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Today's
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November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
November 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
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Harry Browne
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|
November
26, 2003
Media
and War
Bringing
It All Back Home
By
BRUCE JACKSON
(Keynote address at the "Media
and War" symposium, University at Buffalo, 17-18 November,
2003)
Definitions
I want to take a moment to consider the
two words the pairing of which occasions this symposium: war
and media.
"War" seems easy enough to
define or delimit. Most of the things we call "wars"
could be described as a state of belligerence between two entities,
or a campaign a large entity wages against a condition it perceives
as systemically harmful.
Corporations have price wars. Countries
have wars for territory or natural resources. Portions of a country
war against other portions of the same country over ideas, over
religion, over race, over property. The U.S. government has in
recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse,
poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets,
legislation, offices, officials, letterhead--everything necessary
in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.
War is grounded in the notion of triumph
and defeat. It is zero-sum.
Germany and Japan ended WWII by agreeing
to surrender unconditionally, after which we rewarded them by
helping them reestablish the industrial bases we had recently
destroyed.
The war in Korea ended with all parties
agreeing to go back to where they were before the war started.
The war in Vietnam ended with a truce, which let the US detach
itself, after which the North Vietnamese finished what had started
however many years earlier.
All wars end with somebody winning and
somebody losing, or nobody winning or losing.
The meaning of the term "Media"
depends on who's using it.
To a biologist, "media" is
the stuff bug cultures grow in. Perhaps you remember"agar-agar"
in high school biology with which you grew bacteria colonies
in a Petri dish. To a computer engineer or librarian, "media"
is devices that store and transmit information: discs, cables,
satellite signals.
University departments of Media Study
study media, but only selected kinds. None of them studies bacterial
cultures or the ways electronic signals are transmitted or the
magnetic and optical methods for preserving information. Few
Media Study departments study soap operas, print journalism,
theatrical movies, blogs, email, radio, billboards, broadcast
news, or the world wide web. Some of that work in the university
is done by English departments, journalism departments, communications
departments. Most of it isn't done at all. We just don't spend
much time looking at those behaviors, at what media people do
and what might be the meaning of what they do.
For a symposium such as this, I would
take the term "media" to include, at a minimum: print
journalism, broadcast and cable journalism, web journalism, network
docudrama, the web itself, email, and artistic and documentary
renditions of war-related material of various kinds that use
any of those media as raw materials.
A few years ago, books would have had
no place in a discussion of the media and war because they took
so long to appear--a year from typescript to book on the shelf
was not uncommon. But how can we talk of the media and the Jessica
Lynch saga, say, without including the book ghost-written for
her by a disgraced ex-New York Times reporter that was published
a week ago today and which got huge coverage in the November
17 Time magazine? (The cover of which featured a close-up cover
picture of her that bore an uncanny resemblance to porn star
Traci Lords.)
Time and technology
Technology has changed the way book publishing
works, as it has changed everything else in the world of media.
Books can now be on the stands within days from delivery of a
formatted manuscript, and often are. The authors' introduction
in Embedded, an interesting collection of oral histories done
last summer with reporters who worked in this year's war in Iraq,
is datelined September 2003; I got a hardback copy from <Amazon.Com>
in early October 2003.
In World War II, it could be weeks before
a war photographer's images reached a newspaper's pages. In Vietnam,
videotape from reporters in the field had to be flown back to
the US for broadcast. Rolls of 35mm film shot by Associated Press
photographers were sent to Saigon for developing, prints were
selected by editors there, then sent by radio signal (15 minutes
per image) to Japan, and then sent on to editors in the US and
London by undersea cable and landline.
There were no wires needed in Iraq. Video
was sent to stateside editors via satellite, and reporters were
able to go on camera live. Most photographers used Nikon or Canon
digital, not film cameras, so there were no rolls of film needing
developing and printing. The sent their pictures to their editors
in the US from wherever they were, using a a laptop and a BGAN
satellite phone. The editor of Getty Images said he could have
images on the wire to clients 15 minutes after they were uploaded
to the satellite by the photographer in the Iraq desert.
Governments
All governments in all wars have used
all the means at their disposal to put their own motives, decisions
and actions, and the actions of their military forces, in the
best possible light. They have likewise used all the means at
their disposal to put the motives, decisions and actions of their
opponents and their opponents' military forces in the worst possible
light.
For governments at war, the media is
an instrument of war or an element in war that is to be controlled.
When the US press was dutifully reporting false information from
the military about their success shooting down Scud missiles
in the Gulf War, "then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney
said, 'I do not look on the press as an asset. Frankly, I look
on it as a problem to be managed." Dwight David Eisenhower,
supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II, famously
said, "Public opinion wins wars."
Censorship
The media bring our wars home, but only
rarely have they been able to do it in complete freedom. In World
Wars I and II, all news stories and all photographs went through
military censors. The WWI Sedition Act made it a crime to disparage
the government, and Woodrow Wilson imposed what he called voluntary
censorship on the press: they didn't have to sign it, but if
they didn't they wouldn't get any information or access.
In World War II, the military would not
permit the American public to see a photograph of a dead American
soldier until 21 months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
and Germany's declaration of war against the United States. At
that point they decided pictures of dead soldiers would help
mobilize public opinion.
The press operated without government
censorship or control the first few months of the Korean War,
which started June 25, 1950, but General Douglas MacArthur disliked
the gloomy stories appearing in American newspapers about military
disasters. He said people who wrote and published those stories
were "traitors" and in December 1950 he imposed strict
military censorship which continued through the end of the war
three years later.
Lyndon Johnson tried three times to get
US government officials to start censoring the media in Vietnam,
but he got nowhere: officials wouldn't do it. There were too
many foreign journalists on the ground who could not be controlled
by the US, and the genie was already out of the bottle.
His successors fared better: every US
war between Vietnam and the current war in Iraq was heavily censored.
President's Reagan and Bush the Elder ordered journalists kept
out of Grenada, Panama, the first Gulf War, and they were.
Vietnam is often called our only uncensored
war, but that only means that the government wasn't vetting the
pictures and words. Governments aren't the only censors. Writers
and photographers will tell you that editors and publishers are
often frustrating and capricious gatekeepers. Editors and publishers
censor stories and images because of patriotic feelings or political
interests or because of their sense of the public's taste. When
reporters and photographers learn that certain kinds of stories
or images are unacceptable in the editorial suite, they censor
themselves. They stop filing or transmitting such stories and
images.
In coverage of the Vietnam War, no bodies
of dead Americans were shown on US network television until the
Tet offensive of 1968. The absence of images of American dead
the previous five years resulted from media executives' choice,
not the government's restrictions. Even after they started showing
bodies at Tet, gore was minimal. Gore is minimal now. You have
seen nothing on any television newscast that gives you any idea
what war does to human bodies.
Both of our wars in Iraq were, on American
television, largely bloodless. They came across as performance
space for media stars, the punched-out phrases of Wolf Blitzer,
in whose reports all items of information had exactly the same
weight, the same value, and all violence was small and at a distance.
They were often more like computer games than people killing
people.
The media is not at all homogeneous in
the way it tells us about war. Philip Knightley writes in his
classic study of the press at war, The First Casualty, about
New York Times reporter Harrison E. Salisbury, the "first
correspondent from a major United States newspaper to go to North
Vietnam." Salisbury described what it was like seeing US
planes drop bombs on civilian targets in Hanoi in 1966. "The
Pentagon called him 'Ho Chi Salisbury of the Hanoi Times.' The
Washington Post ...said the Salisbury was Ho Chi Minh's new weapon
in the war.... The Pulitzer Prize jury recommended him for a
prize by a vote of four to one, but the Pulitzer Advisory Board
rejected the recommendation by six votes to five."
Lately, there have been rumblings of
increasing friction between the US military and the press in
Iraq. The Baghdad briefer turned away a journalist's question
last week saying, "I refuse to answer a morbid question."
What else is there in war other than
morbid questions?
Synechdoche
The daily press, the immediate media,
is superb at synecdoche, at giving us a small thing that stands
for a much larger thing. Reporters on the ground, embedded or
otherwise, can tell us about or send us pictures of what happened
in that place at that time among those people. The overarching
theory rationalizing the great expense and effort that goes into
those little stories is they somehow give us access to the big
story, the big picture, what is really going on. Otherwise, they
are of no more importance or interest than, say a story about
an RV wreck in Montana, a tenement fire in Chicago, a homicide
in Boston or Buffalo. One story among an infinitude of other
stories.
But synecdoche works only if the part
really does stand for the whole. And that is something you often
cannot know until long after the moment.
In an eloquent description of what he
saw in the assault on Omaha Beach in Normandy in June 1944, the
event that marked the beginning of the final Allied assault against
Nazi Germany, correspondent Morley Safer (in the recent PBS documentary
"Reporting America at War") described what he saw as
an disaster, a slaughter that accomplished little. Most of his
fellow correspondents who took part in the landing thought the
same. The military brass, Safer said, claimed otherwise, that
the operation was a huge success. And, that time, Safer said,
the brass was in fact correct. The D-Day landing on the French
coast was a huge success. When you're there, Safer said, "this
is all you see." And he put his hands next to his face,
like a horse's blinders, and projected his hands out, marking
a long, narrow trapezoid of restricted vision.
Media's attention
span
War is big and there are only so many
reporters and only so many places for their words and images
to appear. Choices are made constantly.
What makes a story a story? The day he
takes over The Enquirer, Charles Foster Kane, protagonist of
Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, looks at the competition paper,
the Chronicle, and says to the editor he is about to fire, "The
"Chronicle" has a two-column headline, Mr. Carter.
Why haven't we?"
"There is no news big enough,"
Carter says..
"If the headline is big enough,"
Kane says, "it makes the news big enough.
Sometimes a story changes the way the
media deal with other stories. After the My Lai story broke,
wrote Philip Knightley in The First Casualty, "the media,
especially in the United States, decided that the war was all
but over. The amount of space and time devoted to it began decline....In
1968, at the height of the Tet offensive, there were 637 accredited
correspondents [in Saigon]; in 1969, 467; in 1970, 392; in 1971,
355; in 1972, 295. By mid-1974, only thirty-five correspondents
remained, mostly American and Japanese. All the correspondents
I have spoken with who were in Vietnam during this period remarked
that it became noticeably more difficult, from 1969 on, to get
their stories used. ABC and NBC both told their Saigon staffs
and free-lancers in that year that the story would now be the
negotiations in Paris and that film footage from Vietnam should
be angled to the withdrawal of the American forces."
Media impact
Perhaps the seven key media moments from
the Vietnam war were these: CBS reporter Morley Safer's story
from a village south of Da Nang where US troops torched 150 houses
while the villagers huddled in terror; Walter Cronkite's personal
note during the 1968 Tet offensive saying that the war was lost
and it was time to negotiate; Eddie Adams's photograph of the
Saigon police chief shooting to death a suspected Vietcong on
the streets of Saigon; Nick Ut's photograph of a 9-year-old girl
running down a road, her skin burnt off by napalm; Malcolm Browne's
photograph of a Buddhist monk who had just set himself afire
to protest the war; Seymour Hersh's My Lai articles; and Ronald
Haeberle's photographs of the My Lai massacre that subsequently
appeared in Life magazine.
Safer said of his village burning story:"This
wouldn't have happened in World War II, or if it happened it
wouldn't have been photographed, and if it had been photographed
it would have been censored."
Which suggests something about media
and war: it's not just that events happen and the media documents
and presents them. There is a third element: what the public
is ready to accept, what the public wants to know. It is not
at all clear how much the media influences public opinion and
how much public opinion influences the media.
The US military still blames the media
for stories and images that turned the American public against
the war in Vietnam. But many media historians say it's the other
way around: the stories were there all along, but the media didn't
start using them until public opinion had shifted because of
the increasing cost in American lives.
The Army's trial in 1969 of Lieutenant
William Calley, who oversaw the massacre of an entire village
by his company of infantry on March 16, 1968, was virtually ignored
by the American press. What happened in that village came to
light only because Washington-based free-lance investigative
reporter Seymour Hersh heard about it and wrote about it. Nobody
would take his stories. Then his next-door neighbor, who ran
a small wire service, agreed to put them out. At first, hardly
any paper was willing to touch them. Then, perhaps because of
increasing public dislike for the war after the 1968 Tet offensive,
public interest grew. The media followed the public. Hersh's
stories got more play, Life magazine published Ron Haeberle's
photographs. My Lai went into our vocabulary.
The University of Maryland's Program
on International Policy Attitudes and Knowledge Networks, Misperceptions,
the Media and the Iraq War did seven separate nationwide polls
between January and September 2003. They found that Americans
have major misperceptions about the Iraq war, and that the degree
of misperception and support for the war correlated closely with
which television station they watched most. "Those who primarily
watch Fox News are significantly more likely to have misperceptions,
while those who primarily listen to NPR or watch PBS are significantly
less likely."
What the study could not determine was
whether the watchers of Fox supported the war because of the
misinformation they got from Fox or if they watched Fox because
it presented the information they wanted to see and hear. I'd
bet on both: the media is making choices all the time, and so
are we.
The padded crotch -mission accomplished
aircraft carrier landing
I just mentioned several key media moments
in the Vietnam War, moments that either influenced public opinion
or provided images for what the public was thinking.
The two key American media moments in
Iraq II were very different. Both were absurd: the coverage of
Bush's "Mission Accomplished" landing on the carrier
Abraham Lincoln and the Jessica Lynch saga.
On May 2, 2003, an S-3B jet with President
George W. Bush in the second seat landed on the deck of the Abraham
Lincoln. Buch got out of the plane on the side away from the
camera, where he took off his helmet and had his hair combed.
He came around the front of the plane, smiling in a body-fitting
flight suit, the pilot's helmet tucked under his arm. He looked
all the world like a dashing young hero. He walked through a
lane of saluting deckhands in color-coordinated uniforms (yellow,
green, purple, red) strutted across the deck, and later made
a speech about this day marking the end of the major combat in
Iraq. Behind and above him, draped across the front of the ship's
bridge, was a huge banner that read "Mission Accomplished."
The Abraham Lincoln? Well, if you were
the world's new Great Emanicpator which aircraft carrier would
you choose to give your victory speech? The only things missing
were the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing "Battle Hymn of
the Republic" and "Let My People Go."
CNN played the landing and strutting
again and again and again. It was on all the evening broadcast
news programs, even "The NewsHour" on PBS. It was great
theater. The pundits said that evening and on the Sunday morning
talk shows that it would surely provide powerful images for the
Bush reelection campaign.
But then it unraveled, and another medium
was largely responsible for it: writers on the web began pointing
out that the last time Bush had been in the cockpit of a jet
fighter was just before he went AWOL for the final year of the
National Guard hitch that kept him out of Vietnam. They didn't
just say it, they provided documents to prove it. And that when
all that great theater happened on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln
the ship was only 39 miles off San Diego--which meant he could
have made the trip just as quickly by helicopter. And that the
huge carrier had been positioned so it would show open sea behind
the president rather than the clearly visible San Diego coastline
you saw if you turned your head.
The landing quickly became a skit on
"Saturday Night Live"; it was hugely popular and has
been rebroadcast several times. As the deaths in Iraq continued
to mount, the "mission accomplished" banner became
more and more embarrassing. A few weeks ago, the White House
press officer disclaimed responsibility for it, saying that Bush's
media team had nothing to do with the banner, that it was the
sailors' idea. Apparently that didn't sit well with the crew
of the Abraham Lincoln: someone leaked that the the White House
had manufactured the banner and delivered it to the ship.
It is unlikely we'll be seeing much footage
of Carrier Pilot George in the campaign. It's too easily ridiculed
and satirized.
The Mission Accomplished Carrier Landing
was perhaps perfect example of the media finding itself pressed
in government service--in this case not pursuit of the war, but
a political campaign. What they told us was news turned out to
be an infomercial.
The Jessica Lynch
saga
The Jessica Lynch saga, like the EverReady
Bunny, keeps going and going and going.
In an article on the Index on Censorship
web site, Nicholas von Hoffman pointed out that when peace demonstrator
Rachel Corrie was killed by a bulldozer operator in Gaza it "was
a one-day story. She might as well have been a suicide bomber.
In contrast there is Private Jessica Lynch, the wounded soldier
rescued from her fiendish Iraqi captors by the derring-do of
the night-raiding US Army Rangers who braved death to snatch
this young woman to safety.
"Thanks to the foresight of the
military, an army TV cameraman was brought along lest these heroic
doings go unrecorded. For several days afterwards Jessica and
her friends dominated all the US news channels. It remained for
Canada's Toronto Star to discover that there were no guards preventing
Private Lynch from leaving the hospital, only a group of non-fiendish
Iraqi medics doing their best to heal her wounds. The paper wrote
that 'the so-called daring rescue was essentially a Hollywood-style
stunt'.
"A few weeks later the BBC did a
full expose of the whole mendacious episode, but apart from a
quick mention on CNN, a story in the Washington Post and an indignant
column in the  Los Angeles Times, the business was ignored
by the mass media."
"Once back in this country,"
said Daniel Schor on "All Things Considered" on November
10, "Pfc. Lynch became a hot-ticket item for the media.
Every news executive sought to become embedded in her adventure....Jessica
Lynch will be all over the media in coming weeks, interviewed
by Diane Sawyer on ABC, Katie Couric on NBC, the David Letterman
show and much, much more, as they say in the television business.
"In her ABC interview, Pfc. Lynch
says the military used her capture and rescue to sway public
support for the Iraq war. With mounting casualties in Iraq and
mounting doubts about the war, the creation of a heroic icon
could not have come at a better time for the military. Pfc. Lynch
is making a great contribution to the military-media complex."
The real story in the Jessica Lynch story
is about the media itself: how American print and electronic
reporters and editors were duped and used by the military. And
how even after the fraud was revealed by Canadian and British
reporters they remain unwilling or unable to let it go.
"With admirable humility,"
said a November 14 Buffalo News editorial, "she does not
call herself a hero." Admirable humility about what? Does
the Buffalo News refer to your 'admirable humility' because you
don't call yourself a linebacker for the NFL or a movie star?
What humility is required in not claiming to be something you
and everyone else knows you aren't and weren't and won't ever
be?
The Jessica Lynch story is a classic
Western: the cavalry going in to rescue the feisty blue-eyed
blonde-haired very white maiden from the rapacious dark-skinned
savages. Even the rhetoric is out of a Western: every single
newspaper and magazine article I've seen about the event refers
to the "ambush." An ambush is where someone hides and
surprises you. There was no ambush. Jessica Lynch was injured
and captured because the captain leading her convoy got lost
and drove into Nasiriyah, a town in total control of Iraqi troops.
If you go into the lion's den you can't fault the lion for being
there and you certainly can't call what the lion does to you
an ambush. You got done by the lion because of your incompetence
or stupidity, maybe, but not because of an ambush. But "ambush"
makes for a much better story than stupid or incompetent, it
fits that Western movie model, it makes for a much better legend.
Legend doesn't care about truth; legend
is about itself. What the media have done with Jessica Lynch
was explained by the newspaper editor in John Ford's The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance. He shreds a young reporter's true story
about an event everyone thinks happened very differently. "This
is the West, sir" the editor says. "When the legend
becomes fact, print the legend."
Other media
I've been talking thus far about mainstream
media, big money media, big institution media. Media that has
a lot at stake and fights like hell to get attention and make
money and does anything it can not to fall out of official favor.
But that's not the only media out there.
The others are, I think, becoming more and more important. Smaller,
thoughtful publications that, without the pressure of or desire
to get data out immediately take time to check things carefully
or think about what they mean. Smart radio from NPR. Pacifica
and "Democracy Now." And, most important of all, the
web, which in this war frequently carried around the globe and
made accessible information the military and politicians had
successfully kept out of the eyes of the mainline press and information
the mainline press thought unseemly for us to see or too complicated
for us to handle.
While the New York Times was front-paging
Judith Miller's rewrites of handouts from Ahmad Chalabi and the
Pentagon about the WMD that were absolutely positively certainly
in Iraq, websters were reading Robert Fisk's columns from The
Independent about what was happening in Baghdad and Uri Avnery's
articles about the struggle to end the violence in Israel. While
the print and television press were rewriting government handouts
about John Ashcroft's domestic war on terrorism as if it were
government as usual, web sites like TomPaine, CounterPunch, Index
on Censorship, Black Commentator and Civil Rights Watch were
publishing tough, smart articles analyzing the war Ashcroft was
waging was on the Bill of Rights. While the mainstream press
all but ignored the Refusenik trials in Israel, the web offered
detailed reports of defense and prosecution positions and statements.
Great stuff available only on the web, free and open to anybody
who can get to a computer.
The web continues to be a source of important
photographs you see nowhere else. The one that stays with me
is an older man holding a pretty girl who is maybe eight years
old. She wears a purple coat and green pants. If you couldn't
see her legs you'd think she was sweetly sleeping. But you can
see her legs, which are ripped and bloody. Her right foot is
blown away, just a bit of the heel still hanging from her leg
by a small strip of bloody skin.
That photograph never, to my knowledge,
appeared on American television or in the American print press.
When the BBC posted the photograph, they cropped the right side
so you couldn't see the severed foot. Were it not for the medium
of the web, hardly anyone here would have seen it, or known of
it, or of others like it. Were it not for those pictures, the
impact of the missiles and bombs would have been videogames and
words.
All those articles and pictures are there
right now. If you weren't interested in them yesterday, you might
be tomorrow, and when you are, they'll be there for you. That
kind of media access never existed before, and we are seeing
the mere beginning of its potential.
What reporters see
The more I think and learn about this
the more questions I have about it. War is such a big word; it
is a word for historians, theoreticians, generals, politicians.
War is an abstraction.
Soldiers and reporters do not live or
work in abstraction. No soldier who goes into battle fights a
war; no reporter sees a war. They do this thing, on this day,
in this place, and tomorrow it's something else in some other
place. Soldiers and reporters deal with specificity, with the
particular: a trail, a tree, a sound, a piece of metal with which
someone kills or mutilates someone, which might kill you.
"The first rough draft of history,"
Washington Post publisher Philip L. Graham called it. That's
a line that journalists offer in pride and by way of explanation
of error and imperfection. "We're the first rought draf
of history. You wouldn't have anything if it weren't for us,"
they say, and they're right. And, "Don't expect us to apply
the polish, to cut away the trash, to extract the meaning. Because
that's your job, not ours."
And they're right about that, too: the
judgments about what matters and what doesn't, the determination
of meaning, the decisions about where we go from here--that's
our job, not theirs.
Bruce Jackson,
SUNY Distinguished Professor and Samuel P. Capen Professor
of American Culture at University at Buffalo, edits the web journal
BuffaloReport.com.
His most recent book is Emile
de Antonio in Buffalo (Center Working Papers). Jackson
is also a contributor to The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. He can be reached at: bjackson@buffalo.edu
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime:
Was It Really a Golden Age?
Saul Landau
Words
of War
Noam Chomsky
Invasion
as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy
Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills
Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith
Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees
Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins
M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory
Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete
Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil
Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?
William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics
Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First
Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners
Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly
Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review
of Bush in Babylon
Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq
Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions
Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?
David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead
Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film
Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam
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