25
Aug
Controlling What We “Think About”
ENO: NOT JUST PROPAGANDA
SUICIDAL POLICIES
BERLUSCONI AND US
Why is it that some of our most thoughtful media critics are artists, not fellow journalists? While I was away, the British musician Brian Eno, who I had the pleasure of hanging out with at a concert in Italy some years back, was writing about the way propaganda seeps into our media system.
Mark his words:
“Its greatest triumph is that we generally don’t notice it - or laugh at the notion it even exists. We watch the democratic process taking place - heated debates in which we feel we could have a voice - and think that, because we have ‘free’ media, it would be hard for the Government to get away with anything very devious without someone calling them on it. It takes something as dramatic as the invasion of Iraq to make us look a bit more closely and ask: ‘How did we get here?…The new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name. It isn’t just propaganda any more, it’s ‘prop-agenda ‘. It’s not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about.”
Here’s what I am thinking about.
HOWLING IN NEW YORK
There are so many worlds in our world. I discovered this old eternal truth again as I withdrew from a self-imposed sentence of a few days of media silence on Long Island (not the trendy Hamptons, but the far less developed, and far more peaceful, North Fork.) Last night, I fled from the mosquitos back into the packed environs of Tompkins Square Park on New York City’s Loisaida or East Village, the area that also calls itself Alphabet City . I went to the HOWL Festival of East Village Arts (FEVA) held in honor, in part, of Alan (gone but not forgotten) Ginsberg, the poet saint of the neighborhood, and jazz great Charlie Parker (a.k.a) Bird, who LIVED for one more show at a festival in his honor. The park was packed for a celebration of the kind of ‘kounter-kultur’ missing on most of our television sets. (Check out Howlfestival.com for more.) The only political outreach going on at the event was for the Dean campaign. Dean will be in New York later this week.
BACK IN THE NEWS VORTEX
I begin with joy but pain was soon to follow, as I read the NY Times and tuned in again to more bland Sunday talk show exchanges in which some dozens of the mainstream media noted that, oh yes, most of the country now opposes the war and that the president’s approval rating is down while the number of people who want him out is up. All along close analysts of public opinion have noted that many Americans see what they think of as defending America in non-partisan terms. So, support they the President in times of conflict. That doesn’t mean they like him or will necessarily support him come election day. The analysis on these shows is barely skin deep. So cliched. So obvious. They all cited a poll carried in Newsweek which showed for the first time that the “percentage of registered voters who would not like to see Bush re-elected as president outnumbered those who supported a second term (49 percent to 44 percent).”
Here we go again. Israel has sealed off Gaza. AGAIN. Four more Hamas leaders assassinated by rocket attack. with many hurt. Angry cries in the streets. Cries of reveange and retribution. All as before, except it looks like the Palastinian Authority no longer has any. with Mr. Sharon. Resorting to tactics Sharon has used before, he demands that the PA “crack down, ” but then refuses to consult or communicate or allow it to act. Instead, Israel attacks the “terrorists” physically and the PA politically, further discrediting it in the eyes of the Palestinian people. This is an old startegy which promises only more insecurity in the name of assuring security. Say goodbye to the Road Map. The velvet glove is off. The iron fist remains.
Here’s Uri Avnery again in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz: “It is no secret that the military party (the only really functioning party in Israel) objected to the hudna (truce) from the first moment, much as it opposed the Road Map. Its powerful propaganda apparatus, which includes all the Israeli media, spread the message: “The hudna is a disaster! …
“The army command was like an addict deprived of his drug. It was forbidden to carry out the action it wanted. It was just about to crush the intifada, victory was just around the corner, all that was needed was just one final decisive blow, and that would have been that.
” Ariel Sharon realized that if this went on, reality would overturn his long-term plans. Therefore, right at the beginning of the hudna, he adopted three immediate goals:
” First, to topple Abu-Mazen as soon as possible. Mahmud Abbas had become the darling of George Bush, a welcome guest at the White House. The unique standing of Sharon in Washington was in danger. ….Second, to wipe out the Road Map in its infancy. ….Third, to put an end to the hudna and give the army back its freedom of action in all the Palestinian territories.
AND WHAT OF THE COVERAGE?
And AGAIN: FAIR calls for more evenhanded coverage. “While U.S. media tended to portray these attacks as a return to violence after a relatively peaceful period, there were numerous killings in the weeks leading up to the suicide bombings that underscore the lack of evenhanded attention given to loss of life in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.” See Fair.org for more.
PENTAGON CHICANERY
In New York Times land, we have a front page report that Mr. Rumsfeld is scheming to out source military jobs so that more uniformed personnel are available for the meat grinder in Iraq. This flim-flam will of course “create “jobs that the Administration can later claim a their achievement, and also expand the scale of government spending. But what’s a Defense Secretary to do when he doesn’t want to start drafting our boys or adding more soldiers to the payroll? You just just call in some out of work accountants from Arnold Anderson to tell you how to shift the books around.
The Times more or less bought the government line that all is well in Iraq with just few pockets here and there of resistance that are doomed to fail. First they say all the fighting is in the Sunni areas, that is until some British soldiers bought it in Shia country in Basra. (Oops: Two more US soldiers dead over the weekend!) While the Secretary maneuvers to internally shift resources, the President is demanding more “foreign troops” be imported into Iraq. Quote: ‘”We do need, and welcome, more foreign troops into Iraq.”This is one of the rare admissions of “need” that we have heard from on-high . Thousands of Iraqis are to be shipped to Hungary for “training” as police.
HOW THE MEDIA GETS IT WRONG
“Why is the media coverage we are getting always so incident driven and perspective free? Why does so much of it sound so alike? That’s an issue that Declain Hill raises on the excellent Canadian site and MediaChannel affiliate Rabble.ca. He asks: “How the media got it wrong? How could so many journalists working for so many different news organizations have got it so wrong?”
“He writes: “Setting aside the truly moronic (of whom there are many, as in other professions) and the intellectually compromised, (any one who works for the Syrian News Directorate or FOX News), there are a great many journalists who completely misread the situation. Why?
“A large part of the criticism has been aimed at “embedded journalists,” correspondents who have been placed with an allied military unit. It is felt by the CBC and others, that this produces propaganda of sexy shots of tanks and missiles or stories of brave U.S. Marines but very little about the human cost of the war.
“However, for all this discussion there is another form of journalistic “embedding”. It is just as insidious, far more widespread and almost never discussed. And it produces work that is equally slanted. It is the “embedding” of journalists within their own community…
He goes on to add:” The next problem is that the desk-bound journalists at whichever country is called home read the mass of orthodox journalism. Then they often pester journalists who are not writing what everyone else is writing into writing the same. The myth is that foreign journalists are all in competition with each other. The truth is that most of the time, most of the journalists are covering exactly the same thing for fear of being perceived as “missing something”.
OSAMA: STILL MISSING
“Missing something? ” You bet. We all are. We are also missing somebody. Rory McCarthy explains why the War on Terror is missing the capture of Osma Bin Laden. It is all in a report carried in the Guardian on Saturday. His stunning finding:
“Experts who have been following the attempts of the Pakistanis and the US to find the al-Qaida leader have suggested that:
“The Pakistani president, General Pervez Musharraf, struck a deal with the US not to seize Bin Laden after the Afghan war for fear of inciting trouble in his own country;
“The al-Qaida leader is being protected by a three elaborate security rings which stretch 120 miles in diameter; and
“The Pakistani specialforces looking for him are no closer than they were a year ago.”
SALUTING ARTHUR HELTON
One of the people I will be missing is a friend, Arthur Helton, the human rights and refugee specialist who was murdered at UN Headquarters in Baghdad while meeting with the late Sergio Vieira de Mello, According to an account in this week’s Times Week in Review, de Mello did not want to be there and even questioned how the UN could achieve its mission. He was meeting with Helton when the truck bomb shattered the building. Arthur, a lawyer and writer, was one of those quiet and persistent souls who advocated tirelessly for refugees, people who are marginalized and usually the most oppressed in any society. He also contributed to MediaChannel affiliate OpenDemocracy.net which salutes his work:
” Arthur was a serious, indefatigable scholar with extraordinary range. He was warm and humorous too. I (Caspar Henderson) will not forget his kindness when I visited him in the grand premises of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York earlier this year, and the touch of irony with which he showed me a photographic tribute to his work in the hallway of the Pratt house. In contrast to the pictures associated with many of his colleagues, which mainly showed important guys in suits and ties shaking hands or dramatic shots of military situations, Arthur’s picture showed a refugee mother and child. “The token soft power guy around here” he joked.
“WAKE-UP CALL?”
“Interestingly, Washington wanted Sergio Vierra de Mello there. He was reportedly “approved” by Condaleeza Rice and President Bush. They did not like the former UN Human Rights Commissioner, the more outspoken Marty Robinson, a former President of Ireland, because she was considered too “confrontational.” According to John Pilger, Robinson called the bombing “a “wake-up call.” He adds: “She is right, of course, but it is a call that millions of people sounded on the streets of London and all over the world more than seven months ago - before the killing began.”
The New York Times did a long essay on suicide bombings this weekend as an example of “asymentrical warfare” — without noting that the foreign policiy of the US under the current Administration may be on its own kind of suicide trip in terms of fueling the very terrorism that it claims to want to end.
US PEACEKEEPERS LEAVE LIBERIA AS WAR RE-ERUPTS
As CNN showed US troops who just arrived in Liberia being returned to their ships (save to fortify the US Embassy’s security unit,) our Liberia watcher Bisi writes: “Danny, what did I tell you? They keep trying to put bandaids on some really deep and rotten wounds.” She passes along this report: “Thousands of civilians were displaced by renewed clashes between Liberian government troops and rebel fighters atthe weeekend. The fighting took place less than a week after the signing of a peace agreement that was supposed to end 14 years of civil war.” Another successful peacekeeping operation!
MEDIA NEWS: BERLUSCONI EXPOSED ON PBS
PBS’s Wide Angle ran an unusually tough film this week exposing Italian Media magnate Silvio Berlusconi. ( It seemed to have been made largely by European broadcasters) Afterwards, Jamie Rubin spoke with Alexander Stille who has written about how media and politics merges in this one flamboyant figure. They spoke about his impact on Italy and global media:
Alexander Stille: … I think that what is interesting and a little scary about Berlusconi is that he’s understood, maybe more than any politician, that if something doesn’t appear on television it doesn’t exist in our world. And so there is freedom of the press because you can find it in print form, if you look at certain newspapers or in certain books. But you won’t find it on TV. And so you have a partial freedom. ….
Jamie Rubin: So you’re saying that democracy’s working but it’s threatened by his power? Would that be a way of putting it?
Alexander Stille: Yes. I think it’s a partial incomplete democracy which is working very badly at the moment. And I think what is troublesome and should be of concern to all of us is that it’s setting a model for the way democracy works in our world. In which private interests are allowed to have a much greater share of public life than they have anywhere else. And I think that’s a model that people get used to that, and say, Well, if they can do that in Italy, then what’s the big deal if I do it to a lesser degree here in France? Or in England or in this country? And so I think it’s setting precedents that are unhealthy for a democracy.
Jamie Rubin: How much do you think the Berlusconi model is playing out in other parts of the world? …
“Alexander Stille: Well, I think the thing that makes Berlusconi a really interesting, important figure is, that he crystallizes — in a very dramatic way — problems and issues that exist in all modern democracies now. In every society, including ours. Money, media, and political power are very closely connected. And the figures you mentioned, are all part of the trend in which people have figured out that the ability, let’s say, to buy TV time and bypass the usual filters between the public and political figures, are very powerful devices that people can use to attract attention, attract voters. And get influence in our society.” (See PBS.org for more of the interview and other resources on the issues.)
SPARING US
Blood on TV is Ok on the movie channels but not in the news. News World passes on this item: “Local TV in Atlanta spared viewers the bloody images of a bank robbery suspect dying in a hail of bullets. Affiliates of Fox, CBS and NBC showed live coverage of the stand-off between the suspect and a SWAT team up until the suspect pulled his gun and fired a shot. But none of them showed the firefight that ensued or the bloody corpse of the suspect, although audio continued. ABC played it even safer and did not even show the man lifting his gun. “It was quite startling and, to be quite honest, very unpleasant to watch firsthand,” Fox reporter Portia Bruner told viewers.
WITNESS IRAQ
Final note for now re: coverage of the Iraq War. Throughout the conflict, still photographers out-classed and out-powered the TV cameras. That’s why so many networks took the unusual step of showing photjournalism as part of their coverage. Now Marcel Saba has edited what may be the definitive collection called WITNESS IRAQ. It is published in a beautifully packaged large-sized edition in full color capturing all the surrealism, pain and humanity of this episode in inhumanity. It’s the visual story that TV News only hinted at. I didn’t know this publishing company until yesterday, but now I want to see everything they have done. The imprint is appropriately called powerHouse Books.
BACK IN THE SADDLE
I am happy to report that Z Magazine and Heartland, the feisty well-edited journal published by Chicago’s Heartland Café have published pieces from our MediaChannel book “Embedded: Weapons of Mass Deception.” And special thanks to Z for carrying an ad for the book, due out this fall from Prometheus Books. If any other publications are willing to follow their heroic example, please advise; the color ad can be downloaded here.
This is the week commemorating the great March on Washington for Jobs and Justice of August 28, 1963. As a member of ‘the original cast.” I will have more to say about an event I played a minor role in organizing and that continues to impact our still racially divided nation.
I’m back. You can write to me at the same old address: dissector@mediachannel.org.
