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 clichéd 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. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learned to
look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike
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 clichés 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 Chávez. 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 façade, 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.
Speech delivered at the Chicago Socialism 2007 Conference on Saturday June 16 2007
