment. This was a prime example of how media distortion of facts could serve to blight entire communities let alone the odd intellectual idealist. The Nazi process of demonization of foreign enemies had truly traveled full circle to serve another militaristic world power, the United States of America.

The sheer disregard for human life induced by mass media came to light during the Vietnam War, where free press got a look in on a major conflict for the first time. The horror inflicted on entire Vietnamese towns and villages via indiscriminate US bombardment was for the first time beamed into every home on earth. The savagery of the US action was such that it prompted mass rallies against the Vietnam War by American citizens. Several US students were shot and killed while protesting on university campuses. Intense US mass media distortion of facts and fabrications could no longer hold back the social upheaval initiated by mass awakening of a well-informed younger American generation.  

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Distortion of facts has been employed as a successful weapon ever since humanity invented language and writing. Countless empires have attempted to impose their ideologies via what has become known as news management, in modern political jargon. With progress in technology enabling news transmission at the speed of light, the propaganda weapon has entered the realms of advanced psychology and used to devastating effect against an unsuspecting world public.

Nazi Germany took state sponsored propaganda delivered by mass media to new highs. Under Nazi rule, countless propaganda methods were experimented on, perfected, and utilized in occupied Europe. People in countries under occupation naturally resist the predicament inflicted upon them through force of arms in any way they can think of, and occupied Europe under Nazi occupation proved no different. However, patchy resistance by the general public at large did not concern the Nazi hierarchy. It was organized resistance by a dedicated few that presented “Wermacht” with an impossible task. The Gestapo opted for heavy handed tactics at first but faced with failure it started to employ many different techniques at multiple levels to tackle the snowballing discontent against Nazi rule. One such technique was development of sound bites that demonized and isolated members of the resistance while discouraging other members of the public from joining or aiding them. The term terrorist as a major propaganda tool was born thus. Nazi communiqués left over from WWII prove beyond any doubt that in Nazi Germany, the practiced state policy for its was for its mass media to refer to members of popular resistance in countries under Nazi occupation as terrorists.   

Nazi hierarchy dictated that the opposition to their rule in the countries they had invaded must be shown in the worst possible light to be inferior. Nazi news reels stereotyped Jews were as scheming parasitic figures, out to corrupt and then enslave civilized, correct societies. Eastern Europeans, in particular the Slavs, were typified as mentally retarded brutes. Locations to film such propaganda were carefully chosen so as not to contradict the Nazi propaganda theme nor complement the enemy of German National Socialism. Often, the least developed areas in enemy territory would be earmarked as location for filming to demonstrate the sheer backward depravity of the racially inferior foe. A bearded Jew, corrupting a pure Germanic girl or a mad eyed Slav leading a murderous charge brandishing a curved sword, proved particularly effective themes in propaganda posters put up all over Nazi Germany. The latter was yet another level of psychological warfare developed to woe Germans to support Nazi ideology; bringing general public’s most intimate fears to the fore to serve the politics of the state.

What we have come to know as scare mongering tactics, a technique practiced liberally by the Neo-Conservatives in the Bush administration, has its roots firmly bedded in notorious Gestapo tactics developed in WWII. Nazi propaganda directives approved by Gobles himself, instructed conjuring up images of a common enemy of the Third Riche; an evil entity that lurked through Aryan society with the sole aim of causing death, destruction and mayhem. If the resistance disrupted orderly Nazi society via partisan action: blowing up a bridge or a railway line, well so much better for Gestapo; it could go about mass murdering and torturing entire communities in occupied Europe completely unchallenged. It is much easier to wipe out entire cities if their inhabitants have already been character assassinated as less than human. Gestapo killed only terrorists, communists and traitors, or so it claimed, and nobody really cared about how the feared common enemy was disposed of. Scare mongering paid huge dividends to Adolf Hitler. Most German army recruits joined the Nazi war machine believing that they were striking evil down before evil could harm their families. Preemptive strike doctrine in war took hold thus.

Using the Preemptive Strike doctrine, the Nazi propaganda machine actually managed to convince ordinary Germans that the National Socialist government was invading other countries and laying waste to their cities in defense of Nazi Germany. It all read like a quaint little story: the racially inferior, parasitic, uncivilized, disheveled, excitable brute was out to kill pure, God fearing, hardworking Germans. Would Deutch Volk be willing to wait for such enemy to strike first? Millions of Slavs, Romany gypsies and Jews passed through the infamous gates of Nazi death camps never to be seen or heard of again, and ordinary Germans did not know the first thing about it until after WWII had ended. After the war millions of pages of instruction manuals for Nazi propaganda were seized by the victorious US forces and shipped back to the US for further examination. Much of the techniques utilized by the Nazis were refined and placed in the capable hands of the CIA.