This GRTV production by James
Corbett was first released in January 2012. In the light of the recent
media disinformation campaign in relation to Syria, we bring this
carefully researched video-documentary report to the attention of GR
readers.
As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea,
and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe,
concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a
population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.
To understand this seeming paradox,
we must first understand the centuries-long history of how media has
been used to whip the nation into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the
supposed enemies, and even to manipulate the public into believing in
causes for war that, decades later, were admitted to be completely
fictitious.
As the US and Iranian governments
escalate tensions in the already volatile Straits of Hormuz, and China
and Russia begin openly questioning Washington’s interference in their
internal politics, the world remains on a knife-edge of military
tension. Far from being a dispassionate observer of these developments,
however, the media has in fact been central to increasing those tensions
and preparing the public to expect a military confrontation. But as the
online media rises to displace the traditional forms by which the
public forms its understanding of the world, many are now beginning to
see first hand how the media lies the public into war.…
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The term “yellow journalism” was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven, and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In one of the most egregious examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s papers widely trumpeted the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.
In many ways, the phrase infamously
attributed to Hearst in reply to his illustrator “You furnish the
pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” apocryphal as the story may be,
nevertheless perfectly encodes the method by which the public would be
led to war time and again through the decades.
The US was drawn into World War I by the
sinking of the Lusitania, a British ocean liner carrying American
passengers that was torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of
Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its passengers. What the public was not
informed about at the time, of course, was that just one week before the
incident, then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written to
the President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to
attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of
embroiling the United States with Germany.” Nor did reports of the
attack announce that the ship was carrying rifle
ammunition and other military supplies. Instead, reports once again
emphasized that the attack was an out-of-the-blue strike by a maniacal
enemy, and the public was led into the war.
The US involvement in World War II was
likewise the result of deliberate disinformation. Although the Honolulu
Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been decipheredby that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary the
week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt “how we
should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the
first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” the public
were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been
completely unforeseen. Just last month, a newly-declassified memo emerged
showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese attack on
Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet the
history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise
attack.
In August 1964, the public was told that
the North Vietnamese had attacked a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin
on two separate occasions. The attacks were portrayed as a clear example
of “communist aggression” and a resolution was soon passed in Congress authorizing President Johnson to begin deploying US forces in Vietnam. In 2005, an internal NSA study was
released concluding that the second attack in fact never took place. In
effect, 60000 American servicemen and as many as three million
Vietnamese, let alone as many as 500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost
their lives because of an incident that did not occur anywhere but in
the imagination of the Johnson administration and the pages of the American media.
In 1991, the world was introduced to the emotional story of Nayirah, a Kuwaiti girl who testified about the atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.
What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm,
Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador. Once again, the public was whipped into a frenzy of
hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the documented atrocities that it
had actually committed on segments of its own population with weapons
supplied to them by the United States itself, but on the basis of an
imaginary story told to the public via their televisions, orchestrated
by a pr firm.
In the lead-up to the war on Iraq, the
American media infamously took the lead in framing the debate about the
Iraqi government’s weapons of mass destruction NOT as a question of
whether or not they even existed, but as a question of where they had
been hidden and what should be done to disarm them. The New York Times
led the way with Judith Miller‘s
now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been
based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of
the media fell into line with
the NBC Nightly News asking “what precise threat Iraq and its weapons
of mass destruction pose to America”, and Time debating whether Hussein
was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction.” Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on
before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their
existence as indisputable fact. We now know that in fact the stockpiles
did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country
into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush
administration ever received over this documented war crime was some polite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit.
Remarkably, the public at large has
seemingly learned nothing from all of these documented historical
manipulations. If anything, the media has become even bolder in its
attempts to manipulate the public’s perceptions, perhaps emboldened by
the fact that so few in the audience seem willing to question the
picture that is being painted for them on the evening news.
Later that year, CNN aired footage of a bombed out Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, falsely labeling it as footage of Gori, which they said had been attacked by the Russians.
In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image of
a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who
assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government. An
uncropped version of the same photograph displayed on the LA Times’
website, however, revealed that the photo in fact came from a rally in
support of Ahmedinejad.
In August of 2011, the BBC ran footage of
what they claimed was a celebration in Tripoli’s Green Square. When
sharp-eyed viewers noticed that the flags in the footage were in fact
Indian flags, the BBC was forced to admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of Tripoli.
Also that month, CNN reported on
a story from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claiming that
eight infants in incubators had died in a hospital in Hama when Syrian
authorities cut off power in the area. Some news sites evencarried pictures of the infants. The images were later admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to back up the accusations.
As breathtaking as all of these lies,
manipulations and so-called “mistakes” are, they in and of themselves
don’t represent the only functions of the media for the war machine.
Now, the US government is taking the lead in becoming more and more
directly involved with the shaping of the media message on war
propaganda, and the general public is becoming even more ensnared in a
false picture of the world through the Pentagon’s own lens.
In 2005, the Bush White House admitted to
producing videos that were designed to look like news reports from
legitimate independent journalists, and then feeding those reports to
media outlets as prepackaged material ready to air on the evening news.
When the Government Accountability Office ruled that these fake news
reports in fact constituted illegal covert propaganda, the White House
simply issued a memo declaring the practice to be legal.
In April 2008, the New York Times revealed a
secret US Department of Defense program that was launched in 2002 and
involved using retired military officers to implant Pentagon talking
points in the media. The officers were presented as “independent
analysts” on talk shows and news programs, although they had been
specially briefed beforehand by the Pentagon. In December of 2011, the
DoD’s own Inspector General released a report concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government policies and regulations.
Earlier this year, it was revealed the
the US government had contracted with HBGary Federal to develop
software that create fake social media accounts in order to steer public
opinion and promote propaganda on popular websites. The federal
contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force Base in
Florida.
As the vehicle through which information
from the outside world is captured, sorted, edited and transmitted into
our homes, the mass media has the huge responsibility of shaping and
informing our understanding of events to which we don’t have first-hand
access. This is an awesome responsibility in even the most ideal
conditions, with diligent reporters guided by trustworthy editors doing
their level best to report the most important news in the most
straightforward way.
But in a media landscape where a handful of companies own
virtually all of the print, radio and television media in each nation,
the only recourse the public has is to turn away from the mainstream
media altogether. And that is precisely what is happening.
As study after study and report after report has
shown, the death of the old media has accelerated in recent years, with
more and more people abandoning newspapers and now even television as
their main source of news. Instead, the public is increasingly turning
toward online sources for their news and information, something that is
necessarily worrying for the war machine itself, a system that can only
truly flourish when the propaganda arm is held under monopolistic
control.
But as citizens turn away from the New
York Times and toward independent websites, many run and maintained by
citizen journalists and amateur editors, the system that has
consolidated its control over the minds of the public for generations
seems to finally be showing signs that it may not be invincible.
Surely this is not to say that online
media is impervious to the defects that have made the traditional media
so unreliable. Quite the contrary. But the difference is that online,
there is still for the time being relative freedom of choice at the
individual level. While internet freedom exists, individual readers and
viewers don’t have to take the word of any website or pundit or
commentator on any issue. They can check the source documentation
themselves, except, perhaps not coincidentally, on the websites of the
traditional media bastions, which tend not to link source material and
documentation in their articles.
Hence the SOPA Act, Protect IP, the US government’s attempts to seize websites at the domain name level, and all of the other concerted attacks we have seen on internet freedoms in recent years.
Because ultimately, an informed and
engaged public is far less likely to go along with wars waged for power
and profit. And as the public becomes better informed about the very
issues that the media has tried to lie to them about for so long, they
realize that the answer to all of the mainstream media’s war
cheerleading and blatant manipulation is perhaps simpler than we ever
suspected: All we have to do is turn them off.
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