www.mediamatters.org: A February 23 Wall Street Journal editorial misrepresented the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusions regarding Iraq's alleged efforts to purchase uranium from Niger in order to defend President Bush's now-infamous "16 words" from the 2003 State of the Union address and attack former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA sent to Niger to investigate the allegation.
The Journal claimed that "both a British and a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee probe found that the White House had been accurate [about Iraq and Niger] and that it was Mr. Wilson was the one who hadn't told the truth." In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the Bush administration's Niger-uranium claim was unfounded. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion complemented the Central Intelligence Agency's own admission that the claim should not have been in Bush's speech because the agency lacked confidence in it. By contrast, the committee reached no conclusion about whether Wilson "told the truth" in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed describing his CIA-sponsored fact-finding mission to Niger -- which led him to conclude that the Niger-uranium allegation was baseless -- and accusing Bush of "manipulat[ing] intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion."
Dominic Timms, Guardian/UK: The US government was today accused of hiding behind a "culture of denial" over the deaths of at least 12 journalists who are alleged to have perished at the hands of the US military in Iraq.
Re-igniting the debate that US soldiers deliberately "targeted" journalists during the Iraqi occupation, a press freedom body called on the US to take "responsibility" for its actions in the country.
Responding to what it said was the "hounding out" of the CNN news chief, Eason Jordan, the International Federation of Journalists called on the US administration to come clean over its "mistakes" in the region.
Since US, British and other soldiers first began Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, more than 70 journalists have been killed in the country.
Danny Schechter, MediaChannel.org: February 11, 2005 -- It's the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an occasion for media commemorations and "never again" reminders.
Today the world knows what happened there although mostly after the fact when it was too late to do much about it. We also know that our own media was not as aggressive in alerting the world about the holocaust for fear of undermining the war effort. The BBC has admitted it had information that it sat on for fear of making it appear that the war was about the survival of the Jews. During that war censorship was widely practiced. Life magazine did not run a photograph of a dead American until 1943, and the director of the Office of Censorship was given a special Pulitzer Prize citation.
After the war, at the Nuremberg Tribunal American prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting Hitler's policies. State propagandists were convicted. More recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal investigating the genocide there while in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian TV was criticized for inciting the war that divided that country.
The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many remember William Randolf Hearst's famous yellow journalism dictum, "you give me the pictures, I will give you the war."
These issues do not belong to the past. In Italy this week, the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on Iraq is putting the media in the dock for its role in doing more selling of the Iraq war than telling. Critics there believe the media covered up war crimes, minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities like Fallujah and mis-reported the reasons for going to war and how it was conducted.
Danny Schechter interviewed by Buzzflash (www.buzzflash.com):
BuzzFlash: Your new film, "Weapons of Mass Deception," documents how the American corporate media complex helped the Bush Administration sell the notion of launching a preemptive attack on Iraq. And more than that, the media misled the American people into believing that there were absolutely no other options other than a preemptive attack to protect our national security. So how was the media able to control and narrow the discussion so much? Is it as simple as just not talking about what other options were available in the buildup to the war?
Danny Schechter: Journalism is supposed to be a watchdog on power, not a lapdog. It’s not there as an echo chamber or a transmission belt for the claims made by the government. The media has a duty to scrutinize information, seek out other sources, try to evaluate and try to understand what the political strategy is behind a focus on a certain issue. But what we saw over and over again, on every single news program on every channel for almost five months, was the demonization of Saddam Hussein. He went from being a bad guy to a Hitler – somebody who not only was threatening his own people, gassing them and committing human rights abuses but also threatening the rest of the world. The media also spun the story that the WMDs in Iraq were presented as offensive weapons that had to be disarmed lest the world itself would be threatened.
The claim made by the Administration, as the basis for the war, was based on two main pillars -- the first was that Iraq had WMDs and biological and chemical weapons. And the second was the link that was implied, inferred, and suggested between Saddam, the secular nationalist, and Osama bin Laden, who is an Islamic fundamentalist and religious fanatic. So everything was put together in a nice little package. And the television media in our country, for the most part got on board and began beating the drum and accepting the logic and need for war.
As I show in "Weapons of Mass Deception," of the 800 experts that were on the air from the beginning of the buildup to the war itself and all the way up to Saddam’s statues coming down in Baghdad, out of 800 experts, only six opposed the war. A report from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) found that only 3% of sources opposed the Iraq war while 71% of sources supported the war. So the information was skewed.
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), www.fair.org: George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s...Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal: the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney....
The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News (2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against Nicaragua." The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel death squads."
Some reporters simply soft-pedaled the history; as CNN reporter Kitty Pilgrim put it (2/17/05), "During his four-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, he had a difficult balancing act in the battle against Communism in the neighboring Sandinista government in Nicaragua." (Sandinista Nicaragua, of course, was not Communist, but a country with a mixed economy and regular elections, one of which voted the Sandinistas out of power in 1990.) Pilgrim's CNN colleague, Paula Zahn (2/17/05), complained that "the critics are already out there sniping at him."
Pamela Root Montpelier, www.timesargus.com: Why has the journalistic community chosen to downplay the latest 9/11 Commission Report? Actually the report substantiated much of what the 9/11 Commission Report states repeatedly. There were many warnings that Osama Bin Laden was going to attack the U.S. on our soil, with strong indications that he would be using aircraft and would target an American icon, be it landmark buildings, bridges etc. It is all in the report, which is very readable. What the report also substantiates is that our president had been in office for eight months before 9/11, and was briefed on all the intelligence reports coming in, but chose to ignore them. Ignore them after being told by Bill Clinton and his cabinet members that Osama Bin Laden and terrorism would be the highest priority of Bush's presidency. Read the report, it's all in the report.
Now we are hearing about another piece of the commission's report that states that there were 52 warnings to the FAA before 9/11 that terrorists were going to use planes to attack the U.S. Why aren't Americans outraged about this? What this means is that the president and his important cabinet members knew we were going to be attacked and did nothing...
The big question is why this administration ignore all the warnings.
It's the media who need to raise the heat on this matter, Why haven't they? It seems as if most of the journalists today are either scared cowards, frauds, or paid for by the administration, which is to say corporate conglomerate ownership. It's confusing and downright frightening.
This is just one example. There are so many. What has gone awry with the media? I'm perplexed, confused, and worried.
WSJ editorial misrepresented Senate findings on Niger uranium to defend Bush, attack Wilson
A February 23 Wall Street Journal editorial misrepresented the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusions regarding Iraq's alleged efforts to purchase uranium from Niger in order to defend President Bush's now-infamous "16 words" from the 2003 State of the Union address and attack former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, whom the CIA sent to Niger to investigate the allegation.
The Journal claimed that "both a British and a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee probe found that the White House had been accurate [about Iraq and Niger] and that it was Mr. Wilson was the one who hadn't told the truth." In fact, the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that the Bush administration's Niger-uranium claim was unfounded. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion complemented the Central Intelligence Agency's own admission that the claim should not have been in Bush's speech because the agency lacked confidence in it. By contrast, the committee reached no conclusion about whether Wilson "told the truth" in a July 6, 2003, New York Times op-ed describing his CIA-sponsored fact-finding mission to Niger -- which led him to conclude that the Niger-uranium allegation was baseless -- and accusing Bush of "manipulat[ing] intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs to justify an invasion."
Neither the CIA nor the Senate Intelligence Committee has definitively stated (in public) whether it believes Iraq did in fact seek uranium from Niger, but following the International Atomic Energy Agency's revelation in March 2003 that documents purporting to chronicle such efforts were forgeries, no one has publicly produced additional evidence to support this allegation.
Rather than proving the White House was "accurate," the 2004 Senate Intelligence Committee's "Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community's Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq" suggested the opposite: that by the time the president delivered his State of the Union address in January 2003, it was no longer supportable to claim, as he did, that "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." The committee wrote: "Until October 2002 when the Intelligence Community obtained the forged foreign language documents on the Iraq-Niger uranium deal, it was reasonable for analysts to assess that Iraq may have been seeking uranium from Africa based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reporting and other available intelligence" (PDF p. 82).
Similarly, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet publicly stated in July 2003 that "[t]hese 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President."
By contrast, the committee report drew no conclusions on the veracity of Wilson's own conclusion based on his findings in Niger or his indictment of the Bush administration. Rather, the report explained how Wilson's trip affected various U.S. intelligence agencies' judgments regarding whether Iraq had indeed sought uranium in Africa:
The report on the former ambassador's trip to Niger, disseminated in March 2002, did not change any analysts' assessments of the Iraq-Niger uranium deal. For most analysts, the information in the report lent more credibility to the original Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) reports on the uranium deal, but State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) analysts believed that the report supported their assessment that Niger was unlikely to be willing or able to sell uranium to Iraq. [PDF p. 83]
The British inquiry into prewar assessments of Iraq's weapons program, known as the Butler report , did conclude that Bush's statement was "well-founded," but the report produced no new evidence that Iraq had indeed sought uranium in Africa, and Tenet's statement explained that the CIA disagreed with British intelligence on this issue at the time of Bush's speech. Here's what the Butler report stated:
We conclude that, on the basis of the intelligence assessments at the time, covering both Niger and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the statements on Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Africa in the Government's dossier, and by the Prime Minister in the House of Commons, were well-founded. By extension, we conclude also that the statement in President Bush's State of the Union Address of 28 January 2003 that:
The British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa was well-founded.
But the Butler report did not identify the basis for the crucial "intelligence assessments at the time." Moreover, the CIA explained that "[i]n September and October 2002 before Senate Committees, senior intelligence officials in response to questions told members of Congress that we differed with the British dossier on the reliability of the uranium reporting." Bush's claim amounted to rejecting U.S. intelligence in favor of British intelligence.
The Financial Times reported (registration required) on June 28, 2004, that unnamed "European intelligence officers" had disclosed the existence of independent "human and electronic intelligence sources from a number of countries" on Iraqi dealings with Niger that is untainted by the forged documents that allegedly corroborated the Niger-uranium claim. The article reported: "These intelligence officials now say the forged documents appear to have been part of a 'scam', and the actual intelligence showing discussion of uranium supply has been ignored." But the article provided no substantive information on the intelligence itself, presumably because its unnamed sources did not provide such details.
Moreover, a subsequent report (registration required) on August 1, 2004, by the Times of London severely undermined the credibility of the Financial Times' unnamed intelligence sources. The Times of London reported that SISMI, the Italian intelligence agency, had produced the forged documents itself, according to the middleman who allegedly received them from a SISMI agent and passed them on to an Italian journalist, Elizabeth Burba. Burba in turn handed them to the U.S. embassy in Rome. The Financial Times' "European intelligence officers" had alleged that the middleman was the forger. But the middleman, who would not speak to the Financial Times, provided details to the Times of London about SISMI's alleged responsibility for the forgeries. Given that the Financial Times itself reported that the middleman "is understood to be planning to reveal selected aspects of his story to a US television channel," it appears likely that the Financial Times' "European intelligence officers," who insisted that untainted evidence existed for Iraq's efforts to procure uranium, were, in fact, Italian intelligence officers attempting to advance the "scam" theory in order to preempt the middleman's revelations and cover their tracks.
— S.S.M. & G.W.
Posted to the web on Thursday February 24, 2005 at 2:02 PM EST
Copyright © 2004-2005 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200502240002
Journalist group calls US to account over Iraq
Dominic Timms
Friday February 18, 2005
The US government was today accused of hiding behind a "culture of denial" over the deaths of at least 12 journalists who are alleged to have perished at the hands of the US military in Iraq.
Re-igniting the debate that US soldiers deliberately "targeted" journalists during the Iraqi occupation, a press freedom body called on the US to take "responsibility" for its actions in the country.
Responding to what it said was the "hounding out" of the CNN news chief, Eason Jordan, the International Federation of Journalists called on the US administration to come clean over its "mistakes" in the region.
Since US, British and other soldiers first began Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, more than 70 journalists have been killed in the country.
The IFJ said that at least 12 journalists had met their deaths at the "hands of US soldiers", including the killings of Taras Protsyuk of Reuters and Jose Couso of Spain's Telecinco after US tanks opened fire on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
The US military claimed the tanks had been responding to small arms fire coming from the hotel, which housed journalists who were non-embedded with military forces, but later withdrew the claim saying: soldiers fired at "what was believed to be an enemy firing platform and observation point".
Almost a year after journalists' groups first demanded it, a US military investigation into the attack found that "no fault or negligence" could be attributed to US soldiers.
As part of a move to establish a new journalist body in Iraq, to be known as the Iraqi National Journalists Council, the IFJ said it would hold demonstrations across the country on the anniversary of the Palestine Hotel attack.
"On that day journalists around the world will once again protest over impunity [and] secrecy over media deaths and, in particular, at the failure of the United States to take responsibility for its actions in Iraq which have led to the killing of journalists," said the IFJ general secretary, Aidan White.
He said that the resignation of CNN's Eason Jordan had been orchestrated by a vitriolic campaign by the US right wing.
Mr Eason was forced to quit after suggesting that that US forces had deliberately targeted journalists in Iraq, though he later clarified his comments, saying that he never meant to imply that "US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists."
Mr White said the CNN news executive had been "hounded out by a toxic mix of hysteria, intolerance and ignorance" and said the IFJ would continue its campaign "until Washington is ready to admit its mistakes".
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857
http://media.guardian.co.uk/site/story/0,14173,1417691,00.html
Putting the Media on Trial
By Danny Schechter
MediaChannel.org
NEW YORK, February 11, 2005 -- It's the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an occasion for media commemorations and "never again" reminders.
Today the world knows what happened there although mostly after the fact when it was too late to do much about it. We also know that our own media was not as aggressive in alerting the world about the holocaust for fear of undermining the war effort. The BBC has admitted it had information that it sat on for fear of making it appear that the war was about the survival of the Jews. During that war censorship was widely practiced. Life magazine did not run a photograph of a dead American until 1943, and the director of the Office of Censorship was given a special Pulitzer Prize citation.
After the war, at the Nuremberg Tribunal American prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting Hitler's policies. State propagandists were convicted. More recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal investigating the genocide there while in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian TV was criticized for inciting the war that divided that country.
The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many remember William Randolf Hearst's famous yellow journalism dictum, "you give me the pictures, I will give you the war."
These issues do not belong to the past. In Italy this week, the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on Iraq is putting the media in the dock for its role in doing more selling of the Iraq war than telling. Critics there believe the media covered up war crimes, minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities like Fallujah and mis-reported the reasons for going to war and how it was conducted.
Already some of America's major media outlets, The New York Times and Washington Post have published limited mea-culpas acknowledging their pro-war coverage was flawed. In November the Presidents of the News Divisions of CBS, ABC and NBC admitted their coverage was not critical enough. "Simply stated, we let the American people down" admitted David Westin, President of ABC News.
The fact is the TV coverage across the board was totally unbalanced. Of 800 experts on all the channels before and during the invasion only six opposed the war. Only six!
Yet there were no consequences for jingoism posing as journalism. No one was held responsible. Or fired. Sadly, the media template has not changed much. The coverage is still mostly "all about us" with the focus on our soldiers and allies. Iraqis are rarely heard from. Neither are soldiers. Yes there have been stories about torture but most sparked by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker, not in a big media outlet. CBS admits holding up its story on prison torture for three weeks and did pursue many details we are just learning. Even when many Iraqis said they turned out in large numbers to vote to end the U.S. occupation, most media outlets spun it as a validation of Bush Administration policies. Ironically this great demonstration of staged and imposed democracy" may yet result in a theocracy even less democratic than Saddam's secular Iraq, if that is possible.
As a former network producer (ABC and CNN) and the author a book on the Iraq media coverage that spawned a critical documentary film I was invited to testify I know it is problematic for a journalist to offer testimony at an international tribunal in another country. Most us tend to stay away the appearance of advocacy or even activism. Testifying overseas -- even to a citizen's panel like this could be construed by some as presumptuous or even unpatriotic.
It could denounced as propagandistic (even as many overseas saw little distinction between most of our coverage and a state media system.)
Yet I decided to testify because I believe that our media like other institutions have a responsibility to be accountable, audit their own practices and acknowledge their errors and omissions. We need to admit that there was a "media failure in Iraq as serious as intelligence failures. If the spies were guilty of "group think," what about us?
We are living in an age of a profound global media crisis that goes beyond borders and boundaries.
Journalists who are closest to our media system are often in the best position to understand media practices and recount experiences. We know how the industry works and are most aware of the pressures journalists face from government interference and corporate control.
It is time for us to blow the whistle on how we intentionally or not misled the American people to "buy" this war. ("They fell for it hook, line and sinker" says Senator Byrd of our top media outlets.)
It's time for us to reflect on how we were used and what we can do to reform a news industry that is rapidly losing the respect and confidence of the American people.
-- News Dissector Danny Schechter is the "blogger in chief" at MediaChannel.org and directed WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) a feature-length documentary exposé of the media coverage of the Iraq war. (www.wmdhttp://www.mediachannel.org/views/dissector/affalert324.shtml thefilm.com)
Danny Schechter, "Weapons of Mass Deception" Filmmaker, Declares War on the War Propaganda Machine
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Media is the front line of the corporate system. And media transmits the values, sells the products. All of this is about selling, not telling. The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but also for new communications strategies.
...our media became a weapons systems targeted at us. Usually in war propaganda you try and confuse the enemy. In our case, this propaganda infiltrated very skillfully back into American and global public opinion, and it was done with the help of Hollywood producers, and corporate PR people brought in to help out at the Pentagon.
* * *
The only thing more compelling than interviewing Danny Schechter is watching his powerful new documentary film, "Weapons of Mass Deception," available exclusively from BuzzFlash.com through March 8. Schechter’s tour de force film puts the media in the cross hairs for their distortion of the threat of Iraq, their failure to challenge the administration’s claims over WMDs, and the media’s war mongering in the buildup to the preemptive invasion. As we wrote in our recommendation for the film, if BuzzFlash were handing out our own Oscars, Danny Schechter's "Weapons of Mass Deception" would win for best film exposé of the media.
Danny Schechter is founder and executive editor of MediaChannel.org, as well as a founder and producer of Globalvision, Inc. His career in print and broadcast journalism has garnered him multiple Emmy awards, the IRIS award, the George Polk Award, the Major Armstrong Award and honors from the National Association of Black Journalists. Mr Schechter is an internationally recognized speaker and writer on media issues. Among Mr. Schechter's books are The More You Watch, The Less You Know (Seven Stories Press) and News Dissector: Passions, Pieces, and Polemics (Electron Press).
We spoke with Danny Schechter about his new documentary, about why good journalism doesn't mean rooting for your side to win a war, and about the American media as a roadblock to progress.
* * *
BuzzFlash: Your new film, "Weapons of Mass Deception," documents how the American corporate media complex helped the Bush Administration sell the notion of launching a preemptive attack on Iraq. And more than that, the media misled the American people into believing that there were absolutely no other options other than a preemptive attack to protect our national security. So how was the media able to control and narrow the discussion so much? Is it as simple as just not talking about what other options were available in the buildup to the war?
Danny Schechter: Journalism is supposed to be a watchdog on power, not a lapdog. It’s not there as an echo chamber or a transmission belt for the claims made by the government. The media has a duty to scrutinize information, seek out other sources, try to evaluate and try to understand what the political strategy is behind a focus on a certain issue. But what we saw over and over again, on every single news program on every channel for almost five months, was the demonization of Saddam Hussein. He went from being a bad guy to a Hitler – somebody who not only was threatening his own people, gassing them and committing human rights abuses but also threatening the rest of the world. The media also spun the story that the WMDs in Iraq were presented as offensive weapons that had to be disarmed lest the world itself would be threatened.
The claim made by the Administration, as the basis for the war, was based on two main pillars -- the first was that Iraq had WMDs and biological and chemical weapons. And the second was the link that was implied, inferred, and suggested between Saddam, the secular nationalist, and Osama bin Laden, who is an Islamic fundamentalist and religious fanatic. So everything was put together in a nice little package. And the television media in our country, for the most part got on board and began beating the drum and accepting the logic and need for war.
As I show in "Weapons of Mass Deception," of the 800 experts that were on the air from the beginning of the buildup to the war itself and all the way up to Saddam’s statues coming down in Baghdad, out of 800 experts, only six opposed the war. A report from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) found that only 3% of sources opposed the Iraq war while 71% of sources supported the war. So the information was skewed.
Later a Senate report came out and said that all the analysts suffered from group-think – they all thought and ruled alike on the same sources. They all reinforced what the others were saying for a political reason. They had an objective and they skewed the information in that direction. Okay, governments do that. Governments always do that when they make a claim. But the question has to be, is there a media here that can question all of this “group-think” and challenge it?
I was with a prominent news anchor recently at the United Nations who basically said, well, how could the media have known if the government didn’t know? My answer is, how could every cab driver in Chicago and New York know that there were no WMDs, you know what I mean?
In the rest of the world, there was a lot more balanced coverage. In fact, if you lived somewhere else, you saw a different war than we saw. And that’s one of the arguments we make in "WMD." We say there were two wars going on. One was the war in which soldiers fought each other. The other was a war in which journalists were in combat for scoops, for information, and often cooperating with the government to get access, to be embedded, to be able to get the inside look forward. The Pentagon converted the American press -- which used to be considered the fourth estate and a check on power --into the fourth front. That’s how General Tommy Franks described the media in his secret war plan.
BuzzFlash: Although it jumps out at me, sadly I think most Americans give the media the benefit of the doubt. If your objective was to convince someone that the mainstream media acts in collusion with the Bush administration and is failing to do its job, where would you even begin to engage someone in that conversation when they falsely believe that the corporate media is a watchdog?
Danny Schechter: This is how I began. I embedded myself in my apartment, and I began watching the channels, flipping the dials of my remote control and comparing and contrasting what was on the American channels, what was on CBC, what was on BBC, what was the rest of the world watching, to the best of my ability. I did this not only on TV but online, as well, looking at countless websites.
I’m the editor of Mediachannel.org, and we have thirteen hundred media affiliates. We have access to a lot of research and reporting. And what I saw was the different narrative from the foreign press than there was in the narrative we saw in the United States. And I began to see that this was very conscious, because certain message points were reinforced again and again. And when you saw what was happening on television, it became not simply a journalist reporting information, but it became pundits interpreting information and government officials reinforcing the information. These tactics all fit into a strategy that we investigate in the film called “information warfare” or information operations.
I thought one of the compelling facts we uncovered was a retired Air Force colonel who did a study of the coverage of the Iraq War who concluded that as many as 60 stories were deliberately invented or changed in various ways to basically conceal the truth. And he’s somebody from inside the Pentagon world.
I began to feel that I had to do more – that I had to fight fire with fire. I had to challenge the media’s images with different images. And I began to start this project with no money, with no support, with no help, with no media channels willing to commission it, with no foundations willing to fund it. And I went into my own pocket until I couldn’t afford it anymore. Eventually I was able to attract some investors and we made the film on one-tenth of one percent of Michael Moore’s budget. We were a very small team based really on our passion and feeling that what we saw emerging in the United States during this war was a state media system – a system that was in essence accepting and promoting government claims. And I was finding out that, in fact, the government was funding reporters to get their politics into the media.
BuzzFlash: One of the grossest examples was the twisted logic in the buildup to the war when Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, and Bush were asked how Iraq could be considered a threat since the U.N. inspectors couldn’t find any WMDs. And the administration’s response was, “Well, the fact that we can’t find the WMDs proves Iraq has them, and that they’re hiding them.” It was so transparent and yet the media swallowed this ridiculous line of reasoning.
Danny Schechter: And the logic was even more bizarre – Osama bin Laden speaks Arabic, hates America. Saddam Hussein speaks Arabic, hates America. Therefore, Saddam Hussein is Osama bin Laden. If they share ideology, then they also might share weapons to destroy America. This hysteria and litany of “what ifs” was just a simplistic message point: you’re either with us or you’re against us. These are the evildoers and we’re the good guys in the world.
Our news system used to rely on information and informing people. There would be facts that would be debated. These guys today have moved into a storytelling mode – a Hollywood narrative technique has invaded the realm of news and information. So what we’re presenting now is not necessarily information designed to inform people or deepen their understanding of how institutions work or what the choices are in the world, but rather to convey a story line. And that story line is the Jessica Lynch story – damsel in distress. The idea of the war being presented like a sporting event – a sports metaphor – where generals are diagramming how we marched into Baghdad so it looked like a Super Bowl play.
These techniques of the merger of show biz and news biz reduced the war to an entertainment event, and everybody played their part in it. And there was a lot of high drama. What’s going to happen? Are we at risk? Our boys are in the field. And so, you basically shift the public’s identification from thinking about the reasons that we’re there – whether or not we should be there – to what’s happening to our soldiers in the field. Your loyalties go to the soldiers and you forget about the politics and the policies that led to the war.
That’s why I felt we had two issues here that were in tandem with each other. One was the weapons of mass destruction and the other was "Weapons of Mass Deception" – the way in which our media became a weapons systems targeted at us. Usually in war propaganda you try and confuse the enemy. In our case, this propaganda infiltrated very skillfully back into American and global public opinion, and it was done with the help of Hollywood producers, and corporate PR people brought in to help out at the Pentagon.
BuzzFlash: Many Americans may find this shocking, but good journalism – professional journalism – means that reporters shouldn’t be rooting for your side to win a war. It’s not a journalist’s job to support the troops, it’s the journalist’s job to tell the story truthfully and accurately.
Danny Schechter: When journalists start talking about “we” – expressing an identification with the policy or with the invasion, even with the soldiers, they’ve lost critical distance, which is essential to journalism. Secondly, jingoism and a lot of flag waving is not journalism, and we saw this after 9/11, with all the anchormen wearing American flags on their lapels rallying the country. And I can understand the reasons for it. I lived near the World Trade Center. I made a film about that as well. I can understand why people were frightened, but this fear was manipulated by this Administration that had planned the war in Iraq before 9/11.
BuzzFlash: Clearly, we as consumers of information can be easily manipulated through branding, advertising, the power of images with music, and intentional framing and manipulating of language. Visuals and impressions dominate information now. Could you explain how the networks branded this war and how significant this was in the overall distortion by the media?
Danny Schechter: A film called "The Power of Nightmares" was just done by the BBC. The idea was that in the earlier part of the century, politicians organized around dreams, around things we could hope for – the Great Society, civil rights, women’s emancipation – issues that were about people’s hopes and dreams. Now we have an administration that’s organizing itself around our nightmares, around fear, and basically being the strong father figure. This authoritarian leadership model is eroding civil liberties, our democracy, and effectively deploying large amounts of money from the corporate world to basically help them realize their self interests. This is something which has come out of a country that’s gone through a tremendous transformation over the last twenty years, where the gap between the rich and poor is growing tremendously.
But the military-industrial interests recognized that the scariest thing that ever happened was the end of the Soviet Union -- suddenly that threat disappeared.
So we needed a new threat because a threat keeps that machine going. Instead of a military-industrial complex, we now have a military-industrial-media complex. Media is the front line of the corporate system. And media transmits the values, sells the products. All of this is about selling, not telling. The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but also for new communications strategies. This is a tremendous priority about how you manage conflict. This goes back to the war in Vietnam, as we show in "Weapons of Mass Deception," where the Nixon Administration concluded that the U.S. lost the Vietnam war because of the media.
BuzzFlash: The distortion of the war in Iraq in the media occurred before, during and after the invasion. Let’s talk about coverage of the war itself. Do you think mainstream news should show graphic images of war?
Danny Schechter: That’s a difference we saw between the Arab satellite channels and our own. Some foreign channels showed the reality of war and the horror of people being killed. The American press decided not to show anything. My film talks about civilian casualties and how our military used cluster weapons -- two issues not covered in the American press. Our press covered it up rather than covered it. And that to me is a tragedy. I came out by saying you don’t want to gross people out. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to tell people what’s happening. And in this case, we didn’t.
But when we talk about this happening before the war, we have to recognize that it’s still happening. If you look at the Iraq election, the way it was spun and covered, we know that a lot of people came out very bravely with their purple fingers in the air and going to vote. But what were they voting for? Or why were they voting? They were voting in part because they want to get the Americans out. Yet this was spun by the Bush administration as a vindication of our policy. So the management and news media manipulation that we saw throughout the war is still happening.
BuzzFlash: What needs to happen? Do progressives need to wage a campaign to show the rest of the country that Americans can’t trust the mainstream news?
Danny Schechter: What we try to provide at mediachannel.org is ongoing, timely criticism of the media together with other resources presenting other points of view for more diversity. I write a blog every day on mediachannel.org looking at the media critically and looking at what can be done about it. I’m trying, as best I can, in addition to my books and my films, to raise these issues. But the final point I tell the viewer in my film is, “I’ve had my say. Now it’s time for you.” I’m trying to involve the public in these issues.
We created an outlet called "Media for Democracy," which over 75,000 people joined in order to talk back to the media and challenge the media. We also need to support independent media such as BuzzFlash.
As the Washington Post military reporter that I quote in the film says, “The United States has not won this war.” We need to understand why and what’s happening there. That’s why I’m hoping "Weapons of Mass Deception" will be an important addition to everybody’s video shelf, and if they can help to get it into libraries, schools, and screenings in communities and discuss it. Every time we’ve shown this, people stay for an hour to discuss and debate it. This film is something that really resonates with people. Obviously it’s hard to get the media to promote and to support a film that criticizes the media.
It’s easier to bash Bush than to critique the media, but we have to move in that direction. That’s what I’m trying to do. I joined the media thirty years ago to address the problems of the world, but I’ve come to see that the media is one of the problems. It’s a problem that we all have to confront and try to do something about because having a strong, vital, independent media is essential to a well-functioning democracy. Without it, it’s over.
And these are not issues of media only. This is what I think BuzzFlash readers have to appreciate. These are issues of democracy. If you can’t have a media that informs the public, how can you have a democracy? If you can’t have a trustworthy media that critiques, analyzes, exposes, and challenges, then what you have in essence is a propaganda system. My hope is that BuzzFlash readers understand the need for political change and will realize that the media is standing in the way of change. The media is a problem now, not a solution, and we have to work for media in our country that will support democracy.
BuzzFlash: Danny, "Weapons of Mass Deception" is a great film. Thanks so much for talking with us about it.
Danny Schechter: Thank you.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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Resources
"Weapons of Mass Deception" DVD, a BuzzFlash premium: http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/05/02/pre05023.html
MediaChannel.org Website: http://www.mediachannel.org/
Danny Schechter biography: http://www.globalvision.org/who/whoa.html
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/05/02/int05010.html
Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)
http://www.fair.org
Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record
Media Advisory (2/22/05)
George W. Bush's February 17 nomination of John Negroponte to the newly created job of director of intelligence was the subject of a flurry of media coverage. But one part of Negroponte's resume was given little attention: his role in the brutal and illegal Contra war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the mid-1980s.
From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was the U.S. ambassador to Honduras, a country that was being used as a training and staging ground for the CIA-created and -backed Contra armies, who relied on a terrorist strategy of targeting civilians. Those years saw a massive increase in U.S. military aid to Honduras, and Negroponte was a key player in organizing training for the Contras and procuring weapons for the armies that the United States was building in order to topple the socialist Nicaraguan government (Extra!, 9-10/01).
Negroponte's ambassadorship was marked by another human rights scandal: the Honduran army's Battalion 316, which operated as a death squad that tortured, killed or disappeared "subversive" Hondurans-- and at least one U.S. citizen, Catholic priest James Carney. Despite regular reporting of such crimes in the Honduran press, the human rights reports of Negroponte's embassy consistently failed to raise these issues. Critics contend that this was no accident: If such crimes had been acknowledged, U.S. aid to the country's military would have come under scrutiny, which could have jeopardized the Contra operations.
Many reports included brief mentions of Negroponte's past. The New York Times (2/18/05), for example, noted that "critics say" that Negroponte "turned a blind eye to human rights abuses" in Honduras. But the Times (like most mainstream reports) quoted no critics on the subject; to get a sense of what Negroponte's critics actually said, you had to tune into Pacifica Radio's Democracy Now (2/18/05), where Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive said that Negroponte "essentially ran Honduras as the Reagan administration changed it from a small Central American country into a territorial battleship, if you will, to fight the Contra war and overthrow the Sandinista government. He was really the head person in charge of this whole operation, which became a massive paramilitary war in the early 1980s."
Kornbluh added that declassified documents from those years show Negroponte had "stepped out of being U.S. ambassador and kind of put on the hat of a C.I.A. station chief in pushing for the Contras to get more arms, in lobbying and meeting with very high Honduran officials to facilitate U.S. support for the Contras and Honduran cooperation, even after the U.S. Congress terminated official support for the Contra war."
The night of Bush's announcement, network news broadcasts woefully understated or misrepresented this history. On NBC Nightly News (2/17/05), reporter Andrea Mitchell glossed over Negroponte's Honduran record: "As Ronald Reagan's ambassador to Honduras, he was accused of ignoring death squads and America's secret war against Nicaragua." While Negroponte might be accused of ignoring Honduran death squads, no one could credibly suggest he was ignoring "America's secret war against Nicaragua." The documentary evidence, as Kornbluh explained, suggests that he was intimately involved with running it. ABC's Good Morning America Robin Roberts turned this reality on its head (2/18/05), noting that Negroponte's "entire life has been a lesson in quiet and measured diplomacy" and that "he generated controversy long after a stint in Honduras when he denied he knew anything about the work of Contra rebel death squads."
Some reporters simply soft-pedaled the history; as CNN reporter Kitty Pilgrim put it (2/17/05), "During his four-year stint as U.S. ambassador to Honduras, he had a difficult balancing act in the battle against Communism in the neighboring Sandinista government in Nicaragua." (Sandinista Nicaragua, of course, was not Communist, but a country with a mixed economy and regular elections, one of which voted the Sandinistas out of power in 1990.) Pilgrim's CNN colleague, Paula Zahn (2/17/05), complained that "the critics are already out there sniping at him."
Fox News reporter Carl Cameron (2/17/05) noted that "the only partisan criticism noted Negroponte's role as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the '80s, when he played a key role in the Reagan administration's covert disruption of Communism in the Nicaragua." In this case, "covert disruption" stands in as a euphemism for a bloody guerrilla war that took the lives of thousands of civilians. Cameron went on to note that the "partisan" remarks "came from a member of the House, which has no vote on his nomination."
NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly made similar observations (2/17/05), noting that previous confirmation hearings generated "a lot of questions about the role he played during the early '80s when he was the ambassador to Honduras." Kelly seemed aware of this history, but thought it a settled matter: "He has already dealt with those issues and obviously answered them satisfactorily-- he was confirmed for that job at the United Nations."
Some pundits were remarkably lenient in the standards by which Negroponte should be judged. Fox News Channel commentator Charles Krauthammer explained (2/17/05) that "he was the ambassador in Honduras during the Contra war. So he clearly knows how to deal with clandestine operations. That was a pretty clandestine one for several years. And he didn't end up in jail, which is a pretty good attribute for him. A lot of others practically did."
In general, right-wing pundits and commentators were much more likely than mainstream news reporters to cite Negroponte's shady past-- as proof that he is the right man for the job. On CNBC (2/17/05), Tony Blankley happily summarized Negroponte's human rights record: "Negroponte is not just some ambassador. He has a track record. Starting in Honduras in 1981, he was the ambassador who oversaw the management when the Argentines turned over the covert operations against the Nicaraguans. He took over that responsibility. He managed it operationally. The CIA was very impressed with the way he handled that."
After James Warren of the Chicago Tribune disagreed (calling the Contra war an "at times slimy operation"), Blankley offered a blunt response-- "Well, we won"-- which host Lawrence Kudlow endorsed: "We did win. Thank you, Tony. I was just going to say, you know, the forces of freedom triumphed with a little bit of help from the right country."
Fox News Channel's Fred Barnes took the same line (2/19/05): "I would say on Central America, I give John Negroponte credit, along with people like Elliott Abrams and President Reagan, for creating democracy in all those countries in Central America, in Nicaragua, in El Salvador and in Honduras, where Marxists were going to take over, they fought them back." By way of balance, Fox pundit and NPR correspondent Juan Williams noted that while he didn't "have any love for Marxists," it was important to note "what death squads do to people, and you understand that nuns were involved, Fred, then you think-- wait a second-- excess is not to be tolerated in the name of democracy." Barnes' response: "Well, now that we have democracy, there are no death squads."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2452
Media ignore 9/11 questions
February 21, 2005
What has happened to the US media?
Why has the journalistic community chosen to downplay the latest 9/11 Commission Report? Actually the report substantiated much of what the 9/11 Commission Report states repeatedly. There were many warnings that Osama Bin Laden was going to attack the U.S. on our soil, with strong indications that he would be using aircraft and would target an American icon, be it landmark buildings, bridges etc. It is all in the report, which is very readable. What the report also substantiates is that our president had been in office for eight months before 9/11, and was briefed on all the intelligence reports coming in, but chose to ignore them. Ignore them after being told by Bill Clinton and his cabinet members that Osama Bin Laden and terrorism would be the highest priority of Bush's presidency. Read the report, it's all in the report.
Now we are hearing about another piece of the commission's report that states that there were 52 warnings to the FAA before 9/11 that terrorists were going to use planes to attack the U.S. Why aren't Americans outraged about this? What this means is that the president and his important cabinet members knew we were going to be attacked and did nothing. Is that what a president does to protect the American people? Why has the media downplayed this report? In addition, why was this report released three months after the election and appointment of Condoleezza Rice? Who as National Security Advisor, most assuredly, was given this information.
9/11 changed our lives forever. 9/11 is the direct reason, as stated by the president, that we invaded Iraq, even though they had nothing to do with it. The big question is whythis administration ignore all the warnings.
It's the media who need to raise the heat on this matter, Why haven't they? It seems as if most of the journalists today are either scared cowards, frauds, or paid for by the administration, which is to say corporate conglomerate ownership. It's confusing and downright frightening.
This is just one example. There are so many. What has gone awry with the media? I'm perplexed, confused, and worried.
Pamela Root Montpelier
http://www.timesargus.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200550221036