[THS] New Study Documents Media Servitude to Government

[The Harder Stuff in news and commentary]

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25846.htm

 New Study Documents Media's Servitude to Government

By Glenn Greenwald

June 30, 2010 "Salon" - - A newly released study from students at Harvard's John F.
Kennedy School of Government provides the latest evidence of how thoroughly
devoted the American establishment media is to amplifying and serving (rather than
checking) government officials.  This new study examines how waterboarding has
been discussed by America's four largest newspapers over the past 100 years, and
finds that the technique, almost invariably, was unequivocally referred to as "torture"
-- until the U.S. Government began openly using it and insisting that it was not
torture, at which time these newspapers obediently ceased describing it that way:

Similarly, American newspapers are highly inclined to refer to waterboarding as
"torture" when practiced by other nations, but will suddenly refuse to use the term
when it's the U.S. employing that technique:

[maybe it's not torture if you use Holy Water? -ths]

As always, the American establishment media is simply following in the path of the
U.S. Government (which is why it's the "establishment media"): the U.S. itself long
condemned waterboarding as "torture" and even prosecuted it as such, only to
suddenly turn around and declare it not to be so once it began using the tactic.
That's exactly when there occurred, as the study puts it, "a significant and sudden
shift in how newspapers characterized waterboading."  As the U.S. Government
goes, so goes our establishment media.

None of this is a surprise, of course.  I and others many times have anecdotally
documented that the U.S. media completely changes how it talks about something
(or how often) based on who is doing it ("torture" when the Bad Countries do it but
some soothing euphemism when the U.S. does it; continuous focus when something
bad is done to Americans but a virtual news blackout when done by the U.S., etc.).
Nor is this an accident, but is quite deliberate:  media outlets such as the NYT, The
Washington Post and NPR explicitly adopted policies to ban the use of the word
"torture" for techniques the U.S. Government had authorized once government
officials announced it should not be called "torture."

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task:
once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media
outlets dutifully cease using the term.  That compliant behavior makes overtly state-
controlled media unnecessary.  In his proposed Preface to Animal Farm, George
Orwell noted how completely the British Government during World War II was able to
control media content without formal or official censorship:

    The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need
for any official ban. . . .

    So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is
extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every
motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. . . . At any given moment there is
an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will
accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but
it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention
trousers in the presence of a lady.


In 2007, Rudy Giuliani was widely mocked for explaining that whether a particular
technique constitutes torture "depends on who does it" -- rarely does one find such
an unapologetically nationalistic theory of morality and even language -- but that's
exactly the same standard not only our government but also our establishment media
has adopted.

The real issue here is the same one raised by the malleable, manipulative use of the
term "Terrorism."  It's to be expected that governments will try to propagandize their
citizenry by applying completely different standards -- even completely different
language -- to their own conduct as opposed to when other countries engage in
exactly the same conduct.  But when the media copies that behavior (as ours does),
they're amplifying and bolstering government propaganda rather than critically
scrutinizing and debunking it.  Isn't that a fairly serious problem?

The behavior is even more egregious when government dictates (as of now, this is no
longer torture) lead directly to the change in media behavior.  And the ultimate effect
of this joint government/media obfuscation is to further entrench the destructive
notion that we're different, exceptional, better, and therefore we deserve even a
different language to describe what it is that we do.  This Harvard study documents
the exact process by which the political class convinces itself and others that bad and
illegal things are, by definition, only what those Bad, Other Foreign Countries do, but
never ourselves.

UPDATE:  For a classic example of the Everything-Is-Intrinsically-Different-When-We-
Do-It syndrome, see the update to the prior post.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/06/29/war/index.html

Tuesday, Jun 29, 2010 13:30 ET
The universality of war propaganda
By Glenn Greenwald

    *

(updated below [reply to Joe Klein] - Update II - Update III - Update IV - Update V)

Jeffrey Goldberg responded yesterday to my post detailing his long list of journalistic
malfeasance by telling me that he and the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kuridstan would like
me to travel there to hear how much the Kurds appreciate the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Leaving aside the complete non sequitur that is his response -- how does that
remotely pertain to Goldberg's granting of anonymity to his friends to smear people
they don't like or the serial fear-mongering fabrications he spread about the Saddam
threat prior to the invasion? -- I don't need to travel to Kurdistan to know that many
Kurds, probably most, are happy that the U.S. attacked Iraq.  For that minority in
Northern Iraq, what's not to like?

They had foreign countries (the U.S. and its "partners") expend their citizens' lives
and treasure to rid the Kurds of their hated enemy; they received semi-autonomy,
substantial oil revenues, a thriving relationship with Israel, and real political power;
the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose lives were
snuffed out and the millions of people displaced by the war were not Kurds, and
most of the destruction took place in Central and Southern Iraq away from their
towns and homes, while they remain largely free of the emergent police state tactics
of the current Iraqi government.  As Ali Gharib put it to Goldberg:  "there are at least
600,000 Iraqis who, I imagine, are not too thrilled about the way it all turned out and
with whom Greenwald will never get a meeting."

Goldberg apparently thinks that if you can find some citizens in an invaded country
who are happy about the invasion, then it demonstrates the aggression was
justifiable or at least morally supportable (I suppose I should be thankful that he
didn't haul out the think-about-how-great-this-is-for-the-Iraqi-gays platitude long
cherished by so many neocons, though -- given the hideous reality in Iraq in that
realm -- that's now a deceitful bridge too far even for them).  I'm not interested in an
overly personalized exchange with Goldberg, but there is one aspect of his response
worth highlighting:  the universality of the war propaganda he proffers.  Those who
perpetrate wars of aggression invariably invent moral justifications to allow
themselves and the citizens of the aggressor state to feel good and noble about
themselves.  Hence, even an unprovoked attack which literally destroys a country and
ruins the lives of millions of innocent people -- as the U.S. invasion of Iraq did -- is
scripted as a morality play with the invaders cast in the role of magnanimous heroes.

It's difficult to find an invasion in history that wasn't supported by at least some
faction of the invaded population and where that same self-justifying script wasn't
used.  That's true even of the most heinous aggressors.  Many Czech and Austrian
citizens of Germanic descent, viewing themselves as a repressed minority, welcomed
Hitler's invasion of their countries, while leaders of the independence-seeking
Sudeten parties in those countries actively conspired to bring it about.  Did that make
those German invasions justifiable?  As Arnold Suppan of the University of Vienna's
Institute for Modern History wrote of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia (click on
image to enlarge): And, of course, German citizens were told those invasions were
necessary and just in order to liberate the repressed German minorities.  To be a bit
less Godwin about it, many Ossetians wanted independence from Georgia and thus
despised the government in Tbilisi, and many identified far more with the invading
Russians than their own government; did that make the 2008 Russian assault on
Georgia moral and noble?  Pravda routinely cast the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as
one of protection of the populace from extremists.  I have no doubt that one could
easily find Iraqi Sunnis today who would welcome an invasion from Hamas or Saudi
Arabia to liberate them from what they perceive (not unreasonably) as their
repressive Shiite overlords; would Goldberg therefore recognize the moral ambiguity
of that military action?  If, tomorrow, China invaded Israel and changed the regime,
there would certainly be many, many Palestinians who would celebrate; would that,
in Goldberg's view, make it morally supportable?  Saddam himself, in FBI
interrogations after he was captured, was insistent that many Kuwaitis were eager for
an Iraqi invasion and that this justified his 1990 war; if he were right in his facutal
premise, would that render his actions just?

As Jonathan Schwarz wrote in 2007, responding to similar war-justifying claims from
Christopher Hitchens that he saw Iraqis giving "sweets and flowers" to American and
British soldiers:

    The strange-but-true reality is that throughout history, whenever one country has
invaded another, there have always been some people within the invaded country
who've welcomed the invaders.  Sometimes it's because they've been oppressed by
their own government, are similar ethnically or religiously to the invader, or just know
what side their bread is buttered on.

    At the same time, those within the invading country who support the invasion
have always seized on tales of the welcome they've received and declared it
demonstrates the justice of their cause. And this is rarely pure cynicism. Human
beings -- even (or especially) the worst of them -- need to believe they're moral.

To underscore the point, consider these photographs of ethnic Germans in Lithuania
handing flowers to invading German soldiers, and citizens of Ukraine and Poland
doing the same, all from the BBC documentary, Nazis:  A Warning from History (click
on photogaphs to enlarge):

As Schwarz wrote: "I don't know who took this footage, but I would bet a lot of
money it was the Nazis themselves, and that they rushed it back to the home front to
demonstrate the extraordinary morality of their cause." And just to bolster the point a
bit more, compare the propagandistic photograph on the right (below) used by
Germans in 1941 to show that Lithuanians welcomed their invasion (depicting citizens
pulling down a statue of an oppressive Communist ruler, likely Lenin), to the virtually
identical, iconic photograph on the left of the staged scene of Iraqis "celebrating" the
American invasion by pulling down a statue of Saddam:

It should go without saying, but doesn't:  the point here is not that the attack on Iraq
is comparable to these above-referenced invasions.  It may or may not be, but that's
irrelevant. The point is that every nation which launches even the most brutal,
destructive and unprovoked wars of aggression employs moralizing propaganda to
claim that their aggression engenders magnanimous and noble ends, and specifically
often points to segments of the invaded population which welcome the violence and
invaders.  Pointing to the happy and rewarded Kurdish minority no more justifies or
legalizes the attack on Iraq than similar claims do for any of those other cases.

What's most pernicious about all of this is that any decent human being has a natural
desire to see oppression of the type that the Kurds suffered under Saddam
alleviated, and neocons exploit that natural human desire to drum up support for
wars that have nothing to do with the noble goals that are touted (which is why so
many of them who stood silently by while the U.S. supported Saddam [even as he
brutally suppressed the Kurds] suddenly feigned concern for his crimes and his
victims when it was time to attack him).  This is how a state of endless war is always
justified:  with blatantly cynical, insincere and exploitative appeals to moralizing fairly
tales that have nothing to do with the aggression itself.

No matter how many of Goldberg's Kurdish friends tell him how grateful they are,
there are hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead, millions who were
displaced, tens of thousands of American troops who are dead or wounded,
hundreds of billions of dollars incinerated, and intense and enduring hatred of
Americans in that part of the world -- all provoked by a heap of false pretenses.
Pointing to some happy Kurds who remained largely shielded from all of that
destruction, and who even benefited from it, doesn't erase the serial deceit of Jeffrey
Goldberg's pre-war "reporting," and it certainly doesn't justify the untold human
suffering that was and continues to be unleashed.

* * * * *

One added irony:  Goldberg accuses me of having "an overly simplistic, black-and-
white view of the situation" (yes, I think unprovoked acts of aggression are clearly
wrong; as lead Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson put it in his Closing Argument
about the crimes of World War II:  "the kingpin which holds them all together, is the
plot for aggressive wars").  But what's ironic is that this "simplistic, black-and-white"
accusation comes from the very same Jeffrey Goldberg who, in 2002, wrote:  "In five
years . . . I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of
profound morality."  One last point:  before the field trip to Iraqi Kurdistan proposed
by Goldberg, would he like to travel to Gaza to explain to Gazans how they got what
they deserved?



UPDATE:  More proof that there is no language sufficiently clear to guard against
either those who want to deliberately distort what you say and/or whose reading
comprehension skills are extremely impaired:

Me, in this post (emphasis in original):

    It should go without saying, but doesn't: the point here is not that the attack on
Iraq is comparable to these above-referenced invasions. It may or may not be, but
that's irrelevant.  The point is that every nation which launches even the most brutal,
destructive and unprovoked wars of aggression employs moralizing propaganda to
claim that their aggression engenders magnanimous and noble ends, and specifically
often points to segments of the invaded population which welcome the violence and
invaders. Pointing to the happy and rewarded Kurdish minority no more justifies or
legalizes the attack on Iraq than similar claims do for any of those other cases.

Time's Joe Klein -- who supported the attack on Iraq and then, once it went bad,
pretended he didn't -- defending his friend Jeff Goldberg today:

    Greenwald -- who, so far as I can tell, only regards the United States as a force for
evil in the world -- has laid out the incredible notion that the liberation of the Kurds,
which Jeff celebrates (and so do I, and so do civilized people everywhere) as a happy
byproduct of George W. Bush's dreadful war in Iraq, can be compared to the Nazi
seizure of the Sudetenland . . . .This is obscene.

It's almost parody; Klein attributes to me (and then spends paragraphs hysterically
railing against) a point I not only did not make but (anticipating that distortion)
explicitly said was one I was not making.  Klein adds:  "For Greenwald, it seems, any
honest political disagreement always winds up with charges of corruption and
decadence."  No, not "any" -- just some, and yes:  I believe people like Goldberg
who spouted blatant, unrecanted falsehoods and helped trigger a horrific war that
slaughtered hundreds of thousands of human beings -- or who smear other people
by printing catty insults from their anonymous friends -- are guilty of "corruption and
decadence," not a mere "honest political disagreement."  As for the rest of Klein's
screed, his commenters, as always, do a quick and thorough job of demolishing it
(see here and here as but two excellent examples).



UPDATE II:

Me:  "It should go without saying, but doesn't: the point here is not that the attack
on Iraq is comparable to these above-referenced invasions. It may or may not be,
but that's irrelevant."

Jeffrey Goldberg, citing his friend Joe Klein, today:

For those for whom it's not already glaringly obvious, just read Klein's own comment
section -- or John Cole here -- to see how deliberately dishonest these two Iraq War
cheerleaders are being, again.



UPDATE III:  One thing about neocons and their lies, as we all saw over the last
decade:  they just keep flowing no matter how discredited they are.  In a separate
post entitled "A Brief Follow-Up on Glenn Greenwald's Nazi Analogy," Goldberg links
to and quotes Yaacov Lozowick, author of the book "Right to Exist, A Moral Defense
of Israel's Wars."  Lozowick repeats Klein and Goldberg's lie, writing in his first
sentence:  "Glenn Greenwald today compared the Nazi invasion of Austria, the
Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia, with the American invasion of Iraq."  And Saddam
really had WMD and a working relationship with Al Qaeda.

Lozowick also says I added updates debunking this lie only after "[h]aving seen the
firestorm of protest [I] ignited."  Actually, knowing the intellectual dishonesty of
people like Goldberg as well as I do (as anyone does who is familiar with his
"reporting" in the run-up to the war and since), I anticipated that exact distortion in
the body of my original post and explained in language as clear as the English
language permits why no such comparison was being made.  And the only so-called
"firestorm" is from war supporters Joe Klein and his friend Jeff Goldberg; the rest of
the commenting Internet -- particularly Klein's own commenters almost unanimously
(literally all 90 who commented, and I really recommend reading what they have to
say) -- all easily recognize this silly smear ("Glenn Greenwald compared the U.S. and
the Kurds to the Nazis!!!") for the transparent and laughable falsehood that it is.  This
little sideshow from Jeff and his friends is all just designed to distract from the actual
issues raised here about the depravity of Goldberg's Iraq war justifications and the
guilt of those like him who enabled it and cheered it on.



UPDATE IV:  Predictably, war cheerleader Jonathan Chait has joined his fellow war
supporters Joe Klein and Jeff Goldberg in promoting Klein's original lie of my
"comparison of the Kurds to the Sudetan Germans."  When you're the subject of
lame and fabricated smears by the neocon fabulists who cheered on the Iraq War,
you know you're doing something right.



UPDATE V: International Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller explains why the
Klein/Goldberg/Lozowick/Chait accusation is "patently ridiculous and can only be
explained as deliberate misrepresentations of [my] post." And as for the ancillary
though ironic attempt by Lozowick and Goldberg to minimize Hitler's crimes by
insisting that he never "invaded" Czechoslovakia and Austria, see Heller's explanation
for what the Nurmeberg Trials found on that question (exactly the opposite of the
Goldberg/Lozowick claim), as well as Brad DeLong's evidence.

Notice the true intent of these war supporters:  don't examine the justifications we
offer for what we did; look over there instead:  he's an unpatriotic Kurd-hater who is
comparing the U.S. to The Nazis!!!!!  I don't blame them for wanting to use shrill
smears in order to distract attention from what they did and what they now say to
justify it -- if you had their record of advocacy, wouldn't you? -- but it doesn't work
when it's grounded in such a transparent distortion.