[Media-watch] Your Media is Killing You - Truthout - 21/09/2004 - 2nd

[Julie-ann Davies]

Resending this as it does not seem to have appeared as
yet.
_______

MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit

As I am using a different system in a different
location at the moment so I hope that this will
display correctly, apologies in advance if the
formatting turns out to be utterly horrific.

JA

________
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/092104A.shtml

 Your Media is Killing You
    By William Rivers Pitt
    t r u t h o u t | Perspective

    Tuesday 21 September 2004

    The American mainstream television news media, in
whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the
American people and is singularly responsible for the
untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent
people.

    The trajectory of this plunge is easy to chart.
The 1980s saw unprecedented deregulation of the rules
pertaining to the ownership of media outlets. Thus
began the combination and consolidation of dozens of
differing viewpoints under the iron control of a few
massive corporations. The many voices became one
voice, and a dullard's voice at that.

    The opening year of the 1990s saw the push towards
our first war in Iraq. Rather than hold to basic
standards set by Edward R. Murrow and the other giants
of journalism - see it for yourself, do the legwork,
because the American people deserve to know what is
happening - the mainstream television news media
decided their best course was to allow themselves to
be hand-fed by the Pentagon. No footage, no reports,
no news whatsoever would be released to the public
without first passing through Defense Department
screeners. The American people learned from this that
war looks like a video game, that death is remote,
that victory is a simple matter of pushing a button.

    After surrendering their integrity to governmental
and military entities which lie as a matter of course,
the mainstream television news media learned with the
trial of O.J. Simpson the simple truth espoused by
H.L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating
the intelligence of the American people." Day after
day, for sixteen months, every television was filled
around the clock with soap-opera entertainment passing
itself off as news. The American people, deprived of
substantive information about the world around them,
learned that real news is only about celebrities.

    Then came the greatest entertainment-as-news
extravaganza of all time: The Monica Lewinski scandal
and the impeachment of a President who lied about sex.
As an athlete will lose muscle tone if he stays away
from the gym or the playing field, so did the
intellectual muscles of the media atrophy after years
of avoiding the basic efforts required in their field.
Why run a scoop down about the war if I can just
publish this Pentagon-prepared battle assessment? Why
investigate Whitewater and the death of Vince Foster
when I can just regurgitate this fax I just got from
the Republican National Committee's media
headquarters? If I can just get in front of the camera
with a salacious bit of gossip, I can become an
anchor. For many 'journalists,' the inflated nonsense
of the impeachment was their "White Bronco."

    Meanwhile, during the period beginning with the
O.J. trial and concluding with the impeachment
extravaganza, the Taliban was taking control of
Afghanistan in the wake left by the completion of our
anti-Soviet policies in that nation. A man named Osama
bin Laden was preparing to attack anything and
everything American he could get close to. UNSCOM
weapons inspectors under Scott Ritter were taking
Iraq's chemical and biological warfare capabilities
apart literally brick by brick, and the sanctions
against that nation, which were killing hundreds of
thousands of civilians, were also reducing Saddam
Hussein's conventional arsenal to a large collection
of formidable paperweights.

    One threat was on the rise, another was on the
wane, but this is boring stuff compared to ill-fitting
leather gloves and a stained blue dress. The American
people were never provided the full scope of the
security issues facing their country, because the
television news media they relied upon didn't want to
put in the work. Often, when then-President Clinton
acted to address these security issues, he was accused
of "wagging the dog," i.e. manufacturing unimportant
threats to obscure the really important stuff, like
whether or not he purchased gifts for Lewinski at the
Big Dog store on Nantucket.

    Think of these points - media laziness, media
complicity with the powers-that-be, media obsession
with fantastically unimportant gossip and tabloidism -
and then remember those tall buildings in New York
collapsing to the ground. Perhaps the 'journalists'
involved could have been focusing on other things
before that dark day?

    Sunday night's episode of the CBS News program '60
Minutes' had a long, detailed and graphic expose on
the fighting that recently took place in Najaf and
Fallujah. All of the commercials for the program,
however, focused on the '60 Minutes' interview with
New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. It was a
clever bit of sleight-of-hand; by now, Americans have
been well-trained to spurn whatever tiny molecules of
substantive news that might somehow blunder across
their screens, because the truly important stuff has
more to do with who is sleeping with J-Lo and how Ben
feels about it.

    Sports is, of course, the champion distraction.
Listen to any sports talk radio show; if the American
people could rattle off housing or budget statistics,
if they could quote from memory the casualty
statistics from Operation Iraqi Freedom, the way they
can tell you in half a second how many doubles Manny
Ramirez hit in his rookie season, half-bright loafers
like George W. Bush would never have a prayer in
American politics. Perhaps CBS knew this. Millions of
viewers made time to watch Belichick, and were treated
to a bloody and terrifying and accurate view of the
Iraq occupation that has been thoroughly, completely
and utterly absent.

    For more than two years now, this column space has
been dedicated to describing, with all truth and
verified data in hand, the mess an invasion of Iraq
would create. This column was among the first to
declare that there were no weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq, that any alleged connection between Osama bin
Laden and the government of Iraq was laughable on its
face, that democracy was a pipe dream in Iraq, that we
would not be greeted as liberators, and that any
military action in Iraq based upon these unfounded
claims would result in a destabilized Middle East, a
world filled with furious former allies, and an ocean
of blood spilled by American soldiers and Iraqi
civilians.

    All of this has come to pass.

    How is it that little truthout.org, with its
limited resources and small staff, got it right time
and again while ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNBC, CNN and
Fox - with their massive financial resources and their
huge pool of reporters - got it so totally and
continuously wrong? The answer comes in two parts.

    The first part is the degree to which these
nationally broadcast news stations have become
compromised by the corporations that own them. The
ownership of the media is key to understanding the
process. Take the example of General Electric, owners
of NBC, MSNBC and CNBC. This company is one of the
largest defense contractors in America; they get paid
every time we go to war, and yet we somehow believe
they will tell us the truth of war, even though it
affects their profit margin. Such thinking is folly.

    Take the example of AOL/TimeWarner, owner of CNN.
This company lives and dies by the 'outsourcing' of
American technological jobs overseas, where labor is
cheaper. Do you think they will tell a straight story
about the economy with so much on the line? Such
thinking is folly, and never mind the fact that
AOL/TimeWarner's largest investor is a Saudi. So much
for the truth about who really supports Osama bin
Laden and international terrorism. So much for the
truth about what really happened on September 11, and
why.

    The decision by the mainstream television news
media to get into bed with the very entities they are
supposed to stand watchdog against has been a mortal
one. Once it becomes acceptable to get your reporting
from Defense Department and military spin-doctors,
without doing any work on your own, the game is over.
What started with the Gulf War as a new 'reporting'
technique has become an institutionalized process of
standing as mouthpiece for those who deserve the
strongest scrutiny.

    The White House and Defense Department boys know
this, and exploited it ruthlessly in the run-up to the
Iraq invasion. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, the
Bush administration sought to capitalize on the
tragedy by using it as an excuse to invade Iraq,
something the power-pitchers in the administration had
wanted for more than a decade. A shadowy and
little-known media consulting company called The
Rendon Group got a $100,000-a-month contract from the
Pentagon right after the attacks. The Rendon Group was
getting paid to offer media strategy advice. Or, in
other words, propaganda.

    The Rendon Group has been around a long time, and
stands at the center of the media's failure to report
accurately on the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The
Rendon Group has received close to $200 million from
the Pentagon and CIA over the last several years to
spread anti-Hussein propaganda far and wide. One of
the first steps they took was to create in 1992, out
of absolute thin air, the Iraqi National Congress. The
Iraqi National Congress, and its most famous
spokesperson Ahmad Chalabi, are entirely the creation
of a media strategy company doing the bidding of the
United States government.

    Since 1992, the Iraqi National Congress has become
accepted completely by the mainstream news media as a
legitimate group. They were embraced by the American
Congress under Newt Gingrich and given hundreds of
millions of dollars. They were, with the help of the
aforementioned Congress, the driving force behind the
passage of the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998, an Act
which made the removal of Saddam Hussein a matter of
American law. All this for a group made out of nothing
by what amounts to a media consulting company.

    The post-9/11 money paid to the Rendon Group
returned handsome dividends for the investment. Rendon
creation Ahmad Chalabi, who has since been accused of
giving vital national security secrets to Iran,
arranged an interview between Judith Millerof the New
York Times and an Iraqi defector named Adnan Ishan
Saeed al-Haidieri. al-Haidieri claimed to have
personal knowledge of the vast and growing stockpiles
of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Miller, thinking
Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress were worthy
sources, believed al-Haidieri and printed an exclusive
report on the threat posed by Iraq in the Times.

    Time and a little legwork has since exposed
al-Haidieri as a total fraud, but Rendon's propaganda
got out there; as the New York Times goes, so goes the
rest of the mainstream media. Miller's report,
released in 2001, created a landslide push towards
war, and allowed George W. Bush to sell the American
people a frightening and utterly inaccurate portrait
of why war was necessary, and necessary now.

    Companies like The Rendon Group are a bellweather
for exactly how depraved our journalistic institutions
have become. Millions of dollars in government
contracts are there for the taking by anyone who wants
to scam the media with bogus stories. The media is
more than happy to oblige, because it relieves them of
having to put the necessary work in. Meanwhile,
stories that might negatively affect the parent
companies go by the boards, and everyone is happy.

    Well, almost everyone is happy. The families of
1,033 American soldiers who have died in Iraq aren't
happy. The families of the 17,000 or so American
soldiers who have been 'medically evacuated' from Iraq
for things like missing legs and faces aren't happy.
The families of the 20,000 or so civilians killed in
the invasion of Iraq aren't happy, and a lot of them
are taking their unhappiness to the streets with
grenades and rifles so they can make more American
families unhappy by killing American soldiers.

    Don't look to the mainstream television news media
for an apology or a reversal of course anytime soon.
They can't report the truth now. To do so would expose
them as the incompetent lapdogs they have become, and
as anyone who has ever screwed up at work knows, the
hardest person to face after a grievous error is the
person you find in the mirror.

    The second part of the answer to that question -
How is it that little truthout.org got it right time
and again while the entire mainstream television news
media got it wrong? - is simplicity itself.

    We put in the work. We did the research in
triplicate. We talked to the people who knew the
score. We took the time. We cared. We understood that
September 11 did not require us to click our heels and
say "Yes sir!" to whatever balderdash Mr. Bush and his
crew spouted. Quite completely the opposite is true.
We understood that September 11 made it more important
than ever for us to be very, very good at what we do.

    The American mainstream television news media, in
whole and in part, has catastrophically failed the
American people and is singularly responsible for the
untimely deaths of tens of thousands of innocent
people. It is not too late for them to reverse course,
to take again the simple rules and requirements
espoused by Murrow and Mencken and place them at the
forefront of their institutional mission. Nothing less
than the basic stability of our republic is at stake.

    William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and 'The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.'


	
	
		
___________________________________________________________ALL-NEW Yahoo! Messenger - all new features - even more fun!  http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com