Source: GRTV and Corbett Report
James Corbett
James Corbett
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
As the drums of war begin to beat once again in Iran, Syria, the South China Sea,
and other potential hotspots and flashpoints around the globe,
concerned citizens are asking how a world so sick of bloodshed and a
population so tired of conflict could be led to this spot once again.
To understand this seeming paradox, we must first understand the
centuries-long history of how media has been used to whip the nation
into wartime frenzy, dehumanize the supposed enemies, and even to
manipulate the public into believing in causes for war that, decades
later, were admitted to be completely fictitious.
The term “yellow journalism”
was coined to describe the type of sensationalistic, scandal-driven,
and often erroneous style of reporting popularized by newspapers like
William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. In one of the most egregious
examples of this phenomenon, Hearst’s papers widely trumpeted
the sinking of the Maine as the work of the Spanish. Whipped into an
anti-Spanish frenzy by a daily torrent of stories depicting Spanish
forces’ alleged torture and rape of Cubans, and pushed over the edge by
the Maine incident, the public welcomed the beginning of the US-Spanish
war. Although it is now widely believed that the explosion on the Maine
was due to a fire in one of its coal bunkers, the initial lurid reports
of Spanish involvement stuck and the nation was led into war.
In many ways, the phrase infamously attributed to Hearst in reply to
his illustrator “You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,”
apocryphal as the story may be, nevertheless perfectly encodes the
method by which the public would be led to war time and again through
the decades.
The US was drawn into World War I by the sinking of the Lusitania, a
British ocean liner carrying American passengers that was torpedoed by
German U-boats off the coast of Ireland, killing over 1,000 of its
passengers. What the public was not informed about at the time, of
course, was that just one week before the incident, then-First Lord of
the Admiralty Winston Churchill had written
to the President of the Board of Trade that it was “most important to
attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hopes especially of
embroiling the United States with Germany.” Nor did reports of the
attack announce that the ship was carrying
rifle ammunition and other military supplies. Instead, reports once
again emphasized that the attack was an out-of-the-blue strike by a
maniacal enemy, and the public was led into the war.
The US involvement in World War II was likewise the result of
deliberate disinformation. Although the Honolulu Advertiser had even predicted the attack on Pearl Harbor days in advance, the Japanese Naval codes had already been deciphered by that time, and that even Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had noted in his diary
the week before that he had discussed in a meeting with Roosevelt “how
we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the
first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves,” the public
were still led to believe that the Pearl Harbor attack had been
completely unforeseen. Just last month, a newly-declassified memo
emerged showing that FDR had been warned of an impending Japanese
attack on Hawaii just three days before the events at Pearl Harbor, yet
the history books still portray Pearl Harbor as an example of a surprise
attack.
In August 1964, the public was told that the North Vietnamese had
attacked a US Destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin on two separate occasions.
The attacks were portrayed as a clear example of “communist aggression”
and a resolution was soon passed in Congress authorizing President Johnson to begin deploying US forces in Vietnam. In 2005, an internal NSA study
was released concluding that the second attack in fact never took
place. In effect, 60000 American servicemen and as many as three million
Vietnamese, let alone as many as 500,000 Cambodians and Laotians, lost
their lives because of an incident that did not occur anywhere but in
the imagination of the Johnson administration and the pages of the American media.
In 1991, the world was introduced to the emotional story of Nayirah, a Kuwaiti girl who testified about the atrocities committed by Iraqi forces in Kuwait.
What the world was never told was that the incident had in fact been the work of a public relations firm,
Hill and Knowltown, and the girl had actually been the daughter of the
Kuwaiti ambassador. Once again, the public was whipped into a frenzy of
hatred for the Hussein regime, not for the documented atrocities that it
had actually committed on segments of its own population with weapons
supplied to them by the United States itself, but on the basis of an
imaginary story told to the public via their televisions, orchestrated
by a pr firm.
In the lead-up to the war on Iraq, the American media infamously took
the lead in framing the debate about the Iraqi government’s weapons of
mass destruction NOT as a question of whether or not they even existed,
but as a question of where they had been hidden and what should be done
to disarm them. The New York Times led the way with Judith Miller‘s
now infamous reporting on the Iraqi WMD story, now known to have been
based on false information from untrustworthy sources, but the rest of
the media fell into line
with the NBC Nightly News asking “what precise threat Iraq and its
weapons of mass destruction pose to America”, and Time debating whether
Hussein was “making a good-faith effort to disarm Iraq’s weapons of mass
destruction.” Reports about chemical weapons stashes were reported on
before they were confirmed, although headlines boldly asserted their
existence as indisputable fact. We now know that in fact the stockpiles
did not exist, and the administration premeditatedly lied the country
into yet another war, but the most intense opposition the Bush
administration ever received over this documented war crime was some polite correction on the Sunday political talk show circuit.
Remarkably, the public at large has seemingly learned nothing from
all of these documented historical manipulations. If anything, the media
has become even bolder in its attempts to manipulate the public’s
perceptions, perhaps emboldened by the fact that so few in the audience
seem willing to question the picture that is being painted for them on
the evening news.
Later that year, CNN aired footage of a bombed out Tskhinvali in South Ossetia, falsely labeling it as footage of Gori, which they said had been attacked by the Russians.
In 2009, the BBC showed a cropped image
of a rally in Iran which they claimed was a crowd of protesters who
assembled to show their opposition to the Iranian government. An
uncropped version of the same photograph displayed on the LA Times’
website, however, revealed that the photo in fact came from a rally in
support of Ahmedinejad.
In August of 2011, the BBC ran footage
of what they claimed was a celebration in Tripoli’s Green Square. When
sharp-eyed viewers noticed that the flags in the footage were in fact
Indian flags, the BBC was forced to admit that they had “accidentally” broadcast footage from India instead of Tripoli.
Also that month, CNN reported
on a story from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights claiming that
eight infants in incubators had died in a hospital in Hama when Syrian
authorities cut off power in the area. Some news sites even carried pictures of the infants. The images were later admitted to have been taken in Egypt and no evidence has ever emerged to back up the accusations.
As breathtaking as all of these lies, manipulations and so-called
“mistakes” are, they in and of themselves don’t represent the only
functions of the media for the war machine. Now, the US government is
taking the lead in becoming more and more directly involved with the
shaping of the media message on war propaganda, and the general public
is becoming even more ensnared in a false picture of the world through
the Pentagon’s own lens.
In 2005, the Bush White House admitted
to producing videos that were designed to look like news reports from
legitimate independent journalists, and then feeding those reports to
media outlets as prepackaged material ready to air on the evening news.
When the Government Accountability Office ruled that these fake news
reports in fact constituted illegal covert propaganda, the White House
simply issued a memo declaring the practice to be legal.
In April 2008, the New York Times revealed
a secret US Department of Defense program that was launched in 2002 and
involved using retired military officers to implant Pentagon talking
points in the media. The officers were presented as “independent
analysts” on talk shows and news programs, although they had been
specially briefed beforehand by the Pentagon. In December of 2011, the
DoD’s own Inspector General released a report concluding that the program was in perfect compliance with government policies and regulations.
Earlier this year, it was revealed
the the US government had contracted with HBGary Federal to develop
software that create fake social media accounts in order to steer public
opinion and promote propaganda on popular websites. The federal
contract for the software sourced back to the MacDill Air Force Base in
Florida.
As the vehicle through which information from the outside world is
captured, sorted, edited and transmitted into our homes, the mass media
has the huge responsibility of shaping and informing our understanding
of events to which we don’t have first-hand access. This is an awesome
responsibility in even the most ideal conditions, with diligent
reporters guided by trustworthy editors doing their level best to report
the most important news in the most straightforward way.
But in a media landscape where a handful of companies
own virtually all of the print, radio and television media in each
nation, the only recourse the public has is to turn away from the
mainstream media altogether. And that is precisely what is happening.
As study after study and report after report
has shown, the death of the old media has accelerated in recent years,
with more and more people abandoning newspapers and now even television
as their main source of news. Instead, the public is increasingly
turning toward online sources for their news and information, something
that is necessarily worrying for the war machine itself, a system that
can only truly flourish when the propaganda arm is held under
monopolistic control.
But as citizens turn away from the New York Times and toward
independent websites, many run and maintained by citizen journalists and
amateur editors, the system that has consolidated its control over the
minds of the public for generations seems to finally be showing signs
that it may not be invincible.
Surely this is not to say that online media is impervious to the
defects that have made the traditional media so unreliable. Quite the
contrary. But the difference is that online, there is still for the time
being relative freedom of choice at the individual level. While
internet freedom exists, individual readers and viewers don’t have to
take the word of any website or pundit or commentator on any issue. They
can check the source documentation themselves, except, perhaps not
coincidentally, on the websites of the traditional media bastions, which
tend not to link source material and documentation in their articles.
Hence the SOPA Act, Protect IP, the US government’s attempts to seize websites at the domain name level, and all of the other concerted attacks we have seen on internet freedoms in recent years.
Because ultimately, an informed and engaged public is far less likely
to go along with wars waged for power and profit. And as the public
becomes better informed about the very issues that the media has tried
to lie to them about for so long, they realize that the answer to all of
the mainstream media’s war cheerleading and blatant manipulation is
perhaps simpler than we ever suspected: All we have to do is turn them
off.
