Foreign Foes and Allies,
Behold the Global Marketplace,
The Media Beat Goes On

excerpted from the book

Through the Media Looking Glass

Decoding Bias and Blather in the News

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

Common Courage Press, 1995, paper

Foreign Foes and Allies

p204
War on the Tube: So Close Yet So Far Away
April 20,1994

Television brings war into our living rooms. That's the conventional wisdom.

And so, we might be tempted to believe that news broadcasts with grisly footage from Bosnia or Rwanda make warfare real to us.

But the room where we sit in front of a TV set could hardly be farther from the realities of a war zone.

A war "is among the biggest things that can ever happen to a nation or people, devastating families, blasting away the roofs and walls," says media critic Mark Crispin Miller. But at home "we see it compressed and miniaturized on a sturdy little piece of furniture, which stands and shines at the very center of our household."

There's never any need to dig shrapnel out of the sofa. And while television "may confront us with the facts of death, bereavement, mutilation, it immediately cancels out the memory of that suffering, replacing its own pictures of despair with a commercial, upbeat and inexhaustibly bright."

But such limitations of the TV-viewing experience are only part of the problem with relying on television to understand the wars of the world. A bigger impediment is that some wars don't make it to the shimmering little box at all.

We're likely to assume that television is showing us the most horrendous and "important" wars. Yet news broadcasts are highly selective, for reasons that include political and racial biases.

Bloody events in Bosnia, for instance, have frequently dominated news programs. But we rarely hear a word, or see even a few seconds of videotape, about the war in Angola- where the victims are black Africans, and the United States government bears major responsibility for the carnage.

The rebel force known as Unita-long backed by U.S. officials who supplied massive aid-lost an internationally-supervised election to Angola's ruling party in 1992. Immediately, Unita launched a new military offensive. Since then, half a million Angolans have died, according to the British magazine New Statesman.

As the magazine reported in March [1994], the human suffering is immense in Angola: "Inexorably, month after month since the elections in September 1992, Unita's reign of terror has worsened, outstripping in horror the familiar scenes of starvation and factional or ethnic killing in Somalia, Liberia, Sudan, or Burundi. Yet this is a war the international community had the power to prevent."

The Unita killers owe a great deal to Western support. "First the Portuguese colonists, then the South Africans in pursuit of regional dominance, then the U.S. in the name of anti-communism created and nourished [Jonas] Savimbi and his Unita. This past two years have seen the United Nations appeasement compound" the tragedy.

But American media rarely discuss U.S. culpability or U.N. appeasement in Angola.

Writing in the New Statesman, journalist Victoria Brittain recalls: "Every year since the mid-1980s, I have interviewed dozens of displaced peasants who described attacks on their villages by Unita, kidnapping of young men and boys, looting, beatings, and killings, while in hospital beds the rows of mutilated women bore witness to the mining of their fields. Defectors from Unita told more chilling stories of mass rallies at the headquarters in Jamba where women were burned alive as witches. These were not stories the outside world wanted to hear about Unita, whose leader was regularly received at the White House."

The New Statesman article concludes: "Angola has been destroyed by Unita leader Jonas Savimbi's determination to take by force the power successive United States administrations promised him, but which the Angolan people denied him in the polls."

Since the election-rather than isolate Savimbi as the terrorist leader that he is-the U.S. and the United Nations have tried to placate him with concessions, more negotiations and access to material aid.

Meanwhile, the American news media tell us little about Angola-where the U.N. estimates that 1,000 people die each day.

Why don't we see Angola on the evening news? Or on the front pages?

Why have we seen so many stories about the Bosnian cities of Sarajevo and Gorazde, but none about the horrible sieges of Angolan cities like Cuito, Huambo and Malange?

For much the same reason that we rarely get any news about East Timor. Since December 1975, when Indonesia invaded that island nation and began to slaughter the native population, a protracted holocaust has been underway. More than 200,000 Timorese-a third of the entire population-have died at the hands of the occupiers.

The murderous Indonesian regime, allied with the U.S. government, has used American aircraft and other military aid to do the killing. Despite the U.S. link-or perhaps because of it-we haven't seen the massacres in East Timor on our TV screens.

We see news reports about the Kurds inside Iraq, suffering from the brutality of the Iraqi regime. But we rarely get news of the Kurds inside Turkey, suffering from the brutality of the Turkish regime.

Even when thousands of Turkish troops invade northern Iraq to attack Kurdish foes, as they did in mid-April, the event gets virtually no U.S. media coverage. Can you imagine the news coverage if Iraqi troops had invaded Turkey (a close U.S. ally) in pursuit of Kurdish guerrillas?

What we see on television only gives us fleeting glimpses of war. And the selectivity of those glimpses renders some victims invisible, their anguish ignored. Conveniently.

Behold the Global Marketplace

p243
Media Whitewash Harm Done By Global Loan Sharks
February 9,1994

We rarely hear about them in the major news media-and when we do, we get mostly fluff and flackery.

According to the media image, they function tirelessly to encourage "reforms" so that backward countries can get their economic houses in order.

Who are they? The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank-the two most powerful financial institutions on earth.

From Russia and Thailand to Bolivia and Chile, the IMF and the World Bank provide loans-and constant advice. Well-heeled economists from affluent countries routinely offer billions of dollars, if the needy nations prove willing to make certain changes in policies.

Serving as a conduit for money from Western governments and banks and bondholders (with the United States as the biggest single source of funds), the IMF and World Bank require that recipient nations adhere to strict "structural adjustment" programs. They include easing limits on foreign investment, increasing exports, suppressing wages, cutting social services such as health care and education, and keeping the state out of potentially profitable endeavors.

"The World Bank and the IMF don't just have direct control over tens of billions of dollars per year," points out researcher Kevin Danaher of the Global Exchange organization based in San Francisco. "They also indirectly control much more from the commercial banks by functioning as a good housekeeping seal of approval. Offending governments who won't follow IMF/World Bank prescriptions get cut off from international lending-no matter how well those governments may be serving their own people."

In Africa, Asia and Latin America, the pattern has been grim: To get grants and loans, governments agree to devalue currencies and cut subsidies-thus raising the prices of necessities like food-while freezing wages and reducing public employment. Scores of countries are struggling to pay the interest on old loans and qualify for new ones.

The spiral has brought deepening poverty and debt. "From the onset of the debt crisis in 1982, until 1990, debtor countries paid creditors in the North $6,500 million [$6.5 billion] per month in interest alone," reports the British magazine New Scientist. "Yet in 1991 those countries were 61 percent more indebted than they were in 1982."

While the U.S. press is apt to portray the IMF and World Bank as selfless Good Samaritans, the reality is that these 50 year-old institutions function more like global loan sharks. One way countries are encouraged to repay their debts is by shifting from domestic agriculture to export crops.

Davison Budhoo, an economist who resigned from the IMF in protest, contends that the agency's approach has "led to the devastation of traditional agriculture, and to the emergence of hordes of landless farmers in virtually every country where the World Bank and IMF operate." And, he adds, "Food security has declined dramatically in all Third World regions, but in Africa in particular."

In Zimbabwe-formerly known as the breadbasket of Southern Africa-the IMF pressured the nation's Grain Marketing Board to make a profit by selling much of its stockpiled grain. And the U.S. Agency for International Development encouraged Zimbabwe to grow high-grade tobacco. As a result, acreage for corn dropped sharply-and the specter of famine was not far behind.

A disaster for all concerned? Not quite. Such disasters in the Southern Hemisphere have a way of serving as bonanzas for bankers in the North. Interest payments keep flowing northward as debt burdens increase.

Since 1980, "structural adjustment" has been visited upon more than 70 countries. "There are losers and there are winners in structural adjustment," says Leonor Briones, president of the Freedom from Debt Coalition in The Philippines. "The losers are those who are already losing. The winners: the banks, the businessmen, the politicians."

The international affairs director of the D.C.-based Environmental Defense Fund, Bruce Rich, cites the World Bank's "sad record of supporting military regimes and governments openly violating human rights." And he points to environmentally destructive actions such as last summer's approval of a $400 million World Bank loan to India for coalburning power plants-anathema to those concerned about global warming and C0-2 emissions.

A revealing memo by the World Bank's chief economist, Lawrence Summers, was leaked in January 1992: "The economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that.... I've always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted." (Summers went on to become the Clinton administration's undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs.)

In his new book Utopia Unarmed, the Mexican scholar Jorge Castaneda calls the World Bank and the IMF "the institutions that play the most important role in managing international economic relations today." Yet the U.S. mass media tell us little about these agencies casting enormous fiscal shadows across the globe.

Raising questions about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank could provoke far-reaching responses. As political analyst Noam Chomsky has put it: "To challenge the right of investors to determine who lives, who dies, and how they live and die-that would be a significant move toward Enlightenment ideals.... That would be revolutionary."

The Media Beat Goes On

p250
George Orwell's Unhappy 90th Birthday
June 23,1993

George Orwell would have reached his 90th birthday on June 25 [1993]. The great English writer has been dead for several decades, but Orwellian language lives on.

These days we have plenty of good reasons to echo poet W.H. Auden: "Oh, how I wish that Orwell were still alive, so that I could read his comments on contemporary events!"

Today, in the United States, media coverage of political discourse attests to Orwell's observation that language "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts."

Anyone who pays attention to routine speeches by politicians is likely to recognize Orwell's description: "When one watches some tired hack on the platform, mechanically repeating the familiar phrases...one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy."

News media frequently make things worse. Instead of scrutinizing the blather, reporters are inclined to solemnly relay it-while adding some of their own.

The standard jargon of U.S. politics in the 1990s is the type of facile rhetoric that appalled Orwell. This lexicon derives its power from unexamined repetition.

To carry on Orwell's efforts, we should question the buzzwords that swarm all around us. For instance:

"Centrist"-A term of endearment in elite circles, usually affixed to politicians who don't rock boats, even ones stuck in stagnant waters.

"Reform"-This word once described change aimed at removing corruption or privilege. Now the word offers a favorable sheen to any policy shift. A linguistic loophole vague and gaping enough to drive a truck through, whatever the political cargo.

"Bipartisan"-An adjective that hails the two major parties for showing great unity and national purpose: usually agreed to behind closed doors, out of view of the riff-raff.

"Special interests"-A negative label commonly applied to mass constituencies of millions of people-seniors, the poor, racial minorities, union members, feminists, gays... Formerly a pejorative to describe monied interests that used dollars- since they lacked numbers of people-to influence politics.

"Sources say"-Leaks from on high, served up as journalistic champagne.

"Experts"-Oft-cited and carefully selected, they supply fertilizer for the next harvests of popular credulity.

"Defense budget"-Having precious little to do with actual defense of the country, these expenditures require the most innocent of names.

"Senior U.S. officials"-Unnamed, they are larger than life. In another culture they might be called "messengers of God."

"Rule of law"-What occurs when those who made the rules lay down the law-sometimes violently-overseas or at home.

"National security"-An ever-ready rationale for just about any diplomatic or military maneuver...or any suppression of incriminating information.

"Stability in the region"-Can be a tidy phrase to justify the continuation of existing horrors.

"Western diplomats"-These bastions of patience and wisdom provide the compass for navigating in foreign geopolitical waters.

"The West"-Often used as a synonym for global forces of good.

George Orwell wrote his last novel, 1984, in the late 1940s- around the time the U.S. "War Department" became the "Defense Department." Orwell's novel anticipated that "the special function of certain Newspeak words" would be "not so much to express meanings as to destroy them."

The repetition of such words and phrases is never-ending. Like a constant drip on a stone, the cumulative effects are enormous.

Language, dialogue and debate are essential tools for a democratic process. But when words are wielded as blunt instruments, they bludgeon our minds rather than enhancing them.

The inflated shadow cast by words has grown in recent decades, but it is not new. "Identification of word with thing," Stuart Chase noted in 1933, "is well illustrated in the child's remark 'Pigs are rightly named, since they are such dirty animals."'

Never better than imprecise symbols, words and phrases come to dominate the conceptual scenery-maps that are confused with the land itself. All too often, familiar words are used to label ideas and events instead of exploring them.

And over the years, evasive and euphemistic language- from "pacification programs" in Vietnam to "collateral damage" (killed civilians) in Iraq-has served as camouflage for inhuman policies.

George Orwell died young, succumbing to tuberculosis in 1950. But his acuity can be brought to life, to the extent that we probe beneath all the facile words and search out the realities they so often obscure.

Through the Media Looking Glass

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