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April 25, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
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by Alexander
Cockburn
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The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
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April 25, 2002
US Media Interests:
Champions of
Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
By John Stanton and Wayne
Madsen
A crisis without precedent is underway in the
United States. And its consequences will be far graver than
those wrought by the U.S. presidential election of 2000 and
the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The collapse of
the Jeffersonian "free and uncensored press" in America
endangers the liberties of all Americans and, arguably, citizens
from all walks of life around the globe. As the U.S. prepares
to invade Iraq and preemptively strike anywhere in the world
it feels threatened, the only remaining barrier to monstrous
U.S. totalitarianism is a sickly and crippled U.S. media, an
aggressive foreign media, and the hope that the heretofore somnambulant
American public will awaken from its stupor.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis
once wrote, "Fear of serious injury cannot alone justify
suppression of free speech and assembly. Men feared witches
and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from
the bondage of irrational fears." Not so in 2002, because
irrationality and indoctrination sell. ABC's Diane Sawyer's
interview with a para-psychologist who talks to the "dead"
gets big billing. U.S. media interests regularly report unsubstantiated
government claims about terrorist capabilities and threats
to the populace. They ignore and, indeed, mock the message of
peaceful anti-establishment protests around the world and here
in the U.S. They editorialize on issues that please advertisers
and the profit margin. They plagiarize day's and week's old
news stories from the foreign and trade press and claim them
as their own. They pound home the message of "just get
over it," whether "it" is election malfeasance,
intelligence and defense failures or corporate theft. In these
environs, can it be long until a daring American author mimics
Czeslaw Milosz and pens the American version of The Captive
Mind?
With precious few exceptions most notably
the nation's "City Papers," independent Internet sites
- like the Indy Media Center -- and grass roots broadcasters
such as Pacifica, U.S. print and broadcast organs from the New
York Times to the Los Angeles Times, from NBC to Fox, and from
AM radio bands to FM bands, spew out a vile and banal concoction
of information that numbs the mind and homogenizes the thought
processes of a U.S. citizenry scurrying about to support the
"war effort." So-called "news programs"
seek to pacify and assure during the commute, the thunderstorm,
the shopping spree, the murder. Weather, roads, guns, cars,
food are all endowed by newsreaders with character as if those
"things" are conscious entities. As Herbert Marcuse
so adroitly pointed out, in this environment people don't "see"
themselves, they project themselves into "things".
Viewers are commodities to the U.S. media interests. "Thought"
need not apply here.
Fantasy is
Fact
Instead of reporting on how many people
are killed in various grass roots insurgencies against U.S.
backed tin horn dictators around the world, networks now report
how well movies do at the box office. Little wonder, considering
how the news networks are so tightly welded into Hollywood's
infotainment empires. Even PBS is not immune from such corporate
infiltration, even though it would have you believe differently
during its long and painful fund drives. Consider the recent
ignoble treatment of Wall Street Week host and founder Louis
Rukeyser. Because AOL Time Warner could not find a time slice
on CNN to plug its Fortune magazine, it simply gobbled up Rukeyser's
show for the magazine. Even PBS's famed documentaries are not
immune to such corporate power moves. The highly-acclaimed wildlife
show Nature has been forced to drop its long time narrators
in favor of personalities like Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan,
whose major contributions to environmental studies were their
respective complaints that life in Mongolia and the hills of
Thailand was just not as cozy as that in Beverly Hills, California.
So it's no surprise that U.S. media interests
enthusiastically embrace all the activities that move money
from one hand to another, but none that move a contrary, novel
or critical idea from one mind to another. U.S. media interests
certainly have their counterparts: the retroviruses whose ingenious
method is the ability to deceive the host cell into operating
on a routine basis as if the retrovirus is a trusted ally --
a supporter.
"We work for you!", exclaims
General Electric's affiliate, NBC News Channel 4 located in
the Washington DC viewing market. "You and Channel 4, Working
Together" is the slogan. "Start your day at 5:00 AM
with us," says NBC, and they solicit viewers to end that
day with them at 1:00 AM the following morning. It's the same
refrain at CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates. Ending a day with the
networks means submitting to the musings of late night talk
show hosts Jay Leno and Dave Lettermen fawning over smarmy politicians
like Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft. If the hangover from that
weren't painful enough, the stupefying advertisements and "news"
inserts that come with viewing or listening to any broadcast
programming from U.S. media interests leaves the viewer punch-drunk.
The nauseating blend of politics, sound-bites, comedy, murder,
"reality", "Hollywood", "news",
"graphic footage" ---- intermixed with the viscous
commercialism that plays on procreation, death, and productivity---put
forth by owners and news readers of infotainment interests stands
as one of the most mercenary acts in capitalist history. And,
more the pity, this charade of news reporting is performed
by those whose intelligence quotient is far below the highest
paid athletes in America.
In the midst of this wretched stew, comes
the truncated seventeen minute network newscast consisting of
750-word propaganda diatribes masquerading as editorials. And
out there on the AM and FM radio bands, the fare is three-to-four
hour invective radio commentaries, interspersed with yuk-yuk
blather with publicity-seeking politicians. A prime example
is Viacom's syndicated morning radio show - simulcast by MSNBC
-- hosted by the desiccated Don Imus, who creeks and groans
like an old wooden galleon. Not only does he offer a radio and
TV platform to people like former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu to advocate the assassination of Yassir Arafat but
he entices professional journalists to aid and abet in such
obvious politically-inspired polemics.
This same script is played out on CBS,
ABC, Fox, MSNBC, PBS and a hundred other channels, newspapers
and AM and FM bands across the land. And so it has become with
U.S. media interests who, in the wake of 911 (itself a worn-out
and pedantic term like Al Qeida) and in conjunction with propagandists
in the current U.S. government, seek to transform the U.S. populace
into a nation of Chauncey Gardners. But then again, can a parasite
be blamed for thriving on the docility of its host, its supporter,
in this instance the American public?
Who Tells You
What to Think?
Columbia Journalism Review and Media
Channel track the owners and minions of U.S. media interests
at http://www.cjr.org/owners/
and www.mediachannel.org,
and a visit there is most enlightening. NBC, General Electric's
marionette, owns an array of properties from financial institutions
in France to long distance telephone services in Hungary. General
Electric is a partner with Starbucks Coffee in Talk City. Under
the Walt Disney Group entity resides ABC, which recently featured
an investigative piece on World News Tonight on whether time
travel is possible. This was not a news story but a movie advertisement:
Disney was preparing to release its remake of the movie, "The
Time Machine." It must have been tough for the quintessential
Peter Jennings to turn into an Entertainment Tonight host for
a Hollywood gossip and gabfest show masquerading as a nightly
news broadcast. Disney also owns interests in petroleum and
natural gas production facilities.
The New York Times owns the Boston Globe
and has a partial interest in a sports franchise, the Boston
Red Sox. Viacom is the holder of CBS and runs everything from
Star Trek properties to Spelling Television. The Washington
Post co-owns the International Herald Tribune with the New York
Times and, along with the LA Times, runs a news service. Gannett,
publisher of USA Today, owns "insider" publications
U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy-Marine Corps Times, as well as
Defense News and Military Market. They also partner with defense
contractor General Electric on web ventures.
And then there's The Unification Church's
Washington Times Newspaper listed as a "project" on
Rev. Sun Myung Moon's website. The Washington Times, along with
the Dow Jones' Wall Street Journal (Jones also owns 20 newspapers
around the U.S.), cater to a powerful constituency: God, Money,
Corporations and Republicans, although not always in that order.
Rev. Moon claims that Jesus Christ visited him in 1935 and,
according to The Unification Church website, "Jesus asked
him to complete the task of establishing God's kingdom on earth
and bringing His peace to humankind." Apparently Bush the
First and Bush the Second agree with Moon. The elder was on
the Moon payroll as a speechmaker and the younger claimed in
a presidential debate that Jesus Christ was the greatest philosopher
of all time. Finally, no mention of media would be complete
without Fox News Corporation. As reported by MediaChannel, Rupert
Murdoch's empire is so vast that he claims, "Our reach
is unmatched around the world. We are reaching people from the
moment they wake up until they fall asleep."
Pay No Attention
to What the Media is Doing Behind That Curtain
With incest in the U.S. media as flagrant
as it is-combined with its subservience to the current U.S administration
and military--is it any surprise that events are scripted to
suit the outcome of the U.S. economic and national policies?
The recent <U.S.-backed> Venezuelan coup exposed the U.S.
media interests as complicit partners in deceiving the American
public. FAIR at documented
the print media's bovine coverage:
"When elements of the Venezuelan
military forced president Hugo Chavez from office last week,
the editorial boards of several major U.S. newspapers followed
the U.S. government's lead and greeted the news with enthusiasm.
In an April 13 editorial, the New York Times triumphantly declared
that Chavez's "resignation" meant that "Venezuelan
democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator."
Conspicuously avoiding the word "coup," the Times
explained that Chavez "stepped down after the military
intervened and handed power to a respected business leader....
Three days later, Chavez had returned to power and the Times
ran a second editorial (4/16/02) half-apologizing for having
gotten carried away."
When the corporate megaliths took over
the news networks, the first casualties were the foreign bureaus.
No longer would network journalists be able to build up a base
of sources and contacts within various capital cities and financial
centers. The result is that the networks increasingly rely on
government spokespeople for "news" that is really
nothing more than propaganda. Take Afghanistan, for example.
Network and newspaper reporters are confined to Kabul because
U.S. military planners have convinced them the countryside is
unsafe. Not knowing any better and lacking any in-country contacts,
they remain in Kabul and dutifully file as news copy every statement
regurgitated by a suspicious military public affairs officer.
As Robert Young Pelton indicated in an interview with Salon,
"Well, the military hates the media.
The conundrum is that we live and die for the Constitution and
one of the elements of the Constitution is freedom of the press
-- the right of the democratic public to make decisions based
on a free flow of information, without censorship, without people
rewriting history. And basically since the Vietnam War, the
military realizes that the press is the enemy, because the press
is actually faster and more intelligent than the military is.
They can assess a military situation long before the military
figures it out".
This story has been replayed in cities
and countries around the world. Last June, the world media bought
the story issued by the government of Nepal that a love sick,
drunk, and deranged Crown Prince executed his entire family,
including his mother and father -- the King and Queen. Not
reported was that incoming King and new Crown Prince were brutal
thugs bent on turning the country into a virtual province of
neighboring India. The Hollywood-inspired news media liked the
O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake angle of the story instead and,
without even a cursory independent investigation, decided the
official government explanation would suffice. It's the same
story-line in Washington, DC.
Rewriting the
Record
The recent pro-Palestinian and anti-globalization
march in Washington was ignominiously ignored by the U.S. media
interests. Only C-SPAN covered it live. However, when the ranks
of the protestors swelled to over 75,000, C-SPAN cut away its
coverage to air a taped three-day old speech by the head of
the International Monetary Fund. Undoubtedly, C-SPAN, like many
other networks that have offered unbiased coverage of Middle
East news, felt the wrath of a powerful lobby group called CAMERA
- the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
- a virtual propaganda arm of the Israeli government known for
berating any reporter who criticizes Israel. It effectively
uses is financial clout to get wayward media elements to fall
in line with Israel's party line.
Another dangerous trend is cable news
addiction to Bush. The Three Stooges of cable news broadcasting
- CNN, FoxCable, and MSNBC -- all break away for live coverage
whether Bush is hamming it up in the mountains of New York State
or disembarking from his helicopter. Gone underreported is the
doctoring of White House transcripts by staffers who excise
Bush's intellectual blunders at press conferences and speeches
who, in effect, are rewriting the record. And U.S. military
movements in support of the failed coup in Venezuela received
scant attention. History is replete with examples of authoritarian
leaders surrounding themselves with cameras and one-sided news
coverage. Consider Leni Riefenstahl's constant filming of Hitler
and how the coverage extended to every German movie house. Or
Soviet TV's ad minutiae coverage of Brezhnev, Andropov, and
Chernenko. Every time they visited a tractor factory in Minsk
or a poultry plant in Kiev, the story was prominently featured
on the nightly "Vremya" news.
As U.S. military planners, politicians
and corporations continue their global pacification campaign
against a now trumped up Al Qeida, they have already planned
for the invasion of Iraq and, perhaps, other members of the
Axis of Evil. To garner public support for boundless U.S. military
operations--from which new exploitable markets magically appear--the
war machine has received the enthusiastic support of U.S. media
interests whose task, it seems, is to keep the public busy and
acquiescent. In reality, most American's are extraordinarily
adverse to war, yet the U.S. media interests upon which they
rely for "thought" are the integral operatives for
U.S. war propaganda and concomitant public indoctrination. Nazi
celebrity Hermann Goering would be right at home in the U.S.
in 2002, working with U.S. media interests to suppress dissent
and bring home a glorious victory for the Homeland.
"Why of course the people don't
want war! Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his
life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come
back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people
don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that
matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the
leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always
a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy,
or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist
dictatorship ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you
have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce
the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger."
John Stanton
is a Virginia-based writer on national security affairs and
Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
journalist who writes and comments frequently on civil liberties
and human rights issues. They can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
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