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Triumph
of the Media Mill
by
Norman Solomon
September
11, 2003
Without
a hint of intended irony, the “NewsHour” on PBS concluded its Sept. 9 program
with a warm interview of Henry Kissinger and then a segment about a renowned
propagandist for the Nazi war machine. Kissinger talked about his latest book.
Then a professor of German history talked about Leni Riefenstahl, the
path-breaking documentary filmmaker who just died at age 101.
The
conversation was cozy with Kissinger, the man who served as the preeminent
architect of U.S. policy during the last half-dozen years of the Vietnam War.
Tossed his way by host Jim Lehrer, the questions ranged from softball to beach
ball. And when the obsequious session ended, Lehrer went beyond politeness:
“Dr. Kissinger, good to see you. Thank you for being with us. Good luck on your
book.”
After
focusing on Kissinger’s efforts during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the
“NewsHour” interview last Tuesday discussed his role in the April 1975 final
withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam. Previously, Kissinger had been the
Nixon administration’s main foreign-policy man while more than 25,000 American
soldiers and upwards of 500,000 Vietnamese people -- most of them civilians --
were killed.
The
Nixon-Kissinger policies in Southeast Asia also included illegal and deadly
bombing of Cambodia, where the Pentagon flew 3,630 raids over a period of 14
months in 1969 and 1970. (Cambodia’s neutrality in the Cold War and the Vietnam
War had infuriated Washington.) Military records were falsified to hide the
bombing from Congress. Massive carnage among civilians also resulted from U.S.
air strikes on Laos.
But
in September 2003, the man who largely oversaw those activities sat under
bright TV lights and basked in yet more media deference. This is routinely the
case for Kissinger. But not always.
Once
in a great while, a mainstream news outlet summons the gumption necessary to
explore grim truth about those in our midst who have exercised bloody power.
That’s what happened in February 2001, when “NewsHour” correspondent Elizabeth
Farnsworth interviewed Kissinger about his direct contact with Gen. Augusto
Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who came to power in a coup on Sept. 11, 1973.
Kissinger was President Nixon’s national security advisor at the time of the
coup.
Nearly
three years after that military coup -- which overthrew the elected socialist
president Salvador Allende -Kissinger huddled with Gen. Pinochet in Chile. By
then, Kissinger was in his third year as secretary of state; by then, thousands
of political prisoners had died, and many more had been tortured, at the hands
of the Pinochet regime. At the 1976 meeting, a declassified memo says,
Kissinger told Pinochet: “We are sympathetic with what you are trying to do
here.”
Farnsworth
confronted Kissinger about the memo’s contents during the 2001 interview. She
asked him point-blank about the discussion with Pinochet: “Why did you not say
to him, ‘You’re violating human rights. You’re killing people. Stop it.’?”
Kissinger
replied: “First of all, human rights were not an international issue at the
time, the way they have become since. That was not what diplomats and
secretaries of state and presidents were saying generally to anybody in those
days.” He added that at the June 1976 meeting with Pinochet, “I spent half my
time telling him that he should improve his human rights performance in any
number of ways.”
But
the American envoy’s concern was tactical. As Farnsworth noted in her
reporting: “Kissinger did bring up human rights violations, saying they were making
it difficult for him to get aid for Chile from Congress.”
During
the past quarter of a century, Kissinger has become a multimillionaire as a
wheeler-dealer international consultant and member of numerous boards at huge
corporations, including media firms. Along the way, he has accumulated many
friends in high media places. When Washington Post Co. owner Katharine Graham
wrote her autobiography, she praised Kissinger as a dear friend and all-around
wonderful person.
As
it happened, the latest “NewsHour” interview with Kissinger came just two days
before the 30th anniversary of the coup in Chile. Although declassified
documents show that Kissinger was deeply involved in making that coup possible,
Lehrer’s hospitality was such that the anchor did not mention it.
Minutes
later, during another “NewsHour” interview, historian Claudia Koonz was aptly
pointing out that Riefenstahl “saw herself as a documentary maker, not as a
propagandist. But what she understood so much before anyone else is that the
best propaganda is invisible. It looks like a documentary. Then you realize all
you’re seeing is glory, beauty and triumph, and you don’t see the darker side.”
The
millions of people who have mourned the victims of the U.S. war in Southeast
Asia might feel that such words describe the standard U.S. media coverage of
Henry Kissinger.
Norman Solomon is Executive
Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy (www.accuracy.org) and a syndicated
columnist. His latest book is Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell
You (Context Books, 2003) with Reese Erlich. For an excerpt and other
information, go to: www.contextbooks.com/new.html#target. Email: mediabeat@igc.org.
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