Democracy and the New American Censorship
By Peter Phillips
Election 2004 was a serious test of democracy in the US. Perhaps we
failed the test. At no other time since the 1930s have we been so
dangerously close to institutionalized totalitarianism. No-fly lists,
prison torture, domestic spying, mega-homeland security agencies,
suspension of habeas corpus, global unilateralism, and military
adventurism interlocked with corporate profit taking are all spurred
on by a media-induced citizen paranoia.
Corporate media is in the entertainment business and fails to cover
important news stories voters need to make election decisions. We
need information about our country's leaders. These are the people
making decisions that impact all of our lives. We need to know who
our leaders are and what they are doing. What are their backgrounds,
their motivations? What policies and laws are they enacting? What
actions are they undertaking, with or against our consent? We don't
need to like them, but we do need to know about them. A participatory
democracy needs people to be aware of issues in order to have active
engaged voters.
The real winners on November 2, 2004 were the military industrial
complex, which will continue to feed at the 500 billion-dollar
military trough, and the corporate media, whose coffers were filled
with billions of dollars for campaign ads.
And can we be sure we actually had a fair election among those who
did vote? Election Systems & Software (ES&S), Diebold, and Sequoia
are the companies primarily involved in implementing the new voting
stations throughout the country. All three have strong ties to the
Bush Administration. The largest investors in ES&S, Sequoia, and
Diebold are government defense contractors Northrup-Grumman,
Lockheed-Martin, Electronic Data Systems (EDS) and Accenture. Diebold
hired Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San
Diego to develop the software security in their voting machines. A
majority of officials on SAIC's board are former members of either
the Pentagon or the CIA including: (Lewellen-Biddle 04)
- Army Gen. Wayne Downing, formerly on the National Security Council
- Bobby Ray Inman; former CIA Director
- Retired Adm. William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
- Robert Gates, another former director of the CIA.
Might the 50 million voters who will cast their ballot on an
electronic voting machine be concerned that the major investors in
the voting machine companies are some of the top defense contractors
in the US and that the firm that developed the security software for
electronic voting is made up of former CIA and NSA directors? They
will never know unless the mass corporate-media tells them.
Might many Americans be more willing to vote if they knew that a
conservative right-wing organization has replaced the American Bar
Association as the main vetting group for federal judge appointments?
Or would there be concern for our returning military vets if it were
widely known that many are permanently contaminated with high levels
of radioactive depleted uranium (DU). Might this concern increase
among young people if they knew the extent of government plans to
reinstate the military draft in the US?
These news stories and hundreds like them are ignored or dismissed by
the corporate media in the United States. The First Amendment of the
US constitution, guaranteeing freedom of the press, was established
to maximize citizen cognition of critical issues in society. It was
understood clearly by the founders that Democracy could only be
maintained through an informed electorate.
A daily newspaper, along with the three major TV networks, ABC, CBS,
NBC, as well as CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, are the major sources of news
and information for most Americans. News stories and the invidious
entertainment segments from these corporate sources generally have
similar themes and common frames of understanding. This concentration
of access to media sources leaves most Americans with very narrow
parameters of news awareness and an almost complete lack of competing
opinions.
Democracy in the United States is only a shadow in a corporate media
cave of deceit, lies and incomplete information. We stand ignorant of
what the powerful are doing in our name and how the corporate media
ignores key issues affecting us all.
Democracy is the people making decisions about the important issues
in their lives. Freedom is the ability to act on these decisions.
Without an electoral choice democracy is non-existent and freedom
only means the right to choose your own brand of toothpaste. Without
an active independent media informing on the powerful, we lack both
freedom and democracy.
The corporate media agenda of maximum profits undermines the public
purpose of a free press by creating the fiscal necessity for cutting
costs and increasing the entertainment content. Ratings and audience
share translate to higher advertising value and higher profits. This
structural arrangement of corporate media results in what Robert
McChesney calls Rich Media Poor Democracy. (Copy editor: Put note
here: McChesney, Robert, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, University of
Illinois Press, 1999
The US is involved in global empire building at a level which most
people in the country are uninformed. The United States intervene
daily in the internal affairs of other countries around the world and
the corporate media seldom reports on our activities.
On February 29, 2004, Richard Boucher from the U.S. Department of
State released a press report claiming that Jean Bertrand Aristide
had resigned as president of Haiti and that the United State
facilitated his safe departure. Within hours the major broadcast news
stations in the United States including CNN, Fox, ABC, NBC, CBS, and
NPR were reporting that Aristide had fled Haiti. An Associated Press
release that evening said "Aristide resigns, flees into exile." The
next day headlines in the major newspapers across the country,
including the Washington Post, USA Today, New York Times, and Atlanta
Journal Constitution, all announced "Aristide Flees Haiti." The
Baltimore Sun reported, "Haiti's first democratically-elected
president was forced to flee his country yesterday like despots
before him."
However on Sunday afternoon February 29, Dennis Bernstein with
Pacifica News Network was interviewing reporters live in
Port-au-Prince Haiti who were claiming that Aristide was forced to
resign by the US and taken out of the Presidential palace by armed US
marines. On Monday morning Amy Goodman with Democracy Now! news show
interviewed Congresswoman Maxine Waters. Waters said she had received
a phone call from Aristide at 9:00 AM EST March 1, in which Aristide
emphatically denied that he had resigned and said that he had been
kidnapped by US and French forces. Aristide made calls to others,
including TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson, who verified
Congresswoman Waters' report.
With this situation, mainstream corporate media was faced
with a dilemma. Confirmed contradictions to headlines reports were
being openly revealed to hundreds of thousands of Pacifica listeners
nationwide. By Monday afternoon March 1, mainstream corporate media
began to respond to charges. Tom Brokaw on NBC Nightly News voiced,
"Haiti in crisis. Armed rebels sweep into the capital as Aristide
claims US troops kidnapped him; forced him out. The US calls that
nonsense." Brit Hume with Fox News Network reported Colin Powell's
comments; "He was not kidnapped. We did not force him on to the
airplane. He went on to the airplane willingly, and that's the truth.
Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call added, "Aristide, �was
a thug and a leader of thugs and ran his country into the ground."
The New York Times in a story buried on page 10 reported that
"President Jean-Bertrand Aristide asserted Monday that he had been
driven from power in Haiti by the United States in "a coup," an
allegation dismissed by the White House as "complete nonsense."
Still, mainstream/corporate media had a credibility problem. Their
original story was openly contradicted. The kidnap story could be
ignored or back-paged as was done by many newspapers in the US. Or it
could be framed within the context of a US denial and dismissed.
Unfortunately, the corporate media seemed not at all interested in
conducting an investigation into the charges, seeking witnesses, or
verifying contradictions. Nor was the mainstream media asking or
answering the question of why they fully accept the State
Department's version of the coup in the first place. Corporate media
certainly had enough pre-warning to determine that Aristide was not
going to willingly leave the country. Aristide had been saying
exactly that for the past month during the armed attacks in the north
of Haiti. When Aristide was interviewed on CNN February 26, he
explained that the terrorists and criminal drug dealers were former
members of the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti
(FRAPH), which had led the coup in 1991, killing 5,000 people.
Aristide believed they would kill even more people if a coup was
allowed to happen. It was also well known in media circles that the
US Undersecretary of State for Latin America, Roger Noriega, had been
senior aide to former Senator Jesse Helms, who as chairman of the
Senate Foreign Affairs committee was a longtime backer of Haitian
dictator Jean Claude Duvalier and an opponent of Aristide. These
facts alone should have been a red flag regarding the State
Department's version of Aristide's departure. Weeks later most news
stories on Haiti published in the US still claimed that Aristide
"fled" Haiti while reporting the on-going civil unrest in the country.
The corporate media's recent coverage of Haiti is how the new
American censorship works. If news stories contradict the official
sources of news they tend to be downplayed or ignored.
Corporate/mainstream media has become dependent upon the press
releases and inside sources from government and major corporations
for their 24 hour news content and are increasingly unwilling to
broadcast or publish news that would threaten ongoing relationships
with official sources.
This means that freedom of information and citizen access to
objective news is fading in the United States. In its place is a
complex entertainment-oriented news system, which protects its own
bottom-line by servicing the most powerful military-industrial
complex in the world. Corporate media today is interlocked and
dependent on government sources for news content. Gone are the days
of deep investigative reporting teams challenging the powerful. Media
consolidation has downsized newsrooms to the point where reporters
serve more as stenographers than researchers. (Barsamian1992)
The 24-hour news shows on MSNBC, Fox, and CNN are closely
interconnected with various governmental and corporate sources of
news. Maintenance of continuous news shows requires a constant feed
and an ever-entertaining supply of stimulating events and breaking
news bites. Advertisement for mass consumption drives the system and
pre-packaged sources of news are vital within this global news
process. Ratings demand continued cooperation from multiple-sources
for on-going weather reports, war stories, sports scores, business
news, and regional headlines. Print, radio, and TV news also engages
in this constant interchange with news sources.
The preparation for and following of ongoing wars and terrorism fits
well into the visual kaleidoscope of pre-planned news. Government
public relations specialists and media experts from private
commercial interests provide on-going news feeds to the national
media distribution systems. The result is an emerging macro-symbiotic
relationship between news dispensers and news suppliers. Perfect
examples of this relationship are the Iraq War press pools organized
by the Pentagon both in the Middle-East and in Washington D.C., which
give pre-scheduled reports on the war to selected groups of news
collectors (journalists) for distribution through their respective
corporate media organizations. The Pentagon's management of the news
has become increasingly sophisticated with restrictions and controls
being cumulatively added to each new military action or invasion in
which the US is involved. (Andersen, 2003)
During the Iraq War, embedded reporters (news collectors) working
directly with military units in the field were required to maintain
cooperative working relationships with unit commanders as they fed
breaking news back to the U.S. public. Cooperative reporting was
vital to continued access to government news sources. In addition,
rows of news story reviewers back at corporate media headquarters
were used to rewrite, soften, or spike news stories from the field
that threaten the symbiotics of global news management or might be
perceived by the Pentagon as too critical.
Journalists working outside of this approved mass media system faced
ever-increasing dangers from "accidents" of war and corporate-media
dismissal of their news reports. Massive civilian casualties caused
by U.S. troops, extensive damage to private homes and businesses, and
reports that contradict the official public relations line were
downplayed, deleted, or ignored by corporate media, while content was
analyzed by experts (retired generals and other approved
collaborators) from within the symbiotic global news structure.
Symbiotic global news distribution is a conscious and deliberate
attempt by the powerful to control news and information in society.
It is the overt manifestation of censorship in our society. The
Homeland Security Act Title II Section 201(d)(5) specifically asks
the directorate to "develop a comprehensive plan for securing the key
resources and critical infrastructure of the United States
including�information technology and telecommunications systems
(including satellites)� emergency preparedness communications
systems." Corporate media's cooperation with these directives insures
an on-going transition to inevitably tighter controls over news
content in the United States. From a Homeland Security agency
perspective, total information control would be the ideal state of
maximized security for the media systems in the US.
Corporate media today is perhaps too vast to enforce complete control
over all content 24 hours a day. However, the government's goal and
many multinational corporations' desires are for the eventual
operationalization of a highly controlled news system in the US. The
degree to which corporate media is hastening moves in this direction
is directly related to the high level embeddedness of the media elite
within the corporate power structure in the United States.
This new American censorship is facilitated by the continuing
consolidation of the corporate media. Since the passage of the
Telecommunications act of 1996, a gold rush of media mergers and
takeovers has been occurring in the U.S. Over half of all radio
stations have been sold in the past eight years, and the repeatedly
merged AOL-Time-Warner- (CNN) is the largest media organization in
the world. Less then a handful of major media corporations now
dominates the U.S. news and information systems. Clear Channel owns
over 1,200 radio stations. Ninety-eight percent of all cities have
only one daily newspaper and huge chains like Gannett and Knight
Ridder increasingly own these. (Bagdikian, 2004)
Media corporations have been under-going a massive merging and
buy-out process that is realigning the sources of information in
America. Conglomeration changes traditional media corporate cultures.
Values such as freedom of information and belief in the
responsibility of keeping the public informed are adjusted to reflect
policies created by bottom-line oriented CEOs. These structural
arrangements facilitate the new censorship in America today. It is
not yet deliberate killing of stories by official censors, but a
rather subtle system of information suppression in the name of
corporate profit and self-interest.
The big corporations that now dominate media in America are
principally in the entertainment business. The corporate media is
narrowing its content with news reports often looking very much the
same. Between media consolidation, the primacy of bottom line
considerations, and the ignoring of important but complex political
issues, it is now believed that Americans are the best-entertained,
least informed people in the world. (Postman, 1986)
Media owners and managers are economically motivated to please
advertisers and upper middle class readers and viewers. Journalists
and editors are not immune to management influence. Journalists want
to see their stories approved for print or broadcast, and editors
come to know the limits of their freedom to diverge from the bottom
line view of owners and managers. The results are an expansion of
entertainment news, infomercials, and synergistic news all aimed at
increased profit taking.
Corporate media are multinational corporations in their own
right, with all the vested interests in free-market capitalism and
top down control of society. In 1997 eleven largest or most
influential media corporations in the United States were General
Electric Company (NBC), Viacom Inc. (cable), The Walt Disney Company
(ABC), Time Warner Inc. (CNN), Westinghouse Electric Corporation
(CBS), The News Corporation Ltd. (Fox), Gannett Co. Inc.,
Knight-Ridder Inc., New York Times Co., Washington Post Co., and the
Times Mirror Co. Collectively, these eleven major media corporations
had 155 directors in 1996. These 155 directors also held 144
directorships on the boards of Fortune 1,000 corporations in the
United States. These eleven media organizations have interlocking
directorships with each other through 36 other Fortune 1,000
corporations creating a solid network of overlapping interests and
affiliations. All eleven media corporations have direct links with at
least two of the other top media organizations. General Electric,
owner of NBC, has the highest rate of shared affiliations with 17
direct corporate links to nine of the 10 other media corporations.
(Phillips, 1998)
These directors are the media elite of the world. While they may not
agree on abortion and other domestic issues, they do represent the
collective vested interests of a significant portion of corporate
America and share a common commitment to free market capitalism,
economic growth, internationally protected copyrights, and a
government dedicated to protecting their interests.
Given this interlocked media network, it is more than safe to say
that major media in the United States effectively represents the
interests of corporate America, and that the media elite are the
watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, parameters of news
content, and general use of media resources.
Corporate media promote free market capitalism as the unquestioned
American ideological truth. The decline of communism opened the door
for unrestrained free marketers to boldly espouse market competition
as the final solution for global harmony. Accordingly, corporate
media have become the mouthpiece of free market ideology by
uncritically supporting the underlying assumption that the
marketplace will solve all evils, and that we will enjoy economic
expansion, individual freedom, and unlimited bliss by fully
deregulating and privatizing society's socio-economic institutions.
The corporate media have been fully supportive of the US policy of
undermining socialist or nationalist leaning governments and
pressuring them into ideological compliance. The full force of U.S.
dominated global institutions -WTO, World Bank, IMF, and NAFTA-focus
on maximizing free market circumstances and corporate access to every
region of the world. Economic safety nets, environmental regulations,
labor unions, and human rights take second place to the free flow of
capital and investments. The corporate media elites are in the
forefront of this global capital movement with an unrelenting
propaganda agenda that gives lip service to democracy while refusing
to address the contradictions and hypocrisies of US global policies.
A closer examination of this American media supported ideology
reveals that "free market" essentially means constant international
U.S. government intervention on behalf of American corporations. This
public-private partnership utilizes U.S. embassies, the CIA, FBI,
NSA, U.S. Military, Department of Commerce, USAID, and every other
U.S government institution to protect, sustain, and directly support
our vital interest-U.S. business.
This ideological mantra affects the U.S. population as well. We are
still riding on the betterments from the first three/quarters of the
20th century and have not faced the full impacts of the economic
bifurcation that has occurred in the past 30 years. Poverty levels
are rising, the numbers of working poor expanding, and homelessness
one pay check away for many. In the last quarter century economic
conditions have declined for the bottom 60 million Americans, and
most of the next 100 million have barely held their own, while the
corporate and media elites have socked away fortunes. (Sklar 2002)
In the past few years, corporate media outlets, under pressure from
powerful corporate/government officials, have fired or disciplined
journalists for writing critical stories about the powerful in the
United States. These terminations have sent a chilling message to
journalists throughout the U.S. - If you attack the sacred cows of
powerful corporate/governmental institutions your career is on the
line. Journalists who fail to recognize their role as cooperative
news collectors are disciplined in the field or barred from
reporting, as in the Iraq War II celebrity cases of Geraldo Rivera
and Peter Arnett.
In a well known case of pressure by powerful institutions,
Fox TV news reporters Steve Wilson and Jane Akre were fired by WTVT
in Tampa for refusing to change their story on the dangers of
Monsanto's bovine growth hormone (rBGH) in the Florida milk supply.
Scientific research has shown that rBGH when injected into cows to
expand milk production results in the increase of insulin-like growth
factor IGF-I in milk. IGF-I has been linked to breast and prostate
cancer. Monsanto claims that the milk is safe, but new scientific
evidence suggests otherwise. Monsanto put pressure on Fox Television
in New York, WTVT's parent company, threatening dire consequences if
the story ran. When Wilson and Akre refused to say the milk was
unchanged, they were fired by the Fox station general manager who was
quoted as saying, "We paid $3 billion for these stations: we'll
decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is." (Wilson
and Akre, 2000 )
Perhaps the most infamous case of media willingly succumbing to
external pressures by the government is the retraction by CNN of the
story about U.S. Military's use of sarin gas in 1970 in Laos during
the Vietnam War. CNN producers April Oliver and Jack Smith, after an
eight-month investigation, reported on CNN June 7, 1998 and later in
Time magazine that sarin gas was used in operation Tailwind in Laos
and that American defectors were targeted. The story was based on
eyewitness accounts and high military command collaboration.
Under tremendous pressure from the Pentagon, Henry Kissinger, Colin
Powell, and Richard Helms, CNN and Time retracted the story saying
that, "the allegations about the use of nerve gas and the killing of
defectors are not supported by the evidence," and fired Oliver and
Smith. Columnists and pundits across the nation attacked Oliver and
Smith for their alleged unprofessional journalism. Newsweek even
wrote on July 20, 1998 that the allegations were "proven wrong".
Oliver and Smith have steadfastly stood by their original story as
accurate and substantiated. What is troubling about this issue is the
speed with which CNN/Time withdrew their support for Oliver and
Smith, after having fully approved the release of the story only
weeks before.
Tailwind can perhaps best be understood better in the context of the
new Vietnam War revelations published in the Toledo Blade October
2003 and widely ignored by the corporate media. The Toledo Blade
story discloses the unrestricted savaging of hundreds of civilians in
the Central Highlands by an elite American Tiger Force during a
several month period in 1967. This free-fire force was given
authority to massacre at will anyone found in the region. Newly
available government documents disclose how an Army war crimes
investigation in 1971 encouraged solders to keep quiet and how the
case was closed in 1975.
The eight-month investigation by Michael Sallah, Joe Mahr, and Mitch
Weiss for the Toledo Blade is similar to the investigation of the
Tailwind story by CNN reporters April Oliver and Jack Smith in
1997-98. Both stories reveal deadly illegal war crimes by US forces
in Southeast Asia, both stories were covered up by higher authorities
in the Pentagon, and both stories challenge the fictionalized
storyline of average GI's caught up in a lousy misunderstood war, who
in isolated incidents made low-level field decisions that resulted in
My Lai-type mistakes. The Tailwind and Tiger Force stories reveal
much higher-level policies of a vicious win-at-any-cost war
officiated by Pentagon and high-level government officials. It is the
revelation of these policies that the Pentagon seems strongly
motivated to suppress.
For the Tailwind story, April Oliver and Jack Smith conducted an
eight-month investigation into the use of sarin gas in Laos during
the Vietnam War. As Oliver states in Censored 1999, (Oliver 1999),
"We stand by the story. We are not novices at news-gathering�The
Tailwind story was carefully researched and reported over eight
months, with our bosses' [CNN] approval of each interview request and
each line of the story's script. It was based on multiple sources,
[six eyewitnesses] from senior military officials to firsthand
participants�in addition to half a dozen on camera sources more than
a dozen pilots told us of the availability or use of a special "last
resort" gas�gb (the military name for sarin), or cbu-15 (a sarin
cluster bomb)."
After the airing of the Tailwind story in June of 1998, CNN
came under a firestorm of pressure from the Pentagon, veteran groups,
and other media to retract the story. CNN president Rick Kaplan told
Oliver and Smith that CNN did not want to end up in congressional
hearings across from Colin Powell and that the story had become a
"public relations problem." A CNN investigation into Oliver and
Smith's story by attorney Floyd Abrams and CNN's vice-president David
Kohler resulted in a recommendation for retraction claiming that the
evidence did not support the use of sarin gas. On July 10, 1998 Ted
Turner made a public apology for airing the Tailwind story before the
Television Critics Association. Oliver and Smith were fired and CNN
retracted the story.
Anyone who actually reads CNN's investigative report can see
the overwhelming evidence that supports the original version of the
story. (CNN 98) However, the CNN report uses a new standard of
absolute proof by saying that the ability to stand up in a court of
law is the criteria for airing stories. Such a standard, if enforced,
would essentially eliminate investigative journalism and stories like
Watergate would never have been published. It is the responsibility
of media to stand firm on solid evidence and tell the truth about
important social issues, not journalistically feasible to research
each story as if it were to be presented in a court of law. The fact
that CNN failed to uphold a commitment to the First Amendment speaks
more about the symbiotic relationship between corporate media and
sources of news than it does about erroneous reporting.
Oliver eventually won a large settlement from her lawsuit for
wrongful termination. Numerous media critics including Fairness and
Accuracy in Reporting, Alexander Cockburn, Project Censored,
Democracy Now! and Media Channel reported her side of the story,
including how CNN caved in to pressure from the Pentagon.
(McLaughlin, 1998) CNN officials clearly understood that they might
not be invited to the next war unless a retraction occurred. CNN
faced more than a public relations problem, they faced a bottom-line
profitability problem if they were refused access to military
cooperation on future broadcasts. Kohler and Turner knew full well
the necessity of cooperation with official sources.
Corporate media has also ignored many important questions related to
9-11, which would offend their sources of news in the government.
Corporate news star Dan Rather in a interview with Matthew Engel for
The Guardian admitted that the surge of patriotism after 9-11
resulted in journalists failing to ask the tough questions. Rather
stated, "It starts with a feeling of patriotism within oneself. I
know the right question, but you know what? This is not exactly the
right time to ask it." (Engel, 2002)
When was the right time to question the levels and intensity of
civilian deaths during and after the bombings of Afghanistan?
According to CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson there was never a good
time. In a memo to his CNN correspondents overseas Isaacson wrote,
"We're entering a period in which there's a lot more reporting and
video from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. You must make sure people
[Americans] understand that when they see civilian suffering there,
it's in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous
suffering in the United States." Isaacson later told the Washington
Post, "�it seems perverse to focus too much on the causalities of
hardship in Afghanistan." This is the same Walter Isaacson, who when
assuming the Chairmanship of CNN in August 2001, claimed that news
needed to be re-defined: "There would be a greater focus on
entertainment, technology, health and fitness, he said. "The goal
should be to make the news smart, but also fun and fascinating."
(Engel, 2002)
Marc Herold, an economics professor at the University of New
Hampshire compiled a summation of the death toll in
Afghanistan-concluding that over 4,000 civilians died from U.S.
bombs-more than died at the World Trade Center. Yet only a handful of
newspapers covered his story. Time magazine reviewed Herold's report
but dismissed it stating, "In compiling the figures, Herold drew
mostly on world press reports of questionable reliability." Time went
on to cite the Pentagon's unsubstantiated claim that civilian
casualties in Afghanistan were the lowest in the history of war.
(Herold, 2002)
At times the corporate media starts in on a story and realizes that
it may lead into areas of concern to their sources of news. Numerous
papers in the country including the San Francisco Chronicle on
September 29, 2001 reported how millions of dollars were made buying
pre-9-11 put-options on United & American Airlines stocks. Yet by
mid-October nothing else was ever printed on the subject. The
Director of the Chicago Office of the FBI, Tom Kneir, admitted on
August 17, 2002 at the American Sociological meetings that the FBI
conducted an investigation into the pre-9-11 stock options, but he
refused to disclose who bought the stock, and the corporate media has
never asked.
At times the hypocrisy of corporate media news coverage is
overwhelming. During the first week of December, 2003, US corporate
media reported that American forensic teams were working to document
some 41 mass graves in Iraq to support future war crime tribunals in
that country. Broadly covered in the media as well, was the
conviction of General Stanislav Galic by a UN tribunal for war crimes
committed by Bosnian Serb troops under his command during the siege
of Sarajevo in 1992-94.
These stories show how corporate media likes to give the impression
that the US government is working diligently to root out evil doers
around the world and to build democracy and freedom. This theme is
part of a core ideological message in support of our recent wars on
Panama, Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Governmental spin transmitted
by a willing US media establishes simplistic mythologies of good vs.
evil, often leaving out historical context, special transnational
corporate interests, and prior strategic relationships with the
dreaded evil ones. (Solomon, 2003)
The hypocrisy of US policy and corporate media complicity is evident
in the coverage of Donald Rumsfeld's stop over in Mazar-e Sharif
Afghanistan December 4, 2003 to meet with regional warlord and mass
killer General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his rival General Ustad Atta
Mohammed. Rumsfeld was there to finalize a deal with the warlords to
begin the decommissioning of their military forces in exchange for
millions of dollars in international aid and increased power in the
central Afghan government.
Few people in the US know that General Abdul Rashid Dostum
fought alongside the Russians in the 1980s, commanding a 20,000-man
army. He switched sides in 1992 and joined the Mujahidin when they
took power in Kabul. For over a decade, Dostum was a regional warlord
in charge of six northern provinces, which he ran like a private
fiefdom making millions by collecting taxes on regional trade and
international drug sales. Forced into exile in Turkey by the Taliban
in 1998, he came back into power as a military proxy of the US during
the invasion of Afghanistan.
Charged with mass murder of prisoners of war in the mid-90s
by the UN, Dostum is known to use torture and assassinations to
retain power. Described by the Chicago Sun Times (10/21/01) as a
"cruel and cunning warlord," he is reported to use tanks to rip apart
political opponents or crush them to death. Dostum, a seventh grade
dropout, likes to put up huge pictures of himself in the regions he
controls, drinks Johnnie Walker Blue Label, and rides in an
armor-plated Cadillac.
A documentary entitled Massacre at Mazar released in 2002 by Scottish
film producer, Jamie Doran, exposes how Dostum, in cooperation with
U.S. special forces, was responsible for the torturing and deaths of
approximately 3,000 Taliban prisoners-of-war in November of 2001. In
Doran's documentary, two witnesses report on camera how they were
forced to drive into the desert with hundreds of Taliban prisoners
held in sealed cargo containers. Most of the prisoners suffocated to
death in the vans and Dostum's soldiers shot the few prisoners left
alive. One witness told the London Guardian that a US Special Forces
vehicle was parked at the scene as bulldozers buried the dead. A
soldier told Doran that U.S. troops masterminded a cover-up. He said
the Americans ordered Dostum's people to get rid of the bodies before
satellite pictures could be taken.
Dostum admits that a few hundred prisoners died, but asserts that it
was a mistake or that they died from previous wounds. He has kept
thousands of Taliban as prisoners-of-war since 2001 and continues to
ransom them to their families for ten to twenty thousand dollars each.
Doran's documentary was shown widely in Europe, prompting an attempt
by the UN to investigate, but Dostum has prevented any inspection by
saying that he could not guarantee safety for forensic teams in the
area.
During the recent meeting with Dostum, Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as
saying, "I spent many weeks in the Pentagon following closely your
activities, I should say your successful activities."(Washington Post
12/5/03) The Post reported that General Dostum was instrumental in
routing Taliban forces from Northern Afghanistan in the early weeks
of the war two years ago, but said nothing about General Dostum's
brutal past. Nor has US broadcast media aired Doran's documentary.
A number of other questions remain unasked and unresolved regarding
events surrounding 9-11 attacks. Both the BBC and the Times of India
published reports several months before 9-11 that the U.S. was then
planning an invasion of Afghanistan. The Unocal oil pipeline from the
Caspian Sea region was to be built through Afghanistan and the U.S.
needed a cooperative government in power. Agence France-Press in
March 2002 reported that the U.S.-installed interim leader of
Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, had worked with the CIA since the 1980s
and was once a paid consultant for Unocal.
A report from France, still unacknowledged by the US press, informs
how the Bush administration, shortly after assuming office, slowed
down FBI investigations of al-Qaeda and terrorist networks in
Afghanistan in order to deal with the Taliban on oil. The ordered
slowdown resulted in the resignation of FBI Deputy Director John
O'Neill, expert in the al-Qaeda network and in charge of the
investigation. O'Neill later took a job as chief of security at the
World Trade Center where he died "helping with rescue efforts."
(Brisard 2002)
A October 31, 2002 report in the French daily Le Figaro disclosed
that Osama bin Laden had met with a top CIA official while in the
American Hospital in the United Arab Emirates to receive treatment
for a kidney infection earlier that summer. CBS news reported one
time on January 28, 2002 that Osama bin Laden was in a Pakistani
military hospital on September 10, 2001.
On 9-11, four planes are hijacked and deviate from their flight
plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked
between 7:45 and 8:10 am Eastern Time. It is a full hour before the
first plane hits the World Trade Center. But it is an hour and 20
minutes later- after the second plane hits - that the President
becomes officially informed. Then, he gives no orders. He continues
to listen to a student talk about her pet goat. It's another 25
minutes until he makes a statement. (Griffin, 2004)
Because of corporate media's failure to investigate questions around
9-11 conspiracy theories abound in America. Corporate media chooses
instead to offer mindless entertainment in place of deeper
investigations into important national questions. The result is that
the general public knows more about Winona Ryder's shop lifting trial
and the Peterson murder case then they do about the history of US
involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The First Amendment provides for freedom of the press and was
established to protect our democratic process by guaranteeing an
informed electorate. Yet we hold national elections in which millions
of voters refused to participate. We denigrated and blamed non-voters
for being uncaring citizens, yet the corporate media has failed to
address core issues affecting most people in this country. Voter
participation levels are directly related to issues that the
citizenry feels are important. Many people no longer trust the
corporate media to provide the full truth. This opens people's
susceptibility to believing in conspiracies and plots to explain
unanswered questions. Cynicism has deterred voting for many.
How can we free ourselves from this dilemma? We can advocate strongly
for corporate media to invest in democracy by supporting deep
investigative reporting on key national issues. We can advocate for
full and clear reporting on the policies and plans emerging from the
public and private policy circles of the American corporate and
governmental elites. Full analysis and disclosure of the published
plans of the Trilateral Commission, The Council on Foreign Relations,
The Hoover Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Cato Institute,
The World Bank, and the Project for the New American Century, would
go a long way in showing the roadmaps that the policy elites are
building for the world. We don't need macro-conspiracy theories to
understand that powerful people sit in rooms and plan global change
with private advantage in mind.
If open debate on socio-political policies were offered nationwide it
would certainly draw wider voter participation. Imagine a Silicon
Valley computer programmer thinking about social policies that would
prevent outsourcing of his job to foreign firms. Imagine his
enthusiasm voting for representatives that would work to protect his
livelihood.
Recognition of corporate media compliance with sources of news is an
important step in understanding our new American censorship. A full
media reform movement that challenges continued corporate media
consolidation is underway in the US, and tens of thousands of people
are involved (McChesney 2004)
Knowing the importance of the role of media in the continuation of
democracy, we have a huge task before us. We must mobilize our
resources to redevelop our own news and information systems from the
bottom up, while at the same time attempting reform at the top. We
can expand distribution of news via small independent newspapers;
local magazines, independent radio, and cable access TV. By using the
internet we can interconnect with like-minded grassroots news
organizations to share important stories globally.
Emerging in the corporate media news vacuum are hundreds of
independent news sources. Independent newspapers, magazines,
websites, radio and TV are becoming more widely available.
Independent media centers (www.Indymedia.org) have sprung up in over
200 cities in the past five years. Thousands of alternative news
organizations already exist and are listed in Project Censored's
Guide to Independent Media and Activism. (Phillips, 2003)
There is a compelling need to encourage activists and concerned
citizens to avoid the propaganda of corporate news, and to focus
instead on news from independent sources. The more corporate news you
watch the less you really know. (Schechter, 1997)
Imagine "Real News" as media information that contributes to the
lives and socio-political understandings of working people. Such Real
News informs, balances, and awakens the less powerful in society.
Real News speaks truth to power and challenges the hegemonic top-down
corporate entertainment news systems. Real news empowers and keeps
key segments of working people in America tuned in, informed and
active. Real News cannot be measured with Arbitron ratings. It is not
there for the selling of materialism, or capitalist propaganda. It is
not there for nationalistic grandioseness. Nor is it there to provide
entertaining stimulation to the alienated suburbs. Real News can only
be measured through its success in building democracy, stimulating
grassroots activism, and motivating resistance to top-down
institutions.
Real News builds movements for social change. It keeps the 5%
radical vanguard aware of our power and our collective ability to
influence positive change. Real News is about stimulating social
activism in our daily lives, and making each act deliberate and heart
centered. Real News reports to the center of self, and helps us find
the collective for shared action. Real News organizes movement
towards betterment, shapes policy for equality, and stands in the
faces of the robber-baron corporate power brokers.
Peter Phillips is Department Chair and Professor of Sociology at
Sonoma State University and Director of Project Censored a media
research program.
Bibliography
Andersen, Robin, The Made-for-TV "Reality" War on Iraq, Chapter 6,
Censored 2004, Seven Stories Press, 2003
Bagdikian, Ben H, The New Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, 2004
Barsamian, David, Stenographers to Power: Media and Propaganda,
Common Courage Press, 1992
Brisard, Jean-Charles and Guilluame Basquie, Forbidden Truth: US
Taliban and Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Hunt for bin Laden,
2002
CNN 1998: Tailwind Report:
http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/02/tailwind.findings/index.html
Engel, Matthew, War on Afghanistan: American Media Cowed by Patriotic
Fever, Says Network News Veteran, The Guardian, May 17, 2002, p. 4
Engel, Matthew, Media: Has Anything Changed? The Guardian, September
2, 2002, p. 2
Griffin, David Ray, The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about
the Bush Administration and 9/11, Olive Branch Press, 2004
Herold, Marc, Truth About Afghan Civilian Casualties, Chap. 9,
Censored 2003, Seven Stories Press, 2002
Lewellen-Biddle, Mark. Voting Machines Gone Wild, In These Times, Jan. 5, 2004
McChesney, Robert, The Problem of the Media, Monthly Review Press, 2004
McChesney, Robert, Rich Media, Poor Democracy, University of Illinois
Press, 1999
McLaughlin, Martin, The Evidence of US Nerve Gas Use in Operation
Tailwind, World Socialist Web Site:
www.wsws.org/news/1998/july1998/cnn2-j24
Oliver, April, The Censored Side of the CNN Firings Over Tailwind,
Censored 1999, edited by Peter Phillips, Seven Stories Press, 1999.
Pauwels, Jacques, The Myth of the Good War, Lorimer & Company, 2002
Phillips, Peter, Self-Censorship and the Homogeneity of the Media
Elite, Censored 1998, Seven Stories Press, 1998
Phillips, Peter, editor, Project Censored Guide to Independent Media
and Activism, Seven Stories Press. 2003, See also:
www.projectcensored.org
Postman, Neil, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the
Age of Show Business, Penguin, 1986
Toledo Blade, 2003, Elite Unit Savaged Civilians in Vietnam:
www.toledoblade.com/apps/phcs.dll/article?AID=/20031002/SRTIGERFORCE/
Schechter, Danny, The More you Watch the Less you Know, Seven Stories
Press, 1997
Sklar, H, and L Mykyta and S Wefald, Raise the Floor: Wages and
Policies that Work for All of Us, South End Press, 2002
Solomon, Norman, Media Fog of War, Censored 2004, Seven Stories Press, 2003
Solomon, Norman and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq, Context Books, 2003
Steve Wilson, Steve and Jane Akre, www.foxbghsuit.com, 2000
--
Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
http://www.projectcensored.org/
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