The Unseen Lies: Journalism As Propaganda
The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Pilger at Socialism 2007 Conference in Chicago this past June:
The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.
For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller’s parroting of official sources and vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin,” was the headline on his report, and it was false.
Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown. In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media giants, and his company will be one of them. This concentration of power is not exclusive of course to the United States. The BBC has announced it is expanding its broadcasts to the United States, because it believes Americans want principled, objective, neutral journalism for which the BBC is famous. They have launched BBC America. You may have seen the advertising.
The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. Its founder was Lord John Reith, who believed that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over.
So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle certainly: a principle to be suspended whenever the establishment was under threat. And that principle has been upheld ever since.
Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the BBC’s reporting. One shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar dissent-2 percent. That is less than the antiwar coverage of ABC, NBC, and CBS. A second study by the University of Wales shows that in the buildup to the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC’s references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them, and that by clear implication Bush and Blair were right. We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake. But that’s not the point. The point is that the work of MI-6 was unnecessary, because professional journalism on its own would have produced the same result.
Listen to the BBC’s man in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the invasion. “There is not doubt,” he told viewers in the UK and all over the world, “That the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up with American military power.” In 2005 the same reporter lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as someone who “believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development.” That was before the little incident at the World Bank.
None of this is unusual. BBC news routinely describes the invasion as a miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked, not based on lies, but a miscalculation.
The words “mistake” and “blunder” are common BBC news currency, along with “failure”-which at least suggests that if the deliberate, calculated, unprovoked, illegal assault on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would have been just fine. Whenever I hear these words I remember Edward Herman’s marvelous essay about normalizing the unthinkable. For that’s what media clichéd language does and is designed to do-it normalizes the unthinkable; of the degradation of war, of severed limbs, of maimed children, all of which I’ve seen. One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”
What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 last year the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn’t say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That’s the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of them-they’ve spoken to me about it-few of them will say it in public.
Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”
Vandana Shiva has called this subjugated knowledge. The great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn got it right when he wrote, “Never believe anything until it’s officially denied.”
One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the first casualty. No it’s not. Journalism is the first casualty. When the Vietnam War was over, the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, a distinguished correspondent who had covered the war. “For the first time in modern history,” he wrote, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all on the television screen.” He held journalists responsible for losing the war by opposing it in their reporting. Robert Elegant’s view became the received wisdom in Washington and it still is. In Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded journalist because it believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam.
The very opposite was true. On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I called at the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed that some of them had a pinboard on the wall on which were gruesome photographs, mostly of bodies of Vietnamese and of American soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being tortured; above the torturers head was a stick-on comic balloon with the words, “that’ll teach you to talk to the press.” None of these pictures were ever published or even put on the wire. I asked why. I was told that the public would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would not be objective or impartial. At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this. I too had grown up on stories of the good war against Germany and Japan, that ethical bath that cleansed the Anglo-American world of all evil. But the longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more I realized that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were they aberrations, but the war itself was an atrocity. That was the big story, and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and effectiveness of the military were questioned by some very fine reporters. But the word “invasion” was never used. The anodyne word used was “involved.” America was involved in Vietnam. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was repeated incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers back home to tell the subversive truth, those like Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh, with his scoop of the My-Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968-the day that the My-Lai massacre happened-and not one of them reported it.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, deliberate policies and strategies have bordered on genocide. In Vietnam, the forced dispossession of millions of people and the creation of free fire zones; In Iraq, an American-enforced embargo that ran through the 1990s like a medieval siege, and killed, according to the United Nations Children’s fund, half a million children under the age of five. In both Vietnam and Iraq, banned weapons were used against civilians as deliberate experiments. Agent Orange changed the genetic and environmental order in Vietnam. The military called this Operation Hades. When Congress found out, it was renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and nothing change. That’s pretty much how Congress has reacted to the war in Iraq. The Democrats have damned it, rebranded it, and extended it. The Hollywood movies that followed the Vietnam War were an extension of the journalism, of normalizing the unthinkable. Yes, some of the movies were critical of the military’s tactics, but all of them were careful to concentrate on the angst of the invaders. The first of these movies is now considered a classic. It’s The Deerhunter, whose message was that America had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best against oriental barbarians. The message was all the more pernicious, because the Deerhunter was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it’s the only movie that has made me shout out loud in a Cinema in protest. Oliver Stone’s acclaimed movie Platoon was said to be antiwar, and it did show glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, but it also promoted above all the American invader as victim.
I wasn’t going to mention The Green Berets when I set down to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie who ever lived. I a saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn’t believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And it wasn’t long before the atmosphere around me grew very cold. My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South, said, “Let’s get the hell out of here and run like hell.”
We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn’t have to fight in World War II. And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote him, “The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well know in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented.” And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. “But,” said Pinter, “You wouldn’t know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” Pinter’s words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain’s most famous dramatist.
I’ve made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed-CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, “John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot.”
I said, “Do you dispute the evidence?” I had quoted a number of CIA documents. “Oh, no,” he replied. “But we’ve decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator.”
Now the term “journalist adjudicator” might have been invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in the United States. Of the five films I have made on Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in New York. I believe it was shown at about one in the morning. On the basis of this single showing, when most people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy. What marvelous irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience.
Harold Pinter’s subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that’s almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. And this is the secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in scope that I’m always astonished that so many Americans know and understand as much as they do. We are talking about a system, of course, not personalities. And yet, a great many people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and his gang. And yes, the Bush gang are extreme. But my experience is that they are no more than an extreme version of what has gone on before. In my lifetime, more wars have been started by liberal Democrats than by Republicans. Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda system and the war-making system will continue. We’ve had a branch of the Democratic party running Britain for the last 10 years. Blair, apparently a liberal, has taken Britain to war more times than any prime minister in the modern era. Yes, his current pal is George Bush, but his first love was Bill Clinton, the most violent president of the late 20th century. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown is also a devotee of Clinton and Bush. The other day, Brown said, “The days of Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate.”
Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the liberal truth that the battle for history has been won; that the millions who died in British-imposed famines in British imperial India will be forgotten-like the millions who have died in the American Empire will be forgotten. And like Blair, his successor is confident that professional journalism is on his side. For most journalists, whether they realize it or not, are groomed to be tribunes of an ideology that regards itself as non-ideological, that presents itself as the natural center, the very fulcrum of modern life. This may very well be the most powerful and dangerous ideology we have ever known because it is open-ended. This is liberalism. I’m not denying the virtues of liberalism-far from it. We are all beneficiaries of them. But if we deny its dangers, its open-ended project, and the all-consuming power of its propaganda, then we deny our right to true democracy, because liberalism and true democracy are not the same. Liberalism began as a preserve of the elite in the 19th century, and true democracy is never handed down by elites. It is always fought for and struggled for.
A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace and Justice, said recently, and I quote her, “The Democrats are using the politics of reality.” Her liberal historical reference point was Vietnam. She said that President Johnson began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic Congress began to vote against the war. That’s not what happened. The troops were withdrawn from Vietnam after four long years. And during that time the United States killed more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs than were killed in all the preceding years. And that’s what’s happening in Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year, and this is not being reported. And who began this bombing? Bill Clinton began it. During the 1990s Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the “no fly zones.” At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing as I’ve mentioned, perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion. Official documents show that the Blair government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal to the figure for deaths in the Fordham University study of the Rwandan genocide. The media response to Robert’s shocking revelation was silence. What may well be the greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in Harold Pinter’s words, “Did not happen. It didn’t matter.”
Many people who regard themselves on the left supported Bush’s attack on Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that the Clinton administration had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them high-level briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United States. The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant Unocal in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And when a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, “We can live with that.” There is compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban not as a result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of 2001. This is virtually unknown in the United States-publicly. Like the scale of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. To my knowledge only one mainstream reporter, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in London, has investigated civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and his estimate is 20,000 dead civilians, and that was three years ago.
The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as sworn to the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe-take your pick. They all use this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a ten-year ceasefire is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone an historic ideological shift in the last few years, which amounts to a recognition of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually unknown; and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of Palestine is unspeakable.
There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the reporting of Palestine. They interviewed young people who watch TV news in Britain. More than 90 percent thought the illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they watched, the less they knew-Danny Schecter’s famous phrase.
The current most dangerous silence is over nuclear weapons and the return of the Cold War. The Russians understand clearly that the so-called American defense shield in Eastern Europe is designed to subjugate and humiliate them. Yet the front pages here talk about Putin starting a new Cold War, and there is silence about the development of an entirely new American nuclear system called Reliable Weapons Replacement (RRW), which is designed to blur the distinction between conventional war and nuclear war-a long-held ambition.
In the meantime, Iran is being softened up, with the liberal media playing almost the same role it played before the Iraq invasion. And as for the Democrats, look at how Barak Obama has become the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home, “We must not rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria.” Listen to this from the liberal Obama: “At moment of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders.”
That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and many of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to God-fearing, what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States adminstrations have overthrown 50 governments-many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is all very well-and is justified-but the moment we begin to accept the siren call of the Democrat’s drivel about standing up and fighting for freedom sought by billions, the battle for history is lost, and we ourselves are silenced.
So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings I have addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this conference, is itself interesting. It’s my experience that people in the so-called third world rarely ask the question, because they know what to do. And some have paid with their freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It’s a question that many on the democratic left-small “d”-have yet to answer.
Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all-and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn’t true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn’t true of the United States.
In all the years I’ve been a journalist, I’ve never know public consciousness to have risen as fast as it’s rising today. Yes, its direction and shape is unclear, partly because people are now deeply suspicious of political alternatives, and because the Democratic Party has succeeded in seducing and dividing the electoral left. And yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear.
Why did the New York Times come clean in that editorial last year? Not because it opposes Bush’s wars-look at the coverage of Iran. That editorial was a rare acknowledgement that the public was beginning to see the concealed role of the media, and that people were beginning to read between the lines.
If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended-the laws to round of hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are already on the books. I believe that these dangers are understood by the public, who have come along way since 9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. That’s why they voted for the Democrats last November, only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power.
I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people’s movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Medialens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web-I can’t mention them all here-from Tom Feeley’s International Clearing House, to Mike Albert’s ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web-Dahr Jamail’s courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the city.
In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert’s investigations turned back much of the virulent propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chávez. Make no mistake, it’s the threat of freedom of speech for the majority in Venezuela that lies behind the campaign in the west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people.
We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.
John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. His most recent book is Freedom Next Time.
© 2007 John Pilger
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China threatens ‘nuclear option’ of dollar sales
WOW! Who could have seen this coming?
Borrow and Buy Now, pay later.
Well, now it’s later and somebody is going to have to pay the baloon payment. We can blame our brilliant leaders for failing to see this coming, but honestly, we are all complcit in the stupidity. We’ve all been borrowing and buying now, refusing to pay our way since Reagan, figuring on passing our debt to future generations. Who cares what happens to our grandchildren after we’re dead. Reagan didn’t care, do you? That’s the real meaning of Trickle Down.
Let’s hope the Chinese don’t throw us all into Debtor’s Prison, if they choose to foreclose on our nation.
Of course, we could always nuke them. Show them who’s boss!
What a bunch of cheap, chiseling morons we are.
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Back in the days before TV, radio and newspapers, people were not warned of impending hurricanes, but if they lived near the beach and saw the waves keep getting bigger and bigger, they moved inland. Those that didn’t, didn’t survive.
It’s time to move inland.
We’ve got leaders that watch TV, listen to the radio and read newspapers, but they seem oblivious that the waves keep getting bigger and bigger.
Hey, Dummies! A hurricane is coming!
Impeach Now, or drown later.
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Do not support the corporate parties. Switch2greens.
If corporate consolidation in the media continues as predicted in this article and by Rupert Murdoch, television consumers will be back to the Big Three options for news coverage just like it was in the 1950’s when the options on your rabbit ears were ABC, NBC and CBS.
Except this time there will be hundreds of cable and dish channels to choose from, but only 3 huge umbrella corporate conglomerates deciding what gets broadcast air time, and what doesn’t get broadcast, on what is supposed to be the public domain broadcast spectrum.
I guess these things go in cycles.
Bill from Saginaw
“In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web-I can’t mention them all here-from Tom Feeley’s International Clearing House, to Mike Albert’s ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web-Dahr Jamail’s courageous journalism…”
Good sites, all, Znet dates way back to the days of the dial-up bulletin boards before the www.
http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm
http://informationclearinghouse.info/
http://www.counterpunch.com/
http://FAIR.org
As Always Pilger gives an excellent analysis of the disaster situation of the so called “free media”.
As an Iranian who live through 2 brutal dictator, the Shah and his brutal secret service Savak and Khomeini and his murdrers gangs. It is hard to understand how the people in the free societies give up their freedoms so easily and buy cheap propaganda from their governments. Maybe because I lived in those countries that I have a strong urge to question the person(s) or organizations behind the news to understand the accuracy of it. But this should not be difficult for most people is it?
My wife started writing a book about the US media back in 2003, right around the time the attacks against Iraq started and the support for war was at it’s highest. We could not believe in the “news” we saw in the US compared to the ones we were reading and watching in Sweden and other European countries.
The result of 2 years of investigation, edition, research and hard work is the book “No Questions Asked: News Coverage Since 9/11″. There you can find a critical look at the news coverage in the US compared to other countries (mainly UK) and some analysis of what made the media act the way they did and why so many Americans still believe Saddam was behind 9/11.
Here is what Norman Solomon wrote in the forewords of the book:
” Lisa Finnegan describes that professional atmosphere well. Journalists, she
points out, “read and listen to each other’s reports and compare and contrast
the information in them. They note the presentation and the play of their peers’
stories and compare them with their own. They often socialize together and
sometimes with the politicians they cover. White House and Pentagon reporters
often share their perspective through ‘pool’ reports, in which one reporter is
given access to information and is expected to summarize it for others on the
beat. As such, they are susceptible to groupthink…”
Anyone who is out of step — straying from conventional media wisdom — may lose
access to official sources and coveted exclusive interviews. When journalists
anger people in high places, the media career risks can be appreciable. But when
journalists are careful to avoid angering people in high places, something is
seriously amiss.”
And American Journalism review wrote:
Here’s an idea: Turn a psychologist loose on journalists. Lisa Finnegan is a former newspaper and magazine writer who earned a psychology degree and now studies “the psychology of terrorism and its impact on the media.” Here, she analyzes why the U.S. press became so meek after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
Many others have documented the press’ letdown in fulfilling its adversarial role after 9/11. Seeing the problem is easy. Explaining it is harder (see Books, August/September). So Finnegan’s rather studious approach, drawing on individual and group psychology, holds promise for not only understanding the failures but pointing toward reforms.
Obviously, whatever went wrong has potentially staggering costs: the top terrorist still on the loose, a war spun out of control and a civil liberties crisis at home. Finnegan criticizes Congress and the public itself, among others, but she firmly casts central blame onto the media.
Ok, my browser crashed when I was trying to correct some issues here, but here is the link to the web page of the book:
http://www.noquestionsasked.org
And here is the foreword by Norman Solomon:
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/foreword.html
And a few reviews:
The American Journalism Review Critiques No Questions Asked
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/blog/?p=159
Booklist Review Of No Questions Asked
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/blog/?p=120
Ok, my browser crashed when I was trying to correct some issues here, but here is the link to the web page of the book:
http://www.noquestionsasked.org
And here is the foreword by Norman Solomon:
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/foreword.html
And a few reviews:
The American Journalism Review Critiques No Questions Asked
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/blog/?p=159
Booklist Review Of No Questions Asked
http://www.noquestionsasked.org/blog/?p=120
It doesn’t matter so much what sort of crap that corporate media spouts these days because it’ll be drowned out by a new generation of citizen reporting, blogging, etc. Given thousands of options today, it’s clear that people in the internet age will gravitate toward media that most accurately “speaks to them”. And why shouldn’t they? It’s clear that the corporate media speaks for corporate America. By god, let them.
The best way for them to lose power over people’s lives is if they render themselves irrelevant.
So unless they come up with a way to shut down the internet or make it a crime to write web pages or go blogging, they’re facing imminent extinction — by virtue of their own irrelevance.
Their strength can be attributed to a peculiar quirk in the history of media technolgy. In 1776 the First Ammendment applied pretty equally, since speech really was “free”. As long as one was literate, or could afford a piece of paper to post in the town square in a more agrarian world, one could make an impact. Up until widespread public availability of the internet, there was the most extreme funneling of idea/memetic dissemination the West has seen since the church dominance of the Middle Ages. The average person, simply put, could not afford a spot on prime time TV, run a radio station, etc.
We’re not quite there with the internet yet (digital divide still blocks out millions of the country’s poorest, although public libraries are a possibility for free access). But the assymetry of who reach audiences is flipping back to an evenness that has not existed in at least a century.
Pilger is brilliant as always.
Personally, I’ve used the parental blocking features on my sat system to block all American corporate news channels. A great improvement and one I’d highly recommend. I don’t watch the crappy local news, and I don’t buy the local newspaper. I wouldn’t trust any of them to tell me the sun is going to set in the west at night without independent confirmation.
The problem is that I suspect I’m a rarity in America. Most Americans still watch and listen to this crap and seem to largely accept what they see and hear rather uncritically.
To me, that’s a key point for activist to attack. There needs to be a constant attack on the credibility of these ‘professional corporate journalists’. Any time, any place, any way that we can convince one more American that this stuff is crap is a gain.
This seems to be vital for any independent political campaigns. Its a given today that the ‘professional corporate media’ will be smearing any non-corporate candidates in the last days before the election. And pumping up the corporate ones at the same time. What happened with the media and Howard Dean and John Kerry at the time of the 04 Iowa caucuses is one example. And I used to live in Atlanta and work on Cynthia McKiinney’s campaigns, and the way the Atlanta media would attack her mercilessly and constantly pump up here opponents is another.
What we need is an electorate that knows not to listen to this. Or even better that knows that the candidates that are supported by the professional corporate media are exactly the ones that any ordinary American should never support.
We aren’t there yet. If you move around ordinary suburban Americans or work in an ordinary job, ask yourself this. How many Americans know the latest on Anna Nicole Smith (or whatever the latest news fad that I’m not seeing on my blocked channedls), versus how many Americans could accurately talk about the case for and the need to impeach Bush and Cheney?
Most Americans know all about the latest phony corporate news story, but you’d get a blank from many if you talk about impeachment. Its getting better, but we ain’t there yet. The lesson is that we need to work this point very hard. Attack and discredit the corporate media at every opportunity, and always try to convince one more American that its all crap that shouldn’t be even watched or listened to.
John Pilger’s article is a combination of breath of fresh air and kick of heavy duty scotch! Whoa! Who remembers the powerful essay written by Gloria Steinem when she got the original MS. Magazine up and running? The bottom line of this insightful essay was that whoever pays for the magazine’s advertising expects content to match what it’s selling. Little has changed.
It’s true we all have an interest in personal security, must deal with the logistics of life on the physical plane, but I still believe a higher payment attaches (karmic) to those that sell out when doing so directly causes pain or death to others. This pretending things are not what they are to just “do one’s job” is spiritually bankrupt.
FARHAD: Your wife’s book sounds very interesting. I may try to get a copy; and I wish her luck with its readership.
On August 24 last year the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.”
Uh, Ms. Great Grey Lady?
We DID have that “popular outcry” back in 2003. You, and your peers, marginalized that outcry as the whining of hippies and crazy Sixties radicals. You willingly acted in favor of those who drove us to the situation we’re in today. You’re still publishing editorials from some of the people who were responsible for Iraq.
In short, shove it. You’re four years too late.
The media is the massage.
Pilger spoke at the 2007 Socialist Convention in Chicago. None of the other respondest mention this? The reality is, we do not have a real Left party, a Socialist Party. We therefore have no access to power. Demos and Repubs are in a three-legged race, and the gunny sacks are full of shit. A truth-telling media without a party operates on fumes. Hooray for Pilger, Amy Goodman, Common Dreams, and etc, but, hey, people, we need a third Party!
Saddest of all is to see and hear PBS and NPR join the corporate bandwagon. Thanks to Amy Goodman and Link TV there is some hope.
msm are criminals. they are unquestionably the main reason the u.s. invaded iraq. i will never trust anything they say. their credibility is shot to hell. bill moyers has a documentary on the media that is a must see. highly recommended.
“The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people.”
In Texas, the Texas Observer does not represent the Mexican American or Chicano voice. As much as people have idolized Molly Ivins and the other TO writers, the critique is that they enjoyed and enjoy what they do, and how they leave people out of the public discourse. Same for PBS and NPR. Their argument, “that some groups just aren’t educated enough, sound like us, or just don’t know what they are talking about — like we do” is their own undoing. What they and others, who may be regulars of this Common Dreams website don’t know is that YOU DON’T KNOW! So move over, and let others in, even if they don’t sound like you. Understand that the people on the ground are constantly moving out and more are taking their place. So taking “subjugated knowledge” is the work of everyone — especially those who are previously unknown to you, don’t sound like you, etc. Plainly speaking: Mix it up!
Siouxrose,
Thanks for the nice words. She wrote the book mainly because she was so pissed off at the way media is working in the US. It took her over 2 years to find a publisher since when she was done, no one wanted to hear about media criticism. They called her europhobe, anti-american, a nobody and much worse. But she finaly got it published.
We are now looking for a publisher to give the book in paper back and hopefully she can reach a broader audience. In the mean time you can order the book at your public library and make it available for others too.
Maybe one day US will have at least one main stream media channel to cover the news and not just 3 second buzz words and government propaganda.
Dreamertoo, you made me laugh out loud.
Pilger’s article is excellent. But I would like to cut the BBC the slightest bit of slack for the following reason.
I had been in the lazy habit of getting much of my current news on NPR during a long comute. I would certainly filter what I was hearing, but expected that the basics would be there. In 2003, on Valentine’s day, I was up earlyier than Morning Edition starts, and so heard 45 minutes of news from the BBC. (This was very shortly after Powell’s UN speach.)
On this morning, instead of the usual many stories from the far-flung former British empire, it was one story for 45 minutes. A professor of Middle Eastern studies at Cambridge had taken note of a paper from British inteligence that Powell had praised, and was one of his prime pieces of “evidence” of the evils in Iraq. The professor looked up the report and read it, and thought he’d read this before somewere. In digging he found that instead of being an inteligence report, it was two plagerized student papers that were on the intenet. Both were about Iraq prior to the ‘91 war. Not even the grammer and spelling had been corrected, but they did remove dates that would expose the time period involved, and changed words liks soldier to terrorist.
In those 45 minutes they interviewed the professor, and both of the students whos work had been missused without attribution or permission. The interviewed angry MPs, and had various others discussing how this would affect Blair and his support of the impending war. As 5:00 AM drew close I was wondering how NPR would cover the story - differently I was sure. What I wasn’t prepared for was that they would not mention the story at all.
“All Things Considered” (sic) in the afternoon also avoided the story - one that was cleary the lead story in England, and involved the veracity of the U.S. I thought perhaps in the Saturday morning news they would catch up, especially in the traditional segment with Danniel Schorr - American journalistic hero. Schorr and Simon did discuss Powell’s testemony, but they never mentioned that a major part of it had already been blown out of the water. (To my knowledge NPR has still never referred to this story.)
This drove me to begin seriosly using the Internet to find out more, and within a few days - still weeks before the invasion of Iraq - I knew pretty much the whole story - that there were no WMDs, that all of the other evidence was either poorly supported, or downright bogus, and had run into the “Project for the New American Century” which is the mother load for what has gone wrong.
How the BBC did after that I can’t say, but that one story had a large impact on me. Now, when I hear people like Senator Clinton - and many others - claim they did the best the could given the “flawed inteligence,” I know these are self-serving excuses for either a lack of political will, or disguising actual support for PNAC and the Neo-con agenda. I do know that most of the reliable information I ran into was coming from European press, which makes it clear to any who would wonder, why the Bush gang couldn’t get the support of other countries. They already knew what was going on. Here it has taken years for the press to move at all, and as someone above noted, they’re doing it again with Iran.
About 90% of the so called journalists simply write down what some government spokesperson says.
Colbert was right on the money at the correspondents dinner.
John Pilger is rainbowizing better than Rev and Jackie Jackson, and while I’m at it be sure to take a look at the alhgoldberg blog by bringing it up on google or just putting it in your URL.
I heard that about a year o0r so ago the South Korean government wanted to go off the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency. It seems the fall in the value of the dollar was hurting them a lot.
The U.S. obviously protects South Korea from the “axis of evil” so we had great influence in persuading them not to abandon the U.S. dollar. If they had left the dollar, that could have caused quite a stir.
I’ll echo the sentiment about public radio. While some of the extended segments are interesting culturally, they stick to exclusively harmless softball reporting. i.e. corporate, non-investigative, and obligatory quoting from conservative tanks on the perpetual “spin cycle” if you know what I mean.
When was the last time I heard an article on NPR which quoted from a progressive ideological source? Quite some time. They seem to be a venue aimed exclusively at comfortable, aging and generally conservative baby boomers. At this rate, nobody will be listening to public radio in 10-20 years unless they begin speaking to the X-Gen.
BBC is among the worst of the worst, they along with Microsoft hosted a conference for NATO in Brussels on how to shape public opininon. Check out Defense Technology magazine.
Online alternative journalism IS NOT WORKING . It cannot create a critical mass the way the COrporate Media can. Only visible protest at media sites can do this. become the lint in the eye to make people aware of the lense.
The internet has become MOATED by the corporations. What are you doing to take the next step? Why is the MEDIA REFORM MOVEMENT INVISIBLE AND GOING NOWHERE? is it reliant on FOUNDATIONS and all that that entails?
I listened to this article on the radio last Thursday, on Amy Goodman’s DEMOCRACY NOW! show, on KPFA, the flagship station of Pacifica radio. Mr Pilger has been one of my heros for a long time, and is as honest as they come, and just as brave.
For those of you in other parts of the country who listen to some of the progressive…hell, why don’t I just say honest…shows on the internet, punch in kpfa.org and check out the programs, and scroll down and select some that interest you ( they’ve got archives too ) and listen. And if you can spare any money, please send them a donation as the station is listener supported.
Mr. Pilger is saying what George Orwell wrote about in “1984″, possibly the most important book written in the 20th Century on thought control, the security police state, and reversed word meanings.
Paul Bramscher: Excellent point. Even when NPR airs a controversial issue, it smoothly embraces the corporate or conservative answer to the problem. Check out The Morning Show on KPFA.ORG., Paul. Phillip Moldari and Andrea Lewis are a pleasure to listen to, for starters.
John Pilgar states:
“Many people who regard themselves on the left supported Bush’s attack on Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that the Clinton administration had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them high-level briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United States. The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant Unocal in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And when a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, “We can live with that.” There is compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban not as a result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of 2001. This is virtually unknown in the United States-publicly.”
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/oil.html
Finally, the discussion can get to the economics behind our foreign policy. We all need to study political economy more. We can’t understand the world and hope to really change anything if we don’t understand the base of all change.
Globalization is based on economics. All of the plans that are made by the US State Department is to protect and expand US economic interests in the world. I am sure we all understand this but then why did the “left” support Bush’s attach on Afghanistan? Did the “left” support Bush’s attack on Afghanistan?
May I digress more and ask. Who is the left anyway and what do they stand for? You don’t have to answer, as I am sure it is clear to everyone but me.
Farhad,
Salam, khoobi? I’m always very interested in how people from other countries see things in the U.S, or how recent immigrants see things here especially when they’ve lived under repressive regimes. It seems people like you do not take your cherished freedoms for granted, which is admirable. Most Americans have never had to actually “fight” for their freedoms or struggle for them. I fail to see how American troops in Iraq are “dying for my freedom”. They are dying for lies.
Hopefully, America is not turning into the Shah’s or Mullah’s Iran, but mamnoon for the warning signal! Dark days lay ahead it seems, but there is hope.
And BTW, I started studying Farsi, because among other reasons I am sick of the ridiculous lies the media and politicians put out about Iran(I despise the Mullahs, but I don’t see them as dangerous to the world as American imperialism, nor are they causing as much trouble in Iraq as kool-aid drinking Zionists would have us believe). I want to learn about the real Iranians. It truly is disturbing to think another war may start because of the psychopaths in power. Also, I am doubly the “enemy” of the Persian people, as an American of Greek origins, I’m fully aware of the very ancient struggles between our ancestors(although my own origins go back to the Pontus, which is now in modern day Turkey, an ancient kingdom which happened to be founded by Hellenized Persian monarchs). Of course those conflicts are now irrelevant, but I see my ancient Greek heritage exploited to the full in movies and in propaganda that aims to portray Iranians as backward, villainous religious freaks who are nothing but trouble, and have always been. Especially in movies like the recent “300″, the Greeks are the good, brave, wise, western, democratic Europeans, while their anti-thesis, the Persians, are the evil, Asiatic, eastern, barbaric, cruel, despotic conquerors. I find this cartoonish use of my heritage both insulting and oversimplified - poisonous propaganda to fuel more hatred and misunderstanding. Furthermore, it ignores the cultural contributions of the Persian peoples, arguably as important as the ancient Greek contributions to western civilization.
I hope your wife’s ketab sells well! Mamnoon for speaking out. Khoda hafez!
“The days of Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate”
This is chilling to say the least. It almost sounds like the rebirth of Nazism ! Wow ! It just goes to show how shallow the apologies really were to begin with.
In the mad rushed life most USA’ers lead, herded like corporate livestock both in work & ‘leisure,’ –radio seems to be the source most people get their News from and form their opinions from.
Vis: Radio -and increasingly - various handheld Flash Gordon devices. These are powerful news media sources/devices for inducing group think/herd mentality and they’re growing in political-hypnosis influence far faster than Internet counter-influence - especially in an obsessively-mobile polulation that needs to take-in quick public issue news just like it gulps junk food on the run.
I want to believe what Paul Bramscher & and others predict RE decisive development of a democratic civics/political agora on the Internet - and probably the internet will expand more this way to some degree.
But sit-down Internet may never be able to compete with Radio/handheld News devices’ ability to hypnotize or disinform huge numbers of people who’re chronically on the run, exactly for reasons referred-to by Medic6869, above.
If the average citizen’s life remains the dehumanizing rat race that corporate life-designers obviously want it to be, with no time for intelligent leisure and citizenship participation, it’s doubful that any new technology will do much to solve the problem of ‘I-have-no-personal-time-for-deep content.’
More likely, most new info technologies will worsen the slanted News problem - because the deeper problem —personal exhaustion and/or quick-fix consumption compulsivity resulting from economic servitude and No Time, will still eat away at people’s psychic vitals and herd them down the path of least resistance.
More likely, if some revolutionary democritization of News Media is to occur, it’ll require multiple factors converging by some conscious design that can counter Rat Race’s techological and psychological Catch-22’s set against it.
If progressives can come up with such a conscious design, and can implement it, just by sharing ideas on the Internet, it’ll be time for me to eat my laptop. I need a new one anyway, and at that point it might even taste good.
My Mentor: Richard Ingrams on Claud Cockburn
‘Claud made us interested in what is now known as investigative journalism’
Interview by Simon Usborne
Published: 06 August 2007
I read Claud Cockburn’s memoirs when I was at Oxford so he was kind of a hero as far as I as concerned. He started as a journalist on The Times and then became a communist and worked on the Daily Worker. In the 1930s he started a paper called The Week which he wrote entirely himself. It was a bit like Private Eye but more political.
Shortly after Private Eye started, I went on my honeymoon to Ireland; I was writing for the Sunday Telegraph and the editor recommended I go and see Claud. He lived in a tumbledown mansion in County Cork, and he was very friendly. I invited him to guest edit Private Eye and it coincided with the climax of the Profumo affair in 1963. He made a lot of trouble and named the head of MI5 and MI6 and after that he was a regular contributor.
What he did as far as Private Eye was concerned was to make us interested in what is now known as investigative journalism. It was taken up later by Paul Foot but it was Claud who started it. One story he wrote, about a man who died in police custody, caused a lot of headlines and was taken up by MPs. We had never done anything like that in Private Eye before and we started doing serious political stories under his influence.
He told me that if in doubt about how to write a political story you should think: what is the worst thing that the government could do in these particular circumstances? And then assume that they had done it. I frequently used that when writing the Denis Thatcher letters.
Claud was accused of being very cavalier about facts but he said it was pointless to think about facts as such: there were no facts until you had decided what the story was, then the facts fitted in.
All his children are journalists. Alexander and Andrew are in America and Patrick is The Independent’s award-winning foreign correspondent. All three are very influenced by their father. He sounds very serious but in fact he was a very amusing man, and we were great friends until he died in 1981.
Richard Ingrams is the editor of The Oldie, and edited Private Eye from 1962 to 1986.
Hope still flickers. Check out www.therealnews.com, internet TV news station being set up for main launch in September. It has no corporate funding, no government funding and no advertising. At the same time an impressive range of feature journalists on the site: Amy Goodman, Eric Margolis, George Monbiot, Tom Morris, Jonathan Schell, Gore Vidal and more.
The funding model is by subscription, suggested $10 per month. If these guys do half of this they are going to stir up hell !
logos.nine,
The writing is already on the wall for corporate media. CBS recently posted a record landslide loss. The first stampede was from the cold war era network bottleneck to cable. And now, it’s clear, the internet will become the new television. I don’t think I’m unusual: I’m short on time. Every minute I spend on the internet is one less minute I spend at the television.
It turns out that the only reason it ever enjoyed a monopoly on ideas was because it enjoyed a monopoly on physical bandwidth. Now that people are able to talk again, I’m certain that the disconnect between corporate media spin and the man on the street will become rendered more visible day to day at this stage. Corporate media will need to either speak to realities of today or else wither. It seems that they’re opting for the latter.
Much of this is good, but providing John Pilger was born in the 1930s, we have had one more war, depending on how people count them, that GOP presidents have started– the GOP ones starting the two Persian Gulf Wars and the Afghan War for three and the Democrats starting the Vietnam War and the Balkans War for two. To this day we don’t know who fired the first shot in and started the Korean War, thus that doesn’t count, and that’s using I F Stone’s “Hidden History of the Korean War” as the very independent and progressive source on that.
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People who live or have lived in openly authoritarian countries don’t believe a word they hear from their media, but with few exceptions the STATE controls the media in all countries, and the United States is no exception. Our corporate/state owned and controlled media has spun a web of fiction, deceit and propaganda pleasing to American conceit that is more unreal than the Twilight Zone.
No matter what crimes and horrors our government commits, the media always portrays us as a noble, benevolent, compassionate and democratic country. Millions of Americans are absolutely convinced we are the light of reason in the world, in spite of our wars of aggression, rigged elections, rampant inequality and never ending belligerence and exploitation of weak countries, all in the name of national interest and national defense.
But that’s alright because we’re the freedom loving good guys.
And never mind that our elected representatives don’t represent us, at all. It’s all good.
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As usual; the main theme of propaaganda, one forgets the Fair and Balenced reporting act that was dismantled by Bush I, Raygun being out of his mind, that was put into effect in response to the Nazi war machine, that had the whole educated country of Germany hoodwinked, not to mention the Flower of Europe Being killed during WWI, leading the mindless masseds were thugs and drugs, seems pretty prevalent today,,,,one last thing, the socalled Vietnam debacle, from the prevalent miltaristic point of view was a failure, but I seem to remember this being a democracy that Democracy WORKED…imagine that!
How can we believe anything the news tells us? They can’t even get the weather right.
As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air however slight, lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. — Justice William O. Douglas
Kathy, thanks for the Wm O Douglas quote. He captured what’s been on my mind for years.
Pilger is brilliant as always.
I have a colleague from a former Soviet State and she is always saying how much our TV news media here reminds her of life under Communism back in her country. She says we are no different here in America than the Soviet’s were in the 1970’s and 1980’s. The only difference she said was that everyone in those countries knew the news was propoganda and saw it as a joke. In contrast, there are many Americans who still believe in the idea of a “free press”. But let’s not explain that to the Fox News viewers as they think they are getting “Fair and Balanced” news. Its not just Fox though and a lot of people need to recognize this. CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, NBC, BBC, and the rest are just as bad. I turned off the TV news programs long ago.