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by David Smith
"The Next Crisis of Weapons of Mass Destruction?"
blared the headline in red hundred-point type, next to a picture of the global
villain du jour, North Korea's Kim Jong-il.
Unfortunately for TimeWarner's opinion-shapers, the oriental despot
bears a closer resemblance to a pudgy housewife with a bad bouffant than Ming
the Merciless. But you have to work with what you've got when you're
manufacturing contempt (I'm surprised Time's art department
hadn't Photoshopped fangs onto the dumpy dictator).
I picked Time magazine from the gym's magazine rack, and carried it
over to the staff counter. Picking up a pen, I circled the headline, and drew
an arrow to the margins, adding, "More WMD propaganda bullshit."
I then returned the magazine to the rack.
It was a minor act of media monkey-wrenching: an act preferable
to ignoring Time's ugly spin on geopolitics, or worse, reading the
copy in a detached state of uncritical acceptance. The simple fact that editors
at high-flying publications like Time still use the WMD tag, parroting a line
used by the US State Department and Pentagon to falsely justify an attack on Iraq,
demonstrates the sorry state of US mainstream media.
Big American media offers up a Truman Show-like simulacrum of democratic discussion
and dissent. Sometimes you see the flaws in the art direction: those
weapons of mass destruction that went AWOL in Iraq, for example. But it's
mostly a seamless presentation, and if there are any contradictions or puzzles,
they are washed away by the relentless 24-hour news cycle.
This audio-visual veil of Maya isn't cobbled together solely by Chomsky-like
mechanisms of institutional pressure. For many decades, the intelligence community,
with their "media assets," have played a big role in
tweaking public information in the US and abroad, and there are good reasons to
suspect they continue to do so today. (Senior CIA official Frank Wisner once bragged
how his employer could "play the media like a mighty Wurlitzer.")
Luckily, the global media is not yet some monolithic entity locked in some kind
of Vulcan mind-meld. There are still hundreds of excellent reporters who maintain
some semblance of editorial autonomy, like the Independent's Robert
Fisk, and the Guardian's Greg Palast. In the US, there are gadflies
like Harper's John MacArthur and Lewis Lapham, the New Yorker's
Seymour Hersch, and former Washington Post reporter William Greider. Canada has
Globe and Mail columnists Naomi Klein and Rick Salutin.
In the past few months, even the New York Times has been emboldened by the administration's
gaffes, offered up scathing critiques of the Bush administration's
policies, primarily through the editorials of MIT economist Paul Krugman. Reporters
at the Washington Post have also strayed from the party line.
Yet the recent noises of dissent in the big US media to the Bush administration's
domestic and foreign policy may have emerged largely because of a divide in the
American elite. On one side are the unilateralists (largely formed from a bigamous
marriage of convenience between Beltway neoconservatives, fundamentalist Christians
and Likud-style Zionists) who support the military projection of US power across
the globe. On the other are the multilateralists (represented by the likes of
Henry Kissinger and former Reagan advisor James Baker), who prefer a more subtle
approach to keeping the global rabble in line, mainly through trade agreements
like NAFTA and international lending agencies like the IMF.
The unilateralists ultimately regard independent journalism, like any of the other
"freedoms" supposedly being brought by force to tinted
types the world over, as a nuisance at best and a strategic problem at worst.
Although much of the US media is already bought and paid for, there is still the
problem of offshore journalists, and that mighty firehose with multiple leaks,
the Internet.
Six months ago, an experiment of sorts was conducted on media allegiance to truth-telling
under extreme circumstances. If journalists got caught in the crossfire, by accident
or design, how would the US media respond?
On April 6, as a coda to Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), coalition forces liberated
no less than three media outposts in one day. In one of the incidents, a tank
shell hit the fourteenth floor of the Palestine Hotel, killing two un-imbedded
journalists and in-bedding several more at overloaded medical stations.
US troops knew that the Palestine Hotel was the main base for almost all journalists
in Baghdad. The official line was that they were responding to weapons fire from
the hotel rooftop. (Reporters at the Palestine Hotel later denied hearing any
arms fire from the building. Journalists from three Western television networks
told CNN they were in the Palestine Hotel when the tank fired and saw no outgoing
fire from the hotel.)
Coincidentally, the international journalists were stationed on the fourteenth
floor, where the shell hit. Yet this unfortunate event wasn't the
end of the synchronistic attacks on international media.
Al-Jazeera's media station was struck from the air earlier the same
day by US forces, killing a reporter and wounding a cameraman. When war planes
returned hours later, the offices of Abu Dhabi TV were wiped out as well, trapping
30 people in the debris.
Perhaps the Palestine Hotel situation can be explained away as a faux-pas by trigger-happy
troops. You can't give the keys to an Abrams tank to a 19-year-old
kid hopped on Go pills, and expect decisions worthy of a Clausewitz.
It's the other two attacks that take this journo-bombing from the
realm of the miraculous to the mendacious. Al-Jazeera, which has had previous
experience with this sort of thing (their media station in Kabul was destroyed
by American fire), claimed outright that they had been struck deliberately. The
Pentagon responded that this was an accident, that they had no official policy
of targetting journalists.
Aidan White, general secretary of the International Federation of Journalists,
said the attacks appeared to be deliberately targeted and called for a full international
inquiry. "We are concerned that attacks on media and journalists, which
appear to have been targeted attacks, are in our view crimes of war. They are
violations, grave and serious violations, of international humanitarian law,"
White said.
The Arab Journalists' Union also accused the US military of deliberately
targeting reporters. The union's secretary-general, Salaheddin Hafedh,
said the deaths constitute "murder" and show that US
and British forces were attempting to prevent the press from carrying out its
work.
A few noises were made by US pundits about an investigation into the incidents,
but quickly subsided.
There was no serious discussion from US news sources on the possibility this attack
was more than an accident. Only the great, gray CBC dared to do a few awkward
dance steps around the unsayable. On the television show Inside Media, the hosts
and guests debated what it all means, and went to satellite interview with a haunted-looking
news producer from one of the major US broadcasters. She had been in close communication
with the Pentagon prior to the incident, she said, and had been told repeatedly
that Baghdad was not safe for journalists. The spokesparrot was sure no attempt
had been made to target her own species. "And I'm not an
apologist for the Pentagon," she squawked.
Her response pretty much reflected the standard line by elite journalism to this
unfortunate series of events. (I was reminded of the kidnap victim who suffers
from Stockholm syndrome, who ends up loving the captor.)
This pattern of non-curiosity from the free press regarding a new, frightening
precedent set by a global superpower is reminiscent of an earlier period in journalism's
history. In his autobiography Arrow in the Blue, the Hungarian-born journalist
Arthur Koestler tells of arriving in Berlin, on September 14, 1930, during the
fateful Reichstag elections - "the day of the end of the Weimar Republic
and the beginning of the age of barbarism in Europe."
Koestler had arrived to take the position of science editor at the Ullstein newspaper
chain, a publishing empire reknowned as a standard-bearer for liberal values,
pluralism, and democracy. With his colleagues, Koestler "settled down
to carry on business as usual in a country that had become a minefield,"
as a result of the electoral triumph of the National Socialists.
"The ticking of the time-fuses was sometimes more audible, sometimes
less," Koestler wrote. With their liberalism and pan-Europeanism,
the largely Jewish Ullstein staff "were Dr. Goebbel's bete
noire."
Within months, a spirit of wishful thinking and denial settled over the mighty
Ullstein news chain, as the Brownshirts outside their journalistic aerie gained
supporters and strength. The science editor's place of employment
became a place of fear and insecurity, reflecting in microcosm Germany as a whole.
"Individuals reacted to the approaching apocalypse according to their
varied temperaments," writes Koestler of his colleagues. "There
were the professional optimists, and the constitutional optimists. The former
fooled their readers, the latter fooled themselves. There were those who said,
"They can't be as bad as all that." And those
who said, "They are too weak, they can't start anything."
And those who said: "They are too strong, we must appease them."
And those who said: "You are frightened of a bogey, you've
got a persecution mania, you are hysterical." And those who said,
"Hatred doesn't lead anywhere, we must meet them with sympathy
and understanding." And those who said simply, "I refuse
to believe it.""
For most Germans, the idea that their nation was descending into a racist fit
of imperial madness was inconceivable. "Owing to the inertia of the
human imagination," Koestler wrote," to most people
it wasn't obvious at all."
The compromises at the Ullstein chain began with shifts in editorial position.
Koestler was chagrined to discover this at the so-called "Council of
the Princes," a "weekly conference of the heads of the
firm, the editors in chief, and seconds in command." With the abandonment
of their position against capital punishment, Koestler discovered that the Princes,
"who were the embodiment of democratic public opinion par excellence,
had neither courage nor convictions."
"We capitulated before the rapid brutalization of the masses. In the
futile hope of gaining public favor, we sacrificed, on the spur of the moment,
our whole social philosophy which held that the function of justice was not punishment
but the protection of society."
The attitude of Koestler's paper towards the Western powers:
Germany's own Axis of Evil: stiffened. "We
had always been critical of the Versailles Treaty; now balanced criticism became
stuffy, patriotic and provincial." This prewar mental reorienation
sounds more than a little familiar to the watchers of Canadian and American print
media. The author's take on the mental gymnastics of journalists of
his time still applies today: "It was not necessary to instruct editors
and foreign correspondents to change their course. Once the tone was set, they
followed suit: automatically and by instinct." Today
we call that self-censorship.
Employees of the Ullstein news chain oscillated between hope and despair, Koestler
writes, all the while giving ground on any remaining professed principles. The
descent into the abyss was "gradual at first, then gathering momentum,
and ending in rapid, headlong, fall."
"The cold purge dragged on through 1932. Though the Ullsteins were
Jews, they tried to Aryanize the firm by degrees, in an indirect way. The victims
of the purge, as far as I can remember, were all Jews; the newly hired staff members
were all Aryans."
There was no one moment when the Ullstein Princes cried out "enough",
or took an editorial position against the National Socialists. Like a frog in
boiling water, there was simply the unacknowledged slide toward the end as the
heat slowly increased. (Perhaps there was little the Ullstein chain could have
done to stem the Nazi tide by the time of the Reichstag elections, but one gets
the sense that the Princes had long ago mastered the arts of expediency.)
Obviously, German media on the edge of totalitarian free-fall is not the same
as the lapdog US media, alternately nipping at and begging to the president select.
But the similarities involve universals in human behavior: in particular
the all-too human pattern of avoiding reality and cutting deals with the devil.
That such appeasement failed to save German journalism in the 1930s is obvious
in retrospect; nor will similar concessions to power by US journalists likely
shield them or their profession should Bush win the next election.
There is no usefulness in a martyr complex. But there is no dignity in declaring
an early defeat either. One would like to rouse the ghosts of the Ullstein's
Princes Council, and ask them this: would it have been better to
go out standing on your feet, rather than begging on your knees?
There are hopeful recent signs that US media is waking up, however. Donald Rumsfeld's
false claims of an Iraqi attempt to procure uranium through Nigeria has alienated
top officials in both the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency. The hubris of the
Bush administration, showing contempt for even its own military and intelligence
community, may prove to be its undoing, with the elites withdrawing their support.
This may be already occurring, as reflected in the media of the past few weeks.
October's issue of Vanity Fair magazine carries a long investigative
piece on the business links between the Bush and bin Laden dynasties. In mid-September,
the Philadelphia Daily News ran a long article on 20 questions outstanding from
the 9/11 attacks, and the San Francisco Guardian featured a story from Project
Censored on "the Neo-Con Plan to Take Over the World."
Let's hope these are genuine noises of dissent from the US media,
rather than its last gasp.
This article is dedicated to the memory of Jose Couso, Tele Cinco cameraman (Palestine
Hotel), Taras Protsyuk, Reuters cameraman (Palestine Hotel), and Tareq Ayyoub,
Al-Jazeera cameraman.
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