The Truth will prevail, But only if we Demand it from Congress!
9-11 Inside Job and Neocons Hacked 2004
When Will US “Journalism” Be Held Accountable for
Promoting War?
by Danny Schechter
Duh. The Bush Administration deployed a dishonest but very effective
propaganda campaign to sell the Iraq War to the American people on
virtually every media outfit. Their “Culture of Deception” is now
acknowledged.
How do we know? Scotty McClellan told us so. It’s all in the former
Press Secretary’s new book. And, happily, it’s all over the news.
It’s easy to put McClellan down. On the right he’s a traitor. The
President dismissed him as “sad.” Karl Rove compared him to a
left-wing blogger. Most of the real left-wing bloggers were equally
contemptuous suggesting he’s just trying to sell books, some asking:
Why did he wait so long? Wasn’t he part of the plot? Is this just
the pot calling the kettle black?
Yes, but, at least, he had the courage, these many years later, to
confirm what I and other have been saying for years. And he didn’t
avoid taking a poke at the media which did the Administration’s job
for them by carrying unverified claims as facts, while blocking out
any other narrative. To his credit, McClellan called our media
“deferential, complicit enablers.”
He’s not the first rat to jump ship and won’t be the last. Think of
him like the informants who turn on the mafia. The fact that a high
profile former propagandist blew a whistle matters in the same way
that it was a former Vietnam strategist named Daniel Ellsberg, who
with Anthony Russo, exposed the Pentagon Papers. We all knew the
government had lied then, but the Pentagon Papers explained how they
did it. (The Papers came out in 1971; the war had been underway
since l945.)
Ellsberg was branded a rat too. But without rats, prosecutors can’t
get convictions. In Ellsberg’s case, he was the one convicted. Let’s
hope that in McClellan’s case, we can get to the real criminals in
the dock along with the many who collaborated with them.
To be honest, what’s needed here are not more confessions by
political insiders but an actual trial of the perpetrators. This
government strategy, and the media coverage that served it, were not
just mistakes or lapses in otherwise accurate coverage but crimes
with real world consequences. Try a million dead in Iraq, and 4,000
Americans. And counting…
As I and others probed into the daily indifference to Iraqi
suffering and the continuing orchestration of pro-war coverage, we
came to see the problem not as continuously flawed reporting or even
as a series of institutional failures, but in the same way as many
whistleblowers tend to view the practices they expose — as a crime.
Given the number of lives lost and the amount of money wasted, these
were the moral equivalents of serious felonies. When crimes take
place in other settings, eventually government officials step in. As
the scandals become public, there are exposés and then prosecutions.
In this case, it is the government committing the crime, and the
media, in essence, covering it up.
Yes, media crimes rationalize war crimes. Both are shameful and
worthy of indictment.
Official scrutiny of media practices rarely happens, partly because
of Constitutional protections afforded journalists and media
outlets, and partly because wronged parties have little recourse.
It’s hard to fight back against media irresponsibility. Public
shaming seems the only response, and its effectiveness depends on
whether critics can be heard in the so-called public square. In the
case of Iraq, there were 800 experts on all the channels in the
run-up to the war. Only 6 opposed the war. No wonder judgments like
this are left to historians.
After the Second World War at the Nuremberg Tribunal, American
prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting
Hitler’s policies. State propagandists were condemned. More
recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal
investigating the genocide there, while in the former Yugoslavia,
Serbian and Croatian TV were criticized for inciting a war that
divided that country, encouraging murderous ethnic cleansing.
The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or
commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming
conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many
remember William Randolf Hearst’s famous yellow journalism dictum:
“You give me the pictures, I will give you the war.”
In February 2005, Italy hosted the citizens-initiated World Tribunal
on Iraq, which put the media “on trial” for its role in selling of
the Iraq War. It was of course not covered here. The Tribunal was
modeled on an earlier initiative during the Vietnam War by the
then-leading international intellectuals Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul
Sartre and Simone du Bouvoir. As a young journalist, I covered their
sessions in Stockholm in 1967. I saw it as an act of conscience.
Most of the U.S. media saw it as an exercise in propaganda. Most of
the charges they made then about U.S. war crimes are largely
corroborated by the historical record even though only a few were
reported when they occurred. I still remember watching CBS
correspondent Morley Safer filming a stand-up in Stockholm,
denouncing the Tribunal. Decades later, his “60 Minutes” returned to
the scene of the My-Lai massacre interviewing former US soldiers who
charged the U.S. military with the very war crimes Safer had
dismissed when it mattered.
Critics today believe the media has covered up war crimes in Iraq,
minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities
like Fallujah, and misreported the reasons for going to war and how
it was conducted. And they are right.
Will any of the “enablers” in TV news, or our leading newspapers,
face consequences for their actions? I am not just talking about
high profile journalists but their editors, producers, executives
and proprietors.
Unlikely.
Many pro-war reports won awards; many of those who engineered the
propagandistic “coverage” were promoted. Their patriotically-correct
‘all the war, all the time’ approach raised ratings and revenues.
Some were hailed as heroes, critics dismissed as zeros. Dick Cheney
even dropped into a post-invasion media dinner to thank them for
their service.
Media companies were happily co-opted as embeds while naysayers like
Peter Arnett were banished. Later, many reporters were killed and
wounded while trying to tell a story that has now largely
disappeared from view.
Has there been any outbreak of conscience in newsrooms over the last
five years or, more importantly, any commitment to cover Iraq in a
less jingoistic manner? Not that I can see, even though there is
occasionally some “good” reporting. The title of the book by Editor
& Publisher’s Greg Mitchell sums it up: “So Wrong for So Long.”
No wonder many of the outlets abandoning journalism for “mili-tainment”
lost viewers and credibility.
So thank you Scotty, whatever your motives, for reopening the
debate. (And thank the indy media and a few gutsy websites and
mainstreamers for telling the truth.)
Now it’s time to consider potential remedies even if we lack the
power to enforce them. Our main media outlets have already been
convicted in the global court of public opinion.
News Dissector Danny Schechter made WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
in 2004, a film shown in 40 countries.(Wmdthefilm.com). He wrote two
books on media complicity, Embedded (2003) and When News Lies
(2006). His latest, PLUNDER is about the financial crisis. Comments
to dissector@mediachannel.org
