McClellan book confirms Lenin on ‘free press’

The Bush White House used propaganda and lies to justify its war on Iraq. The big media did not question this, but instead cheered it on. So says former White House press secretary Scott McClellan, a key propagandist for the war.

In a just released book, “What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception,” McClellan confirms what many have known for some time and what Workers World has reported since before the war on Iraq was launched. There have been other, more detailed accounts about the lies, but none from someone inside the White House.

The reason for McClellan’s book detailing how the White House has repeatedly lied is unknown. He was the official press secretary who put those lies into words. He could be set up to be the fall guy for those crimes, if there were a war crimes hearing. That might be motive enough for writing the book.

The media’s response to the book was at first muted, though the book was available in bookstores for about a week. Then the politico.com Web site gave a summary of the most damning contents and that report spread like wildfire around the Internet.

The New York Times gave more space to reporting on reactions to the book than the book itself. One Times report said that “surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed” with McClellan’s assertion that “the national news media” were “complicit enablers” of Bush’s push for war on Iraq. The Times reporter was apparently not surprised by McClellan’s assertion. After all, the New York Times played a key role in promoting the war. The Times reporter was surprised, however, that Katie Couric, anchor of CBS Evening News, and Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News both publicly agreed with McClellan.

Couric, speaking on the CBS Early Show, said, “I’ll start by saying I think [McClellan is] fairly accurate.” Couric added that she felt pressure from “the corporations who own where we work and from the government itself to really squash any kind of dissent or any kind of questioning of [the war].”

NBC’s Williams agreed on the pressure. “I was in Kuwait for the buildup to the war, and yes, we heard from the Pentagon, on my cell phone, the minute they heard us report something that they didn’t like.”

In February 2005, CNN’s chief news executive, Eason Jordan, was forced to resign after a videotape of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was leaked in which he was heard complaining that the U.S. military had deliberately killed 63 journalists in Iraq whose reporting the Pentagon didn’t like. (Washington Post, Feb. 12, 2005)

Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC in 2003 and is now at CNN, said that the corporate executives that own the networks dictated the pro-war coverage. General Electric, one of the biggest Pentagon contractors, owns MSNBC.

“The press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly,” Yellin said on Anderson Cooper’s 360 on May 28.

At that time, GE executives demanded and got the removal of the Phil Donahue show on MSNBC because it was not sufficiently pro-war. Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR.org) revealed an internal memo from a corporate executive indicating that the show was cancelled because they wanted only pro-war shows. (FAIR, March 7, 2003)

There is a popular myth about the media in the United States, that it is somehow free. But it is in times of crisis like this that the media’s corporate control is unveiled, if only partially.

The claim that there is “freedom of the press” is a lie. That’s the reality of capitalism. Almost a century ago, V.I. Lenin wrote, “In practice the capitalists, the exploiters, the landowners and the profiteers own nine-tenths of the best meeting halls, and nine-tenths of the newsprint, printing presses, etc.” If anything’s changed it’s that they now own 99 percent of the meeting halls and the printing presses and television stations. Lenin added that this means that the workers and farm laborers are, in practice, denied freedom of the press by “the sacred right of property.”

Lenin continues, “The present ‘freedom of assembly and the press’ in the ‘democratic’ German republic is false and hypocritical, because in fact it is freedom for the rich to buy and bribe the press, freedom for the rich to befuddle the people with venomous lies of the bourgeois press, freedom for the rich to keep as their ‘property’ the landowners’ mansions, the best buildings, etc.” (Lenin on “Democracy” and Dictatorship, Pravda, Jan. 3, 1919)

Who’d have thought that the Bush administration would end up so publicly confirming what Lenin had to say about the capitalists?