Propaganda coup for Bush

2003-04-16 09:08

Bangkok - "In a dictatorship, censorship is used; in a democracy, manipulation." - Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski.

While wars are fought in pitched battles on the ground, sea, and air, the crucial fight for "hearts and minds" is now waged in the media.

It is journalists that must weed out nonsense from truth. But according to critics of the mainstream American media, the free press failed to pose tough questions to the George W Bush administration when it claimed the regime in Iraq posed "a grave and growing danger" to the United States of America.

Analysts say this aided the march to war.

The road to convince the American public of the imminent threat posed by Iraq was stepped up in September 2002. The US administration put out a 31-page security policy statement saying "to forestall or prevent hostile acts, it will, if necessary act pre-emptively". America maintains the option of pre-emptive action to counter a "sufficient threat to our national security", the document said.

The message was quickly spread using the media.

US vice-president Dick Cheney was one of five top administration officials to hit the airwaves the following Sunday on major US television talk shows.

No proof Iraq was building a nuclear arsenal

"We do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon," Cheney told the NBC network's Meet the Press programme.

"And increasingly, we believe the United States may well become the target of those activities. The cost of military action, if that's what it comes to, would be significantly less (now) than having to deal with it after we've been struck once again by a deadly system."

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice was more animated on CNN's Late Edition. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

There is no proof even today that Iraq was building a nuclear arsenal.

Defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared on the CBS network's Face the Nation on the same Sunday in September 2002.

"Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3 000 (dead) - it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children," Rumsfeld said.

Yet, Iraq's links to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network and evidence of its weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found.

A truly spectacular achievement of propaganda

According to long-time media critic and renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics scholar, Noam Chomsky, after September 11 about 3% of the American people held Iraq responsible for the carnage at the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania.

"Government-media propaganda managed to raise that to about 50%," Chomsky recently told Frontline India in an interview. "Now if people genuinely believe that Iraq has carried out major terrorist attacks against the United States and is planning to do so again, people will support the war.

"It is a truly spectacular achievement of propaganda."

Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa contacted The New York Times, the Cable News Network (CNN), the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for comment on the criticism. Only CNN and The New York Times responded to decline.

"I don't believe it's appropriate for us to comment on our own coverage," said Catherine Mathis, vice president of The New York Times communications department.

While examples of the US administration tying Iraq to terrorism plans on American soil abounded in the nation's press prior to the invasion, media critics point out challenges to these accusations by reporters were virtually non-existent.

"Bush administration spokespersons have made several cases for waging war against Iraq, and the US press has tended to present all those cases to the public as if they were gospel," veteran New York Times journalist Tom Wicker wrote before the US and its allies attacked Iraq.

"The American press seems sometimes to be playing on the administration team, rather than pursuing the necessary search for truth, wherever it may lead."

Rhetoric of fear

As one example, Steve Rendall of the New York-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (Fair) highlighted the sacking of liberal talk-show host Phil Donahue from the MSNBC network in February. He called it a deliberate attempt to silence a lone anti-war voice by a major US television network.

Executives said poor ratings sunk Donahue's programme, but a leaked MSNBC report puts the claim into question.

"He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and sceptical of the administration's motives," the MSNBC document - obtained by media analyst Rick Ellis - said.

The memo described Donahue as "a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace". Donahue's show held the highest ratings of any programme on MSNBC at the time of his dismissal.

A lack of fair and balanced media coverage is also found in the case of Scott Ritter, former chief UN weapons inspector in Iraq, press critics say.

Ritter, a former Marine who resigned from the inspections team in 1998 after seven years in Iraq, said last September the country was no longer a threat to its neighbours or the outside world, because it had eliminated between 90-95% of its deadliest arms.

"The rhetoric of fear that is disseminated by my government and others has not to date been backed up by hard facts that substantiate any allegations that Iraq is today in possession of weapons of mass destruction, or has links to terror groups responsible for attacking the United States. Void of such facts, all we have is speculation," he said.

Ritter's point of view was dismissed by the Bush administration, and the American media made little mention of his views in the lead up to the US-led invasion.

Chomsky says the American public was frightened into believing the war was inevitable and necessary, despite the absence of credible evidence that Iraq truly was a threat. For that, he says, the media is to blame.

"Since September, there's been a drumbeat of propaganda trying to bludgeon people into the belief that not only is Saddam a terrible person, but in fact he's going to come after us tomorrow unless we stop him today. And that reaches people," Chomsky told Britain's the Guardian newspaper. - Sapa-DPA

- SAPA