How The Media Failed the People in the Run-Up to War
Lonna
Gooden VanHorn
Part II
The broadcast media’s greatest failure was in not challenging the
administration during the run-up to war with
Iraq
. According to a FAIR study
people were six times as likely to hear a pro war opinion as an anti-war
opinion. If only American
sources were considered, the public was 25 times as likely to hear a pro
– war guest. Not one source
had a sit down interview with an anti-war guest. http://www.fair.org/extra/0305/warstudy.html
Surprisingly,
according to this study, Fox was not the worst offender, CBS was
The
network news programs, apparently, could find no anti-war voices to
feature, but they could not have looked very hard.
One thousand veterans, some of them high ranking military officers,
signed a letter to Bush in March of 2003 telling him war would be a
mistake, but the media, apparently, did not believe their opinions and
arguments merited any interviews. http://www.alternet.org/story/15356/
1500 scholars and historians were also against the war as were
numerous religious organizations. Where
were their voices?
Input
from diplomats of the countries protesting against the war, their
knowledge of the Mideast and their opinion as to what likely consequences
of a war in that area might involve should have been taken into account
before the media, and through them the American people, blindly
accepted the president’s words as gospel. Why
were
so many people from so many nations protesting? It seems to me that
would have been a good question to ask. A better one would have been
"How much of a danger could one small, poor country with a destroyed
military be to the most powerful nation on earth?" And, since
Hussein is evil but not stupid, another question to ask might have been why
would
he attack
America
in any way that could be traced back to him since he had to know that if
he did we would hit him with everything we had?
After all, he had it pretty good.
The
first question to ask, perhaps, would have been what is asked when any
crime is committed. "Who stands to gain from this?"
But of course the broadcast media had a vested interest in avoiding that
question because although the obvious answer was Halliburton, Bechtel,
United Defense, etc., CNN and all network news channels also stood to gain from war.
I
understand reporters did not want to believe their president would lie the
United States
into a war, but the media’s job is to question the seats of power and to
hold them accountable for their words and actions.
I am not, myself, convinced the president knew he was lying when he
said the things he did, but I am very sure the people behind him knew he
was lying. He simply did what
he always does, which is to not do the work of governing himself, but to
rely on advisors, who, unfortunately, have their own agenda.
I believe Bush is a pawn who believes what the people he relies on
tell him because believing them is “the path of least resistance,” and
they tell him what he wants to believe.
He does not “weigh” evidence.
That would involve intellectual curiosity, which even the people
who do not believe he is stupid say he does not have.
For
the reporters, however, there is no excuse.
It is not as though people in power haven’t lied us into war
before. I am quite sure most
journalists are familiar with “The Pentagon Papers.” Why didn’t the
media try to find dissident voices, there were plenty out there.
The fact that the rest of the world thought the war was unnecessary
should have been a clue that perhaps
Iraq
was not an imminent threat in spite of what the president was
saying.
Lt.
Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a lifelong conservative, worked in the Pentagon in
the run-up to war but took early retirement rather than be part of the
dishonesty of the "office of special plans." Retired
colonel David Hackworth' wrote "First base first" in Oct. of
2002. He is this country’s most decorated living soldier.
The military was and is his life. He was right about
virtually everything. But not enough media people talked to him.
He was not “on message.” He said:
“Should the president decide to stay the war course, hopefully at
least a few of our serving top uniformed leaders – those who are now
covertly leaking that war with Iraq will be an unparalleled disaster –
will do what many Vietnam – era generals wish they would have done;
stand tall and publicly tell the American people the truth about another
bad war that could well lead to another died-in-vain black wall.
Or even worse.”<>
Other
people the media reporters should have considered interviewing might have
included General Zinni, a
Mideast
specialist who originally supported Bush, and some of the diplomats who
resigned because they could not serve a president they believed was making
a huge mistake. And then, of
course, there is always Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn.
It is truly sad that while everyone knows who Rush Limbaugh is,
only a relatively small number of people know who either Chomsky or Zinn
are.
But,
instead the talking heads continued being shills for the benefit of the
economic prosperity of the military industrial complex Eisenhower spoke
about, without even mentioning that Eisenhower had warned the people about
the influence on policy decisions of the very corporations who owned their
networks!
Now
that the quick victory in
Iraq
is over and the reality of what we have gotten ourselves into has become
evident, no one wants to think about our poor soldiers facing the
consequences of this administration’s mistakes.
No one wants to think about the people of
Afghanistan
and
Iraq
who according to our own GAO are in worse shape for the most part, than
they were before their “liberation.” Obligingly the broadcast
news is letting the story of Iraq fade into the background, just as it let
the story of Afghanistan die, while it focuses on Scott Peterson and Kobe
Bryant because it is better for their “bottom line” that they give the
people news they want to hear rather than the information they need to
know in order to make the “informed decisions” Cronkite referred to.
And now they have the Olympics and the campaign to help them make
the transition to less coverage of the quagmire our soldiers face.
I
gave up on network news long ago when it became “infotainment.”
I did not believe endless coverage of O.J.’s trial, Princess Di's
death or Clinton's sex life qualified as what used to be referred to as
“hard news.” That was when I quit watching network news, almost
entirely. The Baghdad Girl Blogger seems to share my point of view
regarding the news these days. She
wrote on April 7th
We all sit glued
to the television- flipping between Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabia, CNN, BBC and
LBC, trying to figure out what is going on. The foreign news channels are hardly
showing anything. They punctuate dazzling reportages on football games and
family pets with a couple of minutes worth of footage from Iraq showing
the same faces running around in a frenzy of bombing and gunfire and then
talk about 'Al-Sadr the firebrand cleric', not mentioning the attacks by
the troops in Ramadi, Falloojeh, Nassriyah, Baghdad, Koufa, etc.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/
I
now watch C-span and I watch the university channels. I watch
Democracy Now. I wish all
network reporters would watch Democracy Now as well.
They might learn something. It
is refreshing to go to a news source that offers in depth stories about
important subjects. An added
bonus is that there are no commercial interruptions on Democracy Now.
Because I watch Democracy Now, I heard all these
people the network news could not find to interview before the war.
Amy found them. This
morning (August 17th) she spoke with Chalmers Johnson on Bush’s
proposed troop shift. Did any
network news outlets bother to interview Johnson?
The media failed the American people and the
people of the world. It is the
job of journalists to question the seats of power and to hold them
accountable to the people. Not
only did the media not question power, it was a cheerleader for power.
Most especially it failed in its duty to look
out for the powerless, meaning the powerless people of
Iraq
, the soldiers who would be sent to their death or to be maimed for no
good reason, and for we taxpayers, as well, of course.
Rob
Kall wrote an article called "
Media Failure 101; Start Flunking Network "journalists" who Give
Right Wingers who lie and distort a pass."
You
should all read it. Along with the comments that follow it.
The people are pretty much agreed that Judy Woodruff, especially, belongs
on Fox.
Part III
The
Words of War Heroes Versus the Words of Bush/Co
Now that the war with
Iraq
has proven to be such a disaster, the New York Times and the Washington
Post have offered apologies, of sorts, for not asking the administration
tougher pre-war questions about the necessity of going to war.
Some members of the broadcast media have also expressed regrets
that they were so quick to support the war lust of this administration, as
have several members of Congress.
Since the media did not care to interview
living people who questioned the advisability of war, one might have hoped
the thoughtful ones among them would have at least examined what great
leaders of the past – particularly leaders who had actually experienced
war and its’ consequences -- had to say before blindly backing the
dictates of a member of the Texas Air National Guard whose only combat
experience before he became the “war president” was bravely defending
the skies of Texas against the Viet Cong Air Force.
When members of the administration said that
attacking
Iraq
would prevent terrorist attacks in the future, it would have been helpful
for the people to have been aware of what Eisenhower said about that
notion at a press conference in 1954
·
“A preventive war, to my mind, is an impossibility.
I don’t believe there is such a thing, and frankly I wouldn’t
even listen to anyone seriously that came in and talked to me about such a
thing.”
A living former
commander and by all accounts a brilliant man, General Wesley Clark said:
·
If we go in (to Iraq)
unilaterally, or without the full weight of international organizations
behind us, if we go in with a very sparse number of allies, if we go in
without an effective information operation… we’re liable to
supercharge recruiting for al-Qaida.”
<>
Marine
General Anthony Zinni, former Head of Central Command for U.S. Forces in
the
Middle East
, echoed that sentiment:
·
“It’s pretty
interesting that all the generals see it the same way, and all the others
who have never fired a shot, and are hot to go to war, see it another…We
are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we
will rue the day we ever started…”
When Bush, the
armchair warrior Chalmers Johnson calls the “boy emperor”
began talking about our “brave” soldiers and glorifying war, I
wish someone would have quoted the words of a couple of
career soldiers to him:
·
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who
has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”
Dwight
D.Eisenhower
·
“I have known war as few men now living know it.
It’s very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it
useless as a means of settling international disputes.”
General
Douglas MacArthur
Another
war hero whose words I wish the media would have read when this
administration began insinuating Americans needed to be terrified of
Saddam Hussein is General Douglas MacArthur.
MacArthur said:
·
“The powers in charge keep us in a perpetual state of fear:
Keep us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor with the cry
of grave national emergency. Always
there has been some terrible evil to gobble us up if we did not blindly
rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant sums demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened,
seem never to have been quite real.”
When
Ari Fleischer and others began cautioning the people about speaking out,
insinuating that questioning the president in a time of war is
unpatriotic, it is too bad the media did not challenge him with the words
of Teddy Roosevelt who
disputed the idea that a president should be treated like a god when he
said:
·
“To announce that there must be no criticism of the
president or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not
only unpatriotic and servile, but it is morally treasonable to the
American public.”
Eisenhower seems to have agreed with that sentiment:.
·
“May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”
Mark Twain said:
·
“My country, always. My
government when it deserves it.”
Samuel Adams who said it was the duty of the patriot to protect the
people from their government also said:
·
“The appeal to patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”
Einstein
provided an interesting explanation of why he hated the word
"patriotism.”
·
“Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome
nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism – how passionately I hate
them…[we] should not fight for imaginary geographical lines,
racial prejudices and private greed draped in the colors of patriotism.”
One
would think the opinion of one of the most intelligent men in history
might have been worthy of discussion, along with the information that
while Einstein would have been considered a traitor by his own
country, by writing a letter to Roosevelt advising him the United States
must develop a nuclear weapon before Germany did, he became a patriot to
the world. Writing that letter
became the greatest regret of his life, but at the time he thought he had
no choice. Ultimately he
believed humans must find a way to end war or they are doomed.
When Paul Wolfowitz
and others said that the war in Iraq would be a cakewalk, and would only
cost about $50 billion dollars, most of which would be paid for by Iraqi
oil revenues, and that the Iraqi people would welcome our troops with open
arms, perhaps the media would have been wise to remember the prescient
words of former United States Marine Commandant General David Shoup who
resigned his commission in 1963 because he didn’t believe the Vietnam
War was worth the life of one American soldier said in 1966:
·
I believe
that if we had and would keep our dirty, bloody, dollar-crooked fingers
out of the business of these nations so full of depressed, exploited
people, they will arrive at a solution of their own. One that they design
and want, one that they fight and work for. And if, unfortunately, their
revolution must be of the violent type because the "haves"
refused to share with the "have nots" by any peaceful method, at
least what they get will be their own, and not the American style, which
they don’t want and above all don’t want crammed down their throats by
Americans.
Hal Crowther has recently
expounded on the impossibility of a successful occupation in “With
Trembling Fingers.”
·
…”In
Washington
, chicken hawks will still be squawking about "digging in" and
winning, but
Vietnam
proved conclusively that no modern war of occupation would ever be won.
Every occupation is doomed. The only way you "win" a war of
occupation is the old-fashioned way, the way Rome finally defeated the
Carthaginians: kill all the fighters, enslave everyone else, raze the
cities and sow the fields with salt.
Otherwise the occupied people will fight you to the last peasant, and
why shouldn't they? If our presidential election fails to dislodge the
crazy bastards who annexed
Baghdad
, many of us in this country would welcome regime change by any
intervention, human or divine. But if, say, the Chinese came in to rescue us--Operation American
Freedom--how long would any of us, left-wing or right, put up with an
occupying army teaching us Chinese-style democracy? A guerrilla who
opposes an invading army on his own soil is not a terrorist, he's a
resistance fighter. In
Iraq
we're not fighting enemies but making enemies. As Richard Clarke and
others have observed, every dollar, bullet and American life that we spend
in
Iraq
is one that's not being spent in the war on terrorism. Every Iraqi,
every Muslim we kill or torture or humiliate is a precious shot of
adrenaline for Osama and al Qaeda.
The irreducible truth is that the invasion of
Iraq
was the worst blunder, the most staggering miscarriage of judgment, the
most fateful, egregious, deceitful abuse of power in the history of
American foreign policy. If you don't believe it yet, just keep watching.”
When
Bush and others insisted war would make us safer, how enlightening it
would have been if a reporter would have confronted them with what Ike had
to say about that notion:
·
“There is no way in which a country can satisfy the craving for
absolute security, but it can bankrupt itself morally and economically in
attempting to reach that illusory goal through arms alone.”
When
Vice-President Cheney and Wolfowitz said that a limited nuclear war was
winnable, someone should have told them Ike didn’t agree.
·
“Controlled, universal disarmament is the imperative of our time. The
demand for it by the hundreds of millions whose chief concern is the long
future of themselves and their children will, I hope, become so universal
and so insistent that no man, no government anywhere, can withstand it.”
and
·
“If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the
thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would
think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also
his ability to find a peaceful solution.”
Along
the same lines, General Bradley said:
·
“The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.”
And
General MacArthur said:
·
“We have had our last chance. If
we do not devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will
be at our door.”
When
the administration, the media and even Congress were so quick to condemn
France
and
Germany
for not backing Bush’s war, had they listened to Eisenhower, they might
have at least considered the possibility that the people of those nations
were right:
·
“If the United
Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using
force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and
our best hope of establishing a world order.”
Before
so cavalierly sending other people’s children off to die in an
unnecessary war, they might have remembered what Ike, who never got over
the loss of his own child, had to say about that kind of heartbreak:
·
“There’s no
tragedy in life like the death of a child.
Things never get back to the way they were.”
Or
Rudyard Kipling, who after his son died in World War I – a war he had
initially supported – said in remorse for that support:
·
“If any question
why we died, tell them because our fathers lied.”
When Bush, and others began speaking of more
or less eternal war against our “enemies” I wish someone would have
let them know they were not the first people who had espoused that idea.
Another war leader had trumpeted much the same concept when he said
in the "International Conciliation," the publication of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace:
·
"And above all, Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the
development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the
moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of
perpetual peace. . . . War alone brings up to its highest
tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people
who have the courage to meet it."
The person who made that Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Perle/
sounding statement was the father of fascism himself, Benito Mussolini,
who also said
·
“Fascism should more appropriately be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of State and Corporate power.”
The media’s failure to even examine the economic element
of the war might not have happened had they read the words of Albert Pike
who said:
·
“A war for great principle ennobles a nation.
A war for commercial supremacy, upon some shallow pretext is
despicable, and more than ought else demonstrates to what immeasurable
depths of baseness men and nations can descend.”
Cheney’s association with Halliburton and Bush, Sr.’s
ties with the Carlyle Group should have given knowledgeable journalists
pause for thought had they simply remembered what Ike said in his farewell
address:
·
“In the councils of government, we must guard against
the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by
the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist”
Or the words of one of only two two-time Congressional Medal
of Honor winners, Marine Major General Smedley Butler who figured out
seventy years ago that :
·
“War is just a racket. It always has been. It
is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most
vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in
which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not
what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows
what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at
the expense of the masses… of course it isn’t put that crudely in wartime…
It is dressed into speeches about patriotism and love of country
and putting one’s shoulder to the wheel, but the profits jump and leap
and skyrocket and are safely pocketed.”
There
are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes
and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a
racket.
There isn't a trick in the
racketeering bag that the military gang is blind to. It has its
"finger men" to point out enemies, its "muscle men" to
destroy enemies, its "brain men" to plan war preparations, and a
"Big Boss" Super-NationalisticCapitalism…
I spent thirty- three years and four months in active
military service as a member of this country's most agile military
force, the Marine Corps… And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-
man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was
a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
General Butler was a “colorful” character.
He did not believe in war for corporate profit, but my take on the
man is that had he still been alive he would have been the first in line
to fight after
Pearl Harbor
was attacked.
I wish he and Ike would have been alive two years ago to
talk some sense into Bush/Cheney/Wolfowitz.
But then again, I think if General Butler would have been left
alone with Bush, he would have taken the ignorant little warmonger into a
closet and beat the snot out of him. He
would have considered Bush one of the “domestic enemies” it was his
duty as a soldier and a patriot to guard
America
against.
I leave you with one final quote directed mainly at the
broadcast media, who in their eagerness for the increased ratings they
knew a war would provide, failed to do their job, which is to question the
seats of power and to hold them accountable for their actions.
In their timidity they also failed
to look out for the people – the soldiers who would be sent to
their death and maiming for corporate gain, and we taxpayers –
especially those among the middle class -- who will be made to pay for it
all. To them and to all of us
General Omar Bradley said:
“War can be prevented as just as surely as it
can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent it must share the guilt for
the dead.”
Lonna
Gooden VanHorn A
mother of 6 and a grandmother, Lonna Gooden VanHorn grew up in
Minnesota, the daughter of small farmers. She became so frustrated with
the media's failure to do its' job which is to question and hold
accountable those who occupy the seats of power, especially involving
something as important and costly in lives and taxpayer dollars as going
to war, that she began writing to ease her frustration. Lonna is
married to a Vietnam veteran and now lives in New Mexico. My
e-mail address is jvanhorn@peoplepc.com
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