September 21, 2003 Bush's tame U.S. media may yet have teeth By ERIC MARGOLIS -- Contributing Foreign Editor MIAMI -- I've long considered CNN's Christiane Amanpour an outstanding journalist. Last week, my opinion of her rose further when she ignited a storm of controversy when asked by a TV interviewer about the U.S. media's coverage of the Iraq war. Breaking a taboo of silence in the mainstream media, Amanpour courageously replied, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. Television ... was intimidated by the (Bush) administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News." Right on cue, faithful to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's advice to attack all dissenting views as treason, Fox accused Amanpour of being a "spokeswoman for al-Qaida." I felt for Amanpour, having myself been slandered by the U.S. neo-conservative media as "a friend of Saddam" for disputing White House claims about Iraq - whose secret police had threatened to hang me on my last visit to Baghdad. The warlike momma's boys at the neo-con National Review actually had the chutzpah to call me "unpatriotic." Columnists at my own paper pilloried me for opposing the Iraq misadventure. Now, as White House lies and distortions are being exposed daily, these critics are not man enough to admit that their parroting of administration war propaganda - Amanpour politely calls it "high level disinformation" - was foolish and unprofessional. Christiane Amanpour is absolutely right. The U.S. media was muzzled and censored itself. I experienced this firsthand on U.S. TV, radio and in print. Never in my 20 years in media have I seen such unconscionable pressure exerted on journalists to conform to the government's party line. Criticism of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, photos of dead American soldiers or civilians killed by bombing, were forbidden or downplayed. The tone of reporting had to be strongly positive, filled with uplifting stories about liberation and women freed from repression. Criticism, sharp questions and doubt were verboten. The bloated corporations dominating the U.S. media feared antagonizing the White House, which was pushing for the bill - just rejected by the Senate - to allow them to grow even larger. Reporters who failed to toe the line were barred or had their access to military and government officials limited, virtually ending some careers. Many "embedded" reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan became little more than public relations auxiliaries. Critics of administration policies in Iraq and Afghanistan were systematically excluded from media commentary, particularly on national TV. Experts' fabrications Night after night, networks featured "experts" who droned on about Iraq's fearsome weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the U.S., about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the urgency to invade Iraq before it could strike at America and a raft of other fabrications. Such "experts" echoed the White House party line and all were dead wrong. Yet, amazingly, many are still on the air, continuing to misinform the public, using convoluted arguments to explain why they were not really wrong even when they were. I do not exaggerate when I say that much of the U.S. media from 9/11 to the present closely resembled the old Soviet media I knew and disrespected during my stays in the USSR during the 1980s. The American media, notably the sycophantic White House press corps and flagwavers at Fox, treated President George Bush and his entourage with adulation and fawning servility similar to what the Soviet state media once lavished on Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev. When dimwitted Brezhnev made the calamitous blunder of invading Afghanistan, the Moscow media rapturously described the brazen aggression as "liberation" that recalled the glories of World War II. The U.S. media indulged in the same frenzied foot-kissing, and the same silly WW II comparisons over Bush's foolhardy invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. President Bush and his neo-conservative handlers led America into these twin disasters precisely because two of the key organs of democracy - an independent, inquiring media, and assertive Congress - failed miserably to perform their duty. They allowed themselves to be cowed into subservience. They failed to expose and vigorously oppose the sinister, pro-totalitarian Patriot Act that so endangers America's basic liberties. Or, like Fox, a reincarnation of William Randolph Hearst's jingoistic yellow press, they served as White House mouthpieces, eagerly stoking war fever and national hysteria, retailing to the public all the administration's wholesale disinformation about Iraq. In a shocking attempt to silence dissenting voices, U.S. forces bombed the news offices of al-Jazeera TV in Baghdad, Basra and Kabul, killing and wounding some of its staff. "The CNN of the Arab World" had been contradicting too many White House claims. Al-Jazeera's senior correspondent, Tayseer Alouni, has been arrested in Spain and charged with aiding terrorism by interviewing Osama bin Laden. The U.S. previously accused Alouni of being pro-Iraqi; Iraq expelled him for being "anti-Iraqi." In my books, that makes him an honest, courageous journalist, just like Amanpour. So long as Bush was riding high in the polls, the media fawned on him. But now that many Americans are beginning to sense they were lied to or misled by the White House, Bush's popularity is dropping, and the media's mood is becoming edgy and more aggressive. The muzzles may soon be coming off. link
Glynch, I think the treatment of Amanpour by Fox, etc. is appalling, but I would disagree with something else that was in Eric Margolis's column you cited from the "Toronto Sun". And that would be this... Quote: "When dimwitted Brezhnev made the calamitous blunder of invading Afghanistan, the Moscow media rapturously described the brazen aggression as "liberation" that recalled the glories of World War II. The U.S. media indulged in the same frenzied foot-kissing, and the same silly WW II comparisons over Bush's foolhardy invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq." I don't think the invasion of Afghanistan was wrong at all. I supported it then and support it now and, as you know, I'm a Democrat. I think the gist of the rest of his piece is accurate, but I don't agree with lumping Afghanistan in there. That was a mistake on his part that diminishes his credibility regarding the rest of the column unnecessarily. edit: I think Bush's handling of post-invasion Afghanistan is certainly open to criticism. Funding for post-war rebuilding and support of the current government was almost forgotten and is only now getting the promise of adequate funding. Promises followed through on by the Administration, I should say.
here's a somewhat different perspective from a reporter for the NYTimes. the article appeared in the WSJ last week: http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB106376097717546000,00.html -- September 17, 2003 8:59 a.m. EDT COMMENTARY An Absolutely Disgraceful Performance By JOHN F. BURNS The following is an excerpt from John F. Burns's contribution to the book "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq," published this week by The Lyons Press. Mr. Burns is a correspondent for the New York Times. From the point of view of my being in Baghdad, I had more authority than anybody else. Without contest, I was the most closely watched and unfavored of all the correspondents there because of what I wrote about terror whilst Saddam Hussein was still in power. Terror, totalitarian states, and their ways are nothing new to me, but I felt from the start that this was in a category by itself, with the possible exception in the present world of North Korea. I felt that that was the central truth that has to be told about this place. It was also the essential truth that was untold by the vast majority of correspondents here. Why? Because they judged that the only way they could keep themselves in play here was to pretend that it was okay. There were correspondents who thought it appropriate to seek the approbation of the people who governed their lives. This was the ministry of information, and particularly the director of the ministry. By taking him out for long candlelit dinners, plying him with sweet cakes, plying him with mobile phones at $600 each for members of his family, and giving bribes of thousands of dollars. Senior members of the information ministry took hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes from these television correspondents who then behaved as if they were in Belgium. They never mentioned the function of minders. Never mentioned terror. In one case, a correspondent actually went to the Internet Center at the Al-Rashid Hotel and printed out copies of his and other people's stories -- mine included -- specifically in order to be able to show the difference between himself and the others. He wanted to show what a good boy he was compared to this enemy of the state. He was with a major American newspaper. Yeah, it was an absolutely disgraceful performance. CNN's Eason Jordan's op-ed piece in The New York Times missed that point completely. The point is not whether we protect the people who work for us by not disclosing the terrible things they tell us. Of course we do. But the people who work for us are only one thousandth of one percent of the people of Iraq. So why not tell the story of the other people of Iraq? It doesn't preclude you from telling about terror. Of murder on a mass scale just because you won't talk about how your driver's brother was murdered. . . . Now left with the residue of all of this, I would say there are serious lessons to be learned. Editors of great newspapers, and small newspapers, and editors of great television networks should exact from their correspondents the obligation of telling the truth about these places. It's not impossible to tell the truth. I have a conviction about closed societies, that they're actually much easier to report on than they seem, because the act of closure is itself revealing. Every lie tells you a truth. If you just leave your eyes and ears open, it's extremely revealing. We now know that this place was a lot more terrible than even people like me had thought. There is such a thing as absolute evil. I think people just simply didn't recognize it. They rationalized it away. I cannot tell you with what fury I listened to people tell me throughout the autumn that I must be on a kamikaze mission. They said it with a great deal of glee, over the years, that this was not a place like the others. I did a piece on Uday Hussein and his use of the National Olympic Committee headquarters as a torture site. It's not just journalists who turned a blind eye. Juan Antonio Samaranch of the International Olympic Committee could not have been unaware that Western human rights reports for years had been reporting the National Olympic Committee building had been used as a torture center. I went through its file cabinets and got letter after letter from Juan Antonio Samaranch to Uday Saddam Hussein: "The universal spirit of sport," "My esteemed colleague." The world chose in the main to ignore this. For some reason or another, Mr. Bush chose to make his principal case on weapons of mass destruction, which is still an open case. This war could have been justified any time on the basis of human rights, alone. As far as I am concerned, when they hire me, they hire somebody who has a conscience and who has a passion about these things. I think I was a little bit advantaged in this, because I am 58 years old. Look, I don't believe in the journalist as hero, because I think that wherever we go, and whatever degree of resolve that may be required of us, there are always much, much braver people than us. I travel in a suit of armor. I work for The New York Times. That means that I have the renown of the paper, plus the power of the United States government. Let's be honest. Should anything untoward come to me, I have a flak jacket. I have a wallet full with dollars. I'm here by choice. I have the incentive of being on the front page of The New York Times, and being nominated for major newspaper prizes. The people who we write about have none of these advantages. They are stuck here with no food and no money. I don't want to be pious about this, but for a journalist to present himself as a hero in this situation is completely and totally bogus. We have the lure of a spectacular reward. That draws us on. I got a Pulitzer Prize in Sarajevo, which was awarded for "bravery" or something somewhere in the citation. I said, and I absolutely meant it, "I assume that we are talking here about chronicling the bravery of the people of a city that was being murdered. That was where bravery came into this. Then there were no rewards save the possibility of surviving." So I don't want to present myself here as anything like that. No, I don't. As a matter of fact, I think this vainglorious ambition is part of the same problem really. It is the pursuit of power. Renown. Fame. There is corruption in our business. We need to get back to basics. This war should be studied and talked about. In the run up to this war, to my mind, there was a gross abdication of responsibility. You have to be ready to listen to whispers.
I could have sworn that when the coalition forces stopped for 48 hours on their historic and unparalleled blitzkrieg on Bagdad, that all the talking heads on TV and experts on Capitol Hill were criticizing the military, wringing their hands and declaring the sky was falling. Nah, must of just been me. This is great quote in a story about the *dishonest* US press. Go to the al-Jazeera (English) website, and read their history of Iraq. Anyone notice anything missing from their recitation of the Hussein years? It's only a small omission by the "CNN of the Arab World", I admit ....
As it stands today, Afghanistan is still the world's #1 producer and exporter of heroin & opium. Too bad they don't produce oil instead, cuz then maybe they'd get periodic infusions of $87B to remove their warlords and build "infrastructure" too
I don't agree with lumping Afghanistan in there. I don't really agree either. Certainly the author could have limited himself to Iraq. I supported the Afgan war reluctantly at first. I can understand those who supported it. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. We did it prematurely. Granted if we could not have gotten the Taliban to quit protecting Bin Laden, we would have to go and arrest him eventually. I know we gave them a deadline of a few days or somesuch, but it the real world of diplomacy that is not how you do these things. Just like we are lied to about IraQ , i believe that we have been lied to about exactly what we accomplished in Afghanistan. We certainly know a lot of people died. Most of the thousands of the Taliban who died in the fighting us were poor misguided patriotic souls, whose only possible job was being in the army. They weren't hard core terrorists. Overall it was more of a feel good exercise and I believe the mentality it engendered led directly to the Iraq mess. The whole response to terrorism of taking over countries and making it a totally military repsonse has not been helpful.
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/...l?urac=n&urvf=10642377116960.8839345774896111 from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Media's dark cloud a danger Falsely bleak reports reduce our chances of success in Iraq By JIM MARSHALL On Sept. 14, I flew from Baghdad to Kuwait with Sgt. Trevor A. Blumberg from Dearborn, Mich. He was in a body bag. He'd been ambushed and killed that afternoon. Sitting in the cargo bay of a C 130E, I found myself wondering whether the news media were somehow complicit in his death. News media reports about our progress in Iraq have been bleak since shortly after the president's premature declaration of victory. These reports contrast sharply with reports of hope and progress presented to Congress by Department of Defense representatives -- a real disconnect, Vietnam déja vu. So I went to Iraq with six other members of Congress to see for myself. The Iraq war has predictably evolved into a guerrilla conflict similar to Vietnam. Our currently stated objectives are to establish reasonable security and foster the creation of a secular, representative government with a stable market economy that provides broad opportunity throughout Iraqi society. Attaining these objectives in Iraq would inevitably transform the Arab world and immeasurably increase our future national security. These are goals worthy of a fight, of sacrifice, of more lives lost now to save thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands in the future. In Mosul last Monday, a colonel in the 101st Airborne put it to me quite simply: "Sir, this is worth doing." No one I spoke with said anything different. And I spoke with all ranks. But there will be more Blumbergs killed in action, many more. So it is worth doing only if we have a reasonable chance of success. And we do, but I'm afraid the news media are hurting our chances. They are dwelling upon the mistakes, the ambushes, the soldiers killed, the wounded, the Blumbergs. Fair enough. But it is not balancing this bad news with "the rest of the story," the progress made daily, the good news. The falsely bleak picture weakens our national resolve, discourages Iraqi cooperation and emboldens our enemy. During the conventional part of this conflict, embedded journalists reported the good, the bad and the ugly. Where are the embeds now that we are in the difficult part of the war, now that fair and balanced reporting is critically important to our chances of success? At the height of the conventional conflict, Fox News alone had 27 journalists embedded with U.S. troops (out of a total of 774 from all Western media). Today there are only 27 embedded journalists from all media combined. Throughout Iraq, American soldiers with their typical "can do" attitude and ingenuity are engaging in thousands upon thousands of small reconstruction projects, working with Iraqi contractors and citizens. Through decentralized decision-making by unit commanders, the 101st Airborne Division alone has spent nearly $23 million in just the past few months. This sum goes a very long way in Iraq. Hundreds upon hundreds of schools are being renovated, repainted, replumbed and reroofed. Imagine the effect that has on children and their parents. Zogby International recently released the results of an August poll showing hope and progress. My own unscientific surveys told me the same thing. With virtually no exceptions, hundreds of Iraqis enthusiastically waved back at me as I sat in the open door of a helicopter traveling between Babylon and Baghdad. And I received a similar reception as I worked my way alone, shaking hands through a large crowd of refinery workers just to see their reaction. We may need a few credible Baghdad Bobs to undo the harm done by our media. I'm afraid it is killing our troops. -- U.S. Rep. Jim Marshall (D-Ga.) of Macon, a Vietnam combat veteran, is a member of the House Armed Services Committee.
glynch, I agree that very large numbers of Afghan combatants were probably just following their tribal leaders. And the tribal leaders there usually tend to go with whoever offers them the most money and has a long relationship with them (tribal and/or paying up). It's been that way, in the main, for centuries. It's tragic, but it's just the way it is. Knowing that, I still don't regret going in and taking out the Taleban and what we could catch of Bin Laden's guys. I do regret that we haven't done a better job of following up with aid and reconstruction... but whether that will ever be successful by anyone is historically a bad bet. We still need to try. And more credit needs to go to our Allies who are there and helping. I think we should have concentrated on Afghanistan and waited to deal with Iraq... giving us more time to build international support as a side benefit and leaving us freer to scare the hell out of North Korea.
Good Lord, how many reporters are on the AP's (Associated Propaganda's) payroll? Jim Marshall is called into the editor's office. "Look," says the editor, "they're piling on the President and the war. We need a good fluff piece to make those mamby-pambies on the staff quit coming to me wanting to write bad things about the war. Can I count on you? Good doggie!" This article was the most prescient I have seen, even if it's a little old now: http://www.theonion.com/onion3701/bush_nightmare.html
did you read the whole article? "Jim Marshall" is not a reporter. he's a democratic member of congress, and a vietnam vet.
