Scripting the Big Lie
Pro-war propaganda proliferates
By Heather Cottin
The titans of the military-industrial-media complex are
working around the clock trying to annihilate the truth so
people in the United States won't care what happens to the
people of Afghanistan. Using every propaganda vehicle, the Bush
administration is driving hard to control the minds and hearts
of the public here and, if possible, around the world. Those
who would oppose them are run over.
In a briefing, Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer warned
reporters that, in times like these, "people have to watch what
they say and watch what they do." CNN and other major
commercial news organizations are obeying Fleischer's
admonition.
During the bombing of Afghanistan, network news outlets
endlessly repeated, "Taliban claims are nearly impossible to
verify." CNN has ordered reporters to frame reports of civilian
deaths with reminders that "the Pentagon has repeatedly
stressed that it is trying to minimize" such casualties, and
that "the Taliban regime continues to harbor terrorists who are
connected to the Sept. 11 attacks that claimed thousands of
innocent lives in the U.S."
In a special report Nov. 5 that took other media to task for
letting the world know about the slaughter of innocents in
Afghanistan, Fox News anchor Brit Hume said, "Civilian
casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war,
really. Should they be as big news as they've been?"
Mara Liasson from National Public Radio agreed, "Look, war
is about killing people. Civilian casualties are
unavoidable."
U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone added,
"I think the real problem here is that this is poor news
judgment on the part of some of these news organizations.
Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is
that they accompany wars."
A memo circulated to editors at the Panama City, Fla., News
Herald and leaked to Jim Romenesko's Media News warned: "DO NOT
USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from the U.S.
war on Afghanistan. DO NOT USE wire stories which lead with
civilian casualties from the U.S. war on Afghanistan ... play
down the civilian casualties, DO IT."
Propaganda extravaganza
A New York Times article on Nov. 11 delineating the "Battle
to Shape Public Opinion" explained in detail how the Bush
administration was setting up "a round-the-clock war news
bureau" in Washington, London and Islamabad to help develop a
"message of the day."
The Times called the effort a "21st-century version of the
muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the
1940s."
The State Department brought in former advertising executive
Charlotte Beers to sell the U.S. line. This message "dovetails
with the domestic news management" under the supervision of
Karen P. Hughes, the White House communications director. Beers
holds meetings with foreign correspondents "closed to American
journalists."
"We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said
Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State
Department. Heavens, no.
According to the Times, the State Department and Defense
Department aren't allowing any real information out about
military operations. "Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for the
Knight Ridder newspaper chain, said 'American forces are
engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out.'"
The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote, "Substantial amounts of
information about current military actions and their
consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the
conflict."
Moviegoers, beware!
This is total war, even if incredibly one-sided, and the
administration has drafted Hollywood.
The heads of the Warner Brothers television studio and of
the CBS and Fox broadcasting networks are actively
collaborating in a scheme to spread the U.S. government's
message through the movies.
The New York Times reported on Nov. 11 that several dozen
top Hollywood executives met with Karl Rove, President Bush's
senior adviser, to find "common ground on how the entertainment
industry can contribute to the war effort, replicating in
spirit if not in scope the partnership formed between
filmmakers and war planners in the 1940s."
The Sunday Herald of Scotland noted, "Hollywood stars and
scriptwriters are rushing to bolster the new message of
patriotism, conferring with the CIA and brainstorming with the
military about possible real-life terrorist attacks."
Many of the "stars" are thrilled. Actor Tom Cruise,
concerned about his upcoming role as a CIA operative in his
next movie, wants to show the "CIA in as positive a light as
possible." Sylvester Stallone is working on the script for a
fourth Rambo film in which he parachutes into Afghanistan to
battle leaders of the Taliban (New York Post, Nov. 13).
You can't make this stuff up.
Michael Macedonia of the army's Simulation, Training and
Instrumentation Command was enraptured with the prospect of
using Hollywood as a propaganda tool. "You' re talking about
screenwriters and producers. These are very brilliant, creative
people. They can come up with fascinating insights very
quickly," he told the Sunday Herald.
Actually, Hollywood has always been a willing tool for war
propaganda. Many people know nothing about the world except
what they see in war films. These are carefully planned and
funded. For example, a little-known think tank, the Institute
for Creative Studies at the University of Southern California,
received funding of $45 million from the U.S. Army in 1999,
writes the Sunday Herald.
The New York Times noted, "Efforts to create public service
spots for TV and movie theaters, documentaries on terrorism and
home security, live shows for American troops featuring
Hollywood performers and perhaps some involvement in helping
spread the American message abroad, provides an opportunity for
the studios to reassert their patriotism" while being "good
business."
Hollywood, as big business, is in tune with the
sensibilities of the oil companies. The owners of the major
studios are the same capitalists who own the defense and oil
industries, which are the major beneficiaries of the war for
the Middle East and Central Asia. There is no contradiction
between Hollywood's goals here and Pentagon strategy. They are
all profiting from this war. This is just war by other means,
war on people's hearts and minds.
Attack on academia and culture
The Bush administration's minions are meanwhile on the
attack against students and professors who oppose the war in
Afghanistan.
The Boston Globe reported on Nov. 13 that a "conservative
academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice
President Dick Cheney, fired a new salvo in the culture wars by
blasting 40 college professors as well as the president of
Wesleyan University and others for not showing enough
patriotism in the aftermath of Sept. 11."
"College and university faculty have been the weak link in
America's response to the attack,'' says a report by Cheney's
newly created American Council of Trustees and Alumni. The
report names names and criticizes professors for making
statements "short on patriotism."
Not content with creating what one professor called tactics
"reminiscent of McCarthyism" against university professors, the
administration has called in the intelligence agencies to beef
up the attack on culture and the free expression of ideas.
On Nov. 7, FBI and Secret Service agents visited the "Secret
Wars" exhibit at the Art Car Museum in Houston, Texas. Secret
Wars is an exhibition investigating artistic dissent to covert
operations and government secrets.
Donna Huanca, a worker at the museum, said, "It was a very
scary experience. ... They were interested in where we got our
funding, how many people come in in a day, what the traffic was
like, how did we advertise. They let us know that they are
watching us now."
Tex Kerschen, the museum's curator, said to Independent
Media, "The FBI are going to move in as quickly as they can to
investigate any kind of dissent."
Bombing television stations--again
With television, movies, the print media, academia and
cultural outlets on the run, the U.S. government found it still
had one formidable opponent in its war on public opinion. One
news service has been able to present a different view of the
war in Afghanistan. Called by some "the CNN of the Middle
East," Al-Jazeera is a 24-hour television station based in
Qatar that reaches more than 35 million Arabs around the world,
including 150,000 in the United States. The station provided
the only television transmission from Afghanistan until the BBC
arrived just before the fall of Kabul.
The Associated Press on Nov. 13 reported that a missile
destroyed the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. While the Defense
Department claimed it was targeting the building because there
was supposedly an Al-Qaeda meeting going on, critics noted that
it was unlikely that Al-Qaeda would have hung around Kabul
after the Taliban had fled. One Al-Jazeera spokesperson said,
"They know where we are located and they know what we have in
our office and we also did not get any warning."
Nearby offices of the AP and the BBC in Kabul were damaged
in the same attack. Pictures of correspondent William Reeve
diving under his desk to avoid fall-out from the blast have
been shown on BBC television. There were no military
installations nearby, and the bombing in the civilian
neighborhood came after Taliban forces had pulled out of the
city.
Following the attack, the BBC reported Nov. 16 that
Washington had "asked Qatar to rein in the influential and
editorially independent Arab Al-Jazeera television station,
which gives airtime to anti-American opinions." In a sharp
response, Al-Jazeera said its Kabul office had been
deliberately targeted by U.S. bombers, according to the British
newspaper on Nov. 17. On the defensive, Air Force Director of
Public Affairs Col. Brian Hoey replied, "We would not, as a
policy, target news media organizations--it would not even
begin to make sense."
The bombing of a Yugoslav television station in the spring
of 1999 was a "different issue," Hoey said.
But it is not a different issue. It is war. The Bush
administration has declared war on the truth and consciousness.
It needs to generate public support for ongoing military
intervention in the Middle East and Central Asia. And
disinformation just isn't enough. So the military is bombing
renegade media outlets while the capitalist media bombard the
people with lies and disinformation.
But no amount of movies or propaganda will make U.S. youths
willing recruits for a new land war in Asia. They are not going
to buy it. Patriotic fervor tends to wane. Washington will lose
this propaganda campaign. In a shrinking economy, working
people can't afford a war that in the end helps only the oil
companies, the military industries and the corporations.
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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