Democracy Needs a Free Press
You can’t have a democracy when people don’t know what’s going on. One of the frustrating things is we were never allowed to have an honest conversation about whether to go to war. The anti-war protests were the largest in the history of the earth. It was hard to tell that watching American television or reading its papers. Did you know a million people took to the streets of Rome to protest the war, 300,000 in Toronto, perhaps half a million in London, and hundreds of thousands in cities across the United States? But somehow we never got to have a full national discussion. Instead we got Fox News cheerleading and CNN trying to keep up. Clear Channel the largest owner of radio stations with 1,225 actually organized pro-war rallies. MSNBC’s top rated program, “The Donahue Show” was canceled right before the war. An internal NBC memo had warned the program was a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war” because it might provide a forum “for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." It probably didn’t help that GE which is a major defense contractor owns NBC. For almost a year, television news stations had predetermined war was inevitable. Some had even been billing their show “Count Down to War.” So much for objective coverage and honest discussion. The morning of the war, the Fox News Network was running stories of Saddam Hussein’s torture chambers all morning. It is not that it might not be true. The question is the timing. None of this was new information. It had been known for years. Why nonstop coverage now? Obviously, to gear us up for war. If they wanted a story about human rights violations, they could have instead told about prisoners deprived of sleep, bounded, gagged, blind folded and with earphones so they are in a total state of sensory deprivation. This is happening in Guantamo Bay to those the United States captured in Afghanistan in complete violation of International law. Or they could have told of the hundreds imprisoned in the U.S. since September 11 whose names aren’t even known and who have been forbidden to see a lawyer or even know the charges against them. But then, unless you have been watching real closely, you may not know this. Only pro-war reporters were allowed to cover the Second Gulf War. All reports had to be Pentagon approved. The news networks featured pro-war former generals (while there were many anti-war former generals available). Reporters embedded with the troops became little more than military propaganda agents. And that was the only press coverage we saw in the United States. Obviously, you should view everything you heard during the Second Gulf War with a great deal of suspicion. In the first Gulf War, the television public were treated to Patriot missiles intercepting incoming Scud missiles with accurate precision. Yet after the war, the same Pentagon sued the manufacturer claiming 95% missed. And of those that did hit incoming Scud missiles most broke into several pieces merely causing damage in several places rather than one. And yet, military generals stood before the t.v. cameras during the first Gulf War pretending just the opposite. This time it is going to be even harder to sort through the propaganda. Just before the Second Gulf War, 42% of the American people thought Saddam Hussein had something to do with September 11 when he had absolutely nothing to do with it. That shows you the failure of our media. Following the attacks, the Bush administration wanted desparately to establish a link to justify attacking Iraq but never found anything. Israeli intelligence found money wired to Mohammand Atta -- the supposed leader of the attacks -- was actually ransom money paid in Pakistan tracked to Dubai near Saudi Arabia. As you probably know, 15 out of 19 of the September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia but the Saudi prince forbid the U.S. from investigating there. Since he is our good oil partner, the Bush administration instead went to war in Afghanistan (and got the pipeline they had been pushing for as a bonus). Osama bin Laden and Iraq are bitter enemies. Members of Al Qaeda were routinely arrested in Iraq. The two had very different views of women. In Iraq, women even are in the military. Before the first Gulf War, Iraq had the greatest percentage of women in college in the Arab world and more than half its college graduates were women. Al Qaeda like other fundamentalists want to keep women under wraps. Causalities Many said showing pictures of civilian causalities was “anti-war propaganda.” Perhaps they are right. Dead bodies should be the ultimate anti-war message. When you see the dead bodies, it makes it hard to think of war as a video game. It is hard not to be anti-war when you see the gruesomeness of it is there in all its reality. It is easier to be gun ho if everything is at a distance; when you just sing patriotic songs and don’t think other people have lives with all the same hopes and fears we do. When you see pictures of a mother killed by American forces and her dead child laying with the green pacifier still in its mouth, it makes it harder to believe this was a war about liberating them. War becomes so much more complicated; so much more bloody and more cruel. It makes a mockery of George W. Bush, fist punching the air gleefully crying, “Let’s roll” as he headed for his tv appearance announcing the start of the war. It’s fun to be a hero. We like to pretend we are right. The thing is, the other side likes to pretend the same thing. We must be careful that the media does not shut us out from the reality of war. War is not a video game. Philosopher David Hume said that all morality comes either from enlightened self interest or the fact that the misery of others makes us feel uneasy. Propaganda would keep us in the dark about the suffering of others. Vietnam turned around as the American people watched it come into their living rooms on television. The Pentagon vowed to never again let the media interfere with one of their wars. But we can’t make reasonable decisions if we don’t know what is going on. We can’t have democracy without a free press. We don’t hear the blood curdling screams of the family as it runs in terror from American bombs only to be slaughtered by American soldiers as they try to cross a small bridge or the tears of the American soldier picking up the lifeless body of the small child he has just killed. Most don’t know about the women in Bagdad digging holes in their backyards to take refuge with their children as if they were merely hiding from an oncoming tornado rather than the giant devasting bombs of “Shock and Awe.” How many dead? We may never know. We know we dropped thousands upon thousands of bombs -- larger than any onslaught in history -- and yet we are supposed to believe not many people were killed, especially innocent civilians. And if you noticed, over half the American causalities in Afghanistan were reported to be “accidents.” Even though the other side was firing and said they’d hit the plane, Pentagon officials would say the plane when down from mechanical troubles. Somehow classifying deaths as being accidents makes war seem less deadly. In Iraq, there are to many fatalities to be counted as accidents. The casualties grow and grow. But the Bush administration has long forbidden any photographs of returning caskets. When Nightline’s Ted Koppel read aloud the names of those killed so far in Iraq, one corportaotion owning many stations refused to allow it to be aired on its stations. The reality of their deaths does not enter our daily lives. What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You Althought the rest of the world sees a quite different picture, the news is censored in the United States for so-called “patriotic” reasons. In France, a best selling book right after September 11 claimed the Bush administration provoked the attacks by threatening two months before that if the Tailban did not submit to demands to put an oil pipeline across Afghanistan, the U.S. would go to war in Afghanistan by October. Few in America looked askance when after the war the U.S. engineered a top official of Unocal -- the company wanting the pipeline -- be picked as the new President of Afghanistan or when the U.S. appointed representative to Afghanistan was also a Unocal official. But you can bet the French stood up and took notice when after the war, the pipeline was approved. (Few in the United States know that Halliburton -- Dick Cheney’s former company -- is the top builder of pipelines in the world and was originally slated to build the pipeline.) In France, all this is common knowledge. It is small wonder people in France might have had a very different version of Bush’s motives in Iraq. When the book was finally released a full year later in the U.S., the Afghanistan War was in the rear view mirror and the administration had its sights set on Iraq. Congresswoman Cynthia McKiney who’d suggested the U.S. should investigate had already been defeated in the election primary with the help of massive contributions to her rival. Or take another thing most of the rest of the world sees clearly that we don’t. We live in a time were the bullying tactics of giant multi-national corporations have threatened the personal security of American citizens. It is no accident the September 11 attacks were on the World Trade Center. In a videotape realized after the attacks, Osama bin Laden said he would never attack innocent civilians and that they had nothing to fear. (This may sound strange but remember in his mind he would not consider those working in the World Trade Center as being innocents.) This tape would have eased the panic that was everywhere. The American public was not the enemy and had nothing to fear. The Bush administration forbid the American public from seeing this tape saying it contained coded messages to other terrorists. This is interesting because all the rest of the world got to see it, only Americans didn’t. Releasing those tapes certainly would have have done quite a bit to calm fears. But that wasn’t on Bush’s agenda. The public needed to be kept constantly reveed up and afraid. According to the foreign press, two months after September 11, the Bush team had made plans to go into Iraq right before the 2002 Congressional elections hoping the pre-planned war would help Republican candidates (which it did). And you will recall the vote for war came in October right before the election and the only reason the war did not come sooner than it did was because the United Nations refused to rubber stamp Bush’s plans and internationally, the greatest anti-war movement appeared. Conclusion If we are going to be citizens
of the world, we’d better know what is
going on. And the only way to do that is to read the world press. It’s
hard to accept that American news is being censored but if you go to the
foreign press, a quite different picture emerges. The Guardian in England
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/)
reports half their hits come from people in the United States eager for a
another view. The Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.au/index.html)
in Australia and the
Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/?) are also good sources.
Try seeing how the Arab world views the day’s events (http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage).
Or just slip across the border to Canada (http://www.thestar.com/). Same
day, different news. ________________ Rick Ellis, “Commentary: The Surrender Of MSNBC,” February 25th, 2003, http://www.allyourtv.com/0203season/news/02252003donahue.html |
_