Stop the Next War Now (20 page)

We Americans are very lucky to have a rich tradition of torchbearers poking around the dark corners of the caves of the powerful. I’m thinking of muckrakers like Jacob Riis, Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair, who rooted out political corruption, corporate greed, and dangerous working conditions, sparking vital movements for reform. I’m thinking of Rachel Carson, who examined the effects of pesticides on the environment; of I. F. Stone, who revealed how the Gulf of Tonkin incident was used by Lyndon Johnson to justify the Vietnam War; of Seymour Hersh and Ron Ridenhour, for unearthing the massacre at My Lai; of Allan Nairn, who showed the connections between the CIA and Latin American death squads. And the list goes on.

A democratic and ethical society can function and thrive only when the media alert the public to the difference between what the powers that be promise and what they deliver, defend the weak against the strong, and ensure that no person is above the law, no matter how powerful.

To perform these functions, our media must be independent from government interference, from the more subtle pressures imposed by would-be moralists who think they know what the public should read and see, and from base considerations of private profit that are causing many news outlets to turn away from hard news and toward what we now call “infotainment.”

In the Soviet Union, people knew when they opened
Pravda
that they were not getting the truth, and so they became experts at reading between the lines of the official lies and discerning the truth for themselves. Those of us who live in democratic or nonauthoritarian societies have a similar task, but perhaps a harder one because, while our mainstream media are not officially controlled by those in power, journalists are nevertheless under pressure to shy away from reporting hard truths.

Too much of the press has become subservient to the manipulations of the White House and the gatekeepers of other powerful private institutions. Many journalists fear losing access to the powerful, and tailor their reporting accordingly. Thus we have seen a tremendous increase in sycophantic press coverage of the president and his administration. Add to that this administration’s obsession with secrecy and control and you have a very dangerous situation.

But I am a realistic idealist, and I think there are extraordinary opportunities to change our media. First of all, the tradition of independent investigative reporting is not dead, and you can find vibrant examples of it in both the alternative media—at the
Nation
or on Amy Goodman’s
Democracy Now
! — as well as in some corporate outlets. For example, the careful investigative reporting of two journalists at the
Chicago Tribune
in 1999 revealed deeply ingrained problems in Illinois’ system of capital punishment and ultimately led to the commutation of the sentences of all the inmates on death row by the state’s Republican governor.

At the same time, the technologies of the Internet and digital video have fostered a new generation of independent journalism, created directly by the participants in political movements and campaigns. Instead of being mere subjects of the mass media, millions of people are making their own media and talking back to the official journalists in ways that are slowly changing and broadening the definition of “news.”

Can the Internet, with its culture of freewheeling grassroots debate, and the media democracy movement, with its goal of breaking up the giant media monopolies, somehow supplant the top-down, profit-oriented, power-following media conglomerates? I don’t know, but I believe it’s our best hope. Media made by people who are responsive to the real interests of their audiences, as opposed to the interests of their owners or their advertisers, are far more likely to be media that nurture civic society, see the world in its complex interdependence, look for solutions to problems, and help bring about a more peaceful world.

If there is to be an ethical revival in the media, it won’t be because we’ve somehow changed the human nature of the people who work in the media; it will be because we’ve changed the structures they have to work in, so they can be their own better selves. In the end, I believe that the full story will come out—it always does—because someone is heading into the cave with a torch.

“The inappropriate fit between the country’s major media and the

country’s political system has starved voters of relevant information.

It has eroded the central requirement of a democracy that those who

are governed give not only their consent but their informed consent.”

—Ben H. Bagdikian

THE POWER

OF DISSENT

AMY GOODMAN

Amy Goodman hosts
Democracy Now
! a daily news hour that appears on NPR, Pacifica Radio, public access television, and PBS stations across the country.
Exception to the Rulers
, by Amy and David Goodman, was published in 2004.

The U.S. media are among the most powerful institutions on earth. They are not only among the wealthiest, but they are also the way the whole world views us and we view each other.

There was a piece in the
Wall Street Journal
the other day about the difference between CNN and CNN International, two networks owned by the same company. The day the statue was pulled down [in Baghdad], on CNN we watched that statue get pulled down and go back up and get pulled down again all day.

On CNN International they also showed the statue pulled down, but it was on a split screen—and on half the screen they showed the casualties of war. Now, I’m not talking about the difference between CNN and Al-Jazeera. I’m talking about the difference between CNN and CNN International. It means that that company knows exactly what it’s doing—what it provides for domestic consumption and what it provides to the rest of the world.

I really do think that if for one week in the United States we saw the true face of war, if we saw people’s limbs sheared off, saw kids blown apart, war would be eradicated. Instead what we see in the U.S. media is the video war game. Those gray, grainy photographs with a target down on the ground. It would be more accurate to show the target on the forehead of a little Iraqi girl, because that’s who dies in war. The overwhelming majority of people who die are innocent civilians.

Dissent does matter. It’s what makes this country healthy. And the media have a responsibility to go to where the silence is, to present the views of people all over this country and not simply beat the drums for war. And that’s precisely what it did in this lead-up to the invasion.

We get the “news” from reporters embedded with the military and a parade of retired generals who are on the networks’ payrolls.

Why is it that they have these retired generals on the payroll, and they don’t have peace activists and peace leaders on the payroll? Let’s see the same number of reporters embedded with Iraqi families and embedded in the peace movement all over the world. Maybe then we’ll get some picture of what’s going on.

Think about Dan Rather the night that the bombs started falling on Iraq: “Good morning, Baghdad,” he said. Tom Brokaw said, “We don’t want to destroy the infrastructure of Iraq, because we’re going to own it in a few days.”

Peter Jennings was interviewing Chris Cuomo, a reporter for ABC, who was out on the street in Times Square, where thousands of people had come out to protest the war in the freezing rain. They had all sorts of signs that were sopping wet, and people were trying to keep the umbrellas up, and the police charged a part of the crowd.

Jennings said to Cuomo, “What are they doing out there? What are they saying?” And he answered, “Well, they have these signs that say, ‘No blood for oil,’ but when you ask them what that means, they seem very confused. I don’t think they know why they’re out here.” I guess they got caught in a traffic jam. Why not have Peter Jennings invite one of the protesters into the studio and then have a real discussion as he does with the generals?

That is not an independent media. That is a media that is hell-bent on war, and it is violating our sacred responsibility to be fair.

As the Federal Communications Commission and its chairman, Michael Powell, continue the process of deregulating the media, we have seen a concentration of ownership. Clear Channel went from owning forty-seven radio stations to fourteen hundred in no time at all. Clear Channel’s management is sponsoring pro-war rallies and refusing to play music that is critical of war.

It is essential that the media provide a forum for all views. Pacifica Radio and NPR and PBS are not the only ones using the public airwaves. The commercial, corporate-controlled media do, too. They are leasing those airwaves. And responsibilities come with that.

There is a whole chapter in
Exception to the Rulers
about the direction broadcasting has gone at the FCC under Michael Powell, although it goes back to the Clinton administration as well. Powell, the son of Colin Powell, leads the war on the diversity of voices at home. He has thought he could get away with it, and he tried to hold only one public hearing on the largest overhaul of media consolidation regulations in this country’s history.

Pacifica Radio broadcasted the informal hearings that the dissident commissioners, Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, held in early 2003 all over the country to get the public’s views.

It was remarkable. When people heard about the proposed consolidation rules, they revolted—and the anger crossed the political spectrum. Congress and the FCC got more than two million responses. People said: no, it is not healthy for a media mogul to own the newspaper, a television network affiliate, and a radio station in one town.

That level of response was not due to the corporate media. They hardly covered the story all year. Instead, behind the scenes, media owners were filing joint briefs in support of deregulation, because they will benefit. The public demands better than that.

This country has parallel worlds. For some it’s the greatest democracy on earth. There is no question about that. But others, such as immigrants now in detention facilities, have no rights, not even to a lawyer. Independent reporters have to be there to watch and to listen, to tell their stories until they can tell their own.

That’s why I think
Democracy Now
! is a good model for the rest of the media, as are the Independent Media Centers all over the country and the world. They are built on almost nothing except the goodwill and the passion of people who are tired of seeing their friends and neighbors through a corporate lens.

Dissent is what makes this country healthy. And the media have to fight for that, as the rest of us have to fight for an independent media.

“People should fear art, film, and theatre.This is where ideas happen.

This is where somebody goes into a dark room and starts to

watch something and their perspective can be completely questioned . . .

the very seeds of activism are empathy and imagination.”

—Susan Sarandon

BUILDING

A BETTER MEDIA

JANINE JACKSON

Janine Jackson is the program director at FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), the national media watch group, and the producer-host of CounterSpin, FAIR’s nationally syndicated radio show.

“I take a grave view of the press. It has become the weak slat under the bed of democracy. It is an anomaly that information, the one thing most necessary to our survival as choosers of our own way, should be a commodity subject to the same merchandising rules as chewing gum, while armament, a secondary instrument of liberty, is a government concern. A man is not free if he cannot see where he is going, even if he has a gun to help him get there.”

—A. J. L

IEBLING

When the Bush administration made clear its intention to turn the nation’s grief and anger over the 9/11 attacks into an open-ended, ill-defined war on terror, the U.S. media had a choice: whether to serve as an independent, critical check on the government or to act primarily as mouthpieces for the administration, echoing and amplifying the official line. No clear-eyed survey of major U.S. media’s coverage of the subsequent violent interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq will leave any question as to which course they took.

But if we are to fight for better media, it helps to be hopeful—to imagine the media we would like to see. In their failures, the mainstream media’s reporting on the Bush administration’s wars helps us define what sort of news reporting would truly serve democracy. That sort of journalism would:

REPORT ALL THE FACTS.

War involves violence, death, and destruction, and a presentation of war that pretends otherwise is inaccurate and misleading. Yet much of the press corps seemed to accept the White House’s spin that coverage of the “bad news” that naturally comes with a violent military action constitutes “bad press,” or unfairly biased media treatment. This cautiousness led the media to under-cover or ignore numerous stories critical to an understanding of the effects of war.

Civilian deaths resulting from U.S.-led attacks were routinely downplayed. When dozens of civilians, including children, were killed in U.S. air strikes on the Afghan village Niazi Kala in December 2002, overseas newspapers carried headlines like “U.S. Accused of Killing Over 100 Villagers in Airstrike” (
Guardian
) and “100 Villagers Killed in U.S. Airstrike” (
London Times
). In contrast, the
New York Times
first reported the deaths at Niazi Kala under the headline “Afghan Leader Warily Backs U.S. Bombing.” Earlier, saying that it would be “perverse” for the media to “focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan,” CNN chair Walter Isaacson had ordered his staff to “balance” imagery of the devastation of Afghan cities with explicit reminders to viewers that the Taliban harbored murderous terrorists (
Washington Post
, October 31, 2001).