Lessons on Corporate Media's Role in Promoting U.S. War: Next Target Iran

By Scott Harris

Excerpt of talk from a panel discussion, "Propaganda and Communications on Permanent War,"  at the United National Antiwar Coalition conference in Stamford, CT, March 25, 2012. Other panelists included Peter Hart, Activism Director with the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, (FAIR) and author/ activist David Swanson (See BTLonline.org/unac.html)

Throughout America's history, our media system has all too often deliberately failed in its primary mission to keep citizens in our democracy informed...skewing reporting on critical issues in favor of the rich and powerful, cheerleading unjust wars, becoming willing participants in government cover-ups.

Not that long ago, it was that vaunted "liberal" newspaper of record, The New York Times, which featured phony front page reports by Judith Miller about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" -- and later covered up for a year what they had discovered about the Bush administration's massive illegal surveillance program targeting U.S. citizens.

"Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," a brilliant analysis of the relationship between the U.S. media system and the agenda of corporations and the representatives they employ in government, was written by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in 1988.

In the book, Chomsky and Herman describe what they say are the five filters which determine what type of news people receive daily via newspapers, TV and radio – the Internet wasn't yet born when they wrote the body of work.

The filters they write about are: who owns the media, who funds the media, sourcing, flak, and anti-communist ideology.

On the issue of ownership, a handful of giant corporations now control most of the media: newspapers, Internet, broadcast and cable TV, radio, book publishing and entertainment in the U.S. and the world.

Chomsky and Herman argue that because huge conglomerates own the media, they naturally are biased against news stories and coverage of topics that would harm their business interests. In the case of General Electric, they are one of the nation's largest military contractors. So it's not surprising to find that when the war drums are beating to launch a new conflict somewhere in the world, they would feature few if any advocates for diplomacy or peaceful resolutions to international conflicts.

The group Free Press has put together a chart that lists the six largest corporations that dominate our media system today. They are:

• Time Warner
• General Electric  
• Walt Disney
• Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.
• Viacom
• CBS Corporation

Aside from the bias, the concentration of media ownership greatly diminishes locally originated programming from independent sources and consequently, reduces the diversity of points of views expressed on the monopoly owned news outlets.

The second filter described in "Manufacturing Consent" is funding, where attracting advertising revenue is more important than the news content featured. While the advertising business model for newspapers, for example, has changed dramatically with the arrival of the Internet – and the availability of free or inexpensive online advertising – the essential point is that media outlets adjust their content to be appealing and inoffensive to the business interests that buy advertisements, remains unchanged. The exclusion of dissenting views regarding U.S. empire, neo-colonialism and questioning the winners and losers resulting from U.S. imperialism is not surprising in this model.

The third filter Chomsky and Herman cite is sourcing. It's easy to see in the news coverage of past wars and in the current tensions with Iran that corporate media mostly turn to active duty or retired generals by the dozens – as well as official government spokespersons as primary sources – while very few war opponents or peace activists are ever quoted or interviewed.

Not long after the Iraq war was launched in 2003, CNN's chief news executive Eason Jordan revealed that he had secured the Pentagon's approval for a list of military analysts, mostly retired generals, to provide on-air commentary on the invasion of Iraq.

Later, The Nation magazine investigated some of these retired generals and found that former Lt. Gen. Barry McCaffrey and many others had obvious conflicts of interest, including holding paid advisory board and executive positions at defense companies and serving as advisers for groups that promoted the invasion of Iraq, such as the pro-war Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

McCaffrey himself served on the board of four defense firms, all of which had multimillion-dollar Pentagon contracts. When McCaffrey was on one MSNBC cable TV program he said, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and ... the Bradley fighting vehicle," and added that the "war isn't over until we've got a tank sitting on top of Saddam's bunker." In March 2003, a company whose board McCaffrey served on, the IDT corporation, received over $14 million in contracts related to the Abrams tank and Bradley vehicle machinery parts and support hardware.

Providing a platform to those that question the government and Pentagon agenda when a war is about to be launched can and has resulted in an abrupt end to a journalist's or TV personality's career.

Ask Phil Donahue, who although he had the top-rated show on MSNBC in the months leading up to U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, was fired in response to his anti-war opinion and the anti-war guests he regularly featured. An infamous leaked memo from an MSNBC executive stated that Donahue would be a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. ... He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives." The report warned that the Donahue show could be "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."

ABC cancelled Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect program in 2002, after he made a controversial remark shortly after the September 11th attacks. He agreed with his guest, conservative pundit and author Dinesh D'Souza that the 9/11 terrorists did not act in a cowardly manner. Maher's comment was in rebuttal to President Bush's statement calling the 9/11 hijackers cowards.

Maher said, "We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly." Maher later clarified that his comment was not meant to be anti-military. But his show was cancelled nonetheless.

The bottom line mentality or ideology of maximizing profit is the driving force here, with the perception that ad revenue will suffer if dissenting views that challenge the existing power structure are given a prominent or serious platform to communicate their opposition to war.

The fourth filter in "Manufacturing Consent" is something called "flak." These are described by Chomsky and Herman as corporate or government front groups that attack the media spin on a particular story, or advocate their own point of view through astro-turf advocacy organizations or deceptively planting false stories with the press.

Steve McCurry/National Geographic
Tragic consequences: Kuwait's burning oil fields
after the Iraq War in 1991

A blatant example of this occurred in the run up to the first Persian Gulf War against Iraq after Saddam Hussein invaded neighboring Kuwait in August 1990. Public opinion was deeply divided on support for the war and three months before George H.W. Bush launched the invasion, public relations firm Hill and Knowlton scheduled emotionally powerful testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah, for a hearing of the congressional Human Rights Caucus. She testified that while volunteering at a Kuwait City hospital, she saw Iraqi soldiers enter the hospital with guns, and go into a room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, she said, took the incubators, and left 312 innocent babies on the cold floor to die. The testimony repeated by President Bush, members of Congress, UN ambassadors and in TV, newspapers and magazines, helped move public opinion toward support for the war.

After the war, it was revealed that the girl testifying was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal family, her father, being Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. Although entirely false, that testimony helped move the Senate to approve, by a close vote, a declaration of war against Iraq.

Human rights group Amnesty International, which had championed the bogus incubator story, was later forced to publicly apologize for their complicity.

Other more contemporary examples of flak include Big Oil's longstanding, multi-faceted propaganda campaign to cast doubt on the truth about global climate change – and the related American Petroleum Institute's multi-million dollar TV and newspaper ad campaign promoting natural gas hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" and tar sands oil extraction - seen every night on liberal cable TV network MSNBC.

The fifth filter described by Chomsky and Herman in the book was "anti-Communism and fear," a major issue when the book was written during the Cold War.

Even after the demise of the Soviet Union, communism remains a potent bogeyman for much of the media, in places like China, Cuba and Venezuela. But today, terrorism has mostly replaced communism as the most powerful trigger to provoke fear in the American public. This was played on very effectively by the Bush administration to justify everything from the Patriot Act, illegal surveillance programs, the systematic torture of U.S.-held prisoners and ultimately the war with Iraq in 2003. In advance of elections, Bush administration operatives would raise the color-coded terrorism alert from "yellow" to "red," with the media dutifully instructing frightened Americans to seal their doors with duct tape - the not-too-subtle message being: "Vote Republican or risk being the victim of new terrorist attacks."

In recent years, we've seen the groundwork being laid by neo-conservatives for the eventual replacement of the terrorism bogeyman, with China. Although not really a communist nation anymore, China is essentially a practitioner of state capitalism - which has become America's #1 economic competitor in the world, a competition that will likely heat up considerably in future decades.

Here are just a few additional examples of media bias in action during U.S. wars abroad.

During the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama, President H.W. Bush justified the war to arrest one man, Manuel Noriega, on charges of drug trafficking. Although Noriega was a former paid asset of the CIA, which Bush had once led, some speculate that the real reason for the invasion was that the Panamanian leader hadn't wanted to cooperate in renegotiating the Torrijos-Carter treaty that committed the U.S. to turn over control of the canal to the Panamanian government on the last day of 1999. The Academy Award-winning documentary film, "The Panama Deception," by Barbara Trent, exposed the U.S. media's complicity in cheerleading the illegal invasion and covering up the estimated 4,000 civilians that were killed and 20,000 made homeless by the indiscriminate U.S. bombing of Panama City's poor residential neighborhoods.

Other episodes of media complicity in U.S. wars can be found in Washington-backed conflicts in Central America during the 1980s. In Guatemala, the U.S. government provided overt and covert support to successive military regimes that carried out a horrifying rural pacification campaign that resulted in the genocidal mass slaughter of the indigenous Mayan population by government troops and allied death squads. During the war waged against a small group of Guatemalan leftist guerillas, it's estimated that more than 200,000 died or were disappeared during three decades of war between 1966 and 1990. The war was initiated after the U.S. organized a coup against democratically-elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, who was instituting a program of land reform in a nation where only 2 percent of the population owned 70 percent of the land.

In El Salvador, the U.S.-backed government and their death squads abducted, tortured and killed thousands of students, trade unionists, teachers and leftist political leaders and activists, as part of the U.S.-backed anti-Communist campaign that killed an estimated 75,000 people. When the death squads killed dozens of Catholic priests, nuns and religious workers, including American church workers, the U.S. media provided an echo chamber for right- wing charges that three U.S. nuns who were raped and killed by Salvadoran Army troops had been radical communist sympathizers who were working with leftist guerilla groups.

After the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, which overthrew the Washington-backed Somoza family dictatorship, Ronald Reagan supplied arms, training and funding to the remnants of Somoza's brutal national guard. In the illegal U.S. war, funded in part by arms sales to Iran and the sale of cocaine to inner city youth in the U.S., an estimated 30,000 Nicaraguans lost their lives. The Contras, who raped, killed and tortured were dubbed "freedom fighters and the moral equal of our founding fathers" by Ronald Reagan.

When U.S. citizen Ben Linder was killed by the Contras as he worked on a hydro-electric dam project in rural Nicaragua, the U.S. media was quick to follow the lead of right-wing pundits and politicians who demonized this young man as a wild-eyed, gun-toting Marxist. This really hit home with me because before his death I had met Ben Linder, and interviewed him about his life and work in Nicaragua. He was an idealist who in his spare time put on a clown costume to entertain Nicraguan kids. The hatchet job done on Ben after the U.S. Contras killed him was symptomatic of how the U.S. media reliably acts as a pawn of the U.S. war machine.

Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. press focused enormous attention on human rights violations by communist governments in Eastern European nations, championing countless dissidents in Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, while decrying their arrests and government harassment.

The coverage in Eastern Europe stood in stark contrast to the conduct of America's major TV networks and daily newspapers which permitted only mild criticism about the U.S.-supported murderous rampage being waged in Central America. These wars and the media's silent culpability, stand out as one of the most shameful periods in recent U.S. history.

So as we turn our attention to the war drums beating and the sabers rattling advocating a new war with Iran, most of us are not surprised that the U.S. media has already started promoting the most extreme and irresponsible voices pushing for military action as they distort or ignore facts which don't support the charge that Iran is aggressively engaged in building nuclear weapons. And the media will pay little or no attention to opponents of war, whether they're activists in the peace movement, or those few legislators in Congress who are brave enough to stand up to American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the nation's other powerful pro-war institutions.

The bellicose conversation on Erin Burnett's Feb. 16th 2012 CNN program, foreshadowed what we may witness in the coming months. During the program Burnett and New York's Islamophobic Republican Congressman Peter King together went down a checklist of all the reasons the U.S. and Israel must attack Iran. 

They included allegations that Iran has built, or is now building long range missiles that could soon be capable of delivering nuclear weapons to the U.S. homeland and that Iran and Hezbollah likely now have sleeper cells in America, ready to attack and carry out terrorist attacks on U.S. cities.

Although most Americans are tired of the last 10-plus years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and want the troops to come home, the people pushing for a new war with Iran fully understand that the surest way to turn public opinion in favor of a new war is to stoke fear that if our country or Israel doesn't attack Iran first, we may again be victimized by terrorist attacks, like 9/11. Fear is a potent weapon in the battle for public opinion, and I expect in this election year, we'll see the warmongers pull out all the stops to stoke as much irrational fear as possible, with the media being the most important vehicle for spreading that fear.

See more selected audio from the UNAC conference at BTLonline.org/unac.html.

Scott Harris is executive producer of  the nationally syndicated Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine  and host of WPKN Radio's weekly public affairs program, "Counterpoint."  

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