rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (06/13/91)
/** christic.news: 96.0 **/ ** Topic: MEDIA SECTION: UNBIASED SOURCES ** ** Written 6:06 pm Jun 7, 1991 by christic in cdp:christic.news ** ----------------------------------------------------------------- MEDIA SPECIAL SECTION: GULF WAR REVEALED MEDIA BIAS By MARTIN A. LEE and NORMAN SOLOMON Convergence Magazine, Christic Institute, Summer 1991 [The following article was the lead in a four-page special section on ``media alternatives'' in the Summer 1991 issue of Convergence. The section is designed to give our readers information on censorship and bias in the mass media. The remaining articles and action alerts are posted separately. [There are a number of organizations, publications and services that will help you keep informed about issues ignored by the establishment press. Some of these resources--including Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), PeaceNet and the Christic Institute's Media Watch--are described in the following articles.] The patterns of bias that characterize reporting in ``peacetime'' were amplified during the war in the Gulf, as separation between press and state dwindled to the vanishing point. The most powerful news media--key TV and radio networks, newsweeklies, the New York Times, Washington Post and major wire services--were solidly behind the war as soon as it began in mid- January 1991. They went to great lengths to coat the news frame with red-white-and-blue varnish. ``If I were the government, I'd be paying the press for the kind of coverage it is getting right now,'' former Assistant Secretary of State Hodding Carter remarked during the war. No less an expert than Michael Deaver, President Reagan's PR whiz, agreed: ``If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event, it couldn't be done any better than this is being done.'' Journalists, who had to sign papers agreeing to abide by press regulations before they received a visa for Saudi Arabia, found American military activities throughout the region to be largely off-limits. All photographs, video and battlefield dispatches had to be cleared by military censors. Reporters were only allowed to travel in predesignated ``pools'' with U.S. military escorts always at their side. Pool requirements made it much easier for U.S. officials to steer journalists clear of certain operations. Feisty reporters were frequently excluded. According to a report by the Fund For Free Expression (a project of Human Rights Watch), ``the Administration appears to have favored those journalists whose coverage is likely to be favorable to the war effort.'' Press censorship had much less to do with protecting U.S. troops than with projecting the right kind of image so that Americans back home would support the war. Some of the rules were downright ludicrous, as when a reporter at a press briefing in Saudi Arabia asked if General Norman Schwarzkopf weighed 250 pounds. ``General Schwarzkopf is a big man,'' a U.S. officer responded, ``but regulations prohibit the disclosure of his weight.'' Details deleted by U.S. censors, but reported in the British press, included the fact that American pilots were shown pornographic films before taking off on Stealth bombing missions. With U.S. military brass doling out information in measured doses, the networks filled their expanded news holes with a parade of ``experts''--usually current or past officials of the C.I.A., Defense Department and National Security Council (including at least three convicted felons: Oliver North, Richard Secord and John Poindexter). Plus there was the predictable array of think tank specialists, hawkish members of Congress, and patriarchs of the military-industrial complex who scarcely disagreed with each other. For a while it seemed that one shrill note of pro-war punditry blared from the Tube. In the overwhelming majority of cases, the expounded views were the outlooks preferred by the White House and Pentagon. Occasional stories with dissenting viewpoints were aired and printed in mainstream media, but the essence of propaganda is not the exceptional story: It is the steady repetition of code-words, catch-phrases and skewed versions of events. For the most part, articulate dissidents, independent policy critics and leaders of peace groups were banished from televised ``debates'' on the Gulf crisis. TV broadcasts sometimes showed critics of the war protesting in the streets, but rarely allowed the protesters to say more than a few words on the air. Meanwhile, foreign policy specialists associated with the peace movement almost never appeared as analysts on TV news panels. The Pentagon did not order U.S. media outlets to shun policy critics. It was not necessary. The networks voluntarily imposed their own form of censorship by keeping divergent perspectives off the air. A survey of nightly network news programs during the first two weeks of the war by the media watch group FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) underscored the virtual shut-out of opposition viewpoints. Only 1.5 percent of news sources were identified as American antiwar protesters, about the same percentage of people who were asked to comment on how the war affected their travel plans. Only one leader of a peace organization was quoted in the news broadcasts, out of 878 sources cited. Most often, strong opponents of U.S. actions featured on the networks were Iraqis--``the enemy.'' The narrow roster of TV experts fostered a one-sided view of the war. Not surprisingly, polls showed that a large majority of Americans supported Bush's Gulf policy once the fighting began. But when a research team from communications department of the University of Massachusetts surveyed public opinion and correlated it with knowledge of basic facts about U.S. policy in the region, they drew some sobering conclusions: The more television people watched, the fewer facts they knew; and the less people knew in terms of basic facts, the more likely they were to back the Bush administration. Diverse sources are fundamental to good journalism, but U.S news coverage of the Gulf crisis lacked these ingredients. There was plenty of cheerleading and boosterism, but precious little independent reporting on television. Shirking any pretense of objectivity, network correspondents were quick to take sides. ``We've destroyed half the Iraqi Air Force,'' announced Bob Schiefer on CBS. The network's anchor emeritus Walter Cronkite chimed in: ``We knocked one of their Scuds out of the sky.'' Obviously CBS hadn't shot down an Iraqi missile; the U.S. military did. Even Peter Arnett, CNN's controversial correspondent who reported from Iraq during the war, betrayed his sympathies when, peering out of his hotel window in Baghdad, he commented on the first night of the bombing as helicopters buzzed by, ``Are those our choppers or their choppers?'' Arnett wasn't referring to CNN helicopters; he was identifying with ``our'' side, the U.S. side. Journalists no doubt harbored strong feelings about the war. That is to be expected. But as media professionals they should report on their government, not speak for it. The frequent use of the words ``we'' and ``our'' when describing U.S. military attacks against Iraq underscored one of the main failings of American journalism: Reporters, far from being too ``liberal'' or adversarial, are too close to power. Throughout the war, journalists fawned over the military's techno-prowess. Censored news accounts hyped the success of U.S. weaponry. Charles Osgood described the bombing of Iraq as ``a marvel.'' His CBS colleague Jim Stewart extolled ``two days of almost picture-perfect assaults.'' Of course, the Pentagon released footage that showed only hits, not misses, and U.S. journalists--who were reduced to spectators along with the TV audience--filed their reports accordingly. Amidst all the high-tech hoopla, a significant conflict of interest went unnoticed: American news media are sponsored, underwritten and in some cases directly owned by major military contractors. Moreover, the boards of directors of nearly every major U.S. media corporation include representatives from ``defense'' contractors, forming a powerful military-industrial media complex which compromises the integrity of American journalism. NBC, for example, is owned by General Electric, one of America's biggest military contractors. GE, it turns out, designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system employed by the U.S. during the Gulf war-- including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. In other words, when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salary. All the networks aired photos of bull's-eye bomb attacks against Iraqi targets that seemed to atone for years of corruption on the part of military contractors and Pentagon bureaucrats. A chorus of TV experts hailed President Reagan's costly arms build-up. ``It's gratifying to know the money was well spent,'' exclaimed Dallas Times Herald editorial writer Lee Cullum on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Few journalists were impolite enough to mention the Reagan and Bush administrations' role in arming, equipping and financing America's erstwhile ally, Saddam Hussein. Major news media gave short shrift to key stories about cozy U.S.-Iraqi relations before the Gulf crisis, including evidence dug up by Congressional investigators which indicated that American companies, with the approval of the U.S. Commerce Department, had sold bacteria to a major Iraqi military research center working on germ warfare. ``We lie by not telling you things,'' a Pentagon official confessed to Newsday. Honing news management techniques developed during the Grenada and Panama invasions, the U.S. military provided the networks with high-tech bombing videos that were tailored to avoid images of mutilated victims. With few lapses, the American public was shown an antiseptic, bloodless conflict. Correspondents mouthed bland euphemisms in flat tones, rarely alluding to the human toll of the war. While Iraqi Scud missiles were ``terrorist weapons,'' according to U.S. news media, American bombers undertook ``surgical strikes'' that resulted merely in ``collateral damage.'' A few days after the war began, Time magazine defined ``collateral damage'' this way--``a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who should have picked a safer neighborhood.'' The fault for the carnage had to be pegged far away from home. American news media repeatedly blamed Saddam Hussein for putting innocents in harm's way, thereby exonerating the United States. Featuring a Stealth bomber on its cover, Newsweek puffed ``The New Science of War'' with the subhead, ``High-Tech Hardware: How Many Lives Can It Save?'' That was the spin--American weapons don't destroy lives; they save them! ``So far the U.S. has fought this war at arm's length with long-range missiles, high-tech weapons,'' explained NBC's Tom Brokaw. ``This is to keep casualties down.'' Which casualties? Brokaw was referring to American soldiers, not Iraqi civilians who died by the thousands during continuous U.S. bombing raids. The grim reality of civilian casualties was consistently downplayed or denied by U.S. media during the war. Nearly a week into the bombing, while Iraqi cities were under constant bombardment, ABC Nightline host Ted Koppel stated matter-of-factly: ``Aside from the Scud missile that landed in Tel Aviv earlier, it's been a quiet night in the Middle East.'' Denial was key to the psychological and political structures supporting the war. The very magnitude of its brutality required heightened care to turn the meaning of events upside down. Mass media swiftly revised the news in the process of reporting it. The gory TV footage from a Baghdad shelter stimulated a barrage of spin control--denial masquerading as sober analysis and commentary. A barrage of TV commentators quickly dismissed footage of the burned remains of children being removed from the shelter as a cynical Iraqi public relations trick. Typical was the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. which aired a few moments of civilian casualty footage, only to debunk it as an attempt at ``heavy-handed manipulation.'' The emphatic message: Those who believe Iraqi civilians are being victimized by the air war are dupes of Iraqi propaganda. By the next night, the major network news shows had largely redirected the uproar to center on whether U.S. journalists covering the Baghdad slaughter were tools of Iraqi propaganda. A few days later, American journalists were back to pretending that everything was hunky-dory. Ignoring civilian deaths, Katie Couric declared on NBC's Today Show that Operation Desert Storm ``was virtually flawless.'' Few U.S. reporters acknowledged the obvious: The ferocious bombing campaign sought to keep U.S. losses down at the expense of huge casualties among Iraqi civilians. Patrick Cockburn, reporting for the British Independent, offered an uncensored view of the air war: ``From the beginning, the allies' bombs and missiles were never as accurate as might have appeared. . . . There were craters where missiles had hit houses or waste ground, or were far from any obvious targets. The switch to attacks on roads and bridges--so-called `dual use' targets--which have potential military use--means that more non-military people will be killed and wounded because, whatever its potential, the transport system is primarily used by civilians. . . . [Allied forces] have pretended they can carry out surgical strikes; but mass bombing is a blunt instrument.'' Although influential media such as the New York Times and Wall Street Journal kept promoting the illusion of the ``clean war,'' a different picture began to emerge after the U.S. stopped carpet-bombing Iraq--underscoring what Napoleon meant when he said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay it until it no longer mattered. Thus, careful readers of the Washington Post eventually learned that of all bombs dropped on Iraq, only seven percent were so-called smart bombs, and of these only half were thought to have hit their intended targets. U.S. News & World Report later ran a two-sentence disclosure in its gossipy ``Washington Whispers'' section, estimating that the total of Iraqis killed exceeded 200,000, double the number acknowledged by U.S. military officials. ``The grim math'' included many civilians deaths, according to U.S. News, which said that ``aerial attacks inflicted far more casualties than previously thought.'' Significant stories which might have created public relations problems for the Pentagon stayed under wraps. Few Americans learned that the U.S. military used a deadly new armament, the fuel-air bomb, which the Los Angeles Times had previously described as a ``terrorist'' weapon when reporting rumors that Iraq possessed such a device. What mustard gas was to World War I and the atomic bomb was to World War II, fuel-air explosives were to the Gulf War. Western European press reports described the horrible aftermath of a U.S. fuel-air attack during the final days of the war, in which oxygen and blood were literally sucked from the lungs of thousands of mutilated Iraqi soldiers. The use against Iraqi soldiers of white phosphorous--a chemical weapon that burns deep into skin and bone--was also hushed up by the American media, which frequently warned that Iraq might unleash chemical warfare against U.S. soldiers. But actual atrocities inflicted by American fuel-air bombs and chemical attacks merited scant attention in the U.S. press, as it celebrated the victorious outcome of a ``just war.'' News accounts that dehumanized the Iraqi people were often fraught with anti-Arab racism. One network TV report described Iraqi soldiers as resembling ``cockroaches'' from the air. Intent on denying the suffering of Iraq's civilian population, U.S. media conveyed the impression that America and its partners were fighting a war against one man, Saddam Hussein, not a whole country and its people. Day after day, TV anchors asked questions like: ``How badly are we hurting Saddam Hussein?'' ``How long will it take to defeat him?'' Throughout the Gulf crisis, U.S. media sought to demonize Saddam Hussein, whose human rights abuses were long known--but seldom reported--by U.S. media prior to the invasion of Kuwait. ``Beast'' and ``monster'' were typical epithets applied to the Iraqi President. The New Republic, which had urged additional U.S. aid to Saddam in 1987 during the peak of the Iran-Iraq war, went so far as to doctor a cover photo of Saddam to make his moustache resemble Hitler's. Two weeks into the war, the New York Times published an unusually large cartoon across the top of the op-ed page. Titled ``The Descent of Man,'' it showed from left to right a Clark-Gable-like man in a suit-and-tie, a gorilla, a monkey, a venomous snake and finally Saddam Hussein, depicted as small and filthy with a cloud of flies surrounding his head. This grotesque caricature was reminiscent of Nazi propaganda that presented Jews as subhuman and Ku Klux Klan literature comparing African-Americans to apes. The TV networks practiced a more subtle, though in some ways more insidious, form of racism by systematically bypassing people of color when choosing their news analysts. A survey of all the ABC Nightline programs on the Gulf crisis aired the first month after Iraq invaded Kuwait disclosed a pattern of discrimination. During this crucial period, when the terms of the policy debate were being defined and the parameters set, 98 percent of the U.S. guests on Nightline were non-Arab Caucasians. Given that a third of the U.S. soldiers deployed to the Gulf were African-Americans and Latinos, why was it so difficult for a prestigious news show like Nightline to find representatives from these groups? Polls kept showing very high antiwar opinion among black people. And many polls also reflected a ``gender gap,'' with women more skeptical of Bush's Gulf policies than men. But people of color and women were commonly excluded from discussions of those policies on television. Another telling statistic: During the first month of Nightline's Gulf crisis coverage, no U.S. guest argued against sending American soldiers to the region. On this issue there was virtually no debate at all. The toughest question journalists asked President Bush in the early going was not whether it was a wise decision to commit U.S. forces, but whether he should be vacationing on a golf course in Maine. For a while it was hard to tell what journalists were more concerned about--the Gulf crisis or the golf crisis. ABC's Sam Donaldson offered meek excuses for media compliance with White House PR strategies: ``It's difficult to play devil's advocate, especially against such a popular President as Bush.'' At the outset, Bush declared that the sole task of U.S. soldiers was to protect Saudi Arabia. A sense of urgency was fostered by unnamed American intelligence officials who falsely claimed that Iraqi troops were massing along the Saudi border for an imminent attack. ``America does not seek conflict . . . nor do we seek to chart the destiny of other nations,'' Bush explained. ``But America will stand by her friends. The mission of our troops is wholly defensive.'' Within weeks the President was invoking a different rationale, citing American oil interests in the Middle East. Later he flip- flopped again, asserting that ``the fight is not about oil, but about naked aggression.'' And when the bombing raids began, Bush vowed his goal was to ``liberate Kuwait.'' Despite the shifting explanations coming from the White House, ABC correspondent Brit Hume proclaimed on Nightline during the final week of war: ``We in the media have been slow to catch on [sic] this issue of the Gulf crisis. For months this President has meant what he said and done what he said he would.'' (On the day the war ended, Dorrance Smith, executive producer of Nightline, resigned and joined the Bush Administration as an assistant to the President for public affairs.) To the potpourri of changing reasons for the policy, U.S. journalists added some timeworn clichs. NBC's Tom Brokaw stated that American soldiers in the Gulf were ``defending the right, among others, to have freedom of expression.'' Apparently Brokaw forgot that the Emir of Kuwait had abolished parliament and forbade criticism of himself and other Arab leaders. Nor was Saudi Arabia a paragon of free expression. One of the most heavily-censored countries in the world, Saudi Arabia held incommunicado (and without charges) throughout the war a Saudi editor who had alerted western journalists to a demonstration by Saudi women against the ban on their driving. Human rights violations by what TV pundit Morton Kondracke patronizingly referred to as ``our Arabs'' didn't provoke much alarm in the U.S. press. ``It's too bad these countries aren't democratic,'' Kondracke shrugged, ``but in this instance it's a good thing.'' A turning point in the crisis occurred in November 1990, when Bush upped the number of U.S soldiers in the Gulf to nearly half a million, admitting they were there explicitly for offensive purposes. This sparked a flurry of debate among members of Congress who disagreed on tactical matters: how long to let the sanctions work, when to attack, etc. But mass media usually just went through the motions of dissent--providing more pantomime than substance--in effect, legitimizing official opinions while marginalizing critics inclined to challenge basic policy approaches. The air was full of controversies and quibbles, but they centered on how and when--not whether--to go to war. So went the media war dances, choreographed with differing styles but equivalent intent: Get with the military program. The savants of Capitol Hill were thin reeds against the dogs of war, mingling with journalistic lapdogs on a short leash along Pennsylvania Avenue. Once Congress voted to go to war on Jan. 12, the range of debate narrowed dramatically. All but a few in Congress opted to close ranks behind the Bush Administration. So did mass media, which reinforced the assumption that the spectrum of reasonable opinion spanned a mere sixteen blocks from the White House to Capitol Hill. The U.S. press consistently failed to point out blatant double standards on the part of the Bush Administration, which often invoked international law and United Nations resolutions as justifications for its actions. On Nov. 29 the U.N. Security Council voted to give the U.S. a green light to use military means to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait. This resolution got enormous media coverage in the United States. But American reporters displayed little interest in a U.N. General Assembly resolution, passed the next day by a vote of 144 to 2, which called for an international peace conference on the Middle East. Such a peace conference was said to be one of the face-saving devices that Saddam Hussein sought before withdrawing peacefully from Kuwait. Had President Bush chosen to respect both U.N. resolutions, the Gulf war may well have been avoided and hundreds of thousands of lives saved. But U.S news media failed to raise this issue in any meaningful way. Not coincidentally, the U.S. government opposed the idea of a peace conference. The selective emphasis of U.N. actions was typical of how U.S. journalists aided and abetted Bush's war plans by stressing certain facts that were favored by the U.S. government while downplaying other facts that the government preferred to ignore. On the eve of the war, a poll disclosed that 56 percent of Americans supported an international peace conference on the Middle East as a way of avoiding a war with Iraq. This is but one example of how the range of opinion around the country was far wider than the debate presented by U.S. news media. Analysts often wonder whether mass media shape public opinion or merely reflect it. Coverage of the Gulf crisis showed that U.S. news media primarily reflect the opinions of official Washington, thereby shaping public opinion. The collapse of American journalism, which preceded Iraq's surrender on the battlefield, may prove to be one of most enduring legacies of the Gulf war. [The preceding article is adapted from the new preface to Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the Media. To order the first edition of Unreliable Sources use the following order form. The second form posted below is for readers interested in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media reform group that publishes an informative magazine on censorship and bias in the mass media.] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mail to: Christic Resource Center, 1324 North Capitol Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20002, (202) 797-8106 Please send me ______ copies of Martin Lee and Norman Solomon's Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Media Bias, @ 23.95 each. _________________________________________________________________ Name _________________________________________________________________ Address ________________________________________________ ________________ City, State/Province, Zip/Postal Code Phone Method of Payment: Check Visa MasterCard ______________________________ _______________________________ Credit card expiration date Authorized signature Please make your check or money order payable to Christic Institute. telecom/1CV2 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mail to: FAIR, 130 West 25th Street New York, New York 10001 (212) 633-6700 Please send me more information about Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting--the progressive media reform group. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Name ----------------------------------------------------------------- Address ------------------------------------------------ ---------------- City, State/Province, Zip/Postal Code Phone ** End of text from cdp:christic.news **