One of my favorite stories about the
Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United
States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for
their impressions. "I have to tell you," said the spokesman, "that we were
astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day
after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To
get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even
tear out their fingernails. Here you don't have to do any of that. What is
the secret?"
by John Pilger
The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book,
and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often
disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism,
about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might
be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote
about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.
He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not
long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist
talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate
advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something
called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers,
the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the
establishment - objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of
journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun
around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was
associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole
thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, "entirely bogus".
For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional,
journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official
sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day,
and check the sources of the main political stories - domestic and
foreign - you'll find they're dominated by government and other established
interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not
suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more
likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played
in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work
became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an
invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller's parroting of official sources and
vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous
Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up
the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945.
"No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin," was the headline on his report, and it
was false.
Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown. In 1983 the
principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American.
In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about
5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media
giants, and his company will be one of them. This concentration of power is
not exclusive of course to the United States. The BBC has announced it is
expanding its broadcasts to the United States, because it believes Americans
want principled, objective, neutral journalism for which the BBC is famous.
They have launched BBC America. You may have seen the advertising.
The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. Its
founder was Lord John Reith, who believed that impartiality and objectivity
were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British
establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and
the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came
to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for
the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation,
while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike
was over.
So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle certainly: a principle
to be suspended whenever the establishment was under threat. And that
principle has been upheld ever since.
Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the BBC's reporting. One
shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar
dissent - 2 percent. That is less than the antiwar coverage of ABC, NBC, and
CBS. A second study by the University of Wales shows that in the buildup to
the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass
destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them, and that
by clear implication Bush and Blair were right. We now know that the BBC and
other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service
MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories
about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his
palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake.
But that's not the point. The point is that the work of MI-6 was
unnecessary, because professional journalism on its own would have produced
the same result.
Listen to the BBC's man in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the
invasion. "There is not doubt," he told viewers in the UK and all over the
world, "That the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest
of the world, and especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up
with American military power." In 2005 the same reporter lauded the
architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as someone who "believes
passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." That was
before the little incident at the World Bank.
None of this is unusual. BBC news routinely describes the invasion as a
miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked, not based on lies, but a
miscalculation.
The words "mistake" and "blunder" are common BBC news currency, along with
"failure" - which at least suggests that if the deliberate, calculated,
unprovoked, illegal assault on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would
have been just fine. Whenever I hear these words I remember Edward Herman's
marvelous essay about normalizing the unthinkable. For that's what media
cliched language does and is designed to do - it normalizes the unthinkable;
of the degradation of war, of severed limbs, of maimed children, all of
which I've seen. One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a
group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the
final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions.
"I have to tell you," said the spokesman, "that we were astonished to find
after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the
opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our
country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their
fingernails. Here you don't have to do any of that. What is the secret?"
What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media
colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is
critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 last year the New
York Times declared this in an editorial: "If we had known then what we know
now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This
amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the
public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing
the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing
them. What the Times didn't say was that had that paper and the rest of the
media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That's
the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of
them - they've spoken to me about it - few of them will say it in public.
Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free
societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I
filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I
interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the
novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. "In dictatorships we
are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing
of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on
television, because we know its propaganda and lies. I like you in the West.
We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines,
and like you, we know that the real truth is always subversive."
Vandana Shiva has called this subjugated knowledge. The great Irish
muckraker Claud Cockburn got it right when he wrote, "Never believe anything
until it's officially denied."
One of the oldest cliches of war is that truth is the first casualty. No
it's not. Journalism is the first casualty. When the Vietnam War was over,
the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, a
distinguished correspondent who had covered the war. "For the first time in
modern history," he wrote, the outcome of a war was determined not on the
battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all on the television
screen." He held journalists responsible for losing the war by opposing it
in their reporting. Robert Elegant's view became the received wisdom in
Washington and it still is. In Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded
journalist because it believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam.
The very opposite was true. On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I
called at the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed
that some of them had a pinboard on the wall on which were gruesome
photographs, mostly of bodies of Vietnamese and of American soldiers holding
up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being
tortured; above the torturers head was a stick-on comic balloon with the
words, "that'll teach you to talk to the press." None of these pictures were
ever published or even put on the wire. I asked why. I was told that the
public would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would not be
objective or impartial. At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this. I
too had grown up on stories of the good war against Germany and Japan, that
ethical bath that cleansed the Anglo-American world of all evil. But the
longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more I realized that our atrocities were not
isolated, nor were they aberrations, but the war itself was an atrocity.
That was the big story, and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and
effectiveness of the military were questioned by some very fine reporters.
But the word "invasion" was never used. The anodyne word used was
"involved." America was involved in Vietnam. The fiction of a
well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was repeated
incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers back home to tell the subversive
truth, those like Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh, with his scoop of the
My-Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968 - the
day that the My-Lai massacre happened - and not one of them reported it.
In both Vietnam and Iraq, deliberate policies and strategies have bordered
on genocide. In Vietnam, the forced dispossession of millions of people and
the creation of free fire zones; In Iraq, an American-enforced embargo that
ran through the 1990s like a medieval siege, and killed, according to the
United Nations Children's fund, half a million children under the age of
five. In both Vietnam and Iraq, banned weapons were used against civilians
as deliberate experiments. Agent Orange changed the genetic and
environmental order in Vietnam. The military called this Operation Hades.
When Congress found out, it was renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand,
and nothing change. That's pretty much how Congress has reacted to the war
in Iraq. The Democrats have damned it, rebranded it, and extended it. The
Hollywood movies that followed the Vietnam War were an extension of the
journalism, of normalizing the unthinkable. Yes, some of the movies were
critical of the military's tactics, but all of them were careful to
concentrate on the angst of the invaders. The first of these movies is now
considered a classic. It's The Deerhunter, whose message was that America
had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best
against oriental barbarians. The message was all the more pernicious,
because the Deerhunter was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it's
the only movie that has made me shout out loud in a Cinema in protest.
Oliver Stone's acclaimed movie Platoon was said to be antiwar, and it did
show glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, but it also promoted above
all the American invader as victim.
I wasn't going to mention The Green Berets when I set down to write this,
until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie
who ever lived. I a saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday
night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the
then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam,
and I couldn't believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and
I laughed and laughed. And it wasn't long before the atmosphere around me
grew very cold. My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South,
said, "Let's get the hell out of here and run like hell."
We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our
pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn't
have to fight in World War II. And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent
thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable
exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the
playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote
him, "The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless
suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well know in the
West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left
alone, documented." And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of
countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. "But,"
said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever
happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter.
It was of no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The BBC
ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist.
I've made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero:
the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that
provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had
started, Pol Pot completed - CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered
Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it
were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait
outside. One of them finally emerged and said, "John, we admire your film.
But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol
Pot."
I said, "Do you dispute the evidence?" I had quoted a number of CIA
documents. "Oh, no," he replied. "But we've decided to call in a
journalistic adjudicator."
Now the term "journalist adjudicator" might have been invented by George
Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had
been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down
on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in
some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the
world. It was never shown in the United States. Of the five films I have
made on Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in New
York. I believe it was shown at about one in the morning. On the basis of
this single showing, when most people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy.
What marvelous irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience.
Harold Pinter's subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection
between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that's
almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. And this
is the secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in scope that
I'm always astonished that so many Americans know and understand as much as
they do. We are talking about a system, of course, not personalities. And
yet, a great many people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and
his gang. And yes, the Bush gang are extreme. But my experience is that they
are no more than an extreme version of what has gone on before. In my
lifetime, more wars have been started by liberal Democrats than by
Republicans. Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda system
and the war-making system will continue. We've had a branch of the
Democratic party running Britain for the last 10 years. Blair, apparently a
liberal, has taken Britain to war more times than any prime minister in the
modern era. Yes, his current pal is George Bush, but his first love was Bill
Clinton, the most violent president of the late 20th century. Blair's
successor, Gordon Brown is also a devotee of Clinton and Bush. The other
day, Brown said, "The days of Britain having to apologize for the British
Empire are over. We should celebrate."
Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the liberal truth
that the battle for history has been won; that the millions who died in
British-imposed famines in British imperial India will be forgotten - like the
millions who have died in the American Empire will be forgotten. And like
Blair, his successor is confident that professional journalism is on his
side. For most journalists, whether they realize it or not, are groomed to
be tribunes of an ideology that regards itself as non-ideological, that
presents itself as the natural center, the very fulcrum of modern life. This
may very well be the most powerful and dangerous ideology we have ever known
because it is open-ended. This is liberalism. I'm not denying the virtues of
liberalism - far from it. We are all beneficiaries of them. But if we deny its
dangers, its open-ended project, and the all-consuming power of its
propaganda, then we deny our right to true democracy, because liberalism and
true democracy are not the same. Liberalism began as a preserve of the elite
in the 19th century, and true democracy is never handed down by elites. It
is always fought for and struggled for.
A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace and Justice, said
recently, and I quote her, "The Democrats are using the politics of
reality." Her liberal historical reference point was Vietnam. She said that
President Johnson began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic
Congress began to vote against the war. That's not what happened. The troops
were withdrawn from Vietnam after four long years. And during that time the
United States killed more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs
than were killed in all the preceding years. And that's what's happening in
Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year, and this is not being
reported. And who began this bombing? Bill Clinton began it. During the
1990s Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the
"no fly zones." At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic
sanctions, killing as I've mentioned, perhaps a million people, including a
documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the
so-called mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins
School of Public Health found that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000
Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion. Official documents show
that the Blair government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les
Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal to the figure
for deaths in the Fordham University study of the Rwandan genocide. The
media response to Robert's shocking revelation was silence. What may well be
the greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in Harold
Pinter's words, "Did not happen. It didn't matter."
Many people who regard themselves on the left supported Bush's attack on
Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that
the Clinton administration had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them
high-level briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United States.
The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant Unocal in building an
oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And when a Clinton official was reminded
that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, "We can live with that." There
is compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban not as a
result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of 2001. This is virtually
unknown in the United States - publicly. Like the scale of civilian casualties
in Afghanistan. To my knowledge only one mainstream reporter, Jonathan
Steele of the Guardian in London, has investigated civilian casualties in
Afghanistan, and his estimate is 20,000 dead civilians, and that was three
years ago.
The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and
compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as
sworn to the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated
Press, the Boston Globe - take your pick. They all use this line as a standard
disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a ten-year ceasefire
is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone an
historic ideological shift in the last few years, which amounts to a
recognition of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually unknown;
and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of Palestine is unspeakable.
There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the reporting of
Palestine. They interviewed young people who watch TV news in Britain. More
than 90 percent thought the illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they
watched, the less they knew - Danny Schecter's famous phrase.
The current most dangerous silence is over nuclear weapons and the return of
the Cold War. The Russians understand clearly that the so-called American
defense shield in Eastern Europe is designed to subjugate and humiliate
them. Yet the front pages here talk about Putin starting a new Cold War, and
there is silence about the development of an entirely new American nuclear
system called Reliable Weapons Replacement (RRW), which is designed to blur
the distinction between conventional war and nuclear war - a long-held
ambition.
In the meantime, Iran is being softened up, with the liberal media playing
almost the same role it played before the Iraq invasion. And as for the
Democrats, look at how Barak Obama has become the voice of the Council on
Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal
Washington establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home,
"We must not rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such
as Iran and Syria." Listen to this from the liberal Obama: "At moment of
great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed
and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the
freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders."
That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps
into the lives of every American, and many of us who are not Americans. From
right to left, secular to God-fearing, what so few people know is that in
the last half century, United States adminstrations have overthrown 50
governments - many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have
been attacked and bombed, with the loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is
all very well - and is justified - but the moment we begin to accept the siren
call of the Democrat's drivel about standing up and fighting for freedom
sought by billions, the battle for history is lost, and we ourselves are
silenced.
So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings I have
addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this conference, is itself
interesting. It's my experience that people in the so-called third world
rarely ask the question, because they know what to do. And some have paid
with their freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It's a
question that many on the democratic left - small "d" - have yet to answer.
Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of
all - and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the
media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia
and it isn't true of the United States.
In all the years I've been a journalist, I've never know public
consciousness to have risen as fast as it's rising today. Yes, its direction
and shape is unclear, partly because people are now deeply suspicious of
political alternatives, and because the Democratic Party has succeeded in
seducing and dividing the electoral left. And yet this growing critical
public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer
scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the
current manufactured state of fear.
Why did the New York Times come clean in that editorial last year? Not
because it opposes Bush's wars - look at the coverage of Iran. That editorial
was a rare acknowledgement that the public was beginning to see the
concealed role of the media, and that people were beginning to read between
the lines.
If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The
national security and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush
power over all facets of government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the
constitution will be suspended - the laws to round of hundreds of thousands of
so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are already on the books. I
believe that these dangers are understood by the public, who have come along
way since 9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam
Hussein to al-Qaeda. That's why they voted for the Democrats last November,
only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and journalists ought to be agents
of truth, not the courtiers of power.
I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people's movement,
that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every
university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of
journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part
they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a
movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have
never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the
National Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has called
for a boycott of
Israel. The web site Medialens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to
account. In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate
the web - I can't mention them all here - from Tom Feeley's International
Clearing House, to Mike Albert's ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the
splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web - Dahr
Jamail's courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who
reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the city.
In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert's investigations turned back much of the virulent
propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chavez. Make no mistake, it's the threat of
freedom of speech for the majority in Venezuela that lies behind the
campaign in the west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the
rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground
and take it to ordinary people.
We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of
corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be
allowed to be its faade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and
subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that
if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth,
it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.
[Here is a shocking, sobering decades old quote (see Jerry Spence's "Give Me Liberty!") of John Swinton, an eminent New York journalist:
"There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you
know before hand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my
honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with...If I allowed my honest opinions
to appear in one issue of my paper, before 24 hours my occupation would be gone...The
business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to
vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his
daily bread. You know it and I know it, so what folly is this toasting an independent
press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping jacks
-- they pull our strings -- we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are
all the property of other men"--Mohsin Ali, "Around the World of Diplomatic News in 40
Years," The Wisdom Fund, April 20, 1999]
VIDEO: "The film tells a universal story," says Pilger, "analysing and
revealing, through vivid testimony, the story of great power behind its
venerable myths. It allows us to understand the true nature of the so-called
war on terror".--John Pilger, "The War
on Democracy," January 2, 2006
[To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented
tens of thousands of times on television and radio as "military analysts"
whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered
judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon
information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate
favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance, an
examination by The New York Times has found.--David Barstow, "Behind
TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand," New York Times, April 20, 2008]
[The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300
million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment
programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort
to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and
the Iraqi government. . . .
The four companies that will share in the new contract are SOSi, the
Washington-based Lincoln Group, Alexandria-based MPRI and Leonie Industries,
a Los Angeles contractor. . . .
While U.S. law prohibits the use of government money to direct propaganda at
U.S. audiences, the "statement of work" included in the proposal, written by
the U.S. Joint Contracting Command in Iraq, notes the need to "communicate
effectively with our strategic audiences (i.e. Iraqi, pan-Arabic,
International, and U.S. audiences) to gain widespread acceptance of [U.S.
and Iraqi government] core themes and messages."--Karen DeYoung and Walter
Pincus, "U.S. to Fund Pro-American Publicity in Iraqi
Media," Washington Post, October 3, 2008]
[An Associated Press investigation found that over the past five years, the
money the military spends on winning hearts and minds at home and abroad has
grown by 63 percent, to at least $4.7 billion this year, according to
Department of Defense budgets and other documents. That's almost as much as
it spent on body armor for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2004 and
2006.
[Washington Post Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Katharine Weymouth
said today she was cancelling plans for an exclusive "salon" at her home
where, for as much as $250,000, the Post offered lobbyists and association
executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful
few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and even the
paper's own reporters and editors.--Mike Allen and Michael Calderone, "Washington Post Cancels Lobbyist
Event Amid Uproar," Washington Post, June 7, 2009]
[Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic
terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah
terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror,
Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...
In the Western context, power and the media is about words - and the use of
words. It is about semantics. It is about the employment of phrases and
their origins. And it is about the misuse of history, and about our
ignorance of history. More and more today, we journalists have become
prisoners of the language of power. Is this because we no longer care about
linguistics or semantics? Is this because laptops "correct" our spelling,
"trim" our grammar so that our sentences so often turn out to be identical
to those of our rulers? Is this why newspaper editorials today often sound
like political speeches?--Robert Fisk, "Fighting talk: The new
propaganda," Independent, June 21, 2010]
[There's long been a war on journalism. Journalism has always been - I mean,
if you read, let's say, General Petraeus-s counterinsurgency manual, which
he put his name to in 2006, he makes it very clear. He said we're fighting
wars of perception - and I paraphrase him - in which the news media is a major
component.--John Pilger, "There
Is a War on Journalism," democracynow.org, June 29, 2010]
[ . . . Israel "tolerates a far greater range of opinions than America":
it's even more acceptable to utter blasphemy about Israel in Israel than it
is in the U.S.--Glenn Greenwald, "Octavia Nasr's firing and what The Liberal Media
allows," salon.com, July 8, 2010]
[In the opening sequence of my film, The War You Don't See, there is reference to a pre-WikiLeaks private
conversation in December 1917 between David Lloyd George, Britain's prime
minister during much of the first world war, and CP Scott, editor of the
Manchester Guardian. "If people really knew the truth," the prime minister
said, "the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know, and
can't know."--John Pilger, "Why Are Wars Not Being Reported Honestly?,"
antiwar.com, December 11, 2010]