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News :: Miscellaneous |
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PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA PROLIFERATES |
Current rating: 0 |
by Heather Cottin, WWS
(No verified email address) |
26 Nov 2001
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Scripting the Big Lie |
The titans of the military-industrial-media complex are working around the clock trying to annihilate the truth so people in the United States won't care what happens to the people of Afghanistan. Using every propaganda vehicle, the Bush administration is driving hard to control the minds and hearts of the public here and, if possible, around the world. Those who would oppose them are run over.
In a briefing, Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer warned reporters that, in times like these, "people have to watch what they say and watch what they do." CNN and other major commercial news organizations are obeying Fleischer's admonition.
During the bombing of Afghanistan, network news outlets endlessly repeated, "Taliban claims are nearly impossible to verify." CNN has ordered reporters to frame reports of civilian deaths with reminders that "the Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize" such casualties, and that "the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are connected to the Sept. 11 attacks that claimed thousands of innocent lives in the U.S."
In a special report Nov. 5 that took other media to task for letting the world know about the slaughter of innocents in Afghanistan, Fox News anchor Brit Hume said, "Civilian casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, really. Should they be as big news as they've been?"
Mara Liasson from National Public Radio agreed, "Look, war is about killing people. Civilian casualties are unavoidable."
U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone added, "I think the real problem here is that this is poor news judgment on the part of some of these news organizations. Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is that they accompany wars."
A memo circulated to editors at the Panama City, Fla., News Herald and leaked to Jim Romenesko's Media News warned: "DO NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan. DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan ... play down the civilian casualties, DO IT."
PROPAGANDA EXTRAVAGANZA
A New York Times article on Nov. 11 delineating the "Battle to Shape Public Opinion" explained in detail how the Bush administration was setting up "a round-the-clock war news bureau" in Washington, London and Islamabad to help develop a "message of the day."
The Times called the effort a "21st-century version of the muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 1940s."
The State Department brought in former advertising executive Charlotte Beers to sell the U.S. line. This message "dovetails with the domestic news management" under the supervision of Karen P. Hughes, the White House communications director. Beers holds meetings with foreign correspondents "closed to American journalists."
"We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State Department. Heavens, no.
According to the Times, the State Department and Defense Department aren't allowing any real information out about military operations. "Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, said 'American forces are engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out.'" The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote, "Substantial amounts of information about current military actions and their consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the conflict."
MOVIEGOERS, BEWARE!
This is total war, even if incredibly one-sided, and the administration has drafted Hollywood.
The heads of the Warner Brothers television studio and of the CBS and Fox broadcasting networks are actively collaborating in a scheme to spread the U.S. government's message through the movies.
The New York Times reported on Nov. 11 that several dozen top Hollywood executives met with Karl Rove, President Bush's senior adviser, to find "common ground on how the entertainment industry can contribute to the war effort, replicating in spirit if not in scope the partnership formed between filmmakers and war planners in the 1940s."
The Sunday Herald of Scotland noted, "Hollywood stars and scriptwriters are rushing to bolster the new message of patriotism, conferring with the CIA and brainstorming with the military about possible real-life terrorist attacks."
Many of the "stars" are thrilled. Actor Tom Cruise, concerned about his upcoming role as a CIA operative in his next movie, wants to show the "CIA in as positive a light as possible." Sylvester Stallone is working on the script for a fourth Rambo film in which he parachutes into Afghanistan to battle leaders of the Taliban (New York Post, Nov. 13).
You can't make this stuff up.
Michael Macedonia of the army's Simulation, Training and Instrumentation Command was enraptured with the prospect of using Hollywood as a propaganda tool. "You' re talking about screenwriters and producers. These are very brilliant, creative people. They can come up with fascinating insights very quickly," he told the Sunday Herald.
Actually, Hollywood has always been a willing tool for war propaganda. Many people know nothing about the world except what they see in war films. These are carefully planned and funded. For example, a little-known think tank, the Institute for Creative Studies at the University of Southern California, received funding of $45 million from the U.S. Army in 1999, writes the Sunday Herald.
The New York Times noted, "Efforts to create public service spots for TV and movie theaters, documentaries on terrorism and home security, live shows for American troops featuring Hollywood performers and perhaps some involvement in helping spread the American message abroad, provides an opportunity for the studios to reassert their patriotism" while being "good business."
Hollywood, as big business, is in tune with the sensibilities of the oil companies. The owners of the major studios are the same capitalists who own the defense and oil industries, which are the major beneficiaries of the war for the Middle East and Central Asia. There is no contradiction between Hollywood's goals here and Pentagon strategy. They are all profiting from this war. This is just war by other means, war on people's hearts and minds.
ATTACK ON ACADEMIA AND CULTURE
The Bush administration's minions are meanwhile on the attack against students and professors who oppose the war in Afghanistan.
The Boston Globe reported on Nov. 13 that a "conservative academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice President Dick Cheney, fired a new salvo in the culture wars by blasting 40 college professors as well as the president of Wesleyan University and others for not showing enough patriotism in the aftermath of Sept. 11."
"College and university faculty have been the weak link in America's response to the attack,'' says a report by Cheney's newly created American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The report names names and criticizes professors for making statements "short on patriotism."
Not content with creating what one professor called tactics "reminiscent of McCarthyism" against university professors, the administration has called in the intelligence agencies to beef up the attack on culture and the free expression of ideas.
On Nov. 7, FBI and Secret Service agents visited the "Secret Wars" exhibit at the Art Car Museum in Houston, Texas. Secret Wars is an exhibition investigating artistic dissent to covert operations and government secrets.
Donna Huanca, a worker at the museum, said, "It was a very scary experience. ... They were interested in where we got our funding, how many people come in in a day, what the traffic was like, how did we advertise. They let us know that they are watching us now."
Tex Kerschen, the museum's curator, said to Independent Media, "The FBI are going to move in as quickly as they can to investigate any kind of dissent."
BOMBING TELEVISION STATIONS--AGAIN
With television, movies, the print media, academia and cultural outlets on the run, the U.S. government found it still had one formidable opponent in its war on public opinion. One news service has been able to present a different view of the war in Afghanistan. Called by some "the CNN of the Middle East," Al-Jazeera is a 24-hour television station based in Qatar that reaches more than 35 million Arabs around the world, including 150,000 in the United States. The station provided the only television transmission from Afghanistan until the BBC arrived just before the fall of Kabul.
The Associated Press on Nov. 13 reported that a missile destroyed the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. While the Defense Department claimed it was targeting the building because there was supposedly an Al-Qaeda meeting going on, critics noted that it was unlikely that Al-Qaeda would have hung around Kabul after the Taliban had fled. One Al-Jazeera spokesperson said, "They know where we are located and they know what we have in our office and we also did not get any warning."
Nearby offices of the AP and the BBC in Kabul were damaged in the same attack. Pictures of correspondent William Reeve diving under his desk to avoid fall-out from the blast have been shown on BBC television. There were no military installations nearby, and the bombing in the civilian neighborhood came after Taliban forces had pulled out of the city.
Following the attack, the BBC reported Nov. 16 that Washington had "asked Qatar to rein in the influential and editorially independent Arab Al-Jazeera television station, which gives airtime to anti-American opinions." In a sharp response, Al-Jazeera said its Kabul office had been deliberately targeted by U.S. bombers, according to the British newspaper on Nov. 17. On the defensive, Air Force Director of Public Affairs Col. Brian Hoey replied, "We would not, as a policy, target news media organizations--it would not even begin to make sense."
The bombing of a Yugoslav television station in the spring of 1999 was a "different issue," Hoey said.
But it is not a different issue. It is war. The Bush administration has declared war on the truth and consciousness. It needs to generate public support for ongoing military intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia. And disinformation just isn't enough. So the military is bombing renegade media outlets while the capitalist media bombard the people with lies and disinformation.
But no amount of movies or propaganda will make U.S. youths willing recruits for a new land war in Asia. They are not going to buy it. Patriotic fervor tends to wane. Washington will lose this propaganda campaign. In a shrinking economy, working people can't afford a war that in the end helps only the oil companies, the military industries and the corporations.
Copyright Workers World Service
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