------------------------- Via Workers World News Service Reprinted from the April 3, 2003 issue of Workers World newspaper -------------------------
MEDIA MONOPOLY GIVES US A SCRIPTED WAR
By Leslie Feinberg
It would take a very patient person with an empty schedule to punch holes in all the Pentagon propaganda accompanying this endless war drive.
It's all spin, all the time.
"The media is a weapon of war," U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks boasted on March 25. This barrage of high-tech propaganda sandbags the world's view.
"I see these images on television and people commenting that we're bombing Baghdad," Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told Face the Nation March 23. "We're not bombing Baghdad. That is a precise attack on the regime of Saddam Hussein."
Less than 48 hours earlier, the world had watched the fireballs and mushroom clouds that rose from the relentless bombing. If the media industry here hadn't buried reports of Iraqi civilian casualties under its verbal rubble, he never could have gotten away with this Big Lie.
Media polls are being shaped to shape public opinion--from how the questions are skewed to how the results are hewed.
There's less coverage of massive anti-war protests around the world and the resistance to war in U.S. towns, cities and campuses. Anger at media manipulation and censorship is being increasingly expressed in placards and chants at marches and rallies, and demonstrations have targeted CNN offices in Atlanta and Hollywood for glorifying the war.
Advances in technology bring the war into living rooms in real-time. But, "embed ding means the journalists covering the U.S. war on Iraq are 'in bed' with the military," syndicated writer Norman Solomon observed, noting that they're not "embedded" with Iraqi families at ground zero. He added that if reporters want to get front-page stories, they know better than to "rock the boat" with their editorial boards.
NPR--National Public Radio--is now called National Pentagon Radio by many progressives.
The daily "briefing" from the Pentagon is a monolingual tower of babble. The view that the monopoly media are the unofficial government Information Mini stry has driven many to turn to British and French coverage in hopes that they might offer a slightly different slant.
SEARCHING OFF-SHORE AND ONLINE
Little tidbits can be found outside the borders of the U.S. media empire. The Toronto Star pointed out on March 25 that the major U.S. news corporations patched up a little slip of the lip by Com mander in Chief Bush at a March 6 media conference. When a reporter tried to cut him off, Bush began to blurt: "This is a scripted ..." But online transcripts at the New York Times, Fox News, CNN, MSNBC and the Los Angeles Times either cut the reference or changed it to "unscripted."
Others searching for news about the war turn to Arab news sources like Al-Jazeera. The day after the Bush administration rebuked the Qatar- based satellite news channel for broadcasting footage of U.S. prisoners of war and casualties, New York Stock Exchange officials revoked credentials of two of its reporters.
Many people are scouring the information highway for independent news sources including Weblogs, or blogs. Since the war began, many of these daily individual diaries are serving as a network for independent news reports.
MANUFACTURING THE 'NEWS'
A.J. Liebling hit the nail right on the head: "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."
MTV rebuffed an anti-war commercial. Painting them as "advocacy advertising," networks, cable channels and affiliates have blocked commercials that oppose the U.S. military aggression.
As the first bombs dropped on Bagh dad, "Rally for America" events sprouted up in Atlanta, Cleveland, San Antonio, Cin cin nati and other cities. Clear Channel, Inc., paid for the rallies and used its bandwidth to sponsor the campaign.
The San Antonio-based broadcasting network is the country's largest owner of radio stations--more than 1,200 in 50 states and the District of Columbia. In an article entitled "Radio's Big Bully," Salon.com says Clear Channel is as big as NBC or Gannett. Claiming 100 million listeners, Clear Channel garnered about 20 percent of the radio industry's $16 billion in 2001 revenues.
A bill currently in the Senate threatens to freeze further deregulation in the radio industry and limit each corporation's audience share and percent of advertising dollars. The administration is against it. According to Jane Kirtley, professor of media ethics and law at the University of Minnesota, the radio and music industry goliath's support of the Bush war drive in Iraq makes it "hard to escape the concern that this may in part be motivated by issues that Clear Channel has before the FCC and Congress."(Chicago Tribune, March 19)
FROM THE PEOPLE WHO BROUGHT YOU THE WAR
Who are the monarchs behind the monopoly media realm?
Mass media giant NBC is owned by General Electric, a charter member of the military-industrial complex and a mega-war profiteer.
Viacom, the fourth-largest entertainment kingdom, owns CBS. Another of its crown jewels is Blockbuster Entertainment.
ABC? That's Disney, the company founded by Walt Disney, a reported Nazi sympathizer during World War II. It produced the mega-movie "Pearl Harbor," which was filmed aboard Navy vessels with the Pentagon's blessing. It has been charged with racist stereotypes of Arab and other nationally oppressed peoples, and squeezes sweatshop profits out of laborers in Haiti.
MSNBC is a joint venture of blue-chip corporate giants Microsoft and General Electric. CNN is an acquisition of AOL/Time Warner. The bellicose Fox News Channel is owned by media mogul and billionaire Rupert Murdoch.
All told, this is the same moneyed class of banking and corporate magnates that has a stake in expanding a U.S. imperial empire in the Middle East and around the world. n
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