rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel) (06/08/91)
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INVERTED MEDIA & THE WAR
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By Norman Solomon
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As soon as the war began, Time magazine defined "collateral
damage" this way -- "a term meaning dead or wounded civilians who
should have picked a safer neighborhood."
In U.S. news media, the rare mention of civilian casualties
is routinely followed by immediate denial of responsibility.
"We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein
who put these innocents in harm's way," Tom Brokaw declared on
NBC, a network owned by one of the nation's largest military
contractors, General Electric.
The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour -- one of TV's leading war
boosters -- aired a few moments of civilian casualty footage from
Iraq, only to debunk it as "heavy-handed manipulation."
On CBS, reporter Ron Allen said that "Iraq is trying to gain
sympathy" by showing grisly film of bombed civilian sites. Connie
Chung chimed in that Saddam is "trying to break the resolve of
the United States and its allies."
And what a resolve it is.
News accounts routinely refer to "the enemy" without a hint
of human identity. One TV network newscast has described Iraqi
soldiers as resembling "cockroaches" from the air.
At the start of February, the New York Times published an
unusually large cartoon across the top of the op-ed page. Titled
"The Descent of Man," it showed a man in suit-and-tie, a gorilla,
a monkey, a snake, and finally Saddam Hussein.
Avuncular CBS journalist Charles Osgood called the bombing
of Iraq "a marvel." His colleague Jim Stewart extolled "two days
of almost picture-perfect assaults."
On ABC, Peter Jennings exulted in the "brilliance of laser-
guided bombs" set off by the U.S. military. But the next day he
labeled an Iraqi missile "a horrifying killer."
With the United States at war, the U.S. mass media's
inversion is automatic.
Despite the savage and continuous bombings of populated
areas in Iraq, it is the U.S. that must be portrayed as the
mistreated party. Thus the swollen face of a captured American
pilot on the cover of Newsweek. He was dropping bombs, but he is
the victim.
Denial is key to the psychological and political structures
that support this war. The very magnitude of its brutality --
gratuitous and unmerciful -- requires heightened care to turn the
meaning of events upside down. Those who massacre are the
aggrieved; those being slaughtered with high-tech cruelty are
depicted as subhumans, or "civilians who should have picked a
safer neighborhood."
The fault for the carnage must always be pegged away from
home. "There is in Baghdad the feeling of a huge new Jonestown,
with another demented preacher leading his flock to death," Time
magazine reported at the start of the war. On a day when
thousands of bombs struck Iraq, CBS correspondent Allen Pizzey
called Saddam Hussein "psychologically deformed." But U.S.
mainstream media cast no aspersions on the mental health of the
man who ordered the carpet bombing.
As with the brutality of warfare, so too the geopolitical
analysis. Inversion is to denial what jet fuel is to an air war.
Since last summer we have heard endless insistence that
Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government must be stopped, for the
sake of world peace and human security. But by now, a few weeks
into the war, there is ample evidence that this timeworn
propaganda line has masked a starkly different truth: George Bush
and the U.S. government must be stopped, for the sake of world
peace and human security.
Mass media, functioning as key mechanisms of denial, keep
distorting lurid events. The "terrorism" most massively unleashed
in the Middle East is being inflicted by the USA. This truth is
so overwhelming that it must be denied at every turn.
Wide areas of Iraq and Kuwait are incessantly shattered by
bombs that destroy life with the same terroristic finality -- and
with no more justification -- than the occasional Scud missiles
landing in Israel.
The few Israeli victims of Iraq's attacks have gotten
extensive and empathetic news coverage in the United States; the
many Iraqi victims of U.S. attacks get only avoidance. In Israel,
a few innocents have been harmed. In Iraq, a huge number have
already been massacred.
The anguish of Jewish Americans, about the random missiles
falling on Israel, has been a hot topic in U.S. mass media. The
anguish of Iraqi-Americans and others of Arab descent has gotten
little attention. Yet Iraqis, not Israelis, are being slaughtered
en masse.
In the inverted world of newspeak, the double standards and
duplicities must be enormous and never-ending. Moral outrage is
carefully aimed away from home.
So it was natural, in a sick kind of way, for New York Times
columnist A.M. Rosenthal to demand that Saddam Hussein be held
responsible for "war crimes against Kuwait, Israel and coalition
prisoners" -- while editors never allow the suggestion that
George Bush and other U.S. government officials should be held
responsible for their war crimes. All the while, "sorties"
continue to "pound" areas where millions of Iraqi civilians live.
Prevailing media biases include the insistence on draining
life from discussions of life-and-death subjects. What those who
dominate the airwaves and print media keep conveying, with their
flat tones and euphemistic language, is that the Pentagon's
wholesale destruction of human life should be discussed without
emotion; they want to anesthetize us to the horrors that this war
entails at every moment.
To resist this media anesthesia, we need to be able to feel
our sadness and anger. And we need to track the techniques of
unidentified flying propaganda, so that we can develop effective
countermeasures.
Among the pro-war biases that must be fought are the
numerous ways that news media seek to objectify "the enemy," and
justify the air war that continues -- mass murder, by any other
name.
Norman Solomon is co-author of "Unreliable Sources: A Guide
to Detecting Bias in News Media."
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>From PeaceNet article:
** Topic: Media inversion & the war **
** Written 11:07 am Feb 4, 1991 by fair in cdp:udc.media **
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Norman Solomon is an author, investigative journalist, board member
(and former D.C. coordinator) of FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in
Reporting), one of this country's most successful and articulate,
media-bias watchdog groups. He has visited Moscow eight times in the
Gorbachev era, written articles that have appeared in numerous
publications both in this country and abroad (including: "The Nation,"
"Newsday," and "The Progressive"). He has appeared on national media
such as: "ABC's Good Morning America," "CNN's Crossfire" program. He
is co-author of "Killing Our Own: The disaster of America's experience
with Atomic Radiation."
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