Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders,
and the People Who Fight Back
An
excerpt from the book
Static by Amy Goodman and David Goodman
The War on Truth
President George W. Bush has long preferred illusion to reality.
"See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over
and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult
the propaganda," Bush explained of his approach at a public
forum in 2005. For Bush, there are no real problems, only political
problems. The only crises are when poll numbers fall.
Bush administration officials are obsessed with controlling the
flow of information. Their strategy for maintaining their grip on
power is simple: Perpetuate fear. We must remain in a state of total
war. The implications for democracy are chilling. President Bush
has asserted a right to unlimited wartime powers. Thus the Constitution,
Bill of Rights, Geneva Conventions, and the very notion of a balance
of power have been shredded. The official rhetoric is that we are
now in a Long War, led by the president, über alles.
The media, so cowed for so long, has failed to present a coherent
picture of this frontal assault on our democracy. Alarming stories
emerge, piecemeal, of warrantless wiretaps, of U.S. sanctioned torture,
of offshore prisons where thousands are being held at the whim of
a president who invokes sweeping life-and-death powers and dispatches
propagandists to cover his trail.
Information is a crucial weapon in Bush's war. In a February 2006
speech Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that "information
warfare" will be vital to fighting terrorism. He lashed out
at the media for "an explosion of critical press stories"
that exposed secret U.S. anti-terror programs, including propaganda
efforts in Iraq. He declared: "We are fighting a battle where
the survival of our free way of life is at stake and the center
of gravity of that struggle is not simply on the battlefield overseas;
it's a test of wills, and it will be won or lost with our publics,
and with the publics of other nations. We'll need to do all we can
to attract supporters to our efforts and to correct the lies that
are being told, which so damage our country, and which are repeated
and repeated and repeated."
He responded to the images of and charges about American torture
of detainees in Guantánamo Bay and Iraq by dismissing them
as fabrications. "The terrorists are trained . . . to lie.
They're trained to allege that they've been tortured. They're trained
to put out misinformation, and they're very good at it," he
declared.
In a speech a month later, Rumsfeld made clear that he believes
the real problem in Iraq is simply the coverage: "Much of the
reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation .
. . Interestingly, all of the exaggerations seem to be on one side
. . . The steady stream of errors all seem to be of a nature to
inflame the situation and to give heart to the terrorists."
The "truth" that Rumsfeld prefers can be found in the
articles that the Bush administration is planting in the "free"
Iraqi media, written by American psychological warfare operatives.
IRAQI ARMY DEFEATS TERRORISM blared an October 2005 story in Iraqi
newspapers that said, "The brave warriors of the Iraqi Security
Forces (ISF) are hard at work stopping al-Qaeda's attacks before
they occur." Another planted article crowed, "The ISF
has quickly developed into a viable fighting force capable of defending
the people of Iraq against the cowards who launch their attacks
on innocent people." The latter story was published in the
Iraqi press around the time that the United States conceded that
no Iraqi battalions were capable of fighting on their own.
The audience for this cartoonish propaganda is not just Iraqis:
The Bush administration has turned psychological warfare, which
by U.S. law can only be targeted at foreign audiences, on Americans.
Rumsfeld dismissed the legal prohibitions against using foreign
propaganda at home, declaring in February 2006: "The argument
was, of course, that it was taking taxpayers' dollars . . . and
propagandizing the American people. Of course, when you speak today,
there's no one audience . . . Whatever it is we communicate inevitably
is going to be heard by multiple audiences."
Rumsfeld is leaving nothing to chance. A Pentagon briefing for
Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top US. commander in Iraq, identifies
the "home audience" as one of the major targets of American
propaganda. The Washington Post reported in April 2006
that U.S. psychological operations soldiers produced a video about
atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein that was "seen on Fox
News." The Bush administration also attempted to hype the role
of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian who was killed in Iraq in
June 2006. Bush officials used Zarqawi to falsely connect Saddam
Hussein with the 9/11 attacks, and to bolster their dubious claim
that the Iraqi insurgency was led by al Qaeda-backed foreign fighters.
"Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," stated
one US. military briefing. As part of this effort, U.S. psy-ops
soldiers in 2004 leaked a supposed letter from Zarqawi to the New
York Times that boasted of foreigners' role in suicide attacks
in Iraq. Other reporters questioned the authenticity of the document
that wound up in a widely cited front-page Times story. Brig. Gen.
Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's chief spokesman in Iraq in 2004,
boasted later, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful
information campaign to date."
The "information war" Rumsfeld describes is deadly serious.
ABC News reported in May 2006 that the government was tracking the
phone numbers dialed from major news organizations in an attempt
to root out whistle-blowers. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales added
that it "is a possibility" that journalists will be prosecuted
for publishing classified information. The message is clear: The
media can either participate in Bush's war, or become a target of
it. As Bush administration officials have warned, journalists who
do not follow the party line are promoting terrorism.
Declaring war on the media is a desperate and risky move. But the
corporate media, so compromised and atrophied by its own complicity
in promoting the lies of the Bush administration, is woefully unprepared
to do battle. If the past is any guide, as the government aims a
sword at the heart of our civil liberties and freedoms, the media
will provide sporadic resistance at best, and at worst, will help
drive the sword home.
Covering for Power
When the Bush administration launched its PR blitz to sell the
Iraq War in September 2002, the American public never stood a chance
of learning the truth behind the massive fraud emanating from the
White House. Bush and his propaganda czars knew something the American
public had not quite grasped: The American media was little more
than a megaphone for those in power. This was especially true for
celebrity journalists like Judith Miller, the now-disgraced national
security correspondent for the New York Times; and Bob
Woodward, once a crusading muckraker at the Washington Post,
now father confessor to the political elite.
For three years, the Bush administration called the tune, and the
New York Times danced. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the
newspaper, led by Miller's dispatches, acted as a conveyor belt
for the lies of Iraqi exiles, channeling their self-serving distortions
right onto the front pages. Miller's sources were the key players
in the Iraqi National Congress, an outfit first created by the CIA
and later funded by the Pentagon. Its leaders, such as Ahmad Chalabi,
conjured fantastic tales about the menace posed by Saddam Hussein's
weapons of mass destruction. They hinted darkly about bioweapons
labs buried beneath hospitals, aluminum tubes that the Iraqi dictator
was intent on using to develop nuclear weapons, and secret meetings
held between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.
This was propaganda in the purest sense: disinformation that was
bought and paid for by the U.S. government. The only thing needed
was for respected news outlets to legitimize these fairy tales by
running them as fact. The American media rose to the task, and carried
out the Bush administration's dirty work with gusto. The consequences
of the media's abdication of its role as watchdog of democracy are
now written in new front page dispatches -- about the bloody quagmire
in Iraq.
Yet the media can't seem to shake its instinct to defer to power.
In December 2005, the New York Times published a shocking
exposé by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau. Their
story revealed that following the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration
ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to begin wiretapping
people inside the United States, including U.S. citizens, in direct
violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978,
which expressly forbids warrantless wiretaps inside the country.
To read the article, you might have felt alarmed by the picture
of creeping fascism that it describes. But you would have felt vaguely
reassured that the press was on the job as a watchdog . . . until
you came to the ninth paragraph:
The White House asked the New York Times not to publish
this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations
and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny.
After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their
concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct
additional reporting. Some information that administration officials
argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
Let's do the math: Thirteen months before this story was published
there was . . . a national election. Won by George W. Bush. The
guy who ordered laws to be broken, because he felt he didn't have
to answer to anyone. The last president to behave in this way was
Richard Nixon. He faced a public outcry and was forced to resign
in disgrace in the face of almost certain impeachment. Indeed, when
the wiretapping story was finally published in the Times,
it sparked congressional investigations and even calls for impeachment
of the president for violating the law.
It turns out the Times did, in fact, have this story ready
to go before the 2004 election but decided to wait -- at the request
of the people running for reelection, who rightly feared how the
public might respond to the revelations.
Imagine, just for a moment, how different things might have been
if this explosive exposé had been published when it was written.
The Times delayed publication because it might "jeopardize
continuing investigations" -- ignoring, as the media watch
group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has pointed out,
that "placing illegal and unconstitutional programs in jeopardy
is the whole point of the First Amendment."
More astonishing was Times executive editor Bill Keller's
explanation of why the story was delayed for so long. He said that
the Bush administration had "assured senior editors of the
Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that
satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions."
Mind you, this is the regime of George W. Bush we're talking about
-- the folks who assured us that torture was legal, that preemptive
war was legal, and that holding prisoners incommunicado in an offshore
gulag was legal. But for the editor of the Times, it is
enough just to take the government's word when it says something
is legal. The Times finally published the story -- which
won reporters Risen and Lichtblau a 2006 Pulitzer Prize -- only
when it became apparent that Risen was planning to publish the revelation
in a book a month later.
In spite of all that we now know about how the media failed to
challenge government liars and instead became cheerleaders for a
fraudulent war, the corporate media still covers for power. That
may explain why an explosive report in the London Times
on May 1, 2005, which caused a sensation around the world, was ignored
or played down in the American media. The British paper revealed
the contents of the so-called Downing Street memo, minutes of a
July 2002 meeting between British prime minister Tony Blair and
his top advisors, at which British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove
reported to Blair on his meetings with CIA Director George Tenet.
Dearlove explained that Bush "wanted to remove Saddam Hussein
through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism
and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around
the policy."
This bombshell from a top British official -- that Bush had decided
to attack Iraq and would simply cook the intelligence to suit his
aims -- was greeted with a yawn by the American media. It was only
after bloggers promoted the story that the corporate media acknowledged
it -- and only then, to dismiss it. The Los Angeles Times
insisted the memo was not a "smoking gun." The Washington
Post dismissed it as old news. The New York Times
barely mentioned it at all. And the network nightly news shows virtually
ignored the story.
It's a sad day when the government no longer has to cover up its
dishonesty because the American media does it for them.
The Access of Evil
This is the state of the corporate media today. It's a symptom
of what we call the access of evil: journalists trading truth for
access. The public unwittingly mistakes the illusion of news for
reality. This also applies to the one-sided debates that are the
rage on the networks and cable news. Viewers don't even know what
they don't know. The media watch group Media Matters did a study
of the Sunday morning talk shows. During Bush's first term as president,
69 percent of the journalists appearing on the Sunday shows were
conservatives, and 58 percent of all guests were Republicans/conservatives.
This echoes a study done by FAIR in the run-up to the Iraq War.
In the two weeks surrounding Colin Powell's infamous 2003 speech
to the UN in which he made the case for the invasion that was to
occur six weeks later, 393 "experts" appeared on the major
nightly network news shows. Of these, three -- less than
1 percent -- were leaders of antiwar organizations.
We can't even call this a "mainstream" media. It's an
extreme media -- a media that cheerleads for war.
Instead of learning from the media what is actually going on in
the world, we get static -- a veil of distortion, lies,
omissions, and half-truths that obscure reality. As bodies pile
up in Iraq and New Orleans, many people are mystified, wondering
where it went so wrong.
We need a media that creates static of another kind: what the dictionary
defines as "criticism, opposition, or unwanted interference."
Instead of a media that covers for power, we need a media that covers
the movements that create static -- and make history.
We are not waiting for this alternative media; people are building
it right now. Blogs, Indymedia centers, independent filmmakers,
and other grassroots media have opened a new way to understand what
is happening in the world today.
___
From the book Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders,
and the People Who Fight Back By Amy Goodman and David Goodman
Published by Hyperion September 2006;$23.95US/$29.95CAN; 1-4013-0293-9
Copyright © 2006 Amy Goodman and David Goodman
Amy Goodman has been confronting the Washington
establishment and its corporate sponsors while giving voice to the
ordinary citizens and activists who are fighting for a better, more
peaceful world. Her daily international radio and TV show, Democracy
Now!, began in 1996 and is now carried on about 500 stations and
on www.democracynow.org. It is the largest media collaboration in
North American public broadcasting. Democracy Now! is more than
a show -- it's a movement.
David Goodman is an award-winning investigative
journalist, author of six books, and a contributing writer for Mother
Jones. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, Outside,
The Nation, and numerous other publications. His reporting is included
in the American Empire Project book In the Name of Democracy. He
lives with his wife and two children in Vermont.
Visit www.democracynow.org.
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