Bush and the Compliant Media
by
Kim Petersen
Dissident Voice
March 10, 2003
Among all the things I'm going to tell you today about
being a journalist, all you have to remember is two words: governments lie.
-- I.F. Stone
On 7
February President Bush spoke before the media and fielded questions from them
afterwards. It was a very collegial affair with Mr. Bush responding to
questions proffered him by chuckling or praise: “I appreciate that question a
lot;” “Great question.” The quality of the queries conformed without exception
to the Propaganda Model of Herman and Chomsky. (1)
Mr. Bush selected by first
name from among the gathered journalists and reporters, who then tendered their
delicate probes of US government policy. No, it was rather in the words of
Robert Fisk, a “vapid, hopeless, gutless, unchallenging journalism which
passe[s] for coverage in the Western media.” (2)
The hard questions were
marginalized into thin air. There were no questions about the omission of
crucial intelligence of a high-level Iraqi defector, Gen. Hussein Kamel, who
confessed that Iraq had in fact destroyed its weapons of mass destruction
(WMD). This story has been sat upon although Daniel Ellsberg has stated it
could be the biggest story of the entire Persian Gulf War. (3)
Neither were there any queries about the dirty tricks plan for eavesdropping on
the diplomatic communications of six UN Security Council members who hadn’t
staked out a hard position on a second resolution. (4)
Mr. Bush was never taken to
the task when he magnanimously proclaimed that the US would provide “ample food
and medical supplies” to the Iraqi people after the war. No one had the
temerity to ask why the US has been preventing enough food and medicines from entering
Iraq to ameliorate the 6,000 children who die every month from the UN
sanctions.
Mr. Bush peppered his speech
and replies with enough anti-war rhetoric that one might have led a Martian to
mistake him for a dove: “I don’t like war;” “Nobody likes war;” “I hope we
don’t have to go to war;” I pray for peace.” Bush even invoked that “In the
name of peace … the US will disarm him,” as if President Saddam Hussein himself
was the target to be disarmed.
He claimed, “We will respect
innocent life in Iraq.” Not one reporter asked how that was possible under the
Shock and Awe military scheme. The US doesn’t rule out the use of nuclear
weapons (a logical conundrum for the US: Iraq is faced with the violence of WMD
for being accused of having WMD), depleted uranium (which has wreaked a cancer
havoc upon the Iraqis), cluster bombs, BLU-82, and what defense analyst Paul
Rogers referred to as “the mother of all bombs,” the Massive Ordnance Air Burst
weapon. (5)
Mr. Bush asserts that Iraq
is part of the War on Terrorism even though no vaguely credible evidence for
this link has yet been presented. He asserts further that Iraq trains and arms
terrorists.
“The risk of doing
nothing…the risk that somehow, umm, that inaction will make the world safer is
a risk that I’m not prepared to take,” spoke Mr. Bush ominously. Maybe Mr. Bush
is not prepared to take the risk of doing nothing and there are few who are
pushing this position. Indeed most nations stand behind the action of
inspections disarming Iraq.
The president has defined
the “fundamentally disarmed” shriveling hulk of a country ravaged by 20 years
of war and genocidal sanctions as a threat personified by one man. It is an
absurd scenario that beggars the imagination. If the UN refuses to go along
with this illusion it is to be dismissed. If no second resolution is
forthcoming then the “credibility of the Security Council is at stake.” On the
other hand Mr. Bush says he wants the UN to be “effective,” but that he is not
worried about it.
To most observers the notion
that the US is acting out of self-defense is risible. Mr. Bush says it his duty
to “protect and defend the Constitution.” That means, Mr. Bush having lost his
patience, will not wait until Mr. Hussein attacks the US. Without UN
imprimatur, however, this will be unconstitutional as the UN Charter to which
the US signed binds Americans. Mr. Bush goes further to enounce: “We will be
changing the regime of Iraq for the good of the people of Iraq.” Regime change
is not mandated under the UN charter.
A few times the members of
the media raised the threat of a North Korea with nuclear weapons but never
once was nuclear-armed Israel mentioned nor its ongoing violence in the
Occupied Territories in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions.
The media let stand again
the suggestion that America’s enemies hate her freedoms. They didn’t comment on
the ironic fact that those same freedoms have been curtailed post 9-11. US
Founding Father Benjamin Franklin once cautioned: “They that can give up
essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty
nor safety.”
Kim Petersen is an English teacher living
in China. Email: kotto2001@hotmail.com
References
(1) Edward S. Herman and
Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(Pantheon: 1988).
(2) Robert Fisk, “Transcript
Of Robert Fisk Speech At Concordia University In Montreal,”
montrealmuslimnews.net, 17 November
2002:
http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/fiskspeech.htm
(3) Norman Solomon,
“American Media Dodging U.N. Surveillance Story,” Dissident Voice, 6 March 2003:
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles2/Solomon_Observer.htm
(4) Martin Bright, Ed
Vulliamy, and Peter Beaumont, “Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq
war,” The Observer, Sunday 2 March 2003: http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,905899,00.html
(5) Paul Rogers, “The Mother
of all Bombs – how the US plans to pulverise Iraq,” Open Democracy, 7 March
2003:
http://opendemocracy.com/debates/article-2-88-1028.jsp