The blurred line between war news,
propaganda By Khody Akhavi
WASHINGTON - A shocking thing happens
midway through Norman Solomon's documentary film
War Made Easy.
While analyzing the
George W Bush administration's lead-up to the Iraq
invasion, Solomon, a longtime anti-war activist
and media critic, plays a news clip of Eason
Jordan, a CNN News chief executive who, in an
interview with CNN, boasts of the network's cadre
of professional "military experts". In fact, CNN's retired
military generals turned war
analysts were so good, Eason said, that they had
all been vetted and approved by the US government.
"I went to the Pentagon myself several times
before the war started and met with important
people," he said. "We got a big thumbs-up on all
of [the generals]."
In a country revered
for its freedom of speech and unfettered press,
Eason's comments would infuriate any veteran
reporter who upholds the most basic and important
tenet of the journalistic profession:
independence.
But the relationship between
the press and government in the United States
during times of war is changing. In Solomon's
film, it is just one example of the collusion
between the government and the mainstream news
media.
War Made Easy: How Presidents
and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, which
is narrated by Hollywood actor and peace activist
Sean Penn, begins as an anti-war film that decries
the Bush administration's interventionist
rationale and misinformation campaigns after
September 11, 2001. Through a montage of video
clips from cable news networks, presidential
statements, and historical footage from previous
US military interventions, it compares the
propaganda techniques of the past with the
present, and draws striking parallels.
The
late president Richard Nixon's "Vietnamization"
rhetoric, which expanded the Vietnam War instead
of ending it, sounds very similar to the current
president's declaration, "As the Iraqis stand up,
we will stand down."
The first half-hour
of this 73-minute documentary spends too much time
explaining to the audience much of what it
probably already knows. But it redeems itself by
delving into the insidious tactics used by the
Bush administration in managing a war of choice,
and how the mainstream media colluded with the US
government to boost the war effort.
"Rarely if ever does a war just fall down
from the sky. The foundation needs to be laid, and
the case is built, often with deception," says
Solomon during an interview in the film.
War Made Easy was produced and
directed by Loretta Alper and Jeremy Earp for the
Media Education Foundation, a non-profit
organization that distributes educational
programming "to reflect critically on the media
industry and the content it produces", according
to organization's website. Its board of advisers
includes prominent left-wing academics such as
Noam Chomsky and Cornell West.
Six years
after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US
news media's tepid performance during the buildup
to the Iraq war has been exposed and criticized by
the very establishment that was supposed to hold
political officials' "feet to the fire", as the
journalistic proverb goes.
In one
interview clip from Jon Stewart's The Daily
Show, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer shrugs and says,
"We should have been more skeptical," drawing a
puzzled look from Stewart.
War Made
Easy does not dispute the idea that the press
is self-correcting, is willing to investigate its
own reporting lapses (as the New York Times did
after the Judith Miller scandal over exaggerated
claims of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction), and
issue apologies and retractions. But it warns
against the ostensible collusion between press and
government. In Solomon's view, the US mainstream
news media are cast as part and parcel of the Bush
administration's war apparatus, an echo chamber
that packages, builds support for and, through the
vehicle of "leaked misinformation", sells the war
to the US public.
For example, in the
lead-up to "Operation Iraqi Freedom", CNN chairman
Walter Isaacson sent a memo to his anchors and
reporters asking them to "remind viewers why they
are watching the war". As video of the cleanup at
Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan (the site of New
York's destroyed World Trade Center) rolls across
the screen, one can't help but thinking about
September 11.
Solomon also labors over the
parallels between US government propaganda and how
the rhetoric is now filtered into a more
sophisticated media campaign yet, for all intents
and purposes, fulfills the same goal. In short, it
is more insidious than ever.
In one scene,
he describes how a Hollywood set designer was
hired to build a news set (with polished backdrop
and sleek high-definition televisions) for the
public relations arm of the US military during the
Iraq war. Presentations by military commanders and
officials resemble news broadcasts. There is no
discussion of the facts, and what the government
says is accepted without question.
None of
these revelations is exactly new, but the
historical parallels between Vietnam and Iraq wars
are becoming increasingly clear as the US remains
for a fifth year in Iraq. "War Made Easy" offers a
timely criticism of the media, and portends an
ominous future for the US news-viewing public
should they sit back and accept without question
the pronouncements of political leaders and
evening news anchors.
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