"We identified ourselves absolutely with the Armies in the field." We wiped out of our minds all thought of personal scoops and all temptation to write one word which would make the task of officers and men more difficult or dangerous. There was no need of censorship of our despatches (sic). We were our own censors."
Two types of guests who are featured regularly on U.S. television are (1) current military officials, who can be expected to present the Pentagon's official position, and (2) former military officials, who will supposedly give their honest opinions, which will stand a very good chance of lining up nicely with the Pentagon's. In 2008, we learned that the distinction between these two major categories of guests was phony. The Pentagon had recruited 75 retired military officers and given them talking points, which they presented to the media as their own thoughts. Unsurprisingly, the views of the retired generals were not dramatically different from the media norm and no one noticed that anything unusual was going on. The eventual revelation of what was going on went largely unnoticed as well, and few policies were reformed.
The Pentagon continues to spend over a half a billion dollars per year on propaganda, including the production of video and print "news" stories not labeled as having been produced by the military. There is no evidence of any significant shift in the types of guests permitted on the air, and some of the well-known liars about the grounds for launching the War on Iraq are now more than regular guests. They are actually employed by the media: Karl Rove at Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek; John Bolton at Fox News; John Yoo at the Philadelphia Inquirer; Newt Gingrich and Dick Morris at Fox News. The careers of those journalists who have pushed war lies in the media have not been harmed either. Charles Krauthammer is still at the Washington Post and Fox. Judith Miller is no longer at the New York Times, but is happily employed by Fox and a "think tank."
"[I]n late August [2010] commandant of the Marine Corps General James Conway, due to retire this fall, publicly attacked the president's 'conditions-based' July 2011 drawdown date in Afghanistan, saying, 'In some ways, we think right now it is probably giving our enemy sustenance.'
"Or consider that, while the Obama administration has moved fiercely against government and military leaking of every sort, when it came to the strategic leaking (assumedly by someone in, or close to, the military) of the 'McChrystal plan' for Afghanistan in the fall of 2009, nothing at all happened even though the president was backed into a policy-making corner. And yet, as Andrew Bacevich pointed out, 'The McChrystal leaker provid[ed] Osama bin Laden and the Taliban leadership a detailed blueprint of exactly how the United States and its allies were going to prosecute their war.'"
Challenging a sainted active war commander is, of course, not just bad journalism but also a mortal sin of unpatriotism. You won't see it very often in the U.S. corporate media. Nor will expanding our foreign broadcast propaganda help in this regard.
WE WRITE WHAT WE'RE TOLD TO WRITE, SIR
The U.S. corporate media (which, for you grammar mavens, I'll be glad to treat as plural when it gives me some reason to) certainly behaves as if it is in that deferential frame of mind, carrying its subservience so far as to readily obey the wishes of the Pentagon or the White House to no longer use words or phrases or concepts that it has used for decades. Prior to 2004, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today almost always described waterboarding as torture. From that point forward they almost never did, and especially not when the waterboarding was done by the United States. What had changed? Those in power in Washington had put out the propaganda that they did not torture but did waterboard, thereby making waterboarding no longer torture. The use of language in the media is determined by its use in the corridors of power. If a change in usage permits a gruesome crime to be committed with impunity, well that's just the price we have to pay for "objectivity."
Adding a phrase to the media's vocabulary is even easier than deleting one. During the five-and-a-half months leading up to the Gulf War in mid- January 1991, major U.S. media outlets printed and aired comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler several times a day. Hussein had not become a worse dictator. Nothing new had been discovered about him or Hitler. The White House had simply ordered up a fresh supply of righteous and bloodthirsty indignation. And just three years after the New Republic had supported increased military "aid" to Saddam Hussein, the magazine obligingly altered a cover photo to make his mustache look more like Hitler's.
Strict censorship is hardly necessary as a central tool of propaganda when the dominant media outlets are saturating the airwaves and newspapers with comparisons between your desired enemy and Adolf Hitler. As long as the war message is all over page one every day, inconvenient and contradictory facts can show up on page 18 once or twice without much harm being done, although the author of that back-page story will be unlikely to see his or her name on page one in the near future. An even stronger story can safely show up on the internet as long as most people don't hear about it. Censorship won't be required.
Of course, the war planners keep secrets. But the media outlets keep them as well, as part of the team. This wasn't always the case. When Daniel Ellsberg released secret records of the War on Vietnam, the New York Times published them because it feared the shame of someone's later finding out that it had not done so. By 2005, the media culture had changed -- the New York Times was by then more fearful of the possible shame of having published a revelatory story. That year, the Times published a story on the government's illegal warrantless spying programs, explaining that it had sat on the story for a year out of fear that it might affect how people voted in elections. The Times eventually printed the story because one of its reporters was about to make it public in a book, a book that contained several other important revelations the Times never touched. When foreign newspapers or U.S. websites or international whistleblowers make secrets known, the U.S. corporate media tends to behave as if little or nothing has happened, except perhaps to report on efforts to prosecute whistleblowers.
Media outlets will suppress inconvenient news as long as possible. They're still suppressing the news that the attack on Pearl Harbor was expected and provoked. Nearly a dozen major print and television outlets suppressed the My Lai massacre in Vietnam for over a year until an independent news service forced the story out. The major media outlets similarly suppressed their knowledge that the Iraq War was based on lies, meanwhile promoting those lies and facilitating the war. When news that has been suppressed comes out years later, members of the media are not surprised by it and claim that it's boring, trivial, and old news, even though they've never published it. At the same time (forgetting that less can be more) they often claim that the information is false.
In May and June 2005, the most repeated excuse by U.S. media outlets, including the Washington Post, for not covering the Downing Street Minutes and related documents demonstrating the dishonesty of the planners of the War on Iraq, was that the documents told us nothing new, that they were old news. This conflicted, of course, with the second most common excuse, which was that they were false.
Those of us trumpeting the story as new and important scratched our heads. Of course we'd known the Bush-Cheney gang was lying, but did everyone know that? Had corporate media outlets reported it? Had they informed the public of confirmation of this fact in the form of memos from top government officials in the United Kingdom? And if so, when? When had this particular piece of news been new news?
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