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News :: Media |
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Casualties Of War -- First Truth, Then Conscience |
Current rating: 0 |
by Norman Solomon
(No verified email address) |
21 Mar 2003
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"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices," Voltaire wrote in 1767. |
The national media echo chamber is not receptive to conscience. On television, the voices are usually loud and facile. People often seem to be shouting. In contrast, the human conscience is close to a whisper. Easily unheard.
Now, the biggest media outlets are in a frenzy. The networks are at war. Every cable news channel has enlisted. At the bottom of FM radio dials, NPR has been morphing into National Pentagon Radio.
With American tax dollars financing the war on Iraq, the urgent need for us to get in touch with our consciences has never been more acute. The rationales for this war have been thoroughly shredded. (To see how the sordid deceptions and outright lies from the Bush team have been demolished by my colleagues at the Institute for Public Accuracy, take a look at the http://www.accuracy.org website.) The propaganda edifice of the war rests on a foundation no more substantial than voluminous hot air.
"Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities has the power to make you commit injustices," Voltaire wrote in 1767. The quotation is sometimes rendered with different wording: "As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities."
Either way, a quarter of a millennium later, Voltaire's statement is all too relevant to this moment. The Bush administration is proud to turn urban areas of Iraq into hell -- defying most of the U.N. Security Council and violating the U.N. Charter -- all with the righteous claim that the United States is enforcing U.N. Security Council resolutions.
As the apt cliche says, truth is the first casualty of war. But another early casualty is conscience.
Rarely explored in news media, the capacity for conscience is what makes us human. Out of all the differences between people and other animals, Darwin wrote, "the moral sense of conscience is by far the most important."
Voltaire contended that "the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience" and added: "With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear of death." Franz Kafka was alluding to a similar truth when he wrote: "You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering that you could have avoided."
Conscience is smaller than a single pixel, and much less visible. You can't see it on a TV screen. Or hear it. Or smell it. Or taste it. You can only feel it.
That's not a marketable sensation. The huge news outlets have swung behind slaughter in Iraq, and the dissent propelled by conscience is not deemed to be very newsworthy. The mass media are filled with bright lights and sizzle, with high production values and degraded human values, boosting the war effort while the U.S. government implements a massive crime against humanity.
In May 1952, the playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee: "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."
In 2003, this year's media fashions are increasingly adorning the conformist models of pseudo-patriotism. For many Americans, the gap between what they believe and what's on their TV sets is the distance between their truer selves and their fearful passivity.
In the domestic media siege being maintained by top-notch spinners and shrewd political advisers at the White House, conscience is in the cross hairs. They aim to intimidate, stampede and suppress the many millions of Americans who recognize the deranged and murderous character of the war makers in Washington.
Half a century ago, Albert Einstein urged: "Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it." Today, one way or another, the mass media are going along with the Bush administration's demands that we not challenge the U.S. military actions now taking uncounted lives in Iraq.
Conscience is not on the military's radar screen, and it's not on our TV screen. But media messages do not define the limits and possibilities of conscience. We do.
Norman Solomon is co-author of the new book "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You." For an excerpt and other information, go to: http://www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target |
See also:
http://www.accuracy.org
http://www.fair.org/
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ACTION ALERT: In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones For Official Views |
by FAIR
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
21 Mar 2003
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Network newscasts, dominated by current and former U.S. officials, largely exclude Americans who are skeptical of or opposed to an invasion of Iraq, a new study by FAIR has found.
Looking at two weeks of coverage (1/30/03-2/12/03), FAIR examined the 393 on-camera sources who appeared in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The study began one week before and ended one week after Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5 presentation at the U.N., a time that saw particularly intense debate about the idea of a war against Iraq on the national and international level.
More than two-thirds (267 out of 393) of the guests featured were from the United States. Of the U.S. guests, a striking 75 percent (199) were either current or former government or military officials. Only one of the official U.S. sources-- Sen. Edward Kennedy (D.-Mass.)-- expressed skepticism or opposition to the war. Even this was couched in vague terms: "Once we get in there how are we going to get out, what’s the loss for American troops are going to be, how long we're going to be stationed there, what’s the cost is going to be," said Kennedy on NBC Nightly News (2/5/03).
Similarly, when both U.S. and non-U.S. guests were included, 76 percent (297 of 393) were either current or retired officials. Such a predominance of official sources virtually assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be underrepresented. Of all official sources, 75 percent (222 of 297) were associated with either the U.S. or with governments that support the Bush administration's position on Iraq; only four out of those 222, or 2 percent, of these sources were skeptics or opponents of war.
Twenty of the 297 official sources (7 percent) represented the government of Iraq, while a further 19 (6 percent) represented other governments-- mostly friendly to the U.S.-- who have expressed doubts or opposition to the U.S.'s war effort. (Another 34 sources, representing 11 percent of officials, were current or former U.N. employees. Although members of the U.N. inspection teams made statements that were both critical of Iraq's cooperation and supportive of further inspections, because of their official position of neutrality on the question of war they were not counted as skeptics.) Of all official sources, 14 percent (43 of 297) represented a position skeptical or opposed to the U.S. war policy. (Sources were coded as skeptics/critics if either their statements or their affiliations put them in that category; for example, all French government officials were counted as skeptics, regardless of the content of their quote.)
The remaining 96 sources-- those without a current or former government connection-- had slightly more balanced views; 26 percent of these non-official sources took a skeptical or critical position on the war. Yet, at a time when 61 percent of respondents in a CBS poll (2/5-6/03) were saying that they felt the U.S. should "wait and give the United Nations and weapons inspectors more time," only sixteen of the 68 U.S. guests (24 percent) who were not officials represented such views.
Half of the non-official U.S. skeptics were "persons in the street"; five of them were not even identified by name. Only one U.S. source, Catherine Thomason of Physicians for Social Responsibility, represented an anti-war organization. Of all 393 sources, only three (less than 1 percent) were identified with organized protests or anti-war groups.
Overall, 68 sources, or 17 percent of the total on-camera sources, represented skeptical or critical positions on the U.S.'s war policy-- ranging from Baghdad officials to people who had concerns about the timing of the Bush administration's war plans. The percentage of skeptical sources ranged from 21 percent at PBS (22 of 106) to 14 percent at NBC (18 of 125). ABC (16 of 92) and CBS (12 of 70) each had 17 percent skeptics.
ACTION:
Please urge ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS to broaden the sources they rely on in coverage of the Iraq crisis.
CONTACT:
ABC World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
PeterJennings (at) abcnews.com
CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
evening (at) cbsnews.com
NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
nightly (at) nbc.com
PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
Phone: 703-998-2150
newshour (at) pbs.org
As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair (at) fair.org with your correspondence.
For tables, see http://www.fair.org/reports/iraq-sources.html |
