Oh, What an Embedded War

excerpted from the book

Tragedy & Farce

How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy

by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney

New Press, 2005, hardcover

p38
... unless wars are honestly understood, debated, and supported by the population that pays for and fights them and in whose name they are waged they have little or no legitimacy, and they invariably have a cancerous effect upon the body politic.

p40
Elite belief in the propriety of a globally dominant and militarily aggressive United States was not automatically shared across the population. Many people had difficulty accepting the idea of paying taxes and dying in foreign wars of unclear importance The age-old problem for governments: getting poor and middle-class people to fight and pay for their wars. But in a democracy the problem assumes new dimensions, a higher degree of difficulty The traditional recourse of simply forcing a nation to go to war and seizing its monies was limited by the ability of people to evict governments through elections and to peacefully organize opposition to wars. In this context, the use of the media as a lever to shape public opinion, to manufacture consent, became a staple insight in political theory, pioneered by Harold Laswell.

Those in power increasingly came to see the battle for domestic public opinion as arguably the single most important front in any prospective war. And another staple insight, though one spoken less loudly, was that telling the truth about the importance of the war from the elite perspective would not necessarily get the job done, since it was assured that the masses were not capable of grasping the importance of war as readily as those in power. To get the masses to line up behind a war, to be willing to die for the cause, generally required some embellishment of the factual record. This also entailed, more often than not, a large dose of flag-waving, nationalism, and, at times, racism. Indeed, Harlan Ullman and James Wade book, Shock &Awe, the 1996 strategic report produced by the U.S. National Defense University on the new age of US. warmaking, acknowledged that "Americans prefer not to intervene, especially when the direct threat to the U.S. is ambiguous, tenuous, or difficult to define." Therefore, the authors concluded, it was a practical imperative to have the political cover of U.S. invasions appear to be international efforts. And the media is the institution through which the population must be brought to support invasions.

Again, this is not new. Beginning with the 1898 SpanishAmerican War, the United States has engaged in scores of foreign military operations and several major wars involving the deployment of U.S. troops. In nearly all of these major wars-the SpanishAmerican War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Central America proxy wars of the 1980s, and the first Gulf War - a clear pattern emerged: The President wished to pursue war while the American people had severe reservations. In nearly every case, the White House ran a propaganda campaign to generate public support for going to war, and a campaign that bent the truth in line with the strategy that the ends (war) justified the means (lies).

p42
Dan Rather informed a Harvard forum in July 2004

"Look, when a president of the United States, any president, Republican or Democrat, says these are the facts, there is heavy prejudice, including my own, to give him the benefit of the doubt, and for that I do not apologize."

p43
By the early twentieth century, major news media were large commercial organizations and therefore tended to be conservative institutions. Those who owned and managed these firms were, more often than not, comfortable with the worldview of those atop the social structure, because that is where they resided, and supported government policies that were understood to advance those interests.

p44
If people in power are debating an issue, journalists have some wiggle room to root around and explore it. If people in power agree on an issue, presuppose it, or do not seriously debate it, it is almost impossible for a journalist to raise it without being accused of partisanship and pushing an ideological agenda. So it is rarely done, and when it is done it is dismissed as bad journalism.

p44
The ability of official sources to determine the range of legitimate debate is a regrettable tendency for most political stories, but it is nothing short of a disaster for the coverage of the US. role in the world. For here ordinary citizens rely to an even greater extent upon the media than they do for domestic politics, where their daily experience can provide something of a corrective to skewed press coverage. Moreover, there is typically a greater consensus among official sources on the benign role of the United States in the world than there is on any other issue, except, perhaps, the greatness of American-style capitalism as the only legitimate way to organize an economy. In short, most news coverage of the role of the United States in the world has a decidedly establishment tenor, and at times constitutes little more than the regurgitation of official perspectives.

p44
Despite the fact that history reveals that dissidents have often been remarkably accurate in their criticism, as every new war comes along, the skeptics find themselves on the outside of the news cycle looking in.

p45
The component of the U.S. political elite that was fundamentally hostile to having the United States play the preeminent military role in world affairs has all but disappeared in the past half-century. Those political renegades and Congressional backbenchers who hold such views today are marginalized in the political and media culture.

p45
There are two fundamental presuppositions-actually, articles of faith-that guide U.S. foreign policy. They are accepted by official sources in both political parties and they are almost never questioned in major U.S. news media.

The first elite presupposition is the notion that the United States is a benevolent force in the world and that whatever it does, by definition, ultimately is about making the world a more just and democratic place. This is a pleasing assumption, and it puts a necessary fig leaf over what may be less altruistic aims. This presupposition makes it possible to dismiss as insignificant anomalies the recurring support for dictators and antidemocratic regimes and the repression of democratic movements that are seen as insufficiently sympathetic to US. interests. To cite a few examples: Guatemala and Iran in the 1950s, Brazil, Indonesia, and Greece in the 1960s, Chile and Zaire in the 1970s, El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan today.

At an empirical level, if United States foreign policy is driven by a commitment to democracy, it arguably may be among the most incompetently executed policies ever known. The evidence suggests there may be other, less-flattering motivations for U.S. foreign policy, but reporters following the official sources will find little encouragement for critical examination of what these might be. (Perhaps a good place to start would be with criteria used by analysts when assessing the motives of all other powerful nations throughout history: economic self-interest and military pre-eminence.)

This presupposition also makes it possible for there to be almost no debate or discussion of the actual role of the United States in the world. Many Americans accept the official story that the United States is a benevolent giant, attacked on all sides by powerful evildoers. That the United States accounts for almost half of all military spending in the world; that US. military spending dwarfs the second largest military power by a factor of eight; that the United States has hundreds of foreign military bases in literally scores of nations, whereas hardly any other country in the world has a single military base outside its own borders: All of this is largely unmentioned and unknown to Americans. It is simply assumed away. And that leaves most Americans largely clueless about how the United States is perceived in the rest of the world.

The second elite presupposition that is unquestioned in US. media coverage of US. foreign affairs is the notion that the United States, and the United States alone, has a 007-like right to invade any country it wishes. The United States also reserves the right to "deputize" an ally to conduct an invasion if it so desires, but otherwise other nations are not permitted to engage in the invasion business. This presents a small problem for the political elite and for the news media. After all, the UN charter and a number of other treaties signed by the United States prohibit the invasion of one nation by another unless it is under armed attack. Moreover, the U.S. Constitution characterizes treaties as the highest law of the land, so that if the United States violates international law, it arguably warrants presidential impeachment. To top it off, in popular discourse, the United States proudly promotes itself as favoring the rule of law, and a main argument against all of its adversaries is invariably that they are liars who ignore treaties they have signed. That is, in fact, sometimes used as a rationale for a U.S. invasion.

The problem the United States faces is that almost all of its invasions violate international law, and sometimes, as in the case of Iraq, in a blatant manner. So how do the political elite and the news media reconcile this contradiction? Simple: They ignore it. It is virtually unthinkable for a mainstream U.S. reporter to even pursue this issue.

p48
... the limitations of professional journalism, the influence of owners, the linkages of media institutions to the power structure of society, and the internalized presuppositions, have led to what can only be characterized as a palpable double standard in coverage of the U.S. role in the world. None have demonstrated this more convincingly than Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky in their book, Manufacturing Consent. Stories that support the aims of U.S. policymakers get lavish and sympathetic treatment; stories of similar or greater factual veracity and importance that undermine US. policy goals get brief and unfavorable mention. As Howard Friel and Richard Falk have demonstrated in their research, the U.S. news media, including our most respected newspapers like the New York Times, turn a blind eye to U.S. violations of core international law, having no qualms about playing up the violations of adversaries. It would be nearly impossible for the coverage to be more unprincipled.

p49
... there is less capacity for journalists to provide a counterbalance to whatever official story Washington puts forward. At its worst, foreign reporting becomes celebrity journalists and anchors air-dropped into a crisis area and shepherded around by representatives of the U.S. government.

p50
... there are a growing number of media that see themselves as pushing a partisan pro-Republican political agenda, often under a thin veneer of being "fair and balanced." The veneer is there for show purposes. So it is that the FOX News Channel, Sinclair Broadcasting, the New York Post, the Washington Times, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, most of talk radio, all serve as couriers for the Republican Right. They aggressively promote right-wing policies and bash Democrats who get in the way. In coverage of Republican wars this translates into aggressive pro-war posturing and wholesale rabid condemnation of antiwar criticism as unpatriotic or treasonous. Because the rest of the news media tend to be timid by comparison, this right-wing phalanx sets the tone for coverage out of proportion to its actual size. And the rest of the press becomes even more hesitant to contradict the government line.

p51
No government has approached controlling the news with then aggressiveness of the current Bush administration. Despite its rhetoric about small government, ethics and transparency, the Bush administration has made it clear that the less the people know about what the government is doing the better. As Eric Alterman chronicles, open-record laws nationwide have been rolled back three hundred times during the Bush tenure and the pace of classification of federal government documents has shot up 75 percent.

p51
... the Bush administration covertly paid journalists to help promote its policies. Armstrong Williams received $240,000 to pump up the White House's education policies under the guise of being a credible journalist. Two other reporters, Michael McManus and Maggie Gallagher, were also paid under the table to do the White House bidding. Gallagher received less than Williams, prompting Kim Gandy of the National Organization for Women to crack, "Women not only can't get equal pay, we can't get equal payola."

Last but not least, some twenty federal agencies, under Bush administration directives, financed the production of video news releases promoting administration policies, which were submitted to commercial TV stations where they were sometimes broadcast as legitimate news without any disclaimer. The budget for all these secret propaganda activities runs in the range of $250 million, an amount equaling two-thirds of the entire federal budget for public radio and television. In all of the above examples, the Bush administration has stonewalled efforts to get to the truth, and has used Republican control of Congress to prevent an independent investigation. In short, it is an administration with contempt for the principles of a free press. And in the matter of war, where the importance of media is front and center, the Bush administration propaganda campaign has been at full throttle.

p54
The war on terrorism entailed a push for a broad militarization of society and, immediately, for the invasion and bombing of Afghanistan, a nation that did not attack the United States on 9/11. That there might be another explanation for the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was unthinkable. Once the heroic invasion was completed, it all but dropped off the US. news map. Few Americans have any idea of the conditions in that country today except that it is now an "emerging democracy," because our president tells us so. In fact, Afghanistan is a colossal mess, in the midst of ongoing warfare and chaos, where terrorism is as strong as ever, and has now joined the front ranks of the world's leading narco-states. Of course Osama bin Laden and the leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban, the bad guys we were going to smoke out of the caves, remain mostly at large.

p57
Paul Krugman notes, a CIA classified report in the summer of 2005 reached exactly this conclusion:

"Iraq has become what Afghanistan was under Soviet occupation, only more so: a magnet and training ground for Islamic extremists, who will eventually threaten other countries."

p58
... the media institutions themselves were hawkish. The Columbia journalism Review reviewed the editorial pages of the top six dailies that influence public opinion, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and determined that all of them failed to hold the Bush administration to an adequate standard for proof. Editor & Publisher found that of the top fifty daily newspapers in the nation, not a single one was strongly antiwar on its editorial page.

The reliance upon official sources to frame the debate and set the agenda is mostly responsible for the disgraceful press coverage of Bush administration lies. As Jonathan Mermin put it in a brilliant essay in World Policy Journal, conventional journalistic practice means "journalists continue to be incapable of focusing on an issue for perspective on US. foreign policy that has not been first identified or articulated in official Washington debate." Here it is important to note that most Democratic leaders did not assume an antiwar position, so there was little countervailing framing coming from officialdom. Mermin scoffs at the idea that elite consensus justifies journalists regurgitating the government position uncritically: "The absence of opposition to a Republican military intervention among Democratic politicians is not persuasive evidence that the policy is sound, or even that presumptively informed and thoughtful people believe it sound." What it adds up to, in clear contradiction to the spirit and intent of the First Amendment, is "if the government isn't talking about it, we don't report it."

A comprehensive analysis of the sources used on TV news in the weeks leading up to the US. invasion-when a significant percentage of the U.S. population was opposed to an invasion-showed that 3 percent of the sources employed were antiwar and over 70 percent were decidedly pro-war. A Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) survey of nightly news coverage on NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, CNN, and FOX during the first three weeks after the invasion found that pro-war U.S. sources outnumbered antiwar sources by twenty-five to one. Moreover, the on-air experts that TV news relied upon generally were establishment figures and by nature uncritical.

p61
Mainstream journalists should be less dismissive of those outside of power who wish to exercise opinions on whether to go to war. The antiwar critique has been proven far more accurate than that of the Bush administration. It is an apt reminder for why "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances" is inscribed in the First Amendment, and why we should be concerned about its banishment to free speech zones.

p61
Elizabeth Guider - Variety magazine

"The corporate agendas of these mini-nation-states [parent companies of the media] have become so complex and politically sensitized that anything perceived as out of the mainstream is automatically viewed by top brass with suspicion."

p63
CNN's Christine Amanpour - 2003
"I'm sorry to say, but certainly television and, perhaps, to a certain extent, my station was intimidated by the administration and its foot soldiers at FOX News. And it did, in fact, put a climate of fear and self-censorship, in my view, in terms of the kind of broadcast work we did."

p67
"The vast amount of suffering and death endured by civilians as a result of the US. - led invasion of Iraq has, for the most part, been carefully kept out of the consciousness of the average American' Bob Herbert noted in April 2005. "As for the press, it has better things to cover than the suffering of civilians in war. The aversion to this topic is at the opposite extreme from the ecstatic journalistic embrace of the death of one pope and the election of another, and the media's manic obsession with the comings and goings of Martha, Jacko, et al."

The matter of US. casualties is even more striking, as there is a clear interest in this subject on the home front. On the one hand, as Editor & Publisher reported in November 2004, the Bush administration has been revealed to "routinely undercount" US. casualties, especially of those soldiers and pilots seriously injured but not killed. On the other hand, following a policy put in place by the first President Bush, the press was barred from covering the arrival of caskets at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. To insure the success of this policy, soldiers' corpses were flown to the United States in the dead of night. When Ted Koppel's Nightline devoted an entire program to honor the dead soldiers by simply reading their names and showing their pictures over the air, Koppel was accused of being unpatriotic, and several ABC affiliates, in particular those owned by the Sinclair chain, refused to carry the program. One of the few major U.S. newspapers willing to violate the government's ban was the independently owned Seattle Times, which alone showed photographs of the returning dead soldiers on its front page.

The message has been sent explicitly and implicitly that the US. government does not want the American people to see the human cost of this war, and our media, with only a handful of exceptions, has obliged. The government said "jump." And the media responded "how high?"

p70
The New York Times certainly wanted to get the incident in its rearview mirror as quickly as possible. The Times quietly removed Judith Miller-the reporter whose uncritical and whole-hog reliance on extremely dubious sources in 2003 gave tremendous legitimacy to the Bush administration lies about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction-from her beat, but she was not censured formally. Miller herself was unapologetic about her approach to journalism. "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself," she is quoted by Mermin as saying. "My job is to tell readers of the New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." There, in two stunning sentences, Miller presents the formula for government propaganda, for the news values of authoritarian regimes everywhere including Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and, ultimately, for today's anti-journalism.

p74
Because the core articles of faith remain inviolable in U.S. journalism and politics, US. media coverage of American foreign wars inexorably slides into providing a view compatible with those atop society. Despite the thorough repudiation of every official reason provided by the Bush administration to invade and occupy Iraq, there was almost no effort by journalists to locate more plausible explanations for such a major war. It would not have taken long for an inquiring reporter to find serious experts able to discuss the following factors: the imperial drive encouraged by the existence of a massive military-industrial complex; the geopolitical and economic advantages from having permanent military bases and a client regime/friendly ally in the heart of the Middle East; the domestic political advantages for a president to have the populace whipped into wartime fervor; the security needs of Israel, the close ally of the United States; and, of course, oil. Such explanations can be found in elite journals, in the business press, in intelligence reports, and in academic studies. Such an approach is applied in popular analyses of the motives of any other nation, but such inquiry was and is off-limits in US. politics and in US. mainstream journalism. To our leading politicians and journalists, the United States is a benevolent nation, always working with the ultimate objective of promoting democracy.

p76
Hannah Main, the Baghdad bureau chief for Knight Ridder questioned the idea that democratic Iraq would soon be free of its liberators. "But when you see these bases, these are not makeshift tent cities," she wrote of the U.S. occupation force. "They poured in millions and millions of dollars into these facilities. It's clear that they're there to stay"

As the United States celebrated the triumph of freedom and democracy, elementary questions went unasked. On what grounds should the US. claim to be concerned with democracy be taken seriously? (At the same time George W. Bush was leading his democratic crusade in Iraq, the murderous dictator of Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov, who could certainly give Saddam Hussein a run for his money in the human rights violations department, was called "very much George W Bush's man in Central Asia:' by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan.) Is the United States a philanthropy that has no military or economic designs? Why did U.S. occupation authorities in Iraq work so hard to delay elections? If the U.S. favors democratic rule, why ignore the fact that most Iraqis voted for parties calling for a near-term or immediate end to the U.S. occupation? Is it legitimate to invade a nation to install democracy? If it is legitimate, who makes the decision about which country to invade and who does the invading? If the United States can do it to Iraq, can India do it to Pakistan? Can Russia invade Uzbekistan? Can Venezuela invade Colombia? Can Canada look at inequities in our society (toward women and ethnic minorities) or at irregularities in our voting procedures and determine that it needs to invade the United States to establish a bona fide democracy?

Even if we all agree that it is all right to invade a country to install democracy and that the United States is the legitimate force to do so, is Iraq the first nation on the list that should be invaded? Why not Pakistan? Or Saudi Arabia? Or Kuwait? Who is next? Is every non-democracy in need of an invasion or just some? Which ones? These are the questions that must be answered to justify a democratic invasion. Otherwise this is just the law of the jungle, with all talk about democracy, which is predicated upon the rule of law, so much bunkum, and should be acknowledged as such. In our media system, these questions almost never get asked; the subject never gets sustained attention.

p78
The controversy surrounding the documents that came to be known as the "Downing Street memo" revealed the depth to which journalistic standards at major-media outlets in the US. have sunk. The secret memorandums, which were first revealed by an investigative reporter for the Times of London, detailed behind-closed-doors discussions involving British intelligence aides and members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's inner circle from the period in 2002 when the Bush White House was pressuring Britain to back the president's plan to invade Iraq. Blair's lieutenants were skeptical about the likelihood that they could convince the British people of the need to go to war based on the flimsy arguments put forward so far. But Sir Richard Dearlove, the chief of the country's M16 intelligence unit, assured them that the Bush administration was busy "fixing the intelligence and facts" in order to foster the fantasy that action was called for.

Without a doubt, this was a classic "smoking gun" revelation, and the European media treated it as such when the story came to light in the spring of 2005. What more could journalists ask for than evidence that the big boss of British intelligence had secretly acknowledged that the president and his aides had faked the case for what it was generally agreed had turned out to be a disastrous military adventure?

Yet, while British reporters had a field day with the story, major media outlets in the US. ignored it for more than a month and then-under intense pressure from Americans who had learned about the memo from the Internet-finally responded by dismissing it as "old news" because, after all, everyone knew that George Bush had decided to go to war long before he admitted as much to the American people.

The refusal to treat the Downing Street memo story seriously was all the more staggering in light of what US. media outlets chose to cover in May and June of 2005. Arianna Huffington's website Huffflog reported in late June on a study of the big stories of those months. Between May 1 and June 20, ABC News did 121 segments on the Michael Jackson trial, 42 on Natalee Holloway, an Alabama teenager who went missing in Aruba, and zero on the story of the White House falsifying the "case" for war. CBS news did 235 segments on Jackson, 70 on Holloway, and zero on the Downing Street memo. NBC did 109 segments on Jackson, 62 on Holloway, and six on Downing Street.

p84
The years of the Bush presidency will be remembered as a time when American media, for the most part, practiced stenography to power-and when once-great newspapers [New York Times, Washington Post, and others] became little more than what the reformers of another time referred to as "the kept press."

... thousands of communications from grassroots activists to media outlets across this country pressing for serious coverage of the "Downing Street Memo" and the broader debate about the Bush administration's doctoring of intelligence prior to the launch of the Iraq war, is an essential response to our contemporary media crisis. That it had to be written provides evidence not of the decline of American journalism, but of its complete collapse as a source of needed information for citizens who would choose to be their own governors.

p85
The notion that a self-appointed and privileged elite can "handle the truth" about why the United States invades other nations or overthrows their governments, but the great unwashed mass needs to be bathed in a cocktail of propaganda and lies, decontextualized half-truths, and jingoism to get their support is repugnant. Yet our media system and our official political culture have failed to protect democratic control over the war-making process. Their performance goes directly against the Madisonian vision, the spirit of our Constitution, and it will require fundamental changes in our political culture and our media system to rectify.

The dreadful media coverage of the US. invasion of Iraq did produce one significant unintended consequence: It fueled the emerging media reform movement... During the spring of 2003, as millions of Americans organized to protest the coming invasion, many of them were outraged by the rabidly pro-war nature of the media coverage. At the time, Russ Baker characterized the FOX News Channel "as a kind of Gong Show of propaganda," and he noted that "FOX is actually more gung-ho in its support of the war than U.S. government entities like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty." Jim Rutenberg in the New York Times wrote about the "FOX Effect ,"whereby the other cable news channels tried to match FOX's pro-war enthusiasm.

Phil Donahue's MSNBC program was the exception, and it was under strict guidelines to have a majority of its guests be proadministration, since Donahue was a liberal. No other cable news show was under similar guidelines; no conservative hosts were required to have a majority of their guests for every program be antiadministration. Donahue's program was cancelled by MSNBC in February 2003 after an internal memo stated that he represented "a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war." The memo expressed alarm that Donahue's show would become "a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity' As Donahue was being terminated, 'MSNBC was adding conservative shows hosted by pro-war former congressman Joe Scarborough, and by talk radio host Michael Savage, who told his MSNBC audience that those opposing the war "are absolutely committing sedition, or treason:'

p87
... Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, Clear Channel, General Electric, Tribune Company, Sinclair Broadcast Group-that were shilling for the war were now looking to the Bush administration to relax media ownership rules so they could gobble up what remained of the U.S. media system, it was like setting a match to a canister of gasoline... Big media firms push Bush's war, and Bush allows them to establish more monopolistic power, and decimate local ownership.

Tragedy & Farce

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