Essay: Utilize your independent media

In the first editorial we ever did at this site, we noted The Progressive's "Bring the Troops Home" (Comment for the February 2005 issue) and provided a link. Guess what? That article is no longer available at the website of The Progressive. (However C.I. did find a cache version of it.) That's not because the magazine is attempting to make the article disappear but due to the fact that they revamped their site in the spring. Hopefully, it will be up again at some point in the future. However, and here's the reason we bring it up, for this essay we could utilize numerous links. We're not going to. We're working from the print versions for this essay. Some articles are available online, some aren't (and some are available only to subscribers). We'll provide the title of the article, the author (if an author is noted), the publication and the date. If you're interested, you can search the web or you can look for the print versions.

In March of 2003, Howard Zinn noted ("A Chorus Against War, pages 19- 21, The Progessive):

AS I WRITE THIS, it looks like war. This, in spite of the obvious lack of enthusiasm in the country for the war.
[. . . ]
The Administration will not likely be stopped, though it knows its support is thin. In fact, that is undoubtedly why it is in such a hurry; it wants to go to war before the support gets any thinner.

And the administration wasn't stopped. Which is why we're now coasting into the third year of the invasion/occupation, the once hyped "cakewalk."

Following the invastion, Susan Sarandon told Ms. ("Q and A with Susan Sarandon" by Ellen Hawkes, Summer 2003):

I'm alarmed that there was so little debate in the usual forums on questions of this magnitude. By that I mean the House, the Senate and most news sources. There seemed to be more talk about Sean Penn's trip to Iraq than there was about whether we should send bombs over.

So little debate in the usual forums . . . most news sources. Say it again.

As Amy Goodman stated to Carolyn McConnell ("Going To Where The Silence Is," YES!, Spring, 2005):

The corporate media are the furtherest thing I know from objective. They beat the drums for war. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) did a study of coverage the week before and after Colin Powell gave his pitch for war at the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. Of the 393 interviews about the coming war on the four major nightly newscasts -- NBC, ABC, CBS, and the PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer -- in this critical period right before invasion, only three interviews were with anti-war representatives. That is not mainstream media. That didn't represent mainstream America, when most people were in favor of pursuing diplomacy and inspections rather than going to war. That's extreme media.

While Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest's "The Lie Factory: Only weeks after 9/11, the Bush administration set up a secrect Pentagon unit to create the case for invading Iraq . . ." (Mother Jones, January/February 2004) provides important details about the lie factory (the Pentagon's Operation of Special Plans), a larger issue isn't addressed: why was the mainstream media so willing to be fed?

As Seymour Hersh told The Progressive ("The Progressive Interview" by David Barsamian, April 2005):

Similarly, the press never tested many of the assumptions about WMDs. One of the great myths about the WMD issue is that everybody believed Iraq had them. Well, that's not true. There were a number of people in the intelligence community and the State Department who were skeptical, and many analysts in the Department of Energy were dubious about Iraq's nuclear capability. There were also people like Scott Ritter who were saying quite accurately what was going on.

Yet the mainstream media persists in the lie of "we were all wrong" -- meaning "we" as a people. And the same press rushes to point to Judith Miller. Sometimes it strikes us as though her firing was nothing but using her as a sacrificial lamb to save the system -- a deeply corrupt one.

We've said it before, we'll say it again, the war was brought to you by many cheerleaders. Even if you want to designate Judy head cheerleader, she was part of a very large squad. And Miller's TV appearances were as invited guest. Just as The New York Times made a decision to front page her questionable stories (questionable even then, outright wrong now), PBS and others made the decision to bring her on as an "expert." Now why do you suppose that was?

And when Miller wasn't taking the air waves, are we supposedly to honestly believe that the cheerleading stopped? That's not how it happened. The same networks that saw Miller as a guest worth inviting are the ones that, as the FAIR study Amy Goodman cited demonstrated, elected not to give a platform to voices opposed to the war.

Are we supposed to believe Judith Miller called all those shots? If so, it's a miracle that the whole system didn't collapse while she was serving time for contempt of court charges. As Robert Jensen pointed out "The Military's Media" in the May 2003 issue of The Progressive, Wolf Blitzer's concern on Larry King Live, March 29th, over "the U.S. bombing of a Baghdad market that killed at least fifty people" was not about those killed but about "the pictures that are going to be seen on Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabia and all the Arab satellite channels . . . further fodder for this anti-American attitude that is clearly escalating as this war continues." Was Wolfie wearing one of Bully Boy's transmitters while Judy fed him his lines?

And when, as Jensen also pointed out, Judy Woodruff stated on CNN, "We continue to marvel at what those planes can do" was she reciting a line that Judith Miller had scripted for her?

If so, it's amazing that Miller had the time to be spoon fed by the likes of Ahmed Chalabi, Scooter Libby and others, let alone report on it. Was Miller the source behind every Operation Happy Talk of the invasion/occupation? Did she write the talking points to push following every Iraqi election (or "election")?

There's no question that the adminstration ran an effective propaganda campaign, as Danny Schechter's film WMD: Weapons Of Mass Deception illustrates. In one section of the documentary, Schechter interviews Sam Gardiner "a retired Air Force colonel."

Gardiner: Every morning at 9:30 they would have the message phone call, and it would involve the White House Office of Global Communication. The Pentagon Press Office, a media advisor, the people at Central Command, and sometimes people at the State Department. And their notion for that day was to coordinate the message, and after that they would talk to the Brits, so that the message in London matched the message in Washington.
Schechter: One message, one idea, push it out into the media.
Gardiner: Right. Dominate today's message with . . . and you can almost identify by day what the message was.

But cooridnated message by the administration doesn't mean the press has to swallow (unless we're also assuming Judith Miller force fed the mainstream press one by one). As Michael Wolfe (Vanity Fair) told Schechter, "Sometimes your jaw drops and it's hard to figure out why are American journalists so, uh, maybe not even uncritical, self satisfied, I think is the word."

(Note, we're working from the script of Schechter's WMD. We've noted WMD before and it's a film you should see. We'll provide a link to Schechter's site which has buttons and graphs you can click on for more information about the documentary WMD.)

There are serious questions to be asked about the mainstream media's role in promoting this war and the firing of Judith Miller didn't dismiss them. Nor has the problem just been with the cheerleading in the lead up to the invasion. Realities in Iraq are still hidden from the people.

For the March/April issue of Clamor, Collin Yeo conducted "An Interview With Christian Parenti." He asked The Nation's Parenti, "What is the biggest difference between the American public's perception of the situation in Iraq and that of someone who has been there?" Parenti answered:

The biggest difference is that the level of chaos in Iraq is much greater than most people here think. The situation in central Iraq is really out of control and I think it's headed towards a long-term meltdown. The war there is not going to stop for years and years, whether or not the U.S. stays or goes. I'm surprised people don't realize how out of control it is. It's gotten to the point now where journalists are, for the most part, locked down in their hotels. It's very hard to mvoe around; there are very few journalists doing anything unembedded.

And things have not improved. In September, Robert Fisk offered the following to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! (note, the interview aired in October but was conducted in September):

Look, apart from the Kurdistan area, Iraq is in a state of total anarchy and chaos. No roads are safe outside Baghdad. Much of Baghdad is in insurgents hands. Only the little green zones, the armored hotel areas where the westerners live and swim, and some cases don't even leave their rooms, and that applies to many journalists, only here are people allowed to have the illusion that things are getting better, things are improving. Outside in the streets where some journalists still go, including, for example, my colleague Patrick Cockburn of the Independent and myself and the Guardian Newspaper, not most Americans though one or two.
Out in the streets where few of us go is hell on Earth. I managed to get, a couple of weeks ago, to the mortuary in the city of Baghdad. As I often go in the past, counting the bodies of midday and midsummer out in the heat. There were 26 by midday. Nine had arrived by nine in the morning. I managed to get the official figures for July for the total number of violent deaths in Baghdad alone. The figure was 1,100 violent deaths, men, women and children. Shot, butchered, knifed, executed, death squad killings. A figure which, of course is not given out by the Iraqi Health Ministry and certainly not by the occupational authorities.

Now when you read the press accounts (live from the Green Zone) are you aware of this:

Robert Fisk: The American correspondents, some of them are guarded by armed Iraqis. The New York Times has a compound with four watch towers and armed Iraqis with "NYT" New York Times on their black t-shirts. NBC lives in a hotel in the Karada District with iron grills. The A.P. lives in the Palestine Hotel with two armored walls. Very rarely do they ever venture out and never do the American staffers go in the streets. As I say, we still go out with Iraqi friends. We actually go out to lunch in restaurants in Iraq. But I think that's probably because as long as we're with Iraqis and we look at our watch and say, 20 minutes, finish the meal, half an hour, got to be out. You're ok but it's a calculated risk.

Need some more reality? As early as August 19, 2003, Riverbend was alerting readers of Baghdad Burning to the so-called "fly-paper" gambit:

I'm so angry and frustrated. Nothing is moving forward -- there is NO progress and this is just an example. The media is claiming al-Qaeda. God dman, we never HAD al-Qaeda before this occupation...fundamentalists kept their heads down. Now they are EVERYWHERE -- they "represent" the Iraqi people on Bremer's puppet council.

(Excerpted from the Spring 2005 issue of Ms., noting the publication of Riverbend's book Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq.)

It was left to Naomi Klein and Harper's Magazine to address the realities of what the US government is doing in Iraq with "Baghdad Year Zero: Pillaging Iraq In Pursuit Of A Neocon Utopia" (September, 2004). From the article:

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reform unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great the in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself.

Time and again, it's been independent media that's told the reality of Iraq. Is it any wonder that the cover of the November 28, 2005 issue of The Nation, and not the front page of The New York Times, read:

There can no longer be any doubt: The American war in Iraq -- an unprovoked, unneccsarry, unlawful invasion that has turned into a colonial-style occupation -- is a moral and political catastrophe. It has also become the single greatest threat to America's national security. . . . The Nation will not support any candidate for national office who does not make a speedy end to the American war in Iraq a major issue of his or her campaign.

The text was from their editorial in the same issue entitled "Democrats and the War" which led off with this statement, "Everything that needs to be known is now known: The reasons the Bush Administration gave for the American war in Iraq were all falsehoods or deceptions, and every day the US occupation continues deepens the very problems it was supposed to solve."

The independent media (such as those sources cited in this essay) have done a wonderful job addressing the realities of Iraq and they've done so on a limited (to put it mildly) budget. So why is it that with greater resources (read monies) available to them, the mainstream press still can't report the realities in Iraq?

It was The Nation, and not one of our "major" dailies, that ran Naomi Klein's "The Double Life Of James Baker: Bush's Envoy Has Private Interest In Iraqi Debt, Documents Reveal" (November 1, 2004). And it was Democracy Now! that had Klein on to discuss the article, not 20/20, not Dateline and not 60 Minutes (I or II). That is just one story that the mainstream hasn't been interested in. They haven't been interested in the air war. (Though, to its credit, The Washington Post appears to be willing to sniff around the topic lately.)

What have they been interested in? The New York Times was interested in killing the story on Bully Boy's bulge (as documented by David Lindorff at FAIR) right before the election. We've learned this month that there was another story that paper killed before the election, at the Bully Boy's request, the one on how he was allowing NSA to spy on American citizens without any warrants. Over at Time Magazine, they shouldn't feel left out. Matt Cooper was willing to sit on the fact that Karl Rove was taking part in the outing of Valerie Plame. Cooper knew that. He knew it in July of 2003. He could have testified to it before the election (as he would when confronted with jail time). He could have written about it before the election. He didn't do it. He covered for Karl while it mattered. The official story on that is that he was protecting his source. The official story is a joke and was before Viveca Novak passed on to Karl Rove's attorney that Patrick Fitzgerald would know about Rove and Cooper's Valerie Plame conversation. If Matty Coop was as tight-lipped as the official version would have us to believe, then are we also supposed to believe that V. Novak either dug around through Cooper's notes or planted her own wire tap to learn of Rove and Cooper's converstation?

Cooper's behavior is a howler worth noting (though we aren't expecting to hear about it from the media critic who told CJR that "the media did better in 2004" than they had in 2000). And how about our man in Insta-Access, Bob Woodward. Weighing in on CNN and NPR about the outing of Valerie Plame while never saying one word about the fact that he was one of the reporters that Plame was outed to?

There's something very sick about the way the mainstream press made the choice to carry the water for the administration and lead the charge to war. Easy lip service to falsehoods such as "We were all wrong" doesn't change that. It also doesn't hide reality from anyone who's gone beyond the mainstream media in the last few years.

The mainstream media pushed this war before it began and they've done their best to distort reality in Iraq ever since. Nailing Judith Miller to a cross doesn't alter the fact that she wasn't calling the shots for all mainstream media (or even for her paper). The firing of Miller, though possibly intended as a ritual slaughter, doesn't purge the mainstream media of it's complicity. Until the mainstream press is willing to take an honest look at their actions (including the white washing of the slaughters in Falluja -- April, 2004 and November, 2004), they can keep repeating the lie of "We were all wrong" and pinning it on the intel community. But they can't expect a healthy portion of the public who has grown to distrust them to suddenly embrace them. We've learned that, as Amy Goodman and David Goodman note in their book The Exceptions to the Rulers, they've traded access for informing the public.

In "The Military's Media," Robert Jensen noted the following on journalism:

First, clear criteria are needed to evaluate news media performance, based on what citizens in a democracy need from journalists: 1) an independent source of factual information; 2) the historical, political, and social context in which to make sense of those facts; and 3) exposure to the widest range of opinion available in the society.

If and when the mainstream media's willing to live up to those three functions, they might win back some of the trust they've destroyed.