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It was Walter Lippman
who coined the phrase “the manufacture of consent”, enjoining it as a
means of population control. Lippman’s concept may indeed be in effect
today. In this regard, the status of the mass media and its faithful
propagation of the established opinion that Western policy is
fundamentally benevolent in intention, is an issue of paramount
importance. What role has the media played in clarifying the real
principles and motives of Western policy to the public, and what does
this entail for the nature of Western democracy and the role of the
population in the formulation of policy? The mass media is clearly one
of the most powerful institutions in society; it is, for most of the
public, the ultimate source of all their information. The structure of
the mass media will therefore have fundamental implications for the
political and cultural orientation of the public. Hence, an
understanding of the mass media will throw considerable light on the
structure of Western society, the relationship between the public and
those who possess power, as well as the ideologies produced by the
media and their impact on the public. All scholars generally agree
that the media do have the capacity to set the agenda of public
discourse about political affairs, and it is widely recognised that
the media has a significant role in actualising the diffusion of
Western ideology and culture throughout the world. However, they
differ over the degree to which the media limits the public’s
understanding of current affairs and the overall consequences of this.
Nevertheless, the vast
extent of the manipulation of the media under the sway of business
interests has been harshly revealed in the statement of John Swainton,
Chief of Staff of the New York Times. “There is not one of you
who would dare to write his honest opinion,” he reprimanded his
colleagues at his retirement party in September.
“The business of a journalist now is to
destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, fall at the
feet of Mammon and sell himself for his daily bread. We are tools,
vessels of rich men behind the scenes, we are jumping jacks. They pull
the strings; we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are
the properties of these men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”[1]
It is generally clear
that the media has failed to generate genuine public awareness of the
actual nature of Western policy. Majid Tehranian, for example, who is
Professor of International Communication at the University of Hawaii and
Director of the Toda Institute for Global Peace and Policy Research,
points out that:
“In their scholarship, William Appleton Williams,
Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Ramsey Clark, Ali Mazrui, and other critics
of US foreign policies have provided an abundance of evidence to support
the charges on the counter-democratic role of the United States in much
of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”[2]
British
historian Mark Curtis, former Research Fellow at the Royal Institute for
International Affairs in London, similarly confirms:
“Mutual Anglo-American support in ordering the
affairs of key nations and regions, often with violence, to their design
has been a consistent feature of the era that followed the Second World
War... Policy in, for example, Malaya, Kenya, British Guiana and Iran
was geared towards organising Third World economies along guidelines in
which British, and Western, interests would be paramount, and those of
the often malnourished populations would be ignored or further
undermined. Similarly, US interventions overseas - in Vietnam,
Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Chile, etcetera - were designed
to counter threats to the Western practice of assigning the Third World
to mere client status to Western business interests. British and US
forces have acted as mercenary - and often extremely violent - mobs
intended to restore ‘order’ in their domains and to preserve the
existing privileges of elites within their own societies.”[3]
Development specialist Dr. J. W. Smith, who is Director of Research for
the California-based Institute for Economic Democracy, is even more
explicit:
“No society will tolerate it if they knew that
they (as a country) were responsible for violently killing 12 to 15
million people since WW II and causing the death of hundreds of millions
more their economies were destroyed or those countries were denied the
right to restructure to care for their people. Unknown as it is, and
recognizing that this has been standard practice throughout colonialism,
that is the record of the Western imperial centers of capital from 1945
to 1990... While mouthing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority
rule, all over the world state-sponsored terrorists were overthrowing
democratic governments, installing and protecting dictators, and
preventing peace, freedom, justice, rights, and majority rule. Twelve to
fifteen million mostly innocent people were slaughtered in that
successful 45 year effort to suppress those breaks for economic freedom
which were bursting out all over the world... All intelligence agencies
have been, and are still in, the business of destabilizing undeveloped
countries to maintain their dependency and the flow of the world’s
natural wealth to powerful nations’ industries at a low price and to
provide markets for those industries at a high price.”[4]
That
the media has failed to accurately portray the real nature of Western
foreign policy to the public, playing instead the subservient role of a
propaganda machine for elite interests, is therefore quite obvious. The
question that then remains is, why does the media – conventionally
believed to be critical of the establishment - behave in a way that
conforms to the false picture presented by the government and corporate
elite of their own policies? The anwer is simple: in a nutshell, the
mass media is the establishment.
To
begin our analysis then, we will discuss a propaganda model of the mass
media. It is thus useful to begin with what is arguably the most
thorough model of the media - that proposed by Edward Herman (Professor
Emeritus of Finance at Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania)
and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy at
MIT), both of whom are leading critics of US foreign policy.[5]
There are particularly pertinent reasons to begin with their model - the
primary one being that it is arguably the most thoroughly researched and
empirically verified model available. Herman and Chomsky’s landmark
study, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
comes under the recommendation of America’s leading national media
watchdog and research group, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR).
It is also recommended as an essential resource for media literacy by
the Grand Rapids Institute for Information Democracy (GRIID), affiliated
with the US-based Community Media Centre (CMC).[6]
The Oxford-based research and publishing group Corporate Watch (not to
be confused with the US-based organisation of the same name), which
works in cooperation with a variety of other human rights and
environmentalist organisations, describes the study as “one of the most
incisive critiques of the media’s role in society”.[7]
The respected journal Publisher’s Weekly gives the following
review of Manufacturing Consent:
“Herman of
Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that
America’s government and its corporate giants exercise control over what
we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend
make the national media propagandistic - the major three being the
motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media’s close links to and
often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information
from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV,
newspapers and radio distort world events… Extensive evidence is calmly
presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our
freedom is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system
that panders to the interest of America’s privileged and neglects its
duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at
stake.”
Indeed,
according to the leading American media scholar Robert W. McChesney,
Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of
Illinois, any significant attempt to comprehend the structure and
operation of the mass media must begin with Herman and Chomsky’s study.[8] He further observes that:
“This book promises to be a seminal work in
critical media analysis and to open a door through which future media
analysis will follow… Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky are certainly well
qualified to provide a simple yet powerful model that explains how the
media function to serve the large propaganda requirements of the elite.
Together and individually, they have written numerous articles and books
which have chronicled the ways in which the US media have actively
promoted the agenda of the elite, particularly in regard to US
activities in the Third World. Manufacturing Consent is a work of
tremendous importance for scholars and activists alike… Each chapter is
meticulously researched and most draw heavily on the authors’ earlier
works in these areas.”[9]
All
this provides us with ample reason to begin with Herman and Chomsky’s
model.
Contrary to the claims
of the mainstream critique of radical media analysis, a propaganda model
does not entail a grandiose conspiracy theory. Rather, this model is
based on analysing the politico-economic influences on the mass media,
and considering the extent to which those influences both have the
potential to condition the media’s reporting tendencies in accord with
the interests of those who possess power. In other words, the model
constitutes a ‘guided free market’ model, advocating that the media’s
reporting is influenced by the same factors that dominate corporate
activities - the maximisation of profit and therefore the market. The
next step is to document the occurrences where this potential is
actualised. In this sense, according to the propaganda model the media
is conditioned by the profit-orientated considerations of corporate
elites. As Professor McChesney observes:
“Herman and Chomsky quickly dismiss the
standard mainstream critique of radical media analysis that accuses it
of offering some sort of ‘conspiracy’ theory for media behavior; rather,
they argue, media bias arises from ‘the preselection of right-thinking
people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to
the constraints’ of a series of objective filters they present in their
propaganda model. Hence the bias occurs largely through self-censorship,
which explains the superiority of the US mass media as a propaganda
system: it is far more credible than a system which relies on official
state censorship.”[10]
Herman
and Chomsky have forwarded their propaganda model of the media in terms
of five ‘filters’ that act to limit what the media reports in accord
with governmental and corporate interests. As McChesney notes:
“Only stories with a strong orientation to elite
interests can pass through the five filters unobstructed and receive
ample media attention. The model also explains how the media can
conscientiously function when even a superficial analysis of the
evidence would indicate the preposterous nature of many of the stories
that receive ample publicity in the press and on the network news
broadcasts.”[11]
The
first filter consists of the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth
and profit-orientation of the most dominant mass media firms. Media
ownership involves enormous costs, which naturally implicates rigid
limits on who is able to run a media entity, even a small one. To cater
to a mass audience, a media organisation must inevitably be a sizeable
corporation. It will have to be owned either directly by the state or by
wealthy individuals. In 1986, out of about 25,000 media entities in the
US, a mere twenty-nine largest media systems accounted for over half the
output of newspapers and for the majority of sales and audiences in
magazines, broadcasting, books and films. These massive media firms are
profit-orientated corporations, owned and controlled by wealthy
profit-orientated people, which are also “closely interlocked, and have
common interests, with other major corporations, banks, and government”.[12]
Because they are often fully integrated into the stock market, they
become subject to powerful pressures from stockholders, directors and
bankers to focus on profitability. This means that they are united by a
basic framework of special interests, even though they remain in
competition:
“These control groups obviously have a special stake
in the status quo by virtue of their wealth and their strategic position
in one of the great institutions of society [the stock market]. And they
exercise the power of this strategic position, if only by establishing
the general aims of the company and choosing its top management.”[13]
As a
result, major media corporations tend to avoid reports that question the
status quo in terms of the actions of the wealthy: If media entities are
owned by profit-orientated corporations that have a vested interest in
maintaining the status quo, those corporations are clearly not going to
employ individuals who question the status quo to run their media
entities. McChesney observes:
“Many of these corporations have extensive holdings
in other industries and nations. Objectively, their needs for profit
severely influence the news operations and overall content of the media.
Subjectively, there is a clear conflict of interest when the media
system upon which self-government rests is controlled by a handful of
corporations and operated in their self-interest.”[14]
A remarkably large
amount of the information the public receives is controlled by a very
small number of media sources. Freedom House records that within states,
out of 187 governments, 92 have complete ownership of the television
broadcasting structure, while 67 have part ownership.[15]
Ownership of the world’s media sources is similarly increasingly
concentrated in a few giant corporations. Thousands of other sources do
exist, but in comparison their influence is negligible. The leading
American media analyst Ben Bagdikan, noting that despite more than
25,000 media entities in the US only “23 corporations control most of
the business in daily newspapers, magazines, television, books, and
motion pictures”, concludes that this endows corporations with the
extensive power to exercise influence over “news, information, public
ideas, popular culture, and political attitudes”.[16]
The result today is that
about twelve corporations dominate the world’s mass media. In his study
of corporate leverage over the media, Megamedia, Dr. Dean Alger -
who was fellow in the Joan Shorenstein Center on the press, politics and
public policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government - lists this ‘dominant dozen’ as follows in order of power:
Disney - Capital Cities - ABC; Time Warner - Turner; News Corporation;
Bertelsmann; Tele-Communications (TCI) - AT&T; General Electric - NBC;
CBS Inc.; Newshouse/Advance Publications; Viacom; Microsoft; Matra -
Hachette - Filipacchi; Gannet. Alger quotes journalist and former top
editor of the Chicago Tribunal, James Squires, concerning the
escalating patterns of concentration of media-ownership in
profit-orientated corporations:
“In its struggle for
relevance and financial security in the modern information age, the
press as an institution appears ready to trade its tradition and its
public responsibility for whatever will make a buck. In the starkest
terms, the news media of the 1990s are a celebrity-oriented, Wall-Street
dominated, profit-driven entertainment enterprise dedicated foremost to
delivering advertising images to targeted groups of consumers.”
Richard Clurman, who
was for years a leading figure in Time magazine, has similarly
observed:
“As the news media
became bigger and bigger business, the innovative traditions led by
creative editorial dominance began to erode... The media had grown from
a nicely profitable, creative business into a gigantic investment
opportunity. It was becoming harder to think of them as different from
any other business in free enterprise America.”
Former newspaper
reporter who became a journalism professor, Doug Underwood, also
confirms this corporatisation of the media: “It’s probably no surprise
that in an era of mass media conglomerates, big chain expansion, and
multimillion dollar newspaper buy-outs, the editors of daily newspapers
have begun to behave more and more like the managers of any corporate
entity.”[17]
It is well documented
that the elites who dominate the various institutions of society share a
common set of values and associations linked with their generally
wealthy position as members of a highly privileged class. These elites
include the decision makers over politics, investment, production,
distribution; members of ideological institutions involving editorial
positions, control of journals and so on; those in managerial positions,
who manage corporations and have similar roles. These different elite
groups all interpenetrate one another in accord with their shared values
and associations. Furthermore, due to their common social position, they
are largely socialised into the traditional values that characterise
their wealthy class. This has a significant impact on their outlook on
the world, and consequently their attitude towards political affairs.[18]
In Britain, the British
Broadcasting Company (BBC) constitutes an obvious example. The board of
governers on the BBC “tends to be drawn from the ranks of the ‘great and
good’ and to mirror the predominance of the upper middle classes in the
ranks of political life in elected and non-elected positions of power…
“Of the eighty-five governers who have
served in the first fifty years of the BBC’s history, fifty-six had a
university education (forty at Oxford or Cambridge) and twenty were
products of Eton, Harrow or Winchester. The political experience of
Board members has come mainly from the House of Lords although there
have been nineteen former MPs.”[19]
Further documentation
observes Bob Franklin, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the
University of Sheffield, illustrates that the elite “uses its privileged
access to media institutions to produce programming which is partial and
supportive of a particular class interest.” Franklin refers to the
series of Bad News studies by Glasgow University Media Group (GUMG),
offering ample evidence “of a systematic skew in the reporting of
certain kinds of news.”[20]
For example, in their first study the Glasgow scholars concluded that
“television news is a cultural artifact; a sequence of
socially-manufactured messages which carry many of the culturally
dominant assumptions of our society.” In a later study titled More
Bad News, they similarly concluded that television news reporting
“consistently maintains and supports a cultural framework within which
viewpoints favourable to the status quo are given preferred
and privileged readings.”[21]
Former editor-in-chief
David Bowman of the Australian newspaper the Sydney Morning Herald
therefore confirms that “having thrown off one yoke, the press should
now be falling under another, in the form of a tiny and ever-contracting
band of businessmen-proprietors. Instead of developing as a diverse
social institution, serving the needs of democratic society, the press,
and now the media, have become or are becoming the property of a few,
governed by whatever social, political and cultural values the few think
tolerable”.[22]
“The danger”, he elsewhere observes, “is that the media of the future,
the channels of mass communication, will be dominated locally and
world-wide by the values - social, cultural and political - of a few
individuals and their huge corporations.”[23]
The mass media may have
the ideological orientation of its staffing broadly restricted to the
agenda held by its corporate ownership, who obviously have significant
control over the media’s staffing. The cumulative result of this is that
the media may become subservient in its general ideological orientation
to the assumptions and interests of the elite. Bob Franklin elaborates
that this is because “editors are simply workers - albeit at a high
grade - and, as such, remain subject to the discipline of proprietors...
It would certainly be difficult to
persuade an editor that proprietors are no longer in control of their
newspapers. A succession of editors from Harold Evans to Andrew Neil
acknowledge the power of proprietors in autobiographies which invariably
detail their prompt removal from the editorial chair following a
disagreement with the owner... Proprietors’ power to ‘hire and fire’
makes them formidable figures, but they also control all aspects of a
newspaper’s financial and staffing resources.”[24]
The implications of
all this have been summarised well by American analyst David McGowan:
“Following the same course that virtually
every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless
series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of
the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths. The result has
been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the
American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has
become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”[25]
Former Dean at the
Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, and a
winner of almost every top prize in American journalism - including the
Pulitzer - Ben Bagdikian, acknowledges the massive control over public
life entailed by the increasing concentration in corporate ownership:
“In an authoritarian society there is a
ministry, or a commissar, or a directorate that controls what everybody
will see and hear. We call that a dictatorship. Here we have a handful
of very powerful corporations led by a handful of very powerful men and
women who control everything we see and hear beyond the natural
environment and our own families. That’s something which surrounds us
every day and night. If it were one person we’d call that a
dictatorship, a ministry of information.”[26]
The extent of the power
that elites have over the media can be well understood when it is noted
that even Western intelligence agencies have a grip over the press. For
example, an internal committee of the CIA reported in 1992 that: “We
[i.e. the CIA] have relationships with reporters [that] have helped us
turn some intelligence failure stories into intelligence success
stories. Some responses to the media can be handled in a one-shot phone
call.”[27]
Former CIA Director William Colby was more forthcoming when he admitted:
“The Central Intelligence Agency owns anyone of any significance in the
major media.”[28]
Consequently, it is easy to see how the legitimacy of elite interests
can henceforth be presupposed by the mass media in terms of a general
all-pervading set of assumptions. Since these assumptions are rooted in
the elite ideology, the mass media that is of course owned by the
corporate elite, is generally unable to question seriously that
ideology. Bob Franklin thus concludes that “while it is possible to cite
cases where the media have toppled the powerful, there is a greater body
of evidence to suggest that their role is more typically to serve as a
source of support.”[29]
It is therefore not surprising if debate within the media is largely
restricted to the assumption of Western governmental and corporate
benevolence; the belief in the viability and legitimacy of the status
quo. In this context, one can predict that dissent which stretches
beyond these limits by choosing to question the very assumptions adopted
at the outset by the media, will be neglected. Certainly, due to the
sheer mass of news it is also predictable that the odd dissenting report
may filter through - but the substantial majority of reports will “serve
as a source of support” for elite interests.
As the American
political scientist Michael Parenti documents, the result of corporate
ownership of the media where staffing will be especially restricted to
those who conform to the ideological requirements of corporate power, is
that journalists “rarely doubt their own objectivity even as they
faithfully echo the established political vocabularies and the
prevailing politico-economic orthodoxy. Since they do not cross any
forbidden lines, they are not reined in. So they are likely to have no
awareness they are on an ideological leash.” The distinguished British
correspondent John Pilger - who has twice won British journalism’s
highest award, that of Journalist of the Year, as well as several other
major awards - thus comments that “the true nature of power is not
revealed, its changing contours are seldom explored, its goals and
targets seldom identified. This is counterfeit journalism because the
surface of events is not disturbed.”[30]
A propaganda model thus clarifies the institutional structure of the
media that explains why the facts of elite policy receive little
in-depth critical analysis by the mainstream media. On this basis one
may reasonably argue that permissible dissent becomes meaningless, being
unable to question the ideological framework upon which the elite
dominated social structures are based. The result has been noted by
media analyst W. Lance Bennett:
“The public is exposed to powerful
persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully
through the media in response to these messages... Leaders have usurped
enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the
political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and
just plain confusion among the public.”[31]
The
second filter noted by Herman and Chomsky that is related to the first
filter, is advertising, which Professor McChesney notes “has colonized
the US mass media and is responsible for most of the media’s income.”[32]
Other than the points already indicated, the growth of advertising has
meant that newspapers and other media sources have an alternative
primary source of funds other than their selling price. This alone means
that the media’s tendencies in reporting can be influenced and
manipulated by the significant withdrawing or forwarding of economic
support. Since the mass media is largely financed through advertising,
it becomes financially dependent for its existence on advertising
revenue from corporations. One reason for this is that all forms of
media have to ensure that their advertising profile is high to retain
corporate investment in advertising, and thereby to retain a source of
funds. This is ideally achieved by becoming ideologically appealing to
an audience with a high buying capacity: members of the elite and
generally members of the wealthiest classes. Newspapers that are
attractive to advertisers are able to lower their price below the cost
of producing them, thanks to the revenue that advertising brings in.
This
means that newspapers unattractive to advertisers can be undercut,
because without any source of funds from advertising their prices tend
to be higher, reducing sales, and reducing profit by which to invest in
improving saleability (via quality, format, promotions, etc.). Such
newspapers can therefore be effectively marginalised, if not completely
driven out of existence. Advertisers, of course, constitute corporate
sponsors. This means that newspapers that fail to attract such corporate
sponsors, are more likely to be either marginal or non-existent.
Additionally, a newspaper will be more favourable to advertisers if it
is biased towards the assumptions and values of a wealthy readership.
With newspapers having become so dependent on advertising to exist and
flourish, corporate sponsors effectively retain a significant control
over which newspapers survive, what they choose to report, and how they
do so. For instance, James Curran and Jean Seaton in their authoritative
history of the British press conclude that the growth in both
advertising and capital costs were critical in eliminating the popular
radical press, which had emerged in the first half of the nineteenth
century. They observe that “advertisers thus acquired a de facto
licensing authority since, without their support, newspapers ceased to
be economically viable”.[33]
The
above two filters essentially mean that the mass media is
institutionally organised in such a way as to be subservient to the
corporate elite, since it is at once directly owned and thereby
structurally controlled by that elite, and indirectly influenced by
financial pressures related to advertising. Institutionally the mass
media is thus undoubtedly subservient to corporate ideology. Effectively
then, as Professor Edward Herman states, “capitalists control the media
and they do so to maximize profits”, while also generally adhering quite
tightly to the assumptions of the corporate ideology.
“The main
element in corporate ideology is the belief in the sublimity of the
market and its unique capacity to serve as the efficient allocator of
resources. So important is the market in this ideology that ‘freedom’
has come to mean the absence of constraints on market participants, with
political and social democracy pushed into the background as supposed
derivatives of market freedom. This may help explain the tolerance by
market-freedom lovers of market-friendly totalitarians - Pinochet or
Marcos. A second and closely related constituent of corporate ideology
is the danger of government intervention and regulation, which allegedly
tends to proliferate, imposes unreasonable burdens on business, and
therefore hampers growth. A third element in the ideology is that growth
is the proper national objective, as opposed to equity, participation,
social justice, or cultural advance and integrity. Growth should be
sustainable, which means that the inflation threat should be a high
priority and unemployment kept at the level to assure the inflation
threat is kept at bay. The resultant increasingly unequal income
distribution is also an acceptable price to pay. Privatization is also
viewed as highly desirable in corporate ideology, following naturally
from the first two elements - market sublimity and the threat of
government. It also tends to weaken government by depriving it of its
direct control over assets, and therefore has the further merit of
reducing the ability of government to serve the general population
through democratic processes... [P]rivatization yields enormous payoffs
to the bankers and purchasers participating in the sale of public
assets”.
These
ideological positions become implicit assumptions pervading permissible
political discourse within the media, and it is thus extremely rare to
find these principles being subjected to fundamental critical
examination by the corporate-owned media.[34]
The
third filter simply constitutes the sources that the mass media
routinely relies on for its information. Naturally, since the media
needs a steady and reliable source of news, resources are focused where
such news can be most easily acquired. It so happens, unfortunately,
that central news terminals of this type are the White House, the
Pentagon and the State Department, as well as business corporations and
trade groups. The same is the case for other Western countries. The
importance of such organisations as news sources is due to the
elementary fact that they possess the greatest resources for public
relations and promotional material, the result being that “the mass
media are drawn into a symbiotic relationship with powerful sources of
information by economic necessity and reciprocity of interest”.[35]
Alternative media entities established by human rights
organisations and other groups are resultantly marginalised;
consequently, the public is in consistent reception of news and analysis
which is in fundamental ideological conformity to the elite ideology,
thus being unable to scrutinise facts in a way free from the assumptions
of that ideology. This means that news will be filtered in accordance
with what is suitable to the requirements of elite power and its
interests. McChesney explains:
“The media rely heavily upon news provided them by
corporate and government sources, which have themselves developed
enormous bureaucracies to provide this material to the media. They have
developed great expertise at ‘managing’ the media. In effect, these
bureaucracies subsidize the media and the media must be careful not to
antagonize such an important supplier. Furthermore, these corporate and
government sources are instantly credible by accepted journalistic
practices. Anti-elite sources, on the other hand, are regarded with
utmost suspicion and have tremendous difficulty passing successfully
through this filter.”[36]
For example,
consider the fact that the US Air Force publishes 140
newspapers per week, issuing 45,000 headquarters and unit news
releases per year. Other government-related institutions
produce a similar proportion of information. This massive
amount of information produced by the state and corporations in
tandem provides the media with news that is not only easily
acquired, but also inexpensive. Herman and Chomsky observe
that:
“To consolidate their pre-eminent position
as sources, government and business-news promoters go to great pains to
make things easy for news organisations... In effect, the large
bureaucracies of the powerful subsidize the mass media, and gain special
access by their contribution to reducing the media’s costs of acquiring
the raw materials of, and producing, news. The large entities that
provide this subsidy become ‘routine’ news sources and have privileged
access to the gates. Non-routine sources must struggle for access, and
may be ignored by the arbitrary decision of the gatekeepers.”[37]
The impact
of this, as Mark Fishman affirms, is that:
“News workers are
predisposed to treat bureaucratic accounts as factual because news
personnel participate in upholding a normative order of authorized
knowers in the society. Reporters operate with the attitude that
officials ought to know what it is their job to know... In particular, a
newsworker will recognize an official’s claim to knowledge not merely as
a claim, but as a credible, competent piece of knowledge.”
“This amounts to a moral
division of labour: officials have and give the facts”, which are
therefore beyond question, however tenuous or absurd, while “reporters
merely get them” from the bureaucratic elite.[38]
The
fourth filter Chomsky and Herman refer to they call ‘flak’, a term that
designates the negative responses to a media report in the form of
letters, phone calls, petitions, speeches, legal and parliamentary
action, among other methods of complaint. One of the most significant
forms of flak already indicated is the withdrawal of advertising
revenue, which in itself can be sufficient for editors to review their
product. As has already been noted, this form of flak can lead to the
entire elimination of a media source that is unfavourable to corporate
sponsors and their interests. Flak can also serve as a deterrent to
producing certain kinds of programme or story, and can even prevent
reporters from investigating particular issues because of how unlikely
it is that such stories would be published. Business organisations often
come together to form organisations devoted solely to the mass
dissemination of flak, by which to impose immense pressure on the media
to follow the corporate lead.
In the
US, the conservative media organisation Accuracy In Media (AIM) is a
clear example of this, having been formed at the instigation of various
giant corporations with the view to impose flak on mainstream media
sources who may occasionally produce a piece questioning the legitimacy
of elite ideology in some way. As McChesney comments, “right-wing
corporate ‘flak’ producers such as Accuracy in Media [act] to harass the
mass media and to put pressure upon them to follow the corporate agenda…
“This filter was developed extensively in the 1970s
when major corporations and wealthy right-wingers became increasingly
dissatisfied with political developments in the West and with media
coverage… While ostensibly antagonistic to the media, these flak
machines provide the media with legitimacy and are treated quite well by
the media.”[39]
However, it is obvious that one of the most
potent disseminators of flak is the government itself due to
its enormous resources. Compared with such corporate power, the
ability of other organisations representing the poor, the
oppressed or the environment to pressurise the media is
dwarfed. Hence, the mass media remains within the confines of
the corporate agenda.[40]
The fifth filter essentially follows from the other
filters. Since the corporate ideology dominates the media by way of
being almost institutionally assumed, all ideologies that are in
fundamental opposition to the corporate ideology must similarly be
institutionally assumed incorrect. In this context, nationalist social
movements around the world that threatened the international capitalist
system under US hegemony were construed as totalitarian Communist
movements. The final filter is thus the ideology of anticommunism, a
stance that has become integral to Western political culture. According
to McChesney: “Anticommunism has been ingrained into acceptable
journalistic practices in the United States, to the point that even in
periods of ‘détente’ it is fully appropriate and expected for
journalists to frame issues in terms of ‘our side’ versus the communist
‘bad guys’,” even when Communism is not the real ‘threat’ at all.[41]
We can recall evidence for this when we compare the
orthodox interpretation of the Cold War espoused by most academic and
media commentators with the fact that there was no global Communist
threat. Major covert operations, such as the installation of the Shah in
Iran after the elimination of the democratically elected government of
Mussadeq, or the intervention in Nicaragua to overthrow the popular
Sandinista Front, were undertaken on the pretext of preventing the
violent rise of totalitarian Communism and protecting the independence
of local populations. Herman and Chomsky observe: “when anticommunist
fervor is aroused, the demand for serious evidence in support for claims
of ‘communist’ abuses is suspended by the media, and charlatans can
thrive as evidential sources”.[42]
Conversely, when journalists or editors attempt to
challenge the prevailing anticommunist assumptions as well as pass
through the other four filters, they “must meet far higher standards; in
fact standards are often imposed that can barely be met in the natural
sciences”.[43] This filter is, however, not limited to anticommunism, but
rather is related to the prevailing pretext for Western policy at the
time. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the noble fight against
the non-existent international Communist threat could no longer be
pinpointed as a pretext for Western military operations that had
actually been undertaken for far more familiar reasons of economic
domination. Thus, other diverse ideological threats to be similarly
exaggerated, distorted or even fabricated, have had to take its place; a
particularly pertinent one in the present day is the alleged threat to
the United States and the West due to Islam and global Islamic terrorism
- which has been similarly exaggerated[44] (See Chapter VIII below for further discussion).
Apart from this, it is clear that the fifth filter is
essentially synonymous with the elite/corporate ideology in general, and
it is in the context of this ideology that social movements and ideas in
opposition to the dominant ideology are interpreted within the media.
Other elements of the final filter will therefore include the
benevolence of one’s government, the universal merits of private
enterprise, the benign character of corporations and their activities,
and so on. All of these inherently imply the deionization of the
perceived threat to US hegemony with respect to these aspects.
Summarising the politico-economic structure of the media,
former business executive David Edwards writes that “powerful state and
business elites seek to determine the basic framework of modern social
goals: maximum economic growth generated by maximised corporate profit,
fuelled by mass production, fuelled by mass consumerism…
“By
‘pouring’ news, information and ideas into this basic economic
framework, a version of reality progressively suited to the requirements
of the framework is inevitably produced... [while] conscious design is
not required beyond the initial framing conditions (which... business
elites do consciously try to maintain: any threat to compromise the
basic, unchallengeable goal of maximum economic growth from maximum
corporate profit is vigorously and consciously opposed at home and
abroad). So long as the basic framework is maintained, the pyramid will
simply ‘build itself’. Thus supportive media, editors and journalists
will find a stable place in the economic pyramid, while their
unsupportive counterparts will either be moved, or will bounce out (of
business).”[45]
The result is that the media effectively serves elite
interests by the appropriate selection of topics, distribution of
concerns, framing of issues, disparity in emphasis, and the filtering of
information. Lee Bollinger, dean of the University of Michigan Law
School, comments that:
“The press can exclude important points
of view, operating as a bottleneck in the marketplace of ideas. It can
distort knowledge of public issues not just by omission but also through
active misrepresentations... It can also exert an adverse influence over
the tone and character of public debate in subtle ways, by playing to
personal biases... or by making people fearful... It can fuel ignorance
and pettiness by avoiding serious issues altogether, favoring
simple-minded fare or cheap entertainment over serious discussion... Of
course, all these concerns become more serious as the number of those
who control the press become fewer.”[46]
As Anthony Bevins, political correspondent of the respected
British newspaper The Observer (but who also worked for The
Sun, the Daily Mail, The Times and The Independent)
testifies:
“Journalists cannot ignore the
pre-set ‘taste’ of their newspapers, use their own news sense in
reporting the truth of any event, and survive. They are ridden by news
desks and backbench executives, have their stories spiked on a
systematic basis, they face the worst sort of newspaper punishment -
byline deprivation.”[47]
Similarly, Gene Roberts, former executive editor of the
Philadelphia Inquirer and former managing editor of the New York
Times, affirms that though corporately owned newspaper chains “will
tell you they don’t interfere with local coverage, they simply insist
that each newspaper return an ‘acceptable’ level of profits to the
central corporation... This alone is enough to cause newspapers... to
weaken their coverage by slashing newsholes [i.e. the amount of space
devoted to news as opposed to ads] and newsroom staff. But there are
problems even beyond these.” Due to the overall corporate domination of
media-entities, “News coverage is being shaped by corporate executives
at headquarters far from the local scene.”[48]
That the mass media therefore amounts to a propaganda
system for Western elite interests; its framework of investigation and
understanding having been established from the outset by the elite due
to their institutional power over the media; is in light of this
analysis hardly a very unreasonable or shocking concept, given the very
nature of the media’s relation to domestic and international
politico-economic structures. It is due to the media’s structural
subservience to corporate control in accordance with the institutionally
established filters just discussed, that the media becomes generally
unable to question the corporate ideology. Accordingly, Western policy,
which is formulated to meet the corporate/elite interests who have the
greatest leverage on the state, generally cannot be widely disclosed in
a way that reveals its anti-humanitarian character. Structurally-induced
filters cause the media to convey Western policy in a way that will not
generate fundamental opposition to the elite interests behind policy
formulation. In this way, while specific policies may or may not be
criticised, elite interests will rarely be exposed for what they are and
will furthermore not be questioned as to their legitimacy. Thus, debate
over policy will only rarely be capable of criticising elite interests.
That necessarily involves disinformation, misinterpretation and often
fabrication. As the internationally acclaimed political scientist
Michael Parenti observes:
“The news media’s daily performance
is not a failure but a skillfully evasive success. Their job is not to
inform, but to disinform, not to advance democratic discourse but to
mute it. The media gives every appearance of being vigorously concerned
about events of the day, saying so much, meaning so little, offering so
many calories and so few nutrients. When we understand this, we move
from a liberal complaint about the press’s sloppy performance to a
radical analysis of how the media serve the ruling circles”.[49]
In the space of an hour, the United States faced a sample
of the same brand of terrorism that has been inflicted on vast swathes
of the world’s population throughout the twentieth century by its own
military forces. The destruction of the World Trade Centre, the
explosion that racked the Pentagon, and the plane crash near Camp David
have left America in shock and on high alert. The attacks have resulted
in thousands of deaths. Innocent civilians have been killed and injured.
Many states throughout the country have declared states of emergency.
What has happened is an atrocious, but predictable,
backlash rooted in decades, and indeed centuries of oppression. And if
the world is genuinely interested in averting future acts of terrorism
such as this, then the causes of this backlash in the West’s ongoing
terrorization and repression of the majority of the world’s population
must be understood. For it is that sort of intolerable matrix of
policies, which produces people desperate enough to carry out such
intolerable atrocities as were carried out on the 11th
September: people who have been driven by their circumstances of
hopelessness, terror and impoverishment to the point of insanity.
The media has labeled Black Tuesday’s crisis as the worst
act of terrorism in history, yet this is not true. It is certainly the
worst of act of terrorism to be committed against the United States. But
few have paused to consider that the United States itself has carried
out and supported some of the worst acts of terrorism. The 11th
September attacks, horrendous as they were, can barely be compared to
the scale of atrocities carried out, for instance, by US-backed
terrorists in South America to secure US interests, resulting in the
mass murder of hundreds and thousands of innocent civilians. The
internationally acclaimed American political analyst Michael Parenti
provides a particularly acute overview:
“Since World War II, the US government
has given more than $200 billion in military aid to train, equip, and
subsidize more than 2.3 million troops and internal security forces in
more than eighty countries, the purpose being not to defend them from
outside invasions but to protect ruling oligarchs and multinational
corporate investors from the dangers of domestic anti-capitalist
insurgency. Among the recipients have been some of the most notorious
military autocracies in history, countries that have tortured, killed or
otherwise maltreated large numbers of their citizens because of their
dissenting political views… US leaders profess a dedication to
democracy. Yet over the past five decades, democratically elected
reformist governments… were overthrown by pro-capitalist militaries that
were funded and aided by the US national security state.”[50]
US and Western support for terrorism around the world has
elicited widespread anger and resentment among the majority of the
world’s population who are victims of the policies of military, economic
and political repression employed by the powers in their pursuit of
profit. It thus seems that the assaults in Washington and New York will
be used as a pretext to escalate the West’s crackdown on the Muslim
countries of the Third World. World leaders are gathering together and
discuss new measures to strengthen their security without compromising
their global hegemony. It is no surprise that despite a total lack of
evidence that would stand up in a court of law, media and academic
commentators prompted by Western government hints immediately speculated
about the involvement of “Islamic fanatics”. US officials have spoken of
the need to indiscriminately target states where terrorists are
suspected to reside or with a record of being implicated in terrorist
acts, rather than merely focus specifically on the perpetrators of this
particular crime. Countries to be included in this are Afghanistan,
Iraq, Iran, Syria, Palestine, and so on. Speculation by innumerable
esteemed personalities including US officials, academics and journalists
about the role of Osama Bin Laden and his legendary terror network has
also been exploited to fuel a more general anti-Muslim suspicion and
hostility. The hysteria harks back to the 1998 bombing of Sudan when the
US destroyed a pharmaceutical factory, killing an unknown number of
civilians, on the pretext that it was actually one of Bin Laden’s
chemical weapons factories. Not long after this event was it revealed
that the factory produced essential medicines for the Sudanese, and had
nothing to do with Bin Laden. The US also blocked an inquiry by the UN
into the bombing which would have disclosed the exact number of civilian
casualties.
The reaction of the United States speaks volumes about the
real nature of the new programme of indiscriminate targeting of the
entire Muslim world. Former spokesman for the U.S. State Department
James Rubin outlined the future vision on BBC 2’s Newsnight: “We lead.
We go around the world and we make people be counted whether they’re on
our side, or on the side of the terrorists.”[51] In other words, the U.S. solution is to categorise
“people” around the world into two types: those who support U.S. and
Western terrorism around the world whether they know it or not and who
are thus “on our side”; and those who do not, who will inevitably be
labeled those “on the side of the terrorists”. And accordingly those who
are not “on our side” will be targeted indiscriminately. This view has
been adopted uncritically by the media:
“The response to this unimaginable 21st-century Pearl
Harbor should be as simple as it is swift - kill the bastards. A gunshot
between the eyes, blow them to smithereens, poison them if you have
to. As for cities or countries that host these worms, bomb them into
basketball courts.”[52]
“America roused to a righteous anger has always been a
force for good. States that have been supporting if not Osama bin Laden,
people like him need to feel pain. If we flatten part of Damascus or
Tehran or whatever it takes, that is part of the solution.”[53]
“This is no time to be precious about locating the exact
individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack.... We
should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to
Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only
Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed
civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”[54]
“There is only one way to begin to deal with people like
this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not
immediately directly involved in this thing.”[55]
Bill O’Reilly: “If the Taliban government of Afghanistan
does not cooperate, then we will damage that government with air power,
probably. All right? We will blast them, because...”
Sam Husseini, Institute for Public Accuracy: “Who will you
kill in the process?”
O’Reilly: “Doesn’t make any difference.”[56]
The baseless, inflammatory and indeed racist reaction of
the media mimics its previous response to the Oklahoma bombing which
wrongly blamed “Arabs” and “Muslims” for the attack. Although it was
eventually discovered that the perpetrator was actually a former US
soldier - notwithstanding many months of the unwarranted demonisation of
Islam and Muslims – the lesson apparently has not been properly
absorbed. We are seeing a repeat of the hysterical reaction of those
days. The 9-11 attacks must be condemned in the strongest terms, but
they must also be understood. They are the inevitable consequence of
successive US administrations systematically pursuing policies of mass
murder and pillage throughout the world.
The maintenance of high levels of military spending, of
course, has entailed the manufacturing of new threats by which to
justify such spending. In the current world order, the Soviet/Communist
“threat” has become defunct. One of the major new ideological
constructions being highlighted as an alleged threat to national
security, and thus being utilised as a pretext on which to maintain
massive investment in the military, is ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. This
phenomenon can be found within the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and
Europe.[57] The current crisis has permitted the US to exaggerate the
alleged threat of “Islamic terrorism” beyond all proportion to suit its
drive towards military escalation to secure strategic and economic
interests. Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois
College of Law, Francis Boyle, comments:
“According to the facts in the
public record so far, this was not an act of war and NATO Article 5 does
not apply. President Bush has automatically escalated this national
tragedy into something it is not in order to justify a massive military
attack abroad and an apparent crackdown on civil liberties at home. We
see shades of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which the Johnson
administration used to provide dubious legal cover for massive
escalation of the Vietnam War.”[58]
The process of fabricating a new enemy – Islam – was in
full-swing by the early 1990s. Former bureau chief of the Jerusalem Post
and adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Leon T. Hadar, documented
near the beginning that decade the move of the US towards the
demonisation of Islam, among other appropriate “threats”: “Now that the
Cold War is becoming a memory, America’s foreign policy establishment
has begun searching for new enemies. Possible new villains include
‘instability’ in Europe - ranging from German resurgence to new Russian
imperialism - the ‘vanishing’ ozone layer, nuclear proliferation, and
narcoterrorism. Topping the list of potential new global bogeymen,
however, are the Yellow Peril, the alleged threat to American economic
security emanating from East Asia, and the so-called Green Peril (green
is the color of Islam). That peril is symbolized by the Middle Eastern
Moslem fundamentalist - the ‘Fundie’, to use a term coined by The
Economist.”[59]
Thus, according to Amos Perlmutter in the Washington
Post, “Islamic fundamentalism is an aggressive revolutionary
movement as militant and violent as the Bolshevik, Fascist and Nazi
movements of the past”. It is “authoritarian, anti-democratic,
anti-secular” and by its inherent nature cannot be reconciled with the
“Christian-secular universe”. Its goal is the establishment of a
“totalitarian Islamic state” in the Middle East. Thus, the US should
ensure that the movement is “stifled at birth”.[60] The
rise of Islamic movements throughout countries in the Middle East, North
Africa, and Central Asia are contributing to an elitist “urge to
identify Islam as an inherently anti-democratic force that is America’s
new global enemy now that the Cold War is over”, writes Jim Hoagland.[61] The
rise of political Islam, unless quelled with appropriate Western policy,
will thus lead “the Middle East and the once Soviet Central Asian
republics [to] become in a few years the cultural and political
dependencies of the most expansionist militarized regime in the world
today, a regime for which terrorism is the governing norm.”[62] These
essentially facist views stem directly from the official perspective of
the Western political establishment. Then Secretary-General of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), Willy Claes, described Islam as “at
least as dangerous as communism was.” He added: “NATO is much more than
a military alliance. It has committed itself to defending basic
principles of civilization that bind North American and Western Europe.”[63]
Accordingly, numerous think-tank studies have purported to
analyse the ‘Islamic threat’ to the US/Western global order, and the
‘Islamic threat’ has now become a genuine Western foreign policy issue.
US Congress also conducted several hearings on the issue, beginning in
the early 1990s.[64] Mamoun Fandy of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at
Georgetown University reports:
“The US has placed counterterrorism at the
top of its international and domestic agendas, and much of the political
mobilization to win support for antiterrorism measures has been focused
on the need to confront and overcome ‘Muslim fundamentalism’ or ‘Islamic
terror’. Domestically, the US government won support for sweeping new
antiterrorism legislation through repeated references, both veiled and
overt, to the threat posed by Islamic terrorists. In speeches before the
United Nations General Assembly in both 1995 and 1996, Clinton urged
greater international cooperation against terrorism.”
Despite fervent US claims to have “no quarrel with Islam”,
“The US identifies all political activities that mobilize using Islamic
symbols as ‘terrorism’ aimed at undermining Washington’s grand strategy
in the Middle East.” “US policymakers continue to use ‘Islamic terror’
as the replacement for ‘the communist menace’ or the ‘evil empire’, as
the ideological enemy against which all US policy should be aimed. The
US is still thinking in state-based, cold war terms”.[65]
Thus in 1999, Islamic fundamentalism was explicitly
pinpointed by the United States as a new threat necessitating the
maintenance of high levels of military spending. Apart from the
so-called global ‘Is
|
All this has followed as a
result of the fact that “the arms industry has launched a
concerted lobbying campaign aimed at increasing military
spending and arms exports”, as Senior Fellow of the World Policy
Institute William Hartung points out. “These initiatives are
driven by profit and pork barrel politics, not by the objective
assessment of how to best defend the United States in a
post-cold war period.”[68]
Indeed, ironically, while military spending has rocketed on
the pretext of ‘defence’ against international terrorism, acts of
terrorism have actually been on the decrease since the beginning
of the 1990s, including those apparently perpetrated in the name of
Islam - the numbers of which are relatively minute.[69] Despite this the entire Muslim world faces mass
demonisation, as well as possible mass destruction under US
intervention, due to a xenophobic mass media.
The new threat of Islamic fundamentalism thus plays a
particularly important role within the new world order, permitting the
West to formulate and justify strategies by which to enforce and
stabilise hegemony within the Middle East in particular, as well as in
Africa and Asia. Due to this, it is essential for us to discuss in
detail the relation of Islam to the global order, the reasons for this
relationship, and its ideological and political ramifications. The major
reason that Western institutions have taken it upon themselves to
demonise Islam, is inseparable from the structure of the global
politico-economic order; in fact it is a direct logic consquence of that
order and its relations to the Muslim people throughout the world.[70]
Thanks to the efforts of media and academic commentators,
most Westerners are aware of the apparent Islam-West divide, in which
Islam (or at least some aspect of Islam) is supposed to constitute a
fundamental danger to the allegedly ‘free world’. Samuel Huntington and
his infamous “clash of civilisations” thesis concerning the developments
within the global order is a particularly stark example of an academic
justification for the concept of an unfathomable Islam-West divide and a
new inevitable Cold War with Islam.[71] However, as is pointed out by J. A. Progler, Assistant
Professor of Social Studies at the School of Education in the City
University of New York, Brooklyn College:
“The long history
of encounters between Western civilization and Islam has produced a
tradition of portraying, in largely negative and self-serving ways, the
Islamic religion and Muslim cultures. There is a lot of literature
cataloguing (and sometimes correcting) these stereotypes… Western
image-makers, including religious authorities, political establishments,
and corporate-media conglomerates, conceptualize for their consumers
images of Muslims and/or Arabs in sometimes amusing and other times
cruel or tragic ways. Upon closer examination, these images seem to
serve essential purposes throughout the history of Western civilization.
At times these purposes are benign, at others quite sinister. Often,
there are tragic consequences for Muslims resulting from the
socio-political climate fostered by images.”[72]
Within the US, anti-Muslim/anti-Islam sentiment is being
successfully generated and escalated. “In a recent Roper poll”, reports
Angela Stephens, “more than half the respondents described Islam as
inherently anti-American, anti-Western or supportive of terrorism -
though only 5 percent said they’d had much contact with Muslims
themselves. Incidents of harassment and violence against American
Muslims and Arabs have risen sharply following dramatic and devastating
events such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 1996 crash of TWA
flight 800, even though in both events there was no connection to Islam
or the Middle East.”[73] The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) thus
reported a massive 60 per cent rise in discrimination against Muslims in
1997 compared to 1996.[74] In the aftermath of the 11th September attacks,
these figures have only risen drastically, not only in the US, but
throughout the Western countries. In the UK, groups such as the Islamic
Human Rights Commission (IHRC) have documented on the unprecedented wave
of Islamophobia sweeping over the Western world – IHRC’s principal
report on the subject has been used by the British Home Office and the
United Nations.
That these images manufactured by the media and academia in
tandem are actually quite contrary to documented facts is clear.
However, it is not correct to totally deny or ignore the existence of
“Islam-West” tension. The real reasons behind this confrontation in the
inherent structure of the present global order have been lucidly
explained by the distinguished US analyst and journalist, former State
Department official William Blum:
“When asked ‘What is it that these terrorists want from the United
States?’, Richard Haas, head of the foreign policy department at the
Brookings Institution, replied: ‘Well, the answer is it’s not anything
we’re simply doing. It is who we are. It’s the fact that we’re the most
powerful country in the world. It’s the fact that we’re a secular
country... It is simply who we are and it is our existence that really
bothers them.’
“‘Americans are targets of terrorism, in part, because we act to advance
peace and democracy and because we stand united against terrorism’, said
President Clinton.” Blum continues: “These are some of the platitudes
our leaders and policy makers feed us after each terrorist attack
against an American installation. What they never let slip is that the
terrorists - whatever else they might be - might also be rational human
beings; which is to say that in their own minds they have a rational
justification for their actions; and that the justification is usually
retaliation for various American actions.
“The massive bombing of the Iraqi people; the continuing sanctions
against Iraq; the unmitigated support of Israel; the double standard
applied to Israeli terrorism, such as the massacre of 106 Lebanese at
the UN base at Qana in 1996; the large military and hi-tech presence in
Islam’s holiest land, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf
region; the unceasing persecution of Libya; the shooting down of an
Iranian passenger plane... these are some of the American actions that
can turn an Arab or a Muslim into a fanatic, into a terrorist. And their
terrorist acts will continue as long as the United States gives them so
many reasons for retaliation.”[75]
British correspondent John Pilger – twice winner of
Britain’s highest award for journalism - offers a similar assessment:
“How is it that Western establishments can invert the public truth of
their own power and terrorism? The answer is that it is apostasy in
Britain and the United States to describe the democracies as terrorist
states... Stereotypes are much preferred, such as the ‘Muslim fanatic’.
In fact, not only have Muslims been responsible for a tiny proportion of
deaths caused by terrorism, but in recent years it is they who have been
the greatest sufferers from state terrorism: in Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia,
Chechnya and Somalia.”[76]
In fact,
statistics show that the majority of acts of terrorism are undertaken
against Muslims, not by Muslims. In
Patterns of Global Terrorism: 1998, the US Department of State
reports that “the number of international terrorist attacks actually
fell again in 1998, continuing a downward trend that began several years
ago.”
According to the State Department report the ‘Total US Citizen
Casualties Caused by International Attacks’ are as follows:
1993
|
1994
|
1995
|
1996
|
1997
|
1998
|
|
Dead
|
7
|
6
|
10
|
25
|
6
|
12
|
Wounded
|
1004
|
5
|
60
|
510
|
21
|
11
|
Another useful statistic is ‘Total International Attacks by Region’
which states as follows:
1993
|
1994
|
1995
|
1996
|
1997
|
1998
|
|
Africa
|
6
|
25
|
10
|
11
|
11
|
21
|
Asia
|
37
|
24
|
16
|
11
|
21
|
49
|
Eurasia
|
5
|
11
|
5
|
24
|
42
|
14
|
Latin America
|
97
|
58
|
92
|
84
|
128
|
110
|
Middle East
|
100
|
116
|
45
|
45
|
37
|
31
|
North America
|
1
|
0
|
0
|
0
|
13
|
0
|
West Europe
|
185
|
88
|
272
|
121
|
52
|
48
|
As far as
“Islamic terrorism” is concerned, the most pertinent statistic is ‘Total
Anti-US Attacks’ which lists attacks by region as follows: Africa-3,
Europe-3, West Europe-13, Middle East-5, and Latin America-87.[77]
Conversely, extensive documentation shows that 80 per cent of all human
rights violations in the world are committed against Muslims.[78] Thus,
even assuming that the perpetrators of the 11th September
attacks were Muslims, the fact remains that Muslims throughout the world
are nevertheless the primary victims of terrorism, not its cause. For
example, the prestigious international newsmagazine the
New Statesman explains how:
“Arabs must put up with
stereotypes about Islamic fundamentalism and violence, when, in fact,
not only have Muslims been responsible for a tiny proportion of deaths
caused by terrorism, but in recent years it is they who have been the
greatest sufferers from state terrorism: in Palestine, Iraq, Bosnia,
Chechnya and Somalia.”[79]
Rather, the US
corporate-military-industrial complex - which is the driving force
behind the contemporary world order - is also the force that bears prime
responsibility for manufacturing new false threats in the post-Cold War
period to justify an ongoing anti-humanitarian foreign policy, whose
objective is nothing other than global economic domination. The
corporate-controlled media is the principal tool through which the
general public can be spoon-fed this ideology. Under the imperatives of
US hegemonic expansionism, legitimized and veiled by the mass media, the
world is likely to see escalating turmoil, violence and instability as
the US extends its tentacles of consolidation to new regions, and faces
increasing threats from popular demands for social change within the
Global North as well as the Global South.
The unprecedented attacks on key U.S. buildings on the 11th
September mark a shift in the way the US-led West normally conducts its
profit-orientated wars on the rest of the world. It is simply inaccurate
for the US to claim that the perpetrators of Black Tuesday’s horrific
atrocities constitute a “declaration of war” on America. America,
leading the other Western powers, declared war on the non-Western Third
World many decades ago. Now the war has come home. The victims of the
system of global apartheid - in which the Western powers control the
world’s resources while the majority of the population toils under
regimes of extreme oppression and deprivation propped up by the
international community - are becoming increasingly intolerant of the
inhumane conditions in which they are forced to attempt to survive.
Unfortunately, this has meant that a few, finding no other way out, are
resorting to desperate measures to change an increasingly ruthless
status quo. If we are to genuinely stop such acts of terror from being
repeated, then we must dismantle the unjust system that creates such
inhumane conditions from which individuals arise with so little hope
that they feel compelled to use violence. On the contrary, a response
calculated to label and target everyone not “on our side”
indiscriminately - parroted and trumpeted by a corporate-dominated media
which is institutionally dependent upon the elite agenda - based on the
same elite strategic principles and economic interests, will only
exacerbate the systematic injustices of world order and create
conditions conducive to a spiral of violence and war, from which no one
will benefit.
Notes:
[1] Cited in INDEX on
Censorship, Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2001, p. 10.
[2] Tehranian, Majid, ‘A
Requiem for Realism?’, Peace & Policy, 3:1, Spring 1998.
[3] Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power: British
Foreign Policy Since 1945, Zed, London, 1995.
[4] Smith, J. W., ‘Simultaneously
Suppressing the World’s Break for Freedom’, Economic Democracy: The
Political Struggle of the Twenty-First Century,
M. E. Sharpe, New York, Armonk, 2000.
Excerpts of this study can be found at Institute for Economic Democracy, http://www.slonet.org/~ied/. In his Killing Hope, former
State Department official and investigative journalist William Blum
confirms an even larger number of direct deaths than that produced by
Smith.
[5] Herman, Edward S. and Chomsky, Noam,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
Vintage, London, 1994.
[6] FAIR, http://www.fair.org;
GRIID, affiliated with CMC, http://www.grmc.org/, http://www.grcmc.org/griid.
[7] ‘The Media’,
Corporate Watch magazine, Issue 5 & 6.
[8] McChesney, Robert W.,
‘Introduction’ in Chomsky, Noam, Profit Over People, op. cit.
[9] McChesney, Robert,
W., ‘Edward S. Herman on the propaganda model’, Monthly Review,
January 1989
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent,
op. cit., p. 14.
[13] Ibid., p. 8
[14] McChesney,
Monthly Review, January 1989.
[15] US News & World
Report, 11 November 1996, p. 48.
[16] Bagdikan, Ben H.,
The Media Monopoly, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992, p. 4.
[17] Alger, Dean,
Megamedia: How Giant Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort
Competition, and Endanger Democracy, Rowman & Littlefield, Oxford,
1998. See this book for references on the previous citations.
[18] All this is well understood. For studies of
elite power in relation to Britain see: Guttsman, W. L., The
British Political Elite, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1968; Stanworth,
P. and Giddens, A., Elites and Power in British Society,
Cambridge University, Cambridge, 1974; Westergaard, J. and Resler, H.,
Class in a Capitalist Society, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976;
David Coates, The Context of British Politics, Hutchinson,
London, 1984; John Scott, Who Rules Britain?, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1991; Mark Curtis’s study in The Ambiguities of Power
of the mainstream British media is also very illuminating, disclosing
the subservience of the media in relation to Nicaragua and the Gulf
War in particular. A fairly competent analysis of the British media is
Curran, James and Seaton, Jean, Power without responsibility: The
Press and Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen, London, 1985; and
especially Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, St. Martin’s
Press, New York, 1997. Also see Pilger, John, Distant Voices,
Vintage, London, 1992; Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas, Vintage,
London, 1998. Also see more general studies of the media that focus
particularly on the US, especially Chomsky and Herman, The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy
of Human Rights, South End Press, Boston, 1979; Smith, Anthony,
The Geopolitics of Information: How Western Culture Dominates the
World, Faber & Faber, London, 1980; Herman and Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,
Vintage, London, 1994; Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News
in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992; Herman, Global
Media: The Missionaries of Global Capitalism, Cassell Academic,
1998; Parenti, Michael, Inventing Reality: The Politics of the News
Media, St. Martin’s Press, 1993; Clark, Ramsey, et. al., War,
Lies & Videotapes: How media monopoly stifles truth, International
Action Center, New York, 2000; Croteau, David and Hoynes, William,
By Invitation Only: How the Media Limit Public Debate, Common
Courage, 1994; McChesney, Robert W., Corporate Media and the Threat
to Democracy, Seven Stories, 1997; Entman, Robert M., Democracy
Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics, Oxford
University Press, 1999; Parry, Robert, Fooling America: How
Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional
Wisdom, Morrow, 1992; Herman, Edward S. and McChesney, Robert W.,
The Global Media and the New Missionaries of Global Capitalism,
Cassell, 1997.
[19] Dearlove, J. and
Saunders, P. An Introduction to British Politics; cited in
Franklin, Bob, Newszak & News Media, St. Martin’s Press, New
York, 1997, p. 41.
[20] Franklin, Bob, ibid.
[21] Cited in Ibid.
[22] Cited in 24 Hours,
Sydney, April 1996; Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas, Vintage,
London, 1998, p. 543.
[23] Adelaide Review,
February 1996.
[24] Franklin, Bob,
Newszak & News Media, op. cit. p. 40.
[25] McGowan, David,
Derailing Democracy; cited in online e-mail bulletin, Political
Literacy Course, Common Courage Press, 20 March 2000, http://www.commoncouragepress.com.
[26] Ben Bagdikian
interviewed by David Barsamian in ‘Navigating the Media’, Z
Magazine, September 1998.
[27] Memorandum to
Director of CIA, Task Force on Greater CIA Openness, 18 November 1991.
[28] Cited in McGowan,
David, Derailing Democracy, Common Courage Press, Monroe,
Maine, 1999; from online e-mail bulletin, Political Literacy Course,
Common Courage Press, 20 March 2000, http://www.commoncouragepress.com.
[29] Franklin, Bob,
Newszak and News Media, op. cit., p. 31.
[30] Parenti cited in
Pilger, John, Hidden Agendas, op. cit., p. 4.
[31] Bennet, W. Lance,
News: The Politics of Illusion, Longman, New York, 1988, p.
178-79.
[32] McChesney,
Monthly Review, January 1989.
[33] Alger, Dan, Megamedia: How Giant
Corporations Dominate Mass Media, Distort Competition, and Endanger
Democracy, Rowan & Littlefield, Oxford, 1998, p. 154, 158; Curran,
James and Seaton, Jean, Power without responsibility: The Press and
Broadcasting in Britain, Methuen, London, 1985, p.31. Also see
Barnouw, Erik, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate, Oxford
University Press, 1978.
[34] Interview with
Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney by David Peterson, ‘The
Global Media’, Z Magazine, June 1997.
[35] Herman and Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 14.
[36] McChesney,
Monthly Review, January 1989.
[37] Herman and Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 21-22.
[38] Fishman, Mark, Manufacturing News,
University of Texas Press, Austin, 1980, p. 144-45.
[39] McChesney,
Monthly Review, January 1989.
[40] For an introductory discussion of how the
propaganda model can be extended to explain and reveal the corporate
conditioning of Western culture and academia, see Edwards, David,
Free To Be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions,
A Resurgence Book, Green Books, Devon, 1995.
[41] McChesney,
Monthly Review, January 1989.
[42] Herman and Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent, op. cit., p. 25.
[43] Ibid., p. 291.
[44] See for example,
Masud, Enver, The War On Islam, The Wisdom Fund, Madrasah Books
Division, Arlington, 2000.
[45] Edwards, David,
Free To Be Human: Intellectual Self-Defence in an Age of Illusions,
op. cit., p. 9-10
[46] cited in Alger, Dan,
Megamedia, op. cit., p. 153.
[47] ‘21st Century Media
- Shaping the Democratic Vision’ Campaign for Press and Broadcasting
Freedom (CPBF) Media Manifesto, London.
[48] Cited in Alger, Dan, Megamedia, op.
cit., p. 161.
[49] Parenti, Michael,
‘Media Evasion’, in Clark, Ramsey, et. al., War, Lies & Videotapes,
International Action Center, New York, 1999.
[50] Parenti, Michael,
Against Empire, City Light Books, 1995. See Chapter 3
‘Intervention: Whose gain? Whose pain?’.
[51] BBC 2, Newsnight,
London, 11 September 2001.
[52] Dunleavy, Steve,
New York Post, 12 September 2001.
[53] Rich Lowry,
National Review editor, to Howard Kurtz (Washington Post,
13 September 2001).
[54] Coulter, Ann, New
York Daily News, 12 September 2001.
[55] Former Secretary of
State Lawrence Eagleburger, CNN, 11 September 2001.
[56] ‘The O’Reilly
Factor’, Fox News Channel, 13 September 2001.
[57] For discussion see
Said, Edward, Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts
Determine How We See the Rest of the World, Vintage, London, 1997.
[58] IPA News Release,
‘Another Gulf of Tonkin Resolution? Because We Embrace Freedom?’,
Institute for Public Accuracy, Washington DC, 13 September 2001,
http://www.accuracy.org.
[59] Hadar, Leon T., ‘The
“Green Peril”: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat’, Policy
Analysis, Cato Institute, No. 177, 27 August 1992.
[60] Perlmutter, Amos,
‘Wishful Thinking About Islamic Fundamentalism’, Washington Post,
19 January 1992.
[61] Hoagland, Jim,
‘Washington’s Algerian Dilemma’, Washington Post, 6 February
1992.
[62] Beichman, Arnold,
‘Iran’s Covetous Glances’, Washington Times, 28 February 1992.
Also see Miller, Judith, ‘The Challenge of Radical Islam’, Foreign
Affairs, Spring 1993.
[63] Guardian, 3
February 1995. Similar such quotes from the Western press and academia
are cited copiously in Said, Edward, Covering Islam, op. cit.
[64] Hadar, Leon T., ‘The
“Green Peril”: Creating the Islamic Fundamentalist Threat’, Policy
Analysis, Cato Institute, No. 177, 27 August 1992.
[65] Fandy, Mamoun, ‘In
Focus: Islamists and US Policy’, Foreign Policy In Focus, Vol.
1, No. 21, December 1996.
[66] Masud, Enver,
‘Clinton’s $124 Billion Defense Increase Jeopardizes Social Security,
Medicare: `Islamic terrorism` helps justify defense spending’, Wisdom
Fund, Arlington, 18 January 1999, http://www.twf.org/index.html; also
see references cited here.
[67] Masud, Enver,
‘Commission Hypes Terror, Doubles Budget’, The Wisdom Fund, Arlington,
15 June 2000.
[68] Hartung, William,
Milwaukee Sentinel & Journal, 11 January 1999.
[69] For references and
discussion see Masud, Enver, ‘Islamic Fundamentalism $500 Billion
Bogey: Welfare `reform` expected to save $55 billion in six years’,
Wisdom Fund, 2 August 1996; Enver, ‘Facts Belie Hype About `Islamic
Terrorism`’, Wisdom Fund, 31 December 1999. For a deeper analysis see
Hadar, Leon T., ‘The “Green Peril”: Creating the Islamic
Fundamentalist Threat’, Policy Analysis, No. 177, 27 August
1992 - the general analysis is very illuminating. For another
interesting analysis of Islamic ‘fundamentalism’ in the contemporary
world see Sayyid, Bobby S., A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and
the Emergence of Islamism, Zed Books, 1997; read in tandem with
Edward Said’s Orientalism and Culture & Imperialism, the
result a very illuminating insight into relations between “East” and
“West”, which undercuts the essentially Western chauvinist ‘clash’
thesis of Samuel Huntington. Finally, especially see Esposito, John
L., The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?, Oxford University
Press, New York, 1992; also see Masud, Enver, The War On Islam,
The Wisdom Fund, Madrasah Books Division, Arlington, 2000.
[70] For some insight into what is meant by this,
see especially Said, Edward, Orientalism, Random House, New
York, 1979; also see Said, Covering Islam, Pantheon, New York,
1981.
[71] Huntington, Samuel,
Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order, Simon &
Schuster, New York, 1996. For a skillful online dissection of the the
myth of Islamic terrorism supported by the media and academia, see the
cutting edge web-site of the University of Colorado’s Religious
Studies Deparment established by Kevin Choi,
True Lies: The
Construction of “Islamic” Terrorism in Politics and Academia,
. It is also worth noting Professor Huntington’s extraordinary
ignorance of the “civilizations” he purports to discuss - he seems
quite unaware of the abundant scholarly literature disproving the
redundant thesis of the inherently aggressive nature of Islam and
Muslims (for example: “Muslims have problems living with their
neighbours… The evidence is overwhelming.” [p. 256]). His
“overwhelming evidence”appears to merely manifest only his poor and
prejudiced scholarship, by undertaking an exceedingly shallow
analysis of a few cases, thus distorting them, and furthermore
generalising the conclusions without warrant. Suffice it to say that
specialists in the field have long dismissed such essentially
Eurocentric views of Islam and Muslims. As early as the 1950s, James
Michener commented in the American edition of Reader’s Digest:
“No other religion spread so rapidly as Islam… The West has widely
believed that this surge of religion was made possible by the sword.
But no modern scholar accepts that idea, and the Qur’an is explicit in
the support of the freedom of conscience.” (Michener, James A.,
‘Islam: The Misunderstood Religion’, Reader’s Digest [American
edition], May 1955) Professor K. S. Ramakrishna Rao, Head of the
Department of Philosophy at the Government College for Women,
University of Mysore, in his brief summation of Islam and its Prophet
remarks on recent scholarship on Islam: “My work today is further
lightened because those days are fast disappearing when Islam was
highly misrepresented by some of its critics for reasons political and
otherwise… My problem in writing this monograph is easier because we
are now generally not fed on this kind of history and much time need
not be spent pointing out our misrepresentation of Islam. The theory
of Islam and Sword for instance is not heard now frequently in any
quarter worth the name. The principle of Islam that there is no
compulsion in religion is well known. Gibbon, a historian of
world repute says, ‘A pernicious tenet has been imputed to
Mohammadans, the duty of extirpating all the religions by sword.’
This charge based on ignorance and bigotry, says the eminent
historian, is refuted by Quran, by history of Musalman
conquerors and by their public and legal toleration of Christian
worship.” (Rao, K. S. Ramakrishna, ‘Islam and Mohammad the Prophet’,
Islam and the Modern Age, Hydrabad, March 1978) It is certainly
a shame that the esteemed Harvard scholar has to resort to
regurgitating chauvinistic myths to support his untenable position.
[72] Progler, J. A., ‘The
Utility of Islamic Imagery in the West: An American Case Study’,
Winter 1997, Al-Tawhid: A Journal of Islamic Thought & Culture,
Vol. XIV, No. 4.
[73] Stephens, Angela,
‘Terror in East Africa: fundamentally un-Islamic’, The Progressive
Media Project, September 1998.
[74] Cited in ibid. Also
see Commission on British Muslims & Islam, Islamophobia: A
Challenge for Us All, 23 October 1997; report on Islamophobia of
the Runnymede Trust, 22 October 1997; IHRC report, Anti-Muslim
Discrimination and Hostility in the United Kingdom, Islamic Human
Rights Commission, 2000.
[75] Blum, William, ‘The bombings of the US
embassies, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the war on terrorism’, Foreign
Policy Watch, can be accessed via ZNet, http://www.zmag.org/ ; also go
to http://members.aol.com/bblum6/American_holocaust.htm .
[76] Pilger, John,
Hidden Agendas, Vintage, London, 1998, p. 34.
[77] Masud, Enver, ‘Facts Belie
Hype About Islamic Terrorism’, The Wisdom Fund [TWF], Arlington, 31
December 1999.
[78] Figure cited by
Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), London,
http://www.ihrc.org .
The figure is confirmed by other leading human rights organisations.
Mr. Nafeez Ahmed is a
political analyst and human rights activist based in London. He is
Director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development and a
Researcher at the Islamic Human Rights
Commission.
Source:
by courtesy & ©
2002
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
by the same author:
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