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Free Press? Surely You're Joking. |
Current rating: 0 |
by Mike Lehman
(No verified email address) |
27 Feb 2001
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This excerpt is from an article, "In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US power," which appears in the Feb. 18 edition of the 'New Statesman'. It's perspective is particularly appropriate reading for all IMCistas. |
Washington
Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian
writers touring the United States were astonished to find,
after reading the newspapers and watching television, that
almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same.
\"In our country,\" said one of them, \"to get that result we
have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their
fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it?
What\'s the secret?\"
The secret is a form of censorship more insidious than a
totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve. The myth is
the opposite. Constitutional freedoms unmatched anywhere
else guard against censorship; the press is a \"fourth
estate\", a watchdog on democracy. The journalism schools
boast this reputation, the influential East Coast press is
especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper of
record, the New York Times, with its masthead slogan: \"All
the news that\'s fit to print.\"
It takes only a day or two back in the US to be reminded of
how deep state censorship runs. It is censorship by
omission, and voluntary. The source of most Americans\'
information, mainstream television, has been reduced to a
set of marketing images shot and edited to the rhythms of a
Coca-Cola commercial that flow seamlessly into the actual
commercials. Rupert Murdoch\'s Fox network is the model,
with its peep-shows of human tragedy. Non-American
human beings are generally ignored, or treated with an
anthropological curiosity reserved for wildlife
documentaries.
Not long ago, Kenneth Jarecke was talking about this
censorship. Jarecke is the American photographer who
took the breath-catching picture of an Iraqi burnt to a
blackened cinder, petrified at the wheel of his vehicle on the
Basra Road where he, and hundreds of others, were
massacred by American pilots on their infamous \"turkey
shoot\" at the end of the Gulf war. In the United States,
Jarecke\'s picture was suppressed for months after what was
more a slaughter than a war. \"The whole US press
collaborated in keeping silent about the consequences of
that war,\" he said.
The famous CBS anchorman Dan Rather told his prime-time
audience: \"There\'s one thing we can all agree on. It\'s the
heroism of the 148 Americans who gave their lives so that
freedom could live.\" What he omitted to say was that a
quarter of them had been killed, like their British comrades,
by other Americans. He made no mention of the Iraqi dead,
put at 200,000 by the Medical Educational Trust. That
American forces had deliberately bombed civilian
infrastructure, such as water treatment plants, was not
reported at the time. Six months later, one newspaper,
Newsday, published in Long Island, New York, disclosed
that three US brigades \"used snow plows mounted on
tanks to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still alive -
in more than 70 miles of trenches\".
The other day, both the Washington Post and the New
York Times referred to Iraq without mentioning the million
people now estimated to have died as a direct result of
sanctions imposed, via the UN, by the United States and
Britain. That, writes Brian Michael Goss of the University of
Illinois, is standard practice. Goss examined 630 articles on
sanctions published in the New York Times from 1996 to
1998. In those three years, just 20 articles - 3 per cent of the
coverage - were critical of the policy or dwelt upon its
civilian impact. The rest reflected the US official line,
identifying 21 million people with Saddam Hussein. The
scale of the censorship is placed in perspective by
Professors John and Karl Mueller, of the University of
Rochester. \"Even if the UN estimates of the human damage
to Iraq are roughly correct,\" they write, sanctions have
caused \"the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been
slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction
throughout history.\" |
See also:
http://www.consider.net/forum_new.php3?newTemplate=OpenObject&newTop=200102190008&newDisplayURN=200102190008
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