Stenographers to Power:
Gulf War I as a Case Study in Media Coverage
Jeff Cohen, 1991
excerpted from the book
Stenographers to Power
media and propaganda
David Barsamian interviews
Common Courage Press, 1992,
paper
p139
JC: ... Thomas Friedman is a virtual sidekick of the man he covers,
Secretary of State Jim Baker. They're very close. They bounce
ideas off each other. Friedman is the guy who, shortly after Iraq
invaded Kuwait, said on one of these morning network TV news shows
that what the CIA should consider doing is blowing up some Iraqi
pipelines and then lie about having done so. That was a very rare
case where a reporter actually asked the government to disinform
him...
p142
JC: ... the whole history of how the media covered Saddam Hussein:
there was no coverage of his human rights abuses. There was almost
nil. After the crisis began, when the invasion of Kuwait occurred,
all of a sudden he was the greatest human rights abuser in the
world. All of a sudden, Amnesty International reports on Iraq
mattered. Those reports were released all through the 1980s, when
Iraq was an ally of the United States, when the Reagan administration
took Iraq off the terrorist list so they could give them billions
of dollars in agricultural credits, when the Reagan-Bush administration
was getting guns to Iraq through third-party states, including
Jordan and Kuwait. During that whole period when the United States
was helping build up the military and economic might of Saddam
Hussein in Iraq, the issue of his human rights abuses was off
the media agenda. There was this classic in the New York Post,
a tabloid in New York. After the crisis began they had a picture
of Saddam Hussein patting the British kid on the head and their
banner headline was "Child Abuser." That was very important
to us and very ironic, because Amnesty International and other
human rights groups had released studies in 1984 and 1985 which
showed that Saddam Hussein's regime regularly tortured children
to get information about their parents, their parents' views.
That just didn't get the coverage(It shows one of the points that
FAIR has made constantly that when a foreign government is in
favor with the United States, with the White House, its human
rights record is basically off the mainstream media agenda, and
when they do something that puts them out of favor with the ,U.S.
government, the foreign government's human rights abuses are,
all of a sudden, major news. It was shocking to see how little
self-criticism there was on the part of the mainstream media,
which was suddenly outraged by this dictator Saddam Hussein, who
they had virtually ignored for years. The key period in that history
was the year and a half after Bush took power before the invasion
of Kuwait, when there were reports in Western media, in Western
Europe, that Saddam Hussein was busily trying to get a nuclear
trigger and George Bush was doing everything he could to prevent
economic sanctions. If we had had a foreign policy that dealt
with dictators through diplomacy through the 1980s, instead of
building up their economic and military might, there might not
ever have been an invasion of Kuwait. Of course, the United States
bears large responsibility for that, but that's off the mainstream
media agenda. Pundits who have that point of view don't appear.
Maybe we should talk about which pundits do appear.
DB: A series of events occurred a week
before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I would like you to talk
about that.
JC: You're talking about April Glaspie.
The signal that was sent to Saddam Hussein by a leading government
official named Kelly. April Glaspie, the U.S. Ambassador in Iraq,
had a meeting with Saddam Hussein-when intelligence reports were
coming in that it looked like the feud between Iraq and Kuwait
was going to result in military action by Iraq against Kuwait.
She said that the United States would take no position in an Arab-Arab
border dispute. While I feel like emphasizing those signals were
very important, they've got to be placed in a context of nine
years of Reagan-Bush policy. The Reagan-Bush administration was
in an alliance with Iraq and it continued during the year and
a half after the Iran-Iraq war ended when there was no longer
any excuse to help Iraq. George Bush was still protecting Saddam
Hussein at a time when he was trying to acquire nuclear triggers.
So you put the signal, the green light, that the U.S. government
was giving Saddam Hussein right up until the day of the invasion
of Kuwait, in the context of the nine years of policy and you
will see that there is an incredible foreign policy failure that
has gone down the media memory hole. The whole debate in Congress
and in the media ignored the history of the issue. You can't bring
up nine years of a policy failure for which there now will be
a sacrifice of working-class kids. A lot of big companies made
a lot of profits from the alliance with Saddam Hussein.
p144
JC: {Gulf War I was] more like a Nintendo game. About the myth
of one-hand-behind-our-back in Vietnam: the U.S. government poured
every weapon imaginable into the war against the Vietnamese people,
killing an estimated one million people. A heavy percentage of
the people killed were civilians. It was a huge tonnage of bombs.
It involved very significant chemical warfare, including Agent
Orange. It involved cluster bombs and napalm. The only thing that
wasn't dropped on Vietnam was a nuclear bomb. And yet the media
myth, the media revisionism, and you see it every day in the paper,
is that that was a limited war and that the United States isn't
going to make that mistake again. I think what's significant to
talk about is why these issues that you and I are discussing don't
get into the mainstream media. The mainstream media operate under
a code of journalism that's called "objectivity." The
reporters and the anchors can't just go and give a ten-minute
spiel of their own opinion. Because of objective journalism, you
can't give your own opinion. You have to go to the experts. Since
the news from the Persian Gulf War is being censored by every
government in the region and comes back to the States in dribs
and drabs, television news-and television has been the dominant
medium that people turn to in a crisis-has been having expanded
coverage. For a long time, the news shows on the networks have
been an hour instead of a half-hour. CNN basically has been going
around the clock on the Gulf War. What are these TV networks doing?
They're parading a series of experts. These experts have been
the most one-sided collection of experts that we have seen since
we've been tracking TV's pundits and experts since 1986 at FAIR.
In fact, in the first weekend, Dennis Miller, the comedic anchorperson
for Saturday Night Live, got it totally right when he joked, "You
know who I really feel sorry for? It's the one retired colonel
who didn't get a job as a TV analyst this week." What's odd
is that Tom Brokaw, the serious TV anchorperson for NBC news,
was introducing two members of an expert panel. First he introduced
a retired army colonel. Then he said, "Well, I have to point
out that the fairness doctrine is in play here at NBC, so I now
want to introduce a retired Navy admiral." This was Tom Brokaw's
idea of balance. You have the Army balanced by the Navy. We have
tracked who has been getting on and analyzed the real issues.
Those experts are conservative think tank people; generally the
Center for Strategic and International Studies has been breaking
all records. You've had the retired military analysts, the retired
so-called terrorism experts, and, for balance, the Democratic
Party representatives, such as Steve Solarz and Les Aspin, who
support the war even more strongly than George Bush does. Or,
occasionally, you'll have Lee Hamilton, who since the war began
said, "I support the war." Basically, you've had no
dissent. There aren't any independent experts involved in these
discussions. Dan Ellsberg was once invited by ABC to appear on
a panel analyzing Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's briefing
of the press. He was invited by ABC. Why would Dan Ellsberg be
an obvious expert if you were engaging in truly objective and
balanced journalism? Because Dan Ellsberg, during the Vietnam
War, used to prepare Secretary of Defense Bob McNamara for his
briefings with the press. So he could give you some real insight.
About a half-hour before Ellsberg was supposed to go on the air
on national news, he was called and told: "That limousine
isn't going to arrive. We've decided not to have you on the panel."
They had two or three hawks and no dissenters. So my point is
that anti-war experts, or independent or critical experts had
not been invited indoors to the table where the real experts get
to discuss the real issues. What has been shown of the anti-war
movement is more in the nature of outdoors footage, nature footage.
It's the antiwar movement, always outside in its natural habitat,
the street. You would get the impression from watching hours and
hours of television, as we do at FAIR, that anti-war individuals
and experts are incapable of expressing themselves in anything
other than a chant or a sound bite or a slogan. Why? Because they're
never invited indoors to where the real issues are debated. In
fact, you have this debate now-the right wing has been pushing
this debate, as has the Bush administration-about whether the
antiwar movement has been getting too much coverage. The coverage
is always the coverage that marginalizes, that trivializes, and
the experts that you've interviewed for months, Noam Chomsky,
Edward Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Barbara Ehrenreich, Maxine Waters-the
African-American Congresswoman from L.A. who has opposed this
war from Day One-those people don't get invited on national TV
to discuss the issues. If they're ever shown on TV it's because,
like Dan Ellsberg, they've joined an anti-war march and maybe
they will sing a few bars of "Give Peace a Chance."
But that's the kind of national coverage of the anti-war movement
we get.
DB: Your organization has issued a couple
of very critical reports of MacNeil-Lehrer and Nightline. Let's
be specific about the programs now. Have you detected any change
in terms of the guests and the ideology that is reflected?
JC: Nightline has always been atrocious.
We did a 40 month study and found that the bias of the Nightline
guest list goes toward the white male conservatives of the military
establishment. The four most frequent guests on Nightline were
Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Elliott Abrams, and Jerry Falwell.
Falwell was once asked to give his expertise about AIDS. The MacNeil-Lehrer
Report,- we did a study of six months of their coverage-is almost
as bad as Nightline, in some ways worse in excluding public interest
experts and excluding people of color and women experts, excluding
peace movement experts. Our report on MacNeil-Lehrer which was
issued last year did so much damage; MacNeil-Lehrer prior to our
study had an image of being thorough-they're open, they're balanced.
We did this study which totally deflated that image of MacNeil-Lehrer.
An interesting thing happened in the first months of the Persian
Gulf crisis. MacNeil-Lehrer started sending me notices every time
they brought a dissenting person on. It was more than normal.
They had Noam Chomsky on for the first time in their history.
He got about ten minutes all to himself with Mr. MacNeil. Then
the next day they brought Edward Said on for the same treatment,
one on one. It was a breakthrough for MacNeil-Lehrer. Then they
started adding Erwin Knoll, from the Progressive magazine, who
appeared several times in the months right after the Persian Gulf
crisis began. MacNeil-Lehrer staffers were basically telling us,
"Look, this is a victory for FAIR These changes that have
been made are in many ways because of the constant criticism that
we've been getting from you." But then the war began, and
as soon as the war began MacNeil-Lehrer went into automatic war
pilot. They were just like the old days. They've totally excluded
dissenters. I've seen Erwin Knoll on there once. It's been atrocious
coverage since January 16.
DB: Let's talk about National Public Radio.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting just issued a grant to
NPR for continued war coverage. It called it "superb, exhaustive,
the CNN of radio." How do you rate National Public Radio's
coverage of the Persian Gulf?
JC: We've been disturbed by National Public
Radio, that in fairness to NPR, sometimes they do more in-depth
coverage and sometimes a dissenting voice is heard. There was
a period where we were monitoring it closely. At the beginning
of the war it was appalling. Daniel Schorr kept moderating panels
that went from right-wing nuts from the Center for Strategic International
Studies and then for balance on the left wing would be Congressperson
Solarz or Congressperson Aspin, one of the Democrats who supports
the war more strongly than Bush does. I remember a panel on Day
Two of the war. Daniel Schorr thought it was such an important
panel. He had two representatives from the right-wing think tank,
the Center for Strategic International Studies and they were balanced
by Senator McCain, a right-wing Republican from Arizona. Some
of their panels are so bankrupt and so imbalanced that the word
"public" in their title is really obscene. If you're
really engaging in public broadcasting you cannot exclude from
your list of experts minority and dissenting points of view ...
DB: Martin Lee and Norman Solomon in their
book, Unreliable Sources, talk about journalists today as being
stenographers and not really journalists, not reporters. Why is
that?
JC: It's a trend that's gone on for many
years since that blip in time known as Watergate, where reporters
in Washington, the Washington press corps has grown closer and
closer to its sources. It's to the point where Brit Hume, the
ABC correspondent at the White House, plays tennis with George
Bush. Tom Friedman of the New York Times is very close with Jim
Baker. You find these relationships are so close that reporters
don't challenge the subjects of their stories, they just tell
you what the government is saying. In other words, they've become
stenographers for power and not journalists. There are classic
examples of this. George Bush keeps making statements, that any
bush league reporter knows are one-sided, when he keeps invoking
international law. Not once has a mainstream reporter on national
TV said, "Well, it was a major violation of international
law when Bush invaded Panama." When Bush constantly invokes
the "family of nations" and that the U.N. is united
against Iraq, it's not pointed out by any of these mainstream
journalists (and it would be if they were acting as journalists
and not stenographers) that President Bush didn't admit that the
invasion of Panama was declared, in an overwhelming vote at the
U.N., a grievous violation of international law. Another example
of reporters acting as stenographers is the issue we talked about
earlier, where Bush says that we aren't going to fight this one
with one hand behind our back as we did with Vietnam. No one goes
on record and says, I covered Vietnam and the only thing not dropped
on Vietnam was a nuclear bomb."
DB: Let's talk about the use of pronouns,
which flows out of what you were just talking about. Bob Edwards,
for example, the anchor on NPR's Morning Edition, invariably invokes
"we" and "our." "What are we going to
do if Iraq does this?" "How shall our forces respond?"
What is that reflective of?
JC: It's reflective of a media that is
no longer separate from the state. One of the slogans I've heard
at demonstrations outside the New York Times and the TV networks
is: "Two-four-six-eight, separate the press and state."
We've seen Judy Woodruff talk about "How well are we doing,
our armed forces?" I didn't notice that she was wearing a
Marines uniform. Independent press is supposed to talk about the
Marines and the Pentagon in the third person. They aren't supposed
to be speaking about the Pentagon or the U.S. armed forces as
"we." We've been able to document dozens of examples
where anchorpeople and national TV correspondents put questions
like this: "How long is it going to take us to lick this
guy? How long is it going to take us to defeat him?" Besides
the "we" there's the other pronoun problem: "him."
What the media have done is to pick up the lingo of the Pentagon.
They've made it seem, day after day in the TV news, that we are
fighting an individual. You don't fight wars against individuals.
You fight boxing matches against individuals, you fight duels,
but wars are fought against nations. There are thousands of civilians
who have died. When you have the media constantly personifying
the war. "How long is it going to take us to lick him? How
uncomfortable is he?" Saddam Hussein is probably the one
person in Iraq who's eating three square meals a day. He's probably
the safest person in Iraq. When you have the media falling for
that kind of rhetoric, that we're only hurting one person, we're
punishing one person, you have them basically going for a ride
with the Pentagon. You've had these other kinds of quotes from
the national media, where they say how the strategy of aerial
bombardment has been a strategy to keep casualties down. Tom Brokaw
said that word for word. What Brokaw meant is that the massive
air bombardment strategy was a way of keeping U.S. casualties
down. They were trying to keep casualties down so they could keep
U.S. protest down so they could keep the war going. When you have
people talking about "casualties" and you look closely
at their story and you realize that all they're talking about
is U.S. soldiers, then you're seeing a lot of jingoism and racism.
Newsweek had the most ironic cover story. It was puff piece about
the high-tech weapons, in Newsweek on February 18. The cover title
was: "The New Science of War. High-Tech Warfare-How Many
Lives Can It Save?" Ironically, this was out on the newsstands
when the U.S. bombs destroyed hundreds of Iraqi civilians in a
bomb shelter. The title of the Newsweek article read "How
Many Lives Can It Save?" I read the article closely and it
became clear. The only lives that Newsweek was concerned about
were those of U.S. soldiers. The idea that Arab civilian casualties
should be of any concern to a Newsweek reader was beyond the writers
of that article.
DB: In terms of the personalization that
goes on in the media, you've cited examples of Saddam Hussein;
what about Noriega, Qaddafi, Maurice Bishop, Ayatollah Khomeini-is
there a pattern there?
JC: We used to clock Ted Koppel, the most
influential TV journalist. I remember when it looked like there
might threaten to be a peace with Nicaragua and a regional peace,
and the contras might have to lay down their arms; I remember
Ted Koppel interrogating Aronsen, the spokesperson for the Reagan-Bush
administration on the contras. The question he kept asking was,
"How are we going to make Daniel Ortega pay? How does this
punish "Ortega?" It's typical of the news media. We
didn't punish Ortega. The U.S. government is responsible for killing
tens-of-thousands of Nicaraguan civilians. It's typical of the
macho media elite to make it seem like wars are just fought between
heads of state, because, especially in the case of Koppel, all
he deals with is heads of state. One thing that we should talk
about, because we talked about it earlier, about objective journalism,
is how expert have these pundits have been. At FAIR we have the
slogan, "the more off you are, the more on you are."
In other words, the more inaccurate you are, the more television
time you get. The classic case was the one question that the media
was concerning itself with in January: How long is it going to
take us to lick this guy? How long will the war last? You had,
for example, on the McLaughlin Group, which rarely has a broad
spectrum of views, but what was their spectrum of views on predicting
how long the war would last? This was the first weekend after
the war began. The optimists said it would take thirteen days
for the war to end. The pessimists said it could last a full three
weeks. That was the total spectrum. After the three weeks ended,
we communicated to McLaughlin that we thought that since these
five pundits had revealed themselves to be utterly inept, that
maybe they should replace these five and hire five new experts
who really know what they're talking about. You had a parade of
experts like former CIA director William Colby, who assured us
the war would be over in an afternoon. You had a right-wing Congressperson,
Robert Dornan, who is a fixture on CNN; and I think CNN, like
NPR, gets a lot of praise that is undeserved. They have the same
narrow spectrum of experts. Robert Dornan got on CNN and said,
this war will take two days. The most important figure in getting
George Bush the votes he needed to start the war was Democratic
Congressperson Les Aspin from Wisconsin. Les Aspin was on television
networks so often during December and January that we were wondering
whether he had a television union card. He was going from network
to network, and what was he saying? Especially on CBS's America
Tonight, the competitor show with Nightline. He said, this war
will take weeks, not months; he said that over and over. He said,
we may not even need a ground war. We can do this from the air.
What was interesting was, a couple of weeks into the war, Associated
Press had a story they sent out across the country quoting Les
Aspin prominently, saying, President Bush isn't doing a good job
preparing the U.S. public for the large number of casualties there
will be when the ground war begins. It struck me that the Associated
Press was acting as a stenographer to power. When Les Aspin was
saying this war will be over in no time, he was in every media
outlet to say that unquestioned. When he came on later and said
this war could be very dangerous, it could bog down, it could
cost thousands of U.S. troops, the stenographers in the mainstream
media just put that out and never once did a reporter say to Les
Aspin, well, wait a second. You're largely responsible for getting
us into this war on the basis that it would take weeks and might
not even need a ground war. So how can you now be saying 1 something
totally different?
DB: Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming has
described Peter Arnett of CNN, who is reporting from Baghdad,
as an "enemy sympathizer." How do you evaluate Arnett's
reporting from Iraq?
JC: Arnett's reporting has, I think, been
essential. It's been one of the few bright spots. Correctly, CNN
tells you that his stories are cleared by censors. What's ironic
is that many of the stories that appear on CNN are cleared by
censors, but it's only Arnett's stories where you get a big lead-in
on how this was cleared by Iraqi censors. It's always flashed
on the screen: Cleared by Iraqi censors, and then after the story
ends you hear it again. I don't think that's that bad, but I'd
like to see that same kind of talk about the Pentagon censorship,
which is massive. Arnett, of course, has given us a window into
what's happening inside Iraq. It's an important window for the
U.S. public to see because, as I said, wars, despite what the
media pundits say, are not fought against individuals. They kill
all sorts of innocent civilians. The person who shed the best
light on this is one of the best columnists in our country writing
for one of the better newspapers, New York Newsday, and that's
Murray Kempton. Kempton pointed out that what's really being shown
by this war is that the weapons of modern warfare are just too
horrible, that wars are obsolete, that there's got to be a better
way. Kempton pointed out that 80 percent of the victims of wars
since World War II have been civilians. It's such an obvious point.
The fact that Murray Kempton is off-key saying that in a column
in Newsday and that kind of point is never made in the more national
media says something about how narrow the perspectives are in
the national media. We've gone through this before in Panama.
That was an air war, an air bombardment. All the media concerned
itself with was, how many U.S. soldiers have died? Kathleen Sullivan
of CBS got on TV nearly crying. "Eight U.S. soldiers have
died. How long can this fighting go on?" By the point that
she was grieving about the eight U.S. soldiers, it's very likely
that a thousand Panamanian civilians had been baked in their homes
in the E1 Chorrillo section of Panama City. The point is that
it took nine months before a national network, CBS, did a Sixty
Minutes story on the full range of civilian casualties. But during
the time that the Panama invasion was going on, all we heard from
the national media was: We are doing so well. This is one of the
most successful U.S. military operations in years. I think the
Pentagon, from their Panama experience, felt they could count
on the ignoring of civilian casualties in the Persian Gulf War.
Given the history of lies about civilian casualties in Vietnam,
in Panama, the continual lying now about civilian casualties in
Iraq, the way the media constantly falls for it, they almost invert
the words in the song by the rock group The Who: "We Will
Be Fooled Again." In the mainstream media, no matter what
has gone before, they are eternally gullible when the Pentagon
gives them numbers or tells them how smart and how accurate our
bombs are. We., heard all about the surgical strikes in Panama
and what the nurses and ambulance drivers in Panama City were
saying. Surgical strikes? Those are strikes by the United States
that send our people to surgery wards, that's what a surgical
strike is.
DB: Clearly there's a pattern emerging
here, starting with Grenada and Panama and now the Persian Gulf,
of U.S. control of the news. If what you're saying is accurate,
that the press is so compliant and obsequious, why do they even
have to go through the machinations of censorship?
JC: That's a good question. I would argue
that the worst reporting in the U. S. media is not the reporting
that's been censored. Some of that reporting has been real lame.
They interviewed the Marines and the pilots who are all gungho,
"We kicked ass today." No soldier is going to talk candidly
to a reporter in Saudi Arabia; every reporter has a military escort
who's usually a higher-ranking officer than the soldier who's
being interviewed. No one is going to say, "I'm scared. I
wish I wasn't here." You would never say that, because of
the censorship. But I would argue that even with those negatives
in the reports that come from' the war theater, the worst reporting
on television is the reporting from New York and Washington. That's
been the most biased. That's been the steady parade of hawks"
the Center for Strategic and International Studies debating another
conservative think tank, American Enterprise [Institute]. I remember
the Nightline panel, this had nothing to do with Pentagon censorship.
They had: representing the right wing, Patrick Buchanan; representing
the center Newt Gingrich; and representing the left was a Democratic
party Congressman who was saying, "I'm rallying 'round the
President. " I'm supporting the war. It was three war hawks.
I would argue that the most bias in the U.S. media-and it's the
bias that people are glued to-is the bias that comes out of the
studio with the one-sided parade of experts, and the Pentagon
isn't censoring that. That's journalists making a decision that
they are going to censor anti-war perspectives or independent
perspectives.
DB: If, as you say, truth and accuracy
are taking a beating in this kind of coverage, it seems that the
English language is under assault, too. You have "aircraft
going out on sorties, delivering their ordnance to soften up targets,
and there may be some collateral damage but a BDA (bomb damage
assessment) will determine that later."
JC: Noam Chomsky has talked about this
since the Vietnam War. The way the Pentagon has prostituted the
English language toward its ends, when concentration camps were
called "strategic hamlets" and "pacification programs"
in Vietnam. The thing that I keep hearing is the "smart bombs"
and the "surgical strikes." There is so much evidence
to the contrary, and yet the U.S. reporters still pick up that
lingo from the Pentagon.
DB: Talk if you will about polls, because
polls seem to be very, very critical in the formulation and application
of national policy. How are questions designed, and who asks those
questions?
JC: In mid-February, for example, when
the Soviets were pushing toward peace (not just the Soviets; there
were other countries which wanted to avert a further war and an
escalation of the war). Poll after poll-we saw this in the New
York Times, in Newsday, all the Gallup polls- was asking this
question: Do you think U.S. and allied forces should begin a ground
attack soon to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait, or should we hold
off for now and continue to rely on air power to do the job? If
you are one who believes that too many civilians have died already,
that we're bombing Iraq into the l9th century and there's a way
for the U.S. government through diplomacy, to accomplish its goals
of getting Iraq out of Kuwait without this war, you had no answer.
It was one of those questions: Do you support the ground war or
do you support the air war? If you're one who supports neither
war, you had to add yourself to the "uninformed" or
uncaring "I don't know. I don't have an opinion." We've
been tracking these poll questions. People should be very suspicious
of polling data. By the way, we should talk about not taking the
media lying down. If you are a consumer of news and you are appalled
by the steady stream of white male conservative war hawks, then
it's your duty as someone who cares about democracy to pick up
a phone, write a letter, fax a letter and demand that the media
be balanced. When you see a poll that you're skeptical about,
call the newspaper and say, can you send me the raw data. It's
usually ten pages where they write up what the full questions
were, what the votes were, how many the don't-know's were. I remember
a doozie from the Los Angeles Times before the war started. It
read: "If Hussein pulls his troops out of all Kuwait, should
the United States keep a military presence in the Persian Gulf
to maintain stability in the region or not?" Of course, the
question assumed that U.S. military forces maintain stability
in the region. By the way, the Los Angeles Times is considered
very respectable. The Times-Mirror polls are always reprinted
in papers across the country. If you believe that a permanent
or semi-permanent U.S. presence in the Middle East would be hurtful
to regional stability, you could have phrased the question: If
Hussein pulls his troops out of all Kuwait, should the United
States keep a military presence in the Persian Gulf or remove
them in the interest of regional stability? If you frame the question
that way, overwhelmingly the U.S. public would have said, no,
let's get the U.S. troops out. I feel that the public is snookered
by biased questions. The consuming public should be very skeptical
about those questions.
DB: One of the burning issues in this
whole debate has revolved around the issue of "linkage."
How has that been treated in the mainstream media?
JC: It goes with the coverage of the Middle
East in the mainstream media going back years. You would not know
from the mainstream media that there's been an international consensus
on the Middle East, including the Western European countries,
that there should be two states, side by side, a Palestinian state
and an Israeli state. The overwhelming weight of authority in
the world, the consensus in the world, is that there should be
negotiations between Israel and the PLO. You wouldn't know that
from the U.S. media. You'd think that's controversial. So you've
had this war starting because George Bush under no circumstances
would consent to an international peace conference on the Middle
East. What's interesting is that in the media, one institution,
perhaps even more than the Pentagon, has risen in the mainstream
media in this country as "coming back." It's getting
all this propaganda. What institution is it? It's the United Nations.
The mainstream media look at the United Nations very selectively.
On November 29, when Bush got the authorization he wanted to have
a deadline where the use of force would be possible against Iraq,
that was major news. There were all these accolades for the U.N.
The very next day another vote was taken. It was a vote you didn't
hear much about in the mainstream media, called "Question
of Palestine." It was a vote on whether there should be an
international Middle East peace conference, on whether Israel
should pull out of the Palestinian territories. What was the vote?
144 to 2. The dissenting votes were, as usual, the United States
and Israel. So it's not known in this country how strong the international
consensus is for an international peace conference, nor is it
known that the U.S. public overwhelmingly supports an international
peace conference on the Middle East and that the New York Times
poll the day the war started was 56 percent to 37 percent in favor
of such a conference. So I think it's only by excluding certain
facts from the discussion that George Bush could get on TV day
after day and say: "Linkage-not prudent. Won't tolerate it.
Unconditional" and get away with it. The public wasn't even
informed that the idea of a conference is very popular with the
public. The idea that Iraq could have been gotten out of Kuwait
without a war, through an international peace conference, was
overwhelmingly supported by the U.S. public. Not one TV pundit
raised that issue.
p160
JC: ... What's interesting to me is the way the U.S. television
networks constantly parade their one-sided propaganda, their cheerleading
for the war, their boosterism for the Pentagon and all the smart
bombs and high-tech technology and then they poll the public:
What do you think of the war? Any time anything slips in about
civilian casualties, very quickly to follow will be the word "propaganda"
or "manipulation" or "propaganda windfall for Saddam
Hussein. "he context of that very propagandistic coverage,
they are always polling the public and saying, well, the public
continues to support the war, 80 percent. Frankly, what [the media
is] doing is gauging the power of their own propaganda. It's not
sound to continually poll the U. S. public until you've provided
them with alternative or differing points of view or wide-ranging
debate.
p160
JC: ... the mobilization to demand media balance has never been
more intense. It's in a sense a new thing leading to people like
Peter Jennings coming downstairs and actually meeting their critics.
It's the only hope. Your track should be twofold: One, you fight
the mainstream media to end the censorship and you demand balancing
viewpoints; and two, you support the alternative media that goes
into depth on issues that the mainstream media will glance over
in a ten-second story. Those are the two tracks, and frankly I'm
optimistic that both are working better than ever. I've never
been more proud of the alternative media than in their coverage
of the Persian Gulf. I'm talking not just radio, community radio,
but the print publications and television. The Gulf Crisis TV
Project, done by Deep Dish, which was sent up on satellite and
pulled down by cable access stations across the country as well
as some PBS stations, that was a monumental achievement in independent
journalism, alternative journalism. That's going great. Then there's
this new thing, where never before have media consumers-I know
African Americans are complaining to the media like mad. Women's
groups are circulating letters saying, why aren't there women
who get to debate foreign policy? Bella Abzug has been one of
these. She leads a group of women concerned about foreign policy.
Never before has so much well-informed criticism been leveled
at the media, the criticism taken directly to the mainstream journalists.
In the past, especially public interest activists and environmentalist
and peace activists, what they'd do when they saw bad media is
they complained to each other, instead of taking their intelligent
and serious complaints to the media who are doing the censoring,
and that's changing. So I'm optimistic on both counts.
DB: So, how should people react to the
media?
JC: We have found that the main message
we can bring to an audience is: Don't take the media lying down.
It's not enough to grumble quietly to oneself about media bias.
If there's an aroused public, we have found at FAIR, you can exert
an influence even on the media owned by General Electric. We've
demonstrated it. We've had victories. We know that there are programs
which got on PBS that never would have gotten on except for FAIR's
work and the work of other activists. We know that stories have
been published in the New York Times about the death squads in
Honduras, for example, that they probably wouldn't have bothered
with except that we were putting so much heat on them for scrutinizing
minor human rights infractions in Nicaragua and placing that on
the front page while ignoring major death squad activities in
neighboring countries. So there are successes that FAIR can point
to and we just ask people to join. We are a membership organization.
All members receive our bi-monthly publication called Extra. We
look at the news that's not in the news and we look at the gaffes.
We talk about the themes that the media keep propounding which
may be bogus themes, and mostly we talk about the issues they
never talk about. We just believe that if you're going to be an
informed citizen you have to look at a variety of sources. That's
the key to getting the news. Don't rely on one media source, especially
if it's one that's owned by a big corporation, like General Electric
owning NBC when it's General Electric weaponry in part that is
being used in the Gulf War. General Electric stands to gain from
future wars. I would be skeptical of what I see on NBC because
of GE's ownership.
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