/** propaganda.rev: 17.0 **/ ** Topic: Propaganda Review 7 ** ** Written 12:14 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Propaganda Review 7, Table of Contents PROPAGANDA REVIEW A publishing project of the Media Alliance, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization of 2800 media professionals. Spring 1991, Number 7 Note: The following Table of Contents is 145 lines long and contains 918 words. TABLE OF CONTENTS Response No. Article Title, Author, Length ____________________________________________________________ EDITORIAL 1 Editorial by Claude Steiner (1771 words)--New Weird Order -- Who Drafted the Press? 2 Letters (934 words) 3 Propaganda Watch (1945 words, Part 1 of 2) News, quotes and examples of propaganda and the Gulf war. 4 Propaganda Watch (373 words, Part 2 of 2) SPECIAL GULF WAR FORUM INTERVIEWS 5 Special Gulf War Forum Introduction by Johan Carlisle and Stephen Leiper (587 words) This collection of interviews offers a diverse look at the ubiquitous propaganda, censorship and disinformation surrounding the Gulf war. 6 Noam Chomsky by Rory Cox (1257 words, Part 1 of 2) Propaganda and disinformation about the Gulf war is so deep that the entire picture has been largely falsified, and in fact drove the US into the Gulf war. 7 Noam Chomsky by Rory Cox (1269 words, Part 2 of 2) 8 Abn Farid by Eduardo Cohen (1663 words, Part 1 of 2) The US uses propaganda and the fear of terrorism to affect public opinion and defuse the anti-war movement. A double standard in media coverage downplays the suffering of the Palestinian and Arab populations. 9 Abn Farid by Eduardo Cohen (1774 words, Part 2 of 2) 10 Jane Hunter by Eduardo Cohen (1100 words, Part 1 of 2) The role of propaganda is more critical than the military operations, and is the key to keeping the consent of the public for the drive to initiate and continue the war. 11 Jane Hunter by Eduardo Cohen (1606 words, Part 2 of 2) 12 Molly Ivins by Johan Carlisle (1247 words, Part 1 of 2) Military psychological warfare experts and other spin-controllers may ultimately be doing themselves damage. They have been working so hard to make the Gulf war sanitized, bloodless and "good vs. evil" that when reality catches up, there will be a terrible reaction. 13 Molly Ivins by Johan Carlisle (915 words, Part 2 of 2) 14 Sam Keen by Rory Cox (1324 words, Part 1 of 2) The tendencies of a people to scapegoat are like a virus in the bloodstream that may lie dormant for a long time. But, under stress, that virus becomes active and we begin to look for enemies. 15 Sam Keen by Rory Cox (1508 words, Part 2 of 2) 16 Paul Krassner by Johan Carlisle (1609 words, Part 1 of 2) The Gulf war is being packaged like a continuous mini-series on TV, and the constant opinion polls are like a popularity contest. Journalists and comedians alike are staying away from controversial material because of fear for their careers. 17 Paul Krassner by Johan Carlisle (2203words, Part 2 of 2) 18 Michael Parenti by Kris Welch and Philip Maldari (KPFA Radio) (1074 words, Part 1 of 2) There is a community of interest between those who own the world and those who own the media -- they're the same people. Democracy is being short-circuited when journalists are not allowed to truly report the war, and the public is denied any sense of reality of the costs of that war. 19 Michael Parenti by Kris Welch and Philip Maldari (KPFA Radio) (1700 words, Part 2 of 2) 20 Herbert Schiller by Eduardo Cohen (1727 words) All stops have been pulled out in a well-orchestrated arrangement to induce as much popular support with as little information being offered as possible. The press was very quickly enlisted in the effort. 21 Holly Sklar by Johan Carlisle (1642 words, Part 1 of 2) First impressions are often lasting impressions, so the White House and the Pentagon worked very hard to package the initial image of the war. The media, always looking for a good photo opportunity, didn't challenge what was going on. 22 Holly Sklar by Johan Carlisle (1861 words, Part 2 of 2) 23 Reporters Roundtable: Jeff Cohen, Judy Coburn, Tom De Vries, Bill Wallace by Media Alliance (2334 words, Part 1 of 2) Jeff Cohen (Director of Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting - FAIR) takes on two San Francisco-based "mainstream" reporters and shows them how effective FAIR techniques of media monitoring can really be. UC Berkeley lecturer and former war correspondent Judy Coburn provides insight into the unique problems of covering a war live. 24 Reporters Roundtable: Jeff Cohen, Judy Coburn, Tom De Vries, Bill Wallace by Media Alliance (2223 words, Part 2 of 2) FEATURES 25 Disinformation, or The Progress of Lying by Donald Lazere (1902 words, Part 1 of 2) Using the best selling novel, The Spike, written by a right wing editor as an example, Don Lazere gives us an daunting example of the thin line that divides information from disinformation. 26 Disinformation, or The Progress of Lying by Donald Lazere (1437 words, Part 2 of 2) 27 "Unreliable Sources"--excerpts from this new "guide to detecting bias in news media." by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon (1913 words) 28 The Media Missed the Event by Paul Richards (1411 words) 29 Propaganda War at Home by Norman Solomon (1366 words) DEPARTMENTS 30 Ad Watch (433 words) Adbusters 31 Resources (1120 words) A list of organizations and publications which provide propaganda analysis. Also, a special list of anti-war groups around the country. 32 Masthead End, Table of Contents 7 Next, Resonse 1, Editorial ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.1 **/ ** Written 12:17 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** START, Editorial *** EDITORIAL NEW WEIRD ORDER by Claude Steiner Claude Steiner is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. We are at war. Ninety percent of the public wants to continue the onslaught until Saddam Hussein agrees to withdraw unconditionally (Newsweek, 2/25/91). The streets of America are lined with flags. What does this unanimity mean? To us at Propaganda Review it is proof positive of the effectiveness of government propaganda. Propaganda analysis, if it is to go beyond a post hoc whining over past misdeeds, is a task requiring intense concentration. Propaganda is per force a secretive activity. Since we have no moles in the White House, we are reduced to keeping our ear to the ground and our eye on CNN. Modern propaganda is often a shell game which involves feints and deliberate false leads. One of the important requirements of propaganda analysis is to follow the ball while at the same time avoiding being sent on a paranoid, wild goose chase. Paranoia, as we know, is the symptom of those whose awareness is being insulted by lies. One aspect of this extremely successful propaganda war is that it is micro-managed, day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour. The issues change and are exploited constantly with daily "talking points" faxed around the world, photo opportunities, and speeches for the eager media to broadcast. A partial list of these one-, two- or three-day, poll-driven issues: War for oil . . . Civilian hostages . . . US mercenary force . . . War economics and allied contributions . . . Saddam Hussein's nuclear capabilities . . . Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds . . . Linkage . . . Mistreatment of POW's; Saddam will be punished . . . War on course; we will not be rushed . . . We will win but there will be losses . . . SCUD attacks on Israel . . . Israel, innocent victim showing restraint . . . Saddam Hussein as Hitler . . . The Vietnam analogy . . . Environmental terrorism . . . Precision bombing . . . and so on. All the while, as these daily issues fade from the video screen one after the other, the big picture--as Sam Keen points out in this issue, the background upon which the short term images are projected--is constantly being built upon. For example, in only a few days the following propaganda mini-drama was played out: Around February 11-12 there began to be a hue and cry regarding the constant bombing of Iraq and how it might be overstepping the UN resolutions. Bush appeared to go on the defensive--in fact went on the offensive-- and subtly changed the terms of the debate when he personally (and through Dick Cheney, Jim Baker, and his Pentagon and Saudi briefers) denied that any indiscriminate bombing of civilians was going on, and generally praised the accuracy of high-tech bombing. This was not responsive to the accusation that was being made (excessive rather than indiscriminate bombing). But it accomplished two goals: First, it effectively controlled the short-term PR damage caused by relentless bombardment and "collateral" civilian casualties. This was accomplished by the steadfast assertion that military--and only military--targets were being targeted. Second, it contributed to the continuing praise for the wonders of high-tech US weaponry and how in the case of "collateral damage" it actually "saved" lives. On the very next day, February 13, it appeared that the bombing of a hardened shelter caused hundreds of civilian casualties. Efforts at damage control consisted of an admission that the deaths had occurred, manifestations of regret, blaming Hussein for putting civilians in military targets, and repeated reassertions that the shelter housed an Iraqi military facility. As reports from journalists in Baghdad made this assertion implausible, the government line (that it was a hardened military command post) became monotonously repetitive, and on February 14 the government closed the books on the attack without further investigation. However, the whole issue was buried on February 15 by Iraq's radio announcement that it might withdraw from Kuwait. The shelter bombing--perhaps the most dramatic media event since the war began--became a two-day issue and faded from the TV screen. By February 18 the additional suggestion that the people in the shelter were families of the high command operating in the lowest level of the bunker (now flooded) further undermined the power of the issue. The propaganda war went on. All of which is to say that government propaganda is a 24-hour-a-day-seven-day-a-week team enterprise, and its analysis needs to be equally intensive if it is not to be mis-, dis- or un-informed or hopelessly behind the curve. We at Propaganda Review wanted to make a contribution to the understanding of this complex issue. Since we did not know of anyone who, at such short notice, had a thorough analysis of the propaganda supporting the Gulf war, we decided to assemble the collective wisdom of many thinkers in the field for you to sort through. It is apparent to many that George Bush had made up his mind long before the start of the war--by around mid-December--that for a variety of reasons an armed conflict was the preferred outcome. Therefore, to every extent possible he did what he could to bring about a war while unleashing an extensive "extra mile for diplomacy" campaign designed to cover up the facts of his decision. As Holly Sklar points out, Bush had the enormous advantage of primacy. From his bully pulpit he could shape the initial images: poisonous dictator invades helpless country, world opinion unites behind an allied effort to reverse invasion, every avenue for peace attempted, war will be short and will end when Saddam Hussein withdraws. These primal, first to be established notions--once implanted in the public mind and continually reemphasized--are extremely difficult to dislodge. Opposing views: respected Arab leader, encouraged by the US to be himself, being punished for threatening US and Israeli interests, have absolutely no chance to get a hearing within the US. The uncanny grafting of the Vietnam phenomenon upon this conflict and its transmutation into the pro-war, flag-waving, Support-Our-Troops, Thank-God-for-the-Patriots movement is almost too much to bear, and it has to be credited as a noteworthy propaganda success. From the comments which we get repeatedly in the interviews, it seems the collective wisdom is that the August 2 demonization of Saddam Hussein is highly questionable and worthy of analysis. In other words, how come Saddam Hussein went from being our friend to requiring extermination, while we ourselves have invaded sovereign countries, Israel won't give up its territories, and others of our "friends" around the world are as brutal--if not moreso--than Saddam ever was? Theories vary: We planned to have Saddam Hussein invade Kuwait, we encouraged him, we can't tolerate his disobedience, we are doing Israel's bidding, we are using this opportunity to establish a military presence in the Middle East and to revitalize our military-industrial-media complex. But all agree that while Saddam Hussein is a bad man, the rationale for his demonization is replete with deceptive information. "Truthfulness," a strategy espoused by Goebbels, is widely used in this propaganda war. By being meticulously "truthful," that is, by not telling any bold-face lies which could be exposed by an eager media, the government can give the appearance of candor, can lie extensively by omission and by claiming ignorance, lack of expertise, or by refusing to discuss certain matters--lest we endanger the safety of our troops--or to protect our sources. In general, all the government propaganda seems to follow the dictum elaborated by Jacques Ellul that propaganda must be based on a credible kernel of truth to be effective. That the media, especially CNN, has turned out to be an almost completely passive conduit for Pentagon dispatches seems a foregone conclusion. At the same time, even CNN attempts to create its own sources, as in the case of Peter Arnett, whose independence has been labeled treasonous by some. Opinions vary on how aware the media are of their passive function and how willingly they perform it. The evidence is that an effort exists within the various media to counteract this passivity, some of which is arguably structural, having to do with the nature of the medium rather than with journalists' venality. It also seems clear that the press's latent desire for professionalism and independence is easier to exercise in times of turmoil and chaos. The government's constant effort is to normalize the process of news gathering so as to keep the upper hand--so far with great effectiveness, especially in Saudi Arabia. As Todd Gitlin has pointed out elsewhere, however, the much commented upon censorship of the journalists covering the troops in the Gulf is not really the lead story in this propaganda war--the story is elsewhere and we don't know what it is because it's not being covered. At the moment, the largest effort seems to be to insure that the public is kept unaware of deaths by keeping ours low, calling theirs "collateral damage" and denying their extent, by speaking about allied respect for the sanctity of life and refusing to mention Iraqi troop casualties in Kuwait while prohibiting pictures of the wounded and of body bags. This enterprise is becoming more and more difficult since the obvious fact is that thousands of Iraqi civilians and tens of thousands of men who happen to be in uniform (in most cases, unwillingly) are dying without acknowledgement. Over and over in a myriad of ways--in the admiring tones of war correspondents and talking heads, in the imagery of the logos that precede news reports, in the canned Pentagon stories, and in the predigested statements of the men and women in the field--we hear of the importance of the existence and perpetuation of the US military-industrial capabilities and of the wisdom, as Dick Cheney puts it, of those who "thought it important to put our military might in place." This is, it appears, the ultimate, long-term point being made in the propaganda wars: "US High-Tech Military Might Heads New World Order," while the everyday effort is to hide human suffering, degradation, and death from view. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 END, Editorial NEXT, Response 2, Letters ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.2 **/ ** Written 12:18 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Letters *** LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Katy Butler Responds to Paul Kleyman's "Scapegoating the Elderly" Paul Kleyman's article, "Scapegoating the Elderly" [PR#6] raises important questions about the use of the economic discontent of the young to serve conservative goals. But he transforms my article "The Great Boomer Bust" into "granny- bashing" by omissions and distortions--in other words, by propaganda tactics unworthy of your magazine. My article attacked the myth that the young are as well off as the media portrays them. I talked about day care, the declining value of the minimum wage, and housing costs--all burdens falling heavily on the young. I said: "young people could have learned a thing or two (about political organizing) from the elderly." I argued that the goal is not to steal from those who have enough or be resentful because you don't have as much as your parents, but to learn to live with limits within which every one can survive. Kleyman takes me to task for "granny-bashing" and quoted from a sidebar in which I noted that the elderly successfully lobbied to index Social Security benefits to inflation. He criticizes me for failing to note that a drop in Social Security benefits would send many old people below the poverty line. I did not argue for a cut in Social Security. I bemoaned the failure of young families--especially those earning the minimum wage--to mount a similar campaign on their own behalf. The cost of years of failure to index the minimum wage are visible in the shelters of America, among homeless children whose parents work but cannot earn enough to cover the rent. I do not advocate the abandonment of the elderly - - only an end to the abandonment of children. Mr. Kleyman notes that a large number of middle class elders "are one serious illness away from having their homes and nest-eggs wiped out." True. And a large number of younger families--the children and grandchildren of Kleyman's elders--rent modest homes, will never own homes and are one paycheck way from being homeless. Although many old people are by no means rich, poverty rates among the elderly are slightly lower than among the population as a whole--which makes the photograph accompanying Mr. Kleyman's article (of a homeless elderly couple on a park bench) misleading. Finally Kleyman attacks me for "bias or at least lazy scholarship" for quoting Phillip Longman who had worked for a Republican congressman on generational equity issues. Mr. Kleyman describes Longman as a "gerontologist." I did not quote him as a gerontologist, but as an expert in the relative political influence of the old and the young. Many of the statistics in my article which Kleyman attacks as "half-truths," came not from the conservative Americans for Generational Equity but from the Social Security Administration and the American Association of Retired Persons. In the interest of precise scholarship please correct the following errors: I am 41, not 44; I do not own a home; I don't have a new job and I drive an eight year old Honda, not a new one. My article was a subtle and complex look at the declining fortunes of the middle class and young families and at issues of generational equity and American consumerism. To reduce it to granny-bashing is insulting and adds only a new layer of propaganda to an intense and necessary debate. It had a least the virtue of using accurate statistics and quoting people correctly. Mother Jones is fact checked. Propaganda Review apparently is not. Sincerely Katy Butler Ms. Butler's main accusation is that I took her article out of context. My purpose, however, was to give her essay the context she denies. While her main article depicts a complex social issue in personal terms, its sidebar anchors it to a skewed public-policy interpretation. This is no small criticism for a piece that has been reprinted 31 times around the country. She denies that the article has relevance to efforts to misrepresent older Americans as affluent and play their modest gains off against the poverty of children and the struggle of those in the middle. Yet her sidebar throws gas on the flames. The supposedly factual sidebar is as tidy a rendition as I've seen over the past few years of the standard line from conservative proponents of generational warfare, including her recitation of the same, questionable government statistics. (Adequate reporting would note that use of these figures is debatable. For example, the poverty rate for the elderly is lower, partly because it's lower--the feds actually set a reduced income level for people 65 and older to qualify for poverty status.) Ms. Bulter also seems to have missed my point that "the elderly" are not a group to envy for their political power. Low-income and middle-class elders certainly have not won the right to such basic needs as long-term health care and decent levels of income maintenance. Further, even the huge AARP took its lumps last year over its attempt to swing a congressional deal on catastrophic-illness coverage. Voting records show that older people are as diffused in their politics as any cross-cutting demographic cohort, and they certainly are not a lobby in the sense of the petroleum industry. For those who are interested in more background on generational warfare issues, I'll be glad to send a free issue of the newpaper I edit with a special section on "Redefining Generational Equity--Are the Elderly Really Overconsuming?" Write Paul Kleyman, Editor, The Aging Connection, American Society on Aging, 833 Market St., San Francisco, CA 94103. Cordially, Paul Kleyman End, Letters NEXT, Response 3, Propaganda Watch ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.3 **/ ** Written 12:20 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Propaganda Watch (Part 1 of 2) *** PROPAGANDA WATCH by Stephen Leiper Stephen Leiper is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. Bushspeak Becomes a Snow Job White House Chief of Staff John Sununu has chosen Anthony Snow as President Bush's new speechwriter. Snow has for the past three years been the editorial page editor of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Fly Now, Pay Later? According to AP, the US House of Representatives on 2/20/91 approved, by a vote of 409-0, a non-binding resolution calling on Americans to fly the flag in support of US troops in the Gulf. Star-Spangled Radio Play Lists From a Gulf War "Arts & Entertainment" column in the San Francisco Examiner, 2/17/91: War is big on the hit parade. One of the biggest hits is an old one--"The Star-Spangled Banner." From Whitney Houston's Super Bowl version to Jimi Hendrix's guitar solo from Woodstock, the national anthem is getting unprecedented air time. John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" has been dropped from numerous American radio play lists and from Britain's BBC. At WGR-FM in Buffalo, NY, Sean Lennon's remake of his father's song was dumped because "it didn't feel right," said program director John Hager. A song titled "Kick Ass USA" is more popular, he said. One Pennsylvania station stopped playing Paul Simon's "Loves Me Like a Rock" because some listeners complained "a rock" sounded too much like Iraq. The Media Take a Pounding From an article by Thomas B. Rosenstiel in the Los Angeles Times, 2/20/91: WASHINGTON--It may have been the strongest signal yet of who is losing the political battle of the Persian Gulf war. NBC's "Saturday Night Live" recently opened with a skit pointedly satirizing not Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, or President Bush, or allied Commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, or even Vice President Dan Quayle. Instead, the skit shredded the American press corps. Every question that the red-eyed media horde asked at a mock Pentagon briefing seemed designed to help the enemy. Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) recently accused CNN's Baghdad correspondent Peter Arnett of being an Iraqi "sympathizer." The press now finds itself huddled in a new and uncomfortable political bunker: It has reduced access to real news, more sides are effectively manipulating it, and its reputation is being damaged to boot. Most evidence suggests people still believe what they are reading and seeing of the war. A recent L.A. Times Poll found that 65% of Americans think the press is offering an "accurate picture". Nevertheless, an overwhelming majority of Americans want the press controlled. Seventy-nine percent approve of the Pentagon's restrictions, and 57% favor even stricter rules, a Times Mirror survey found last month. That comes as no surprise to the Pentagon. "We knew from doing our homework that the public would support our position on restricting the press," said one senior military official involved in shaping Pentagon press policy. The Pentagon has been studying how to conduct a television war for more than a decade, in planning sessions, military exercises, war college classes and through models of other recent military actions. The conclusion, military planners say, was that the press in the era of instant global communications had to be carefully controlled. Pictures in particular are a powerful weapon, which could aid the enemy and demoralize morale at home. A key model became the Falklands War, in which British authorities kept reporters on board ships and briefed them only after engagements occurred. . . .The Persian Gulf arrangements mirror the Falklands experience. A Correspondent's Tale From an article by James LeMoyne, "Pentagon's Strategy for the Press: Good News or No News" in the New York Times, 2/17/91: Three Pentagon press officials in the gulf region said they spent significant time analyzing reporters' stories in order to make recommendations on how to sway coverage in the Pentagon's favor. In the early days of the deployment, Pentagon press officers warned reporters who asked hard questions that they were seen as "anti-military" and that their requests for interviews with senior commanders and visits to the field were in jeopardy. This effectively dampened critical reporting. In general, Pentagon press officers seemed most restrictive of television. At times they staged events solely for the cameras; at others, press handlers would stop an on-camera interview because they did not like what was being portrayed. By far the most open moments came when press officers left reporters alone and troops felt at ease to speak their minds. But if the troops' frank comments angered senior Pentagon officials, reporters' access immediately suffered. For nearly two months, for example, this reporter had a standing request for an interview with the chief American commander, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf. Over several weeks a Pentagon press officer telephoned with updates on the chances of getting the interview. "The General liked your last story," the officer would say. Or, more ominously, "The General did not like your last story." He said that if articles were not "liked," the interview would probably be denied. One article the Pentagon officials said they definitely did not like included quotes from Army enlisted men who criticized President Bush and who, after two months in the desert, emotionally questioned the purpose of their being sent to fight and perhaps die in Saudi Arabia. The day the article was published, the Pentagon press officer strongly intimated that it might well scuttle the interview with General Schwarzkopf. The interview was later canceled with no explanation other than that the general's "schedule has changed." In a meeting one and a half months later, General Schwarzkopf apologized for the cancellation and denied it was due to the seemingly irksome story. In the meantime, the commander and some of the men in the unit who had been quoted as being critical of Mr. Bush denounced the article in a letter. A request to return to the unit, to find out why they had apparently changed their minds, was denied. A few days later a junior officer of the unit whose members had been quoted paid a quiet visit. He said that he and other men in the unit thought the article was fair, but said that "all hell broke loose" when it was published. He said that senior commanders had demanded explanations of the soldiers' critical views. For the next six weeks almost all print news reporters were denied visits to Army units. When reporters pressed for access, they were told there was no transport available or that units were changing position and could not be easily contacted in the field. A Pentagon press official said privately that Army commanders felt there had been too many "critical" stories. But television personalities with no experience of war, such as the football star and sports announcer O. J. Simpson and weatherman Willard Scott, were being escorted by the Pentagon to a number of units. A senior press officer responded to one protest by saying that unlike some reporters, O. J. Simpson and Willard Scott did not "cause problems." TV's Flags and Yellow Ribbons From an article by Howard Rosenberg in the Los Angeles Times, 2/20/91: Newspapers and airwaves abound with criticism of media coverage of the war, most of it charging CNN and other elements of TV with either purposely or inadvertently using material that assists or encourages Iraq. . . . Yet there is no evidence that TV is trashing the war. On the contrary, much of TV has calculatingly wrapped itself in a yellow ribbon of respectablity, with local newscasts such as those on KABC Channel 7 and KNBC Channel 4 incorporating the symbols of war and Americana into their logos and entertainment shows making Operation Desert Storm a continuing theme. In the same week, for example, several daytime series featured beauty makeovers for families of troops in the Gulf, almost as if patriotic themes were being passed from show to show. On a recent episode of "The Price Is Right," moreover, the women wore red, white and blue costumes--including hats emblazoned with the American flag--when introducing prizes that included a trip to Washington, DC, and not just a new car but one "you can drive across America." Then came the patriotic march music . . . . Among the most chauvinistic local newscasts have been those on KCAL Channel 9, whose anchors wore yellow ribbons in the early days of the war. It's Channel 9 also, in a segment titled "Songs from the Heart," that invites amateur songwriters to submit war compositions for possible singing and playing during newscasts. The station so far has received no anti-war songs, a Channel 9 spokeswoman said, but would consider them "depending on their musical merits." --Don't hold your breath. War As a Matter of Taste From a column by Rick Du Brow in theLos Angeles Times, 2/21/91: Television is the public's primary source of news images, including local TV, where comical weather reporters and sportscasters, lightweight anchors and ratings sweeps series--such as a recent one on aphrodisiacs--hardly inspire confidence. Given this trivialization of the news, isn't it logical that TV viewers would gravitate to well-versed, authoritative military spokesmen who clearly have prepared for media combat in this first instant satellite war? This can be dangerous, of course--Big Brother. .But the increasing entertainment values in news--from local TV to reality spinoffs such as the tabloid shows "Hard Copy" and " A Current Affair," not to mention their supermarket kin--are coming home to roost. . . . As the war threatened to get uglier on TV with ground action, it became clear that attempts to withhold the ugliness from home viewers were part and parcel of policy. Is this right? Maybe, if you' re running the show and have government interests as first priority. But should the networks engage in complicity, which is what they are doing in agreeing that viewers should not see the extreme horrors of war? Walter Porges, vice president of news practices for ABC, says that "the executive producers of each broadcast" decide on the content and generally " put on only what they'd like to see in their living rooms." David Miller, director of foreign news for NBC, adds: "We have our standards of taste. We don't want to offend the viewer. We're not grotesque.We maintain prudent standards." Cashing in on War Songs From an article by Richard Harrington, "Country Stars Stir Up a Desert Storm" in the SF Chronicle 1/31/91 (Washington Post): R&B and rock may have provided the soundtrack for Vietnam in much the way big bands did for World War II, but country music is (for now) first to the turntable with musical takes on the Persian Gulf war. Besides Waylon Jennings' "The Eagle," there's fellow Highwayman Johnny Cash's "Goin' by the Book," which mixes Armageddon lyrics with excerpts from speeches by Bush . . . Veteran Donna Fargo has revived "Soldier Boy" Another dual revival is Bill Anderson's update on T. Texas Tyler's "Deck of Cards," in which a soldier justifies transforming his deck of playing cards into a Bible " since we can't display our religion in public here." Playing War on Home Computers From an article by Jamie Beckett in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1/31/91: The outbreak of hostilities in the Persian Gulf has created a boom in sales of militaristic computer and video games that allow armchair generals to shoot down enemy aircraft, bomb oil fields or command armies. And far from just relying on inventory, game makers are rushing to produce authentic Desert Storm simulations. " People feel they want to be a part of it. They want to defeat Saddam. So they do it via a computer game," said Mark Dutler, a district sales manager for Electronic Arts, a San Mateo-based software publisher and distributor of such battle games as F/16 Combat Pilot and 688 Attack Sub . . . .The most popular games are those with a Middle Eastern connection. Players like to imagine that they are flying the same planes and using the same weapons as US troops in Saudi Arabia, the game makers say . . . .None of the games depicts bloodshed. In that respect, they resemble the war as Americans see it on TV, noted Electronic Arts' Dutler. "You don't see the enemy face-to-face," he said. "We fire a missile 40 miles away. When it hits, there's all sorts of destruction, but we're not there to witness it. . . . "It doesn't make the game enjoyable to show blood and guts," said a MicroProse spokeswoman. "We don't want you to have to worry about the negative aspects of what could happen in a real war situation." End, Propaganda Watch (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 4, Proaganda Watch (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.4 **/ ** Written 12:21 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Prop Watch (Part 2 of 2) *** What's Good for the Proper Goose Is Good for the Proper Gander From an article, "Iraqi Claims on Civilian Deaths Worry US" in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/12/91: White House officials demonstrated concern yesterday that Iraqi reports of civilian casualties are finding a sympathetic audience and could risk international support for the allied position. They cited Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev's statement during the weekend that the allied effort may be going too far as evidence of the success of Saddam Hussein's "propaganda and PR battle." Oil Spill Revisited From an AP story, "New Estimates On Size, Origins of Gulf Spill" in the San Francisco Chronicle, 2/20/91: Dharhan--The Persian Gulf oil slick is much smaller than originally feared, and allied attacks on Iraqi positions are believed to have caused as much as 30 percent of it, Saudi officials said yesterday. . . . In an interview [Abdullah Dabbagh, director of research at the University of Petroleum and Minerals] said seabeds and plankton fields shown in satellite imagery of the gulf's shallow waters appeared to have been mistaken for oil. He described the initial estimate of 11 million barrels as an estimate of how much oil could have entered the water, not an "approved scientific study" of the actual amount. "It was a worst-case scenario," he said. "After an investigation, we scaled down the size." Saudi officials had said the entire spill was the result of Iraqi soldiers opening valves at a Kuwaiti oil loading terminal. President Bush accused Saddam Hussein of "environmental terrorism." -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Prop Watch (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 5, Special Gulf War Forum Introduction by Johan Carlisle and Stephen Leiper ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.5 **/ ** Written 12:22 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Gulf War Forum Intro *** GULF WAR FORUM INTERVIEWS INTRODUCTION Interviews with Propaganda Analysts: Noam Chomsky Abn Farid Jane Hunter Molly Ivins Sam Keen Paul Krassner Michael Parenti Herb Schiller Holly Sklar PLUS: Panel Discussion with Jeff Cohen (FAIR), Judy Coburn (U.C. Berkeley), Tom deVries (KRON TV, San Francisco-NBC), Bill Wallace (SF Chronicle) We had originally talked about doing an issue on George Bush's "New World Order." But when the war broke out in the Middle East on January 16th, we decided to mobilize our resources and get out an issue, as quickly as possible, on the propaganda and disinformation which permeates this first "New Weird Order World War." We realized it would be impossible to commission articles on the subject on such short notice, so we called up as many propaganda experts we could locate and taped our interviews with them. These interviews were then edited for clarity, trying to retain each person's personality as much as possible. If you wish to contribute to our next issue on the war, please send us your articles and ideas as soon as possible. Also, we welcome the submission of short items for our Propaganda Watch section and any artwork or images from the mainstream press. The following interviews were conducted during the last week of January. Here are some highlights: Noam Chomsky: Propaganda and disinformation about the Gulf war is so deep that the entire picture has been almost totally falsified, and in fact drove the US into the Gulf war. Abu Farid: The US uses propaganda and the fear of terrorism to affect public opinion and defuse the anti-war movement. A double standard in media coverage downplays the suffering of the Palestinian and Arab populations. Jane Hunter: The role of propaganda is more critical than the military operations, and is the key to keeping the consent of the public for the drive to initiate and continue the war. Molly Ivins: Military psychological warfare experts and other spin-controllers may ultimately be doing themselves damage. They have been working so hard to make the Gulf war sanitized, bloodless and "good vs. evil" that when reality catches up, there will be a terrible reaction. Sam Keen: The tendencies of a people to scapegoat are like a virus in the bloodstream that may lie dormant for a long time. But, under stress, that virus becomes active and we begin to look for enemies. Paul Krassner: The Gulf war is being packaged like a continuous mini-series on TV, and the constant opinion polls are like a popularity contest. Journalists and comedians alike are staying away from controversial material because of fear for their careers. Michael Parenti: There is a community of interest between those who own the world and those who own the media -- they're the same people. Democracy is being short-circuited when journalists are not allowed to truly report the war, and the public is denied any sense of reality of the costs of that war. Herb Schiller: All stops have been pulled out in a well-orchestrated arrangement to induce as much popular support with as little information being offered as possible. The press was very quickly enlisted in the effort. Holly Sklar: First impressions are often lasting impressions, so the White House and the Pentagon worked very hard to package the initial image of the war. The media, always looking for a good photo opportunity, didn't challenge what was going on. -- J. Carlisle & S. Leiper -30- End, Forum Introduction Next, Response 6, Interview with Noam Chomsky by Rory Cox ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.6 **/ ** Written 12:24 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Chomsky Interview Noam Chomsky--Interviewed by Rory Cox Rory Cox is an editor of Propaganda Review. Noam Chomsky is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a well-known critic of US foreign policy. He has written several books for South End Press, including Turning the Tide and The Culture of Terrorism, and is a regular contributor to Z magazine. *** January 31, 1991 Boston Propaganda Review: What do you see going on in terms of propaganda and disinformation in this war? Noam Chomsky: It is so deep at this point that you can hardly talk about propaganda. The entire picture of what has been happening has been almost totally falsified, and has in fact driven us into war. From the beginning, August 3rd, it was clear that there were two separate paths developing as to how to respond to the invasion of Kuwait. One path was sanctions and diplomacy. The other path was rejection of peaceful means and insistence on the use of force. World opinion split on that very quickly, with Britain and the United States going for the use of force and rejecting diplomacy and sanctions, and most of the rest of the world going the other way. And it continued like that until the day of the war. And the day of the war, the United States and Britain remained, and still remain today, virtually alone, with the support of the family dictatorships in the Gulf, and very marginal support from others. That effectively undercut the United Nations. The US moved at once to undercut the sanctions. That was the effect and doubtlessly the purpose of sending that huge expeditionary force instead of a deterrent force. A deterrent force can be kept there while sanctions work, but an expeditionary force has to be used. You can't keep it there, it's too expensive. There have been diplomatic opportunities from the beginning. The position of the United States has been unwavering and explicit, namely, there can be no negotiations, period, that's what Bush has said over and over again, without ambiguity. And in fact there were diplomatic offers right until the end, all flatly rejected to insure that there could be no peaceful settlement. So the choice was for Iraq to capitulate or die, and they didn't capitulate -- they die. And a lot of other people died, too. Now, that's the story. However, the picture in the media -- and here it's something like 100% -- is praise for George Bush for exploring every possible diplomatic opportunity, going the last mile towards diplomacy and peace, and so on. The man tells you day after day there can be no negotiations, the only contact will be delivery of an ultimatum. The way that comes through the press filter is: He's trying every possible diplomatic option, and seeking in every possible way to avoid war. You couldn't achieve that in a totalitarian state. The actual diplomatic proposals were largely suppressed. Aside from Knut Royce in Newsday, almost nobody's reported the Iraqi offers. The most important of them I didn't see anywhere. All I heard were generalities about the Palestinian issue. Now, there's another point. They have brought in the Palestinian issue and the issue of weapons of mass destruction in the region. And they've called for a diplomatic settlement of both of those. Why does the United States refuse, why do we prefer to go to war, rather than answer that? The response is, we can't accept linkage. But linkage is another word for diplomacy, so it means we can't accept diplomacy. Well, why can't we accept diplomacy? Because aggressors cannot be rewarded. This is the guy who just invaded Panama, who stands accused before the World Court of unlawful use of force against Nicaragua, and is refusing to accept the judgment, who has supported the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, who continues to support the Indonesian invasion of East Timor -- which is near genocidal, it makes Saddam Hussein look like a boy scout -- and on and on. He says principles cannot be compromised, aggressors cannot be rewarded, we therefore can't consider diplomacy. Outside the United States and England, people just crack up in ridicule. In the United States, everybody soberly reports our high principle. Is the reason that we're opposing diplomatic settlement of those two issues because of linkage? Well, if that's the reason, how come we were opposing a diplomatic settlement of them before Iraq invaded Kuwait? And we were, both of them. Those two issues were alive before the Iraqi invasion, and the United States explicitly rejected the offers, including Iraqi offers, so it has nothing to do with the invasion of Kuwait. Now, this is all elementary. But nothing of this sort can appear in the American press. You've got to goose step. The government says "no linkage," the press says "no linkage;" the government says "high principle," they say "high principle;" government says "no negotiations," they say "last mile for diplomacy." What is it about the media that's making them such lap dogs and such uncritical propaganda organs? What happens to a Knut Royce when he isn't? There are a few exceptions. Randolph Ryan of the Boston Globe has told the truth about it, and if you go around the country you can find something here and there. But it's so close to 100%, it's astonishing. There are the usual pressures, government pressure, business pressure, and so on, but I think that's only a small part of it. I think the same is true if you go into the faculty club at universities. We just have a very servile intellectual culture. We're expected to repeat what we're told by authoritarian figures, and not question. Make sure you don't question, questioning's too dangerous. Don't think, don't question, just repeat. Can you draw any comparisons to propaganda from Iraqi or Israeli media? Every government puts out propaganda, that you expect. You don't expect the government to tell you the truth on anything, any government. Of course the government doesn't tell the truth, the question is what happens to the independent media. In Iraq, the question doesn't arise, there aren't any, and in Israel -- I haven't yet seen the newspapers, I don't know what they're saying. I spent five days in England; I got there just after the bombing started. I had a rather graphic personal comparison between the British media and the American media. The British and the United States are the two radical militarist states that are insisting on the use of force and that reject diplomacy, so you'd expect them to be very similar. And in fact they are very similar, the media coverage there and the media coverage here is very similar, with some differences. For one thing, there really is a scattering of independent journalists there which you don't have much of here. The striking difference is that they're open to critical opinion, so from the minute I got off the airplane to the minute I got back on the airplane, I was talking to radio and television. Then when I came back here, I talked to Pacifica, and other community radio stations. I'm on the telephone all day doing interviews, but it's overseas: BBC, Australia, France . . . In England every morning a BBC radio car would come to the suburban house where I was staying with some friends for a morning interview, and it went on that way until midnight. Here, it's [only] community radio. End, Chomsky Interview (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 7, Chomsky Interview (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.7 **/ ** Written 12:25 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Chomsky Interview (Part 2 of 2) PR: What, if any, mainstream US media outlets have aired your interviews? NC: I had two brief op-eds in the Boston Globe where I have some friends. Before the war I was on WGBH, on their news program, for a couple of minutes. The tone of the media coverage between here and Europe is about the same. But in England there's still a recollection of pre-Thatcher days, years ago, when it used to be a relatively open society. And they are therefore open to critical opinion. I had a long article that came out in the London Guardian a couple of weeks ago, and it was immediately reprinted all over the world outside the United States. It might appear in the United States in a black newspaper in New York, but I doubt if it will get anywhere else. Did you get a chance to see the amazing packaging job the media seemed to give this war, the slick computer graphics. I looked at some of it in England. They try to sanitize it. They're going to have a hard time sanitizing it in the next week or two. There's another simple point that I've been stressing in interviews for weeks, and that is: Don't believe one word you hear from any general. They were always wrong in the past, and there's every reason to believe they're wrong now. And that's exactly what happened. The predictions were wrong, especially from the Air Force, essentially what Les Aspin released in his white paper. "It'll be over in a couple of days with heavy bombing." That's what every military says in every war, and it's always false. And now they're conceding that it was false this time. We're going to have to go to a big ground war, and that can be a real meat grinder. How do you think the media has covered the protest movement? Nothing much, you don't really expect them to cover it. There was a kind of decision back in the late 60s that it's a mistake to cover protest movements, it just stirs up more protest. I don't think there's anything special about that. I was talking to Dennis Perrin today (from FAIR). He told me that CBS radio in New York had had a couple of critics on the radio for a couple of minutes this morning, and he said they have absolutely been swamped with right wing calls denouncing this act of treachery against this country. Dennis told me he called and asked them how many positive calls they had gotten, and they said "You're the third." Do you think the oil companies' role in the war has been properly covered? They made huge profits, which you could reasonably expect. I don't really think that's the central part of it. The central part of it is that the United States and the United Kingdom, in near isolation, succeeded in undermining any peaceful diplomacy, and reducing the options to either war or capitulation. They got away with that because of media subservience. That's why we're in a war. If the media had taken even the most minimal critical look at the rhetorical stance -- you know, "We can't have linkage because principles can't be compromised." Just a moment's reflection on that and the whole story collapses, and then you quickly discover that no reason, none whatsoever, has been presented for going to war. But that was never done. This is a war you can put right on the lap of the media. How about the environmental aspects of this war? There seems to be concern over the oil fires, but not much about just what the simple use of oil does to the environment. In a sense, rightly. The use of oil has not much to do with it. If the United States had 100% solar energy, we'd be doing exactly the same thing. It has nothing to do with our access to oil. We get about 10% of our oil from there, we could get it from somewhere else. We had the same policies when we got none of the oil from the Gulf. What it has to do with is that we get the profits from oil. It's quite a different story. Profits from Kuwaiti and Saudi oil helps prop up the British and American economies. That's one of the reasons Britain and the United States are in there. Oil generates huge profits. It's been very important to insure those are propping up the British and US economies. There's a rich documentary record on this which I suppose I'm the only person in the United States who has looked at. The documentary record goes right through the 1950s and it's very explicit on this point. Can you comment on the demonization of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi people, and the racism implicit in that? It's an old story in American history. There's a category of people called moderates. Moderates are murderous gangsters who happen to be serving US interests. Mussolini was a moderate, Hitler was a moderate, Trujillo was a moderate, Marcos was a moderate, everybody's a moderate until they do something wrong. Doing something wrong means stepping on the wrong toes. They show that they're not subordinate to US orders. And at that point, the moderates suddenly become Ghengis Khan. One of the latest ones before this was Noriega. He's a ten-cent thug in comparison with these guys, but he also was fine going around beheading people, running dope, stealing elections -- it was all just fine, as long as it looked like he was following American orders. Then he did bad things, he started supporting the Contadora Treaty, striking out on his own, and suddenly he became Genghis Khan. On August 2nd, that happened to Saddam Hussein. On August 1st, he was a moderate whose behavior was improving, therefore we have to give him all kinds of credit, aid and so on. On August 2nd, he was Hitler. It takes willful mindlessness not to see this, it goes on over and over again. Anyone with the least familiarity with American history knows it. And once, of course, the guy makes the transition from moderate to Hitler, then the monster's record that was suppressed before becomes available to show why he needs to be destroyed. That's the way the game's played. Mussolini was a moderate until about 1930. Any closing comments? It just seems to be a textbook example, very unusual because of the extremism. Even for an old cynic like me, to see 100% of the American press virtually applaud George Bush for going the last mile for diplomacy, when for five months he's been saying there will be no negotiations . . . that really takes discipline. I don't think a fascist state could achieve that. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Chomsky Interview (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 8, Abn Farid Interview by Eduardo Cohen (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.8 **/ ** Written 12:27 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Farid Interview (Part 1 of 2) Abn Farid Interviewed by Eduardo Cohen Eduardo Cohen is the producer of "Other Americas Radio" on KPFA (Pacifica-Berkeley), an editor of Propaganda Review and a Vietnam veteran. Abn Farid writes for Al Fahj, a West Bank newspaper. January 30, 1991 Chicago *** Propaganda Review: First, are there any political or academic associations or credentials you would like to mention about yourself? Abn Farid: I am a free-lance writer and I do a lot of interviews and some lectures but I am not affiliated with anyone. I am originally a Palestinian and all my children were born here in the US. I have been a US citizen since 1959. Before this war we were working hard to get a peaceful resolution in the Israeli-Arab war, and we worked hard to get the PLO to communicate with the US and the US to enter a dialogue with the PLO and we were hopeful. But this war changed a lot of the equations. It seems like in any event it's always Palestinians further from their cause as if it were a pre-planned operation. Even if you support Saddam of Iraq, they will say the Palestinians are doing the wrong thing and so they are not supposed to solve their problem. If you, for instance, support peace in Lebanon between the factions and want to have a peaceful Lebanon, suddenly they will say the Palestinians are the cause of all the problems. I'll never forget that, in 1982, before Israel invaded Lebanon they claimed that they were going there to force a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians, because the Palestinians were the cause for the disruption in Lebanon. That was 1982; today is 1991, and Israel still occupies Lebanon. Seems to me they have the media connections and it seems to me, we always have to wait for some kind of concession from the Palestinians. We have to be massacred, we have to be oppressed, we have to be deported, and our homes to be demolished, for somebody to care. All the organizations for human care in this world -- Amnesty International, the Red Cross, the United Nations -- testify to this. It seems to me nobody cares. And you notice in the Gulf Crisis, I think the US went to war because there was a pressure from the Zionist lobby here not to make a linkage between the occupation of Kuwait and the occupation of Palestine. If we really don't want the linkage, then why do we have to wait for 42 years not to solve the problem? Is linkage a bad word? What is linkage about? Aren't we asking to solve the problem, to end the occupation? So linkage is not a bad word, and if it were, why didn't we work on that previously? From your perspective, what do you think about the claim that there has been a foundation of anti-Arab racism which has permeated our culture for some time? Americans are Americans before they are anything else. The Americans are telling us on the news that they are defending the Arabs in Saudi Arabia. It seems like nobody is defending the Arabs in the United States. It's funny how racism works:. In the Vietnam War there were good Vietnamese and bad Vietnamese, just like now there are good Arabs and bad Arabs in this conflict as the Americans see it. As a matter of fact, in the White House you have Arabs. Sununu is an Arab. I don't think he admits to that, does he? Doesn't mean anything whether you admit it or not. The fact remains, the facts are facts, correct me if I'm wrong? That's what I think. Whether you admit your region or not is your prerogative, but the facts remain the same. I will always admit that I'm an Arab, and I'm proud, there's nothing wrong with it, we all came here from somewhere, and we became Americans and we are proud it. I have seen where President Bush and a lot of his Cabinet claims that they are defending defenseless Kuwait and they are Arabs. If that's the case why would they destroy Iraq? What do you see in terms of propaganda and the Persian Gulf war? I think it plays a big role in the US, but it has two edges and it might kick back at the US. US propaganda is so strong -- they have the means and the power to do so -- but by the same token, actions will alienate the people of the Middle East against the US. Let me give you an example. General Schwarzkopf, when he was cornered, at first said he was calling the air raids on Iraq precisely on military objects, airfields and so forth, and then when he was asked about the church destroyed in Baghdad and some of the old places and some of the civilians that were shown on Iraqi television, his answer was "War is not a clean business." Sometimes people find out the truth no matter how strong the propaganda is. And also they magnify Iraq, especially before the war, as a big power and as a strong and unbeatable power. Iraq, as you know, is not a producing country. They do not produce arms. They bought their arms from the West or the East, mostly from the West during their war with Iraq and they have some left, but they are not powerful. I believe that America defined Iraq as a big power because they know the public opinion in the US. The people here don't agree when someone in the name of the UN coalition destroys a whole country. They don't agree, but if they magnify it and make it look big and bad, then they probably think their killing will be admissible to the US people and they will be forgiven for it. On the other hand, concerning the battles, for instance, the US will tell you every day that they hit installations and SCUD missile sites and so forth. Actually what they are doing is carpet bombing. I have seen the Jordanian television, and I have seen what they are doing. They have destroyed a lot of Baghdad, most of Basra, they destroyed downtown where people work and live. They destroyed a milk factory in Baghdad, then a US Army official came on television and said they saw a guard in front of the so-called milk factory. Then they asked, "If it was a milk factory, why was there a guard on it?" My answer to that is that if you go to a Ford factory or a GM factory right here in the US you'll see a guard in front of it. That doesn't mean that this produces chemical or biological weapons. So, propaganda at least is framed for public opinion more than anything else. They know there are a lot of anti-war groups in this country, they know the American public opinion, and what they are trying to do is to defuse that. That is what I think of the American propaganda. You called Iraq a peaceful country. People here would say it would be difficult to portray Iraq as peaceful, given the war with Iran and the invasion of Kuwait. Well, let me tell you why I said that. I heard King Hussein on television with Ted Koppel, and he said twice to Koppel that he got an assurance, a commitment from Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait, providing that the US will settle the matters between Iraq and Kuwait with the Arab League, meaning that he really didn't want war. Now a couple of days ago, I heard Peter Arnett of CNN describe the meeting between the two as "chilling." Saddam reportedly said, "Did you see when the whole world was telling me to give up what they called the hostages and which I called guests? Did you see I was right that if I kept them as guests, Bush would never bomb Iraq?" If a guy is doing all these things not to get destroyed, or bombed or hit, then he's peaceful, he's not looking for war. This is why we say he was pursuing peace. King Hussein, in his meeting with Ted Koppel, added that he went to the US to tell them what Iraq's position was, that there was nothing in their position that indicated they wanted war. He said unfortunately the US government was buying time to gather their army and equipment in the desert and, under the influence of the Zionist lobby, they had war in their minds. A lot of people were beating the drums for war. Israel and Kissinger and some of these people advised the US to destroy the power of Iraq. So when I say peaceful, I mean that this instance and others prove his peaceful intentions. He didn't hit first, the US invaded him. Correct me if I'm wrong. There are three reasons I am saying he is peaceful. I am not saying he is a saint, but he stood fast, he did not start the war. He asked for an Arab League meeting to settle the problem between Iraq and Kuwait. You know the US gave him a green light to go into Kuwait. If you remember, at first they said that there was no agreement whatsoever between the US and Kuwait, when he pressed the US to pressure the Kuwaiti Emir to give him his rights. The Emir had steel in his eyes with US equipment, he was in a conspiracy to destroy and to put Saddam out of power and so he tried to get these things done. As a matter of fact, two hours before he invaded Kuwait, he went to the Emir and to King Fahd and tried to settle this matter peacefully. That is why I meant by a peaceful Iraq. End, Farid Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 9, Farid Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.9 **/ ** Written 12:28 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Farid Intv (Part 2 of 2) PR: How would you see the term or concept of terrorism and how it has been used as a propaganda clich in the current crisis? AF: The concept of terrorism is another word that the US government and the media are using to try to gather support because they know that in any civilized country nobody likes terrorism. If it's real. But when you create an illusion that there is a terrorist threat, like yesterday, when the President of the US went into the House chamber to make a State of the Union speech, they are showing us all these guards. Who is going to do anything there? Terrorism is not a serious problem in the US, but they are using it as propaganda to open the gap between the people. I think it's bad for Arab-Americans like myself, that's where we feel mostly hurt because most of us are intellectuals. We don't believe in it, if it is truly terrorism. Now there is an interest in the Middle East and there was some talk by the Iraqi leader Hussein to use all its power, probably meaning terrorism, to hit the American interests. It seems to me that most of the things they say here disappear the next day when you listen to the news. For example, on the spill of oil, they said: "Look what Iraq did to the environment," when we know today -- it was in the papers -- that the US hit two Iraqi tankers and hit the oil wells in Kuwait trying to cut off the logistics of the Iraqi army. All the last two days we were told that the Iraqis did it to spoil the environment. If not for Iraqi television and Jordanian television we would never have learned that it was not the Iraqis, but the so-called allies -- mostly the US Army -- which did this terrible thing. When you were in Jordan did you see things on television that you could not see on TV here? Yes. We saw in Jordan more clearly, for instance, where the US bombed a big church in Baghdad and they made their mass outside because the whole roof fell down. That was on Jordanian television and I saw a different version of the milk factory story which you did not see on CNN here in the US. Of course, Saddam Hussein left Arnett there for one specific reason. He wants a window to the world to show what's going on in Iraq. I grant you that some of the reports are censored, but also the Western press faces the same problem -- they are under strict censorship in the Gulf. But there are things that I saw on Jordanian television that I did not see here. One thing we heard on television here, when SCUD missiles were falling on Israel, the Palestinians were on their roofs shouting and calling for Saddam to use chemical weapons against Israel. If this was going on, why? If this was not going on, what was going on? I never heard of that, I never heard of any Palestinians saying that they hope Iraq will hit Israel with chemical weapons. They would be fools to say that for the reason that they live there, too. The reason they support Hussein is because for 42 years they have waited for a peaceful resolution to their problem -- and the Palestinians have sacrificed a lot to solve their problem -- and nobody cares. What they are doing now is supporting Saddam Hussein because of what they hear about his insistence on linkage to their problem and, as I told you before, I don't think linkage is a bad word. If it was you giving me something bad for something good, then you're right, its a bad word. But if it's peace for both parties, then it's a good linkage. There's nothing wrong with it. What would you say about what we call the "demonization" of Hussein in the American press? That's another way of building up the public opinion to support President Bush and the American policy. If you would remember, they did that with Khomeini and the public swallows this, unfortunately, and you get a lot of support. Propaganda plays a big role in this. Why is it Saddam was a good man when he was fighting Iran and the US was giving him all the weapons in the world, and giving him the advice and the technological know-how? And now, why is he the butcher, the murderer and so forth? So I think they use propaganda to gather and rally public support. Have you seen coverage of the Iraqi bombing of Israel with SCUD missiles? Yes I did, I saw most of the SCUD missiles. At first, they were very open, then they censored it. At first, they showed us where it hit in Tel Aviv and Haifa, and then they censored it, telling us on Israeli TV that they don't want the Iraqi government to know what they hit. They started the censorship on that. But, I did see parts of it when I was there. Almost daily, they showed us on Israeli television and sometimes on Jordanian television. In coverage of the SCUD missile attacks, the Israelis are seen as victims, but we don't often see Palestinians or other Arabs as victims. Do you feel there is a double standard in place, and how does that affect the way America views the Arab world? There is a double standard in the coverage. For instance, if the victim is an Israeli, the whole world -- the Western world -- will really rock and roll. But if you notice, when Palestinians are massacred you don't see the same kind of coverage. I have been in the West Bank where they shoot unarmed civilians. You probably remember the mosque where the Israelis shot 23 people -- the UN took a resolution that even the US supported. Then, only two weeks after that, they did the same thing in Gaza. But with the Israelis -- as far as propaganda is concerned -- they usually show kids, or old ladies, old men trying to take cover. Some have a scratch here or there from the SCUD missile and they probably use that for two reasons. One, to gain sympathy for Israel and, two, probably for money. They are donating a lot of money to Israel because of that. One Israeli official told us the damage from the SCUD missiles in Tel Aviv is about a million shekels -- about a half million dollars -- yet I hear they are collecting thirteen billion dollars. So they are making money in this. But that's not what really matters. I feel uncomfortable where Jewish children suffer or Palestinian children suffer, but I'd like some kind of an equality, some kind of fairness in describing the miseries of both races. But I have found in the US, the Zionist machinery is far stronger than what we have. And in the Gulf Crisis, even though the Arabs retroactively stand alongside the Americans, that is really forgotten. An Egyptian just yesterday in Brooklyn on Atlantic Avenue said, "You know, no matter what you are they call you an Arab. I'm an Egyptian and Mubarek has his army fighting with the US and they are harassing me in downtown Brooklyn." So you see what propaganda does. It really makes no difference where you stand. It's Arab vs. Westerner, or Arab vs. Jew. Is there anything you haven't touched on about the American perception of this war and how the media has shaped our view of it? What I would like to draw your attention to is that the US went further, they deceived the Coalition. They told them at first they were there to protect Saudi Arabia. Then they were there to liberate Kuwait. What they are doing is not touching Kuwait; they are destroying Iraq. Only one sentence from Tel Aviv would solve this problem. If they would say "We will adhere to all the UN resolutions," this whole thing would stop. Why is Turkey still in Cyprus? Forget about Israel for 42 years, let's say it is the dear sacred cow. But what about Cyprus? Nobody seems to care. They never use force. I think there should be an equality in treating issues. The UN was founded to make peace and solve international problems equally, with the same rules and laws. In this case I admire the Pope when he said this is not a just war. Why? Because the the UN was influenced -- and, in many cases, forced -- to agree with the US to destroy Iraq for the two simple reasons I mentioned at first: that is, not to have Iraq in the power to threaten American oil companies, and the Israeli expansionist occupation. I don't know if you remember, but President Nixon a long time ago said, "Israel is wrong. They should make peace with the Palestinians and the Arabs because someday the Arabs will learn how to fight and they will have a big problem." It proves the point, now we have a good Arab who learned how to fight. Even though they might destroy him -- they are strong enough to -- but they will not destroy the will of the people. The US took a big chance on their interests. They are protecting Israel even if it costs them their own interests. You will have an Arab population in Egypt that's boiling. In Syria they are boiling. These leaders are not going to stay in power for long. How long is the US going to fool their masses? The US is not looking at the long term and I think they should. I think they are looking at the short term and it's going to be very bad for them in the future. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Farid Interview (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 10, Interview with Jane Hunter by Eduardo Cohen (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.10 **/ ** Written 12:30 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Hunter Interview, (Part 1 of 2) Jane Hunter Interviewed by Eduardo Cohen Jane Hunter is editor of Israeli Foreign Affairs, which has for seven years covered IsraelUs activities outside the Middle East. [PO Box 19580, Sacramento, CA 95819] Eduardo Cohen is the producer of "Other Americas Radio" on KPFA (Pacifica-Berkeley), an editor of Propaganda Review and a Vietnam veteran. January 30, 1991 Sacramento, California *** Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? Jane Hunter: What do you mean by that? Who is the most appalling offender of the so-called standard of objective journalism? Something like that. What do see as the role of propaganda? Then weUll get into any aspect of that. I see the role of propaganda as being probably more critical than any of the military operations. ItUs quite evident that thereUs no requirement for the military to be effective, that the young people that are there are expendable, and basically that propaganda is the key to enabling popular permission, the key to keeping the consent of the public, to keep the operation going. How do you see propaganda shaping the way people in the United States perceive this war? ItUs very evident that itUs done exactly that. ThereUs this now almost instant interplay between polls and whatUs dished out from the administration and is repeated unquestioningly by most of the media, and then people are polled again, and people are told that itUs almost the universal tenet of faith in this country that the United States is doing the right thing in the Gulf. ItUs absolutely critical. What do you think about Iraqi propaganda, the role it has played, and whether it has been effective or not? Well, from the research that I do in terms of countries outside the rich, white Western industrial countries, itUs extremely effective. The only place itUs been ineffective are in little corners of the world like Sierra Leone where obviously the Imam is being paid by the Saudis to say that itUs not a jihad, a holy war. But itUs very clear the Iraqis hardly have to say anything. ThereUs a very clear message going out from their military activity simply from withstanding all of this industrialized techno-weaponry for so long, that here is one person that is going to stand up to the bully of the New World Order. And that message is getting through loud and clear. What comes out of Baghdad sounds very flowery and a little embarrassing and silly to us, but it does certainly strike a chord in the original Arabic, and it strikes a chord as well in most of the people who have been pushed around by the United States and its fellow former colonial powers. WeUve heard a lot about Vietnam syndrome in relation to this conflict. How do you think that fits in? Well, I think thatUs the newest form of red-baiting. I expect it will be accompanied very soon by denunciations of peopleUs patriotism, so-called. But Vietnam syndrome, simply by the way itUs used, means you donUt have a stomach for murdering -- cold-bloodedly and needlessly -- people in the Third World. And of course there can be another way of interpreting Vietnam syndrome, which is simply that many people remember the appalling damage that this country gratuitously did to Vietnam and they are absolutely determined to stop this war as soon as possible. How is the role of oil and the concerns about oil played into how the crisis has been covered and discussed? Well, I think itUs a bullshit issue in a lot of ways, certainly the way itUs been discussed. Can I quote you on that? Absolutely. I would have used another word had I wanted another word used. The first thing thatUs phony about it is the idea that Iraq, if it controlled the oil production of the Persian Gulf, might raise prices. Obviously, it canUt raise prices any more than the Saudis can, because it would be doing itself out of a market and encouraging oil-consuming countries to develop alternatives, etc. What is interesting and what never did get argued in the public sphere in terms of oil is two other things: One, the fact that oil sales are denominated in dollars, and the dollar is a radically sinking currency at this point, and that since the OPEC shock, so to speak, of the 1970s, the United States has been able to survive as much as it has in terms of its economy by getting the deposits of the OPEC countries in dollars into our banking system. And, parenthetically, these same dollars were taken and loaned to the Third World for ridiculous projects and is now -- in the form of debt -- crippling the Third World. Another thing that people might have been scared of (but of course they never articulate it to the public) about oil is the fact that perhaps Iraq, which very clearly wanted to be out from under the hegemony of the United States, would have decided to start denominating oil sales in deutschemarks (or perhaps in pounds sterling, although that seems less likely), and that would have been a crippling blow to the US economy. Is there an indication that Saddam Hussein had plans or was considering doing that? Absolutely none, but it certainly would be a more reasonable cautionary to throw up than the idea that he would jerk up the prices to $100 a barrel while Bush was flying around in his stupid macho boat and talking about it back in August. The other thing that I think is really important about the oil issue that again never got mentioned, but now weUre hearing whiffs of it in terms of the United States being the only leader and all that kind of stuff because we can murder so many more people than anybody else, is the idea that the United States doesnUt really need that oil, but it does need to control what goes on in that oil marketing system in order to have any leverage at all on Japan and on Europe, which are countries who have of course focused on their educational systems, have developed their economies, have not let their manufacturing capacity become antiquated all the while we were building up this military machine. This war seems to be the most packaged and marketed war, particularly in terms of television coverage. Do you have any concerns or thoughts about that? I have very deep concern. I have noticed only one of the anchors is able to restrain himself in use of adjectives and inflection. WhoUs that? Jennings, to some extent . . . I think CNN in particular has bent over backwards to do propaganda. Local stations, especially here itUs even more noticeable, are acting as cheerleaders for the military. There just doesnUt seem to be any questioning. ItUs one thing to see it coming out of the mouths of these twerpy models that are used as news readers on these stations who are obviously too young to remember the trauma of Vietnam when people all of a sudden discovered that some of us who had been saying "ItUs not a question of patriotism, itUs a question of principle,S had actually been right for the preceding eight or ten years. ItUs much more reprehensible with some of the older people. When people do things like ignore a demonstration that has a quarter of a million people in favor of some white, blond crackers waving little flags, I begin to wonder how much of this is sheer inanity and how much of it is actual malice. And if it is actual malice, then even more than building a shallow and brittle consensus for war, itUs also creating an atmosphere where we can have McCarthyism again. End, Hunter Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 11, Hunter Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.11 **/ ** Written 12:35 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Hunter Interview (Part 2 of 2) PR: How have demonstrations and anti-war actions and the anti-war movement been represented? JH: TheyUve been mentioned in a very derisory way without fail. I think the only exception to that is in the San Francisco media which, because the city is -- it seems -- almost unanimously and vigorously opposed to the war, it becomes for them a simple commercial consideration that they would have to worry about selling advertising if they took too much of a different tack. But certainly in terms of the local stations that IUve seen up and down California, there is almost a universal tendency to pretend that those demonstrations donUt exist, not to take them seriously. What is the role of pro-Israeli and mainstream Jewish organizations in the United States? The Wall Street Journal published an article outlining how AIPAC (American Israeli Political Action Committee) and other Jewish lobbying organizations have been at work to lobby the case for war. They have actually played a very interesting role. Their hold on Congress disintegrated with that vote. I think it seemed a lot more significant at the time than it seems now, because that was really a very temporary state of affairs. We now have a Congress thatUs not a hell of a lot different than the Congress we had in 1964-65, when people started trying to press for some kind of Congressional intervention in the Vietnam War. We now have a bovine Congress thatUs following along and bleating in the same careless manner that it was bleating about flag-burning not so long ago. It has been very clear from my research -- and I take this mostly from the Jewish publications that I read -- that the mainstream Jewish organizations, pro-Israel organizations, did very quietly lobby for the war. I think the quietness is significant because that essentially meant that they did not want to have the blame for the Bush decision put on Israel and on them. They lobbied against linkage in a way that was profoundly different than the Bush AdministrationUs approach to linkage, linkage being the connection of the occupation of Palestine to the occupation of Kuwait. Bush is basically hammering on that point to make sure that he obtains a complete humiliation of Saddam Hussein. Some people think itUs to do the yearly check he seems to need on his virility. Other people seem to think itUs more rooted in this New World Order business where if you teach an uppity Third World leader that that behavior doesnUt pay, the United States should be able to charge into the next century without any worries about other uppity Third World leaders getting ideas like Iraq. The point that the Jewish organizations were making in terms of linkage was that they didnUt want Israel to be subjected to international pressure for justice for the Palestinians. It was fine to talk about restoring some overprivileged, decadent Kuwaitis to their territory, but now that Israel has stolen all of the water and uprooted all of the trees and wrecked the economic infrastructure of occupied Palestine itUs apparently not important to talk about returning that land to the people who live there along with their national rights. ItUs apparently not a matter of simple justice to link that to anything. So they were protecting Israel. What do you feel the use of terrorism has been in propaganda around the Persian Gulf? Well, IUm old enough to remember when it was "communists hiding under your bed" quite literally, and they were scaring these little old ladies with blue hair and tennis shoes. I think theyUve found that "terrorism" is a lot more effective for scaring a much broader swath of the population. You see these pinhead jerks going into stores and buying gas masks, which just shows how completely irrational people are and how this government propaganda has played on these fears. Terrorism, by the way -- as a concept and a notion -- was created in the late 70s by the right wing that was very upset about detente and the fact that they couldnUt have nice anti-communist crusades to cow the domestic population and carry out aggression abroad, and terrorism was cooked up between the Far Right and the Israeli government. ItUs always been used as a way of disciplining the population, as a way of marginalizing Arabs in this country. ItUs been very successfully at the base of a very methodical campaign to develop a racist attitude in the United States toward Arabs. But now itUs also being used to suppress the domestic population. I think itUs kind of funny that first we went from loyalty oaths to urine tests, in the sense of how weUre going to fight our wars and lose our civil liberties, and now weUre up to terrorism, which simply means that the guys who like to regiment and repress get that much more control over peopleUs lives. And of course the people who have always needed protection, like women who have to be on the streets after dark are no more protected and probably less protected. What do you feel about the demonization of Saddam Hussein and the analogy between him and Adolf Hitler? Well, I donUt think that thatUs silly or trivial. I mean, most of us are sophisticated enough to know because we yelled our guts out at Lyndon Johnson that as evil as George Bush might be, that the system that permits him to do these things is far more evil and far more at the root of things. The demonization of Saddam Hussein happens to again be a well-tried marketing device. It worked very well in the case of the Libyan leader Kaddafi who, by the way, has gotten all kinds of US concessions so he would sit on the sidelines of this war, and because it pleased the Egyptians to give him those concessions. What kind of concessions are those? Basically, a contra war against him in Chad has been removed. Libya is now without any US protests, integrating large parts of its economy with Egypt, and itUs being mainstreamed as a major player in Africa without any US resistance. The other thing that I think is really obnoxious is the idea that Saddam Hussein is "he,S even after Iraqi forces that we donUt even know if they were able to communicate with their headquarters, their command, were inside Saudi territory standing off these well-fed Coalition forces for so long at Khafji, for well over a day. So I think thatUs demeaning and it suggests the idea that this is just one madman, and that itUs not a whole nation behind him. We somehow are being very shielded from the fact that people all over the world really blame the United States for this war and would be very well satisfied if the United States lost it. How does racism play into all of this? Well, racism is the whole basis for it. We didnUt ever go bomb the white South Africans, now did we? We donUt bother with the white Israelis. When itUs time to trot out the killing machines, we only go after dark-skinned people. And itUs our right -- apparently almost 90% of the population assumes -- to kill them when we can think of a good enough reason. What do you think the role of racism is in the propaganda specifically that we hear from the United States about what the US is doing in the Persian Gulf? Well, I think that racism is a very implicit part of all of it, that dark-skinned people canUt control their own affairs, and that we have to get in there and direct them and help them, and even more meaningfully, is the fact that we are encouraged very much not to take seriously the deaths of Iraqis, whether theyUre soldiers or civilians. And I also think that itUs extremely racist that we have so many people of color, who are apparently so expendable, in our front lines while all of those fancy pilots that we see look like white crackers to me. One of the aspects of racism seems to be that we play by the rules of war, the gentlemenUs rules of war, but Arabs donUt, and, in particular, Iraqis donUt. What do you think about that? I donUt think that thatUs racist as much as I think that thatUs just your normal propaganda, and I think that in a way itUs what comes from a country thatUs never been attacked, especially not from the air, that somehow seems to think that itUs nice and clean and dandy and moral and so forth to drop these devastating tons and tons of bombs on people, but that when people fight with what is available to them, thatUs supposedly dirty. I donUt know that thatUs so racist. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Hunter Intv (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 12, Interview with Molly Ivins by Johan Carlisle (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.12 **/ ** Written 12:36 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Ivins Intv (Part 1 of 2) Molly Ivins Interviewed by Johan Carlisle Molly Ivins is a syndicated columnist who writes for the Dallas Times Herald. Johan Carlisle is a senior editor of Propaganda Review, Investigative News Features and the Public Eye. January 31, 1991 Austin, Texas *** Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? Molly Ivins: I have been collecting the sports metaphors, which I think are fabulous. I wrote about General Wicklow, one of my personal favorites, USA (Ret.), on MacNeil-Lehrer. General Wickow is very fond of talking about "deep penetration.S HeUs a great guy. And, letUs see, the Time magazine Middle Eastern bureau chief interviewed on MacNeil-Lehrer the night Bush -- it must have been Nov. 8 -- announced that he was sending another 200,000 troops, said "This is big league baseball!S Several more IUve heard along the lines of, you know, one of the briefers, "ItUs all going according to the game plan,S and there are several soldiers who talked about Super Bowl analogies. My skepticism level was triggered by a couple of things. One was that there were SCUD missiles hitting Tel Aviv and Riyadh for a couple of nights before they announced any casualties, which seemed to me fairly bizarre. And then a SCUD hit Tel Aviv again and they announced that three elderly Jews had died of heart attacks. My skepticism level was triggered by that one. It is very strange to me to watch both CNN and even to read the good newspapers -- like the New York Times. What you get is page after page of stories about which high-tech, gee-whiz, whiz-bang nifty-o device is just working super keen-o, and how swell it all is. ItUs very strange stuff. ItUs not real war coverage, itUs really Pentagon P.R. The special takes on the weapons, I would be interested to know how much of that CNN did itself and how much of that it gets packaged from the Pentagon. Right. Well, I know the Pentagon spends hundreds of millions of dollars producing public relations films. . . I was curious, youUre down in oil country, it seems to me that the oil companies are getting off scot-free in this, you know, their past history of involvement in Saudi Arabia and so on. Well, thereUs a really kind of interesting thing going on, I donUt know how closely youUve followed it, but there was a real pattern before the war started of oil people either confidently predicting it would never happen or saying "DonUt do it.S I donUt know how closely youUve followed that, but John Connolly made a stunning mid-year commencement speech at U.T. [University of Texas]. . . saying, "Listen, IUve been over seeing that country and itUs the most dreary place in the world, and itUs not worth a single drop of blood of a single American boy. Ross Perot, one of our better right-wing billionaires out of Dallas, has been running around conducting a personal anti-war campaign. I mean, it was real interesting, I thought. What about some of the metaphors that the President has been using, like "going the extra mile" and "world unanimity?S Well, the speech the opening night, as it were (one thinks of it now in terms of theatrical metaphors), his opening night speech, his curtain-raiser speech, which at least according to one place I read, and I can no longer remember the source on this, but he had actually written himself, it was a shocking collection of clichs, just a dreadful speech. It was one after the other, I think I counted about 17. One wonders if thatUs the way he really thinks. Well, thatUs just it, I mean, read OrwellUs essay on "Language and Politics.S ItUs just frightening. I assume the speechwriters did his State of the Union address the other night, which in fact was much better. What do you think about the mediaUs coverage in general? Well, you know, I think one of the things weUre failing to make clear, you know, Mr. Arnett -- who, by the way, I think is doing a superb straight old-fashioned wire service job out of Baghdad under difficult circumstances -- we must carefully remind people whenever Mr. Arnett is heard from that we are told that we are looking at what the Iraqis want him to see and that he has information censors standing by at every step, we need exactly the same kind of warning on all the coverage weUre getting. Right. Another point at which my skepticism level was triggered, they were interviewing some poor soldier who had been involved in the firing, the first day the 12 ground troops were killed . . . and the questions were along the lines of "Well, gosh, you know, here youUve just been in this real active battle where they were shooting at you and you were shooting at them. I guess that feels pretty good, huh?S And the soldier looks at him like he has two heads and says, "yeah, well, itUs better to get some action than to just sit around out here.S "Well, howUd you feel, you know, now that weUre finally under way?S And you could see this guy looking off camera at what is clearly his superior officer, at least this is my interpretation of it. IUm going, yeah, well, weUre sure gonna know. ItUs like the obvious answer to that question is, "Oh, itUs my idea of real great fun to sit out here all day and get my ass shot at, dummy!S I mean, what?! It just seems to me that one of the things weUre failing to do is to explain that all our information is just as censored as all of theirs. And itUs making me so profoundly uneasy. My ultimate sense is something that IUve had for about a week now. I think maybe our military psychological warfare experts and whoever else is spinning and tilting the news for us are ultimately doing themselves damage. I know that sounds a bit self-serving as a journalist, but I think theyUve been working so hard to make this war sanitized and bloodless and clean-cut, and good versus evil, that when the reality catches up with people thereUs going to be a terrible reaction. I think basically they are setting themselves up for a dreadful fall. Do you think that the establishment media on the East Coast is largely responsible for this, or do you think theyUre doing the best they can? Well, I think there are people doing the best they can under troubled circumstances, and, indeed, that includes Mr. Arnett. Yeah, I think there are some people, but we have no idea how theyUre being edited. There was one example given in Time magazine in the analysis where . . . oh, it was one of those dreadful word changes that drives you absolutely nuts if youUre a journalist. It was something like, arrogant or cocky. It was "giddy.S "Giddy!S And then "proud" was put in instead. And the funny thing is that those little tiny changes do make a world of difference in a story. I mean, IUve been there, and youUve been there, and you know. So itUs partly historical record too. Yeah. I really do think that as is often happens with, you know that phrase "blowback,S where sometimes we get caught up in our own propaganda? Yeah. End, Ivins Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 13, Ivins Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.13 **/ ** Written 12:37 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Ivins Intv (part 2 of 2) I think the greatest disservice would be to adhere to the people who, I think they assume that they are being protected from the ugly realities of war, or that itUs somehow necessary for all our media to be lined up to do a lot of "rah-rah, cheer-cheer, letUs go, boys!S What worries me more than anything else is that IUve never seen a story that needed more emphasis on the complexities of it to be fully reported. This is a story of such enormous complexity. And I wonder how much the extent to which the public doesnUt want to look at the complexities may indeed be a factor. During that period when the networks were doing 60 minutes of nightly news, Peter JenningsU network . . . did at one point in their second half-hour a long look at the immense demonstrations against the war in the Magreb nations, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco, the Arab nations around North Africa, and growing anti-war sentiment even among some of the Coalition partners, but CNN never even mentioned it. I mean, weUre talking about 250,000 people in Algiers or some place. It just seems to me almost creepy. And again, itUs always the assumption of censors that people are too dumb to understand, and itUs so insulting. What about the coverage of the anti-war protests in this country in the last two weeks? IUm not able to answer that really well because I havenUt been watching regularly enough. I find myself unable to watch any more. I have been struck by a couple of things. By interviewing particularly the wives of members of the military, guys who are over serving in the war theater, and then we get these moving interviews with their wives and there seems to be a tendency to ask these poor, suffering women, "What do you think of the flag-burning sons-of-bitches out in the street?S I mean, you know, the questions are not that leading, but they are sometimes rather bad. And a couple of the wives have . . . one I heard brought up the old idea that anti-war protesters in the Vietnam era spit on returning soldiers. It seems to me that this knee-jerk reaction of, you know, "we must support our boys,S itUs a question of whether we should support this war which is, like Vietnam, a policy war. ItUs not as though this country had been attacked and needed to defend itself against an enemy. This war is the result of a policy. It is one thing to criticize and disagree with the mistakes that get you into a war . . . that doesnUt mean that you are against the people who get stuck fighting on our behalf. And it just seems to me that that is a distinction that gets lost in the shuffle a good deal. Have people been burning flags at these protests? I keep hearing them refer to flag burning. Well, I was out on the streets reporting on San Francisco, where some of the largest protests were, and there were occasional flag burnings. But certainly, we had over 100,000 two weeks in a row here, and there was no flag burning at the rallies. The flag burning was more the first few days after the war started, where people were extremely angry. Well, as I say, I never saw, or canUt ever remember a story that more cries out for -- this is such a horrible word, I hate it -- nuance. Scratch that! But basically some emphasis on the complexity a bit. And among other things, the ahistoricity of the American media, which is always a trial from day to day, is of course just stunning in this case. One of the networks advertised -- I believe it was NBC -- that they were doing a history of Iraq. And I thought, oh good, this will be helpful. Well, I assure you there was nothing more modern than 5000 B.C. I mean, there we were faced with the vexatiousness of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians hadnUt gotten along in whatever it was B.C. There was absolutely no history of the colonial exploitation, the modern history that has led up to this whole situation. I mean, itUs just stunning, the ahistoricity. Even things like, this is IraqUs second case of naked aggression -- we always call it naked aggression. I like that. As though clothed aggression would be better. The first instance of absolutely blatant invasion came of course when they invaded Iran, and our response was to send them weapons. ThereUs an extent to which heUs not so much an American Frankenstein but he is a Frankenstein of the creation of Western policy. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Ivins Interview (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 14, Interview with Sam Keen by Rory Cox (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.14 **/ ** Written 12:39 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Keen Intv (Part 1 of 2) Sam Keen Interviewed by Rory Cox Sam Keen is a free-lance writer, lecturer, contributing editor of Psychology Today and author of Faces of the Enemy (1986) and The Passionate Life (1984). Rory Cox is an editor of Propaganda Review. January 29, 1991 Sonoma, California *** Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? Sam Keen: Let me start with what I think propaganda is, and what it isn't, because I think one of the problems is we don't understand very well what propaganda is. About the only one I think has got a really good handle on it is Jacques Ellul, a French intellectual who wrote a book on the subject. Propaganda is really a whole climate that is created, it's not just the specific things that are now appearing. Superficially, it looks like the propaganda that is shaping this war -- the images of Saddam Hussein as Hitler and the obviously managed news -- the Pentagon is quite overtly censoring all stories they don't want out, in that sense that's the top level of propaganda. And that, in a way, is easiest for us to see, especially for anyone with a radical persuasion. It's easy to see how we're being handed manipulated news. So, that's one level. But there's a much, much deeper level on which propaganda functions. And that is a level at which a whole view of the world, a whole ideology is built up by any people that shapes their perceptions of the world. For instance, the American mind and spirit has been molded by the myth of the hero, the myth of the Lone Ranger, the very dualistic world-view in which there are good guys and there are bad guys, there are white hats and there are black hats, that our whole national romance has been with the notion of America as the nation that sits on the hill, the righteous nation, the one that will bring democracy to the world and light to the nations. We're the new-found land, we're the new Israel, we're God's chosen people, so that kind of ideology, which has been with us right from the beginning, you see de Tocqueville in Democracy in America saying "this is the American character." It is as if this is the template of American experience. So when a situation comes up, whether it's Vietnam or whether it's this, the image that we get of an enemy and of warfare are superimposed on that template, upon that natural tendency we have to structure our political experience in that way. So, what IUm saying is that a part of what it is that makes overt propaganda work is the covert psychological structures, psycho-political structures of any people. I've stated very often in Faces of the Enemy that these tendencies to scapegoat, and these tendencies to blame others, these tendencies to cast our experience, are like a virus in the bloodstream that may lie dormant for a long time. But as soon as there is pressure which comes from stress -- which comes from other circumstances, from a depression as it was in Nazi Germany (the same thing is happening here, from frustration, from moral breakdown, from our inability to solve our problems) -- then that virus becomes active again, and we begin to look for enemies. We look for some symbolic enemy that we can purge and therefore destroy the evil in the world. And I think that happens almost cyclically in a peoples' history, certainly in our history. It happened in Vietnam. And then we began to run out of enemies, and then we got a Noriega, and we got a Columbian drug lord, and they were not compelling enough enemies to really unite public opinion. So here came along Saddam Hussein, almost as a God-given enemy. That's one of the things I see going on. Now, having said that I have to back up and I have to say that one of the reasons that this mythical morality tale that Americans always love to tell, is so easy to tell is that Saddam Hussein really is a bad-ass. HeUs power-hungry, heUs megalomaniacal, heUs all of those things. But in order to get any kind of perspective on the war, we have to realize that he was that way when we were quite willing to use him as a counterbalance to Iran, he was that way when we were willing to use Iran as a counterbalance against him, and we were willing to arm the Kurds and stir up trouble in Iraq. He was certainly that same man only weeks before the invasion when April Glaspie said that we didn't have any opinion in this war. So, it's a very complex situation, but what is clear is that the minute we get in any hot circumstances, these images of the enemy that I've shown in Faces of the Enemy, these archetypes of the hostile imagination begin to emerge, and here heUs pictured as a Hitler, as a rat, as a racist, as a barbarian, all of which have a degree of truth in them. It seems all the tactics that have been used are very well accounted for in your book which was published in 1986. It's almost as if they read it before they started their campaign. In the book you also discuss how, with current technology, it's now not even necessary to come face to face with the enemy, they become a blip on a screen. This is often referred to as a Nintendo war. . . To me one of the most frightening interviews was one I saw with a wing commander, or wing king as they called him, and he was a beautiful man -- handsome and virile, guiding these marvelous toys, these F-111's -- and they asked him right before it started, "Are you anxious?" and he said "No, IUm not anxious." And they asked "Do you have any problems?" and he said, "No, we're superbly trained, we're gonna go in there and do the job." They said, "Have you seen the enemy?" and he said, "No, I've seen him just as a blip on the radar screen, and I hope that's all IUll ever see of him. When my missile hits I just want to see the blip disappear from the radar screen." You realize that with that kind of mentality, there can be no realization of the tragedy of war, or of the moral complexities of going in there. It's technological, so the enemy is not even a barbarian, a racist or anything else. HeUs just a technical problem to be solved. It's the worst image of the enemy. Any observations of propaganda on the other side, from the Arab world? If you want to get a quick fix on the war, it's a conflict between a 13th century ideology and a 19th century ideology. For Hussein, it's basically a 13th century Islamic crusade, and if he can use the idea of a holy war quite overtly, and marshal people with it -- although I doubt if he himself believes it -- it definitely is this 13th century notion. Bush is really 19th century. Although he does flip and talk with Billy Graham about God being on our side, and when he talked the other night to the National Religious Broadcasters he talked very much about that. But basically what he is doing is much more the appeal to empire, the early 19th century thing where we've replaced the British in the Mideast as the order-givers, the ones that have to enforce the New World Order, and that we have this right and this obligation as the superpower to bring order and justice into the world. He talks mostly like James Baker does, as if it's a conflict between right and wrong. Baker said that in the UN. He said it's simply a conflict between right and wrong. End, Keen Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 14, Keen Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.15 **/ ** Written 12:40 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Keen Intv (Part 2 of 2) What do you think about Bush's boasts of "almost unanimous world opinion on this?" I think that when he put troops in Saudi Arabia there was a genuine chance to do the New World Order, that getting the Coalition there was really a masterful piece of work. If he had left a symbolic force in there, and said now we have an international coalition, and we have a consensus that you cannot have Kuwait, that we're not going to go in there and bomb, we are going to pressure you by really severe embargoes, and everybody is united in this -- if he would have stayed with that, it would have been a masterful piece of diplomacy and, I think, an enormously helpful thing. People said, "Well, you canUt stay there for a year or two years." Quite to the contrary, I think that a severe blockade of the nation, plus staying there with a peaceful but powerful presence, we could have pulled off a conference on the Mideast situation including the Palestinian issue that would have some genuine hope. The other Arab countries didn't want him taking over, they didn't want him doing that, so we had an authentic consensus going into there about not letting him get away with it. But I don't think we've got much of a consensus about whatUs going to occur from here on. TheyUre in there now and it's hard for them to pull out unless Israel gets totally involved. George Bush just missed it when he escalated. He was going beautifully, from my perspective. I think we did have to put troops in there. He just got carried away with that macho ego that says you crossed the line, and IUm going to clobber you. And the problem is is heUs facing up to someone who's got an ego even bigger than his is, someone that has absolute power, and that has no representatives, no Congress that he has to bring along. I think the thing we should have done years and years ago was to stop the arming of the Mideast, but I don't think that intrinsically it was a good idea of putting a trip-line in Saudi Arabia, and then admitting that the Kuwait situation is very complex in terms of Iraqi claims to it. I don't think there's anything wrong in using power. I just think to escalate from the use of power to this kind of war was a tragic mistake. You don't think just the presence of the troops would eventually ignite the same thing? IUm thinking of the "peacekeeping" troops in Lebanon. They didn't do a whole lot of good. Well, that's right, and it might not have done a lot of good. For me it would have been a hard call, but on a 60-40 vote I would have gone with it. We have to make some sort of compromise between cynicism and idealism in politics. The difference between realpolitik and our rhetoric. . . and of course our rhetoric is always about free people and all that crap, which you and I know is ridiculous, because there are plenty of atrocities. Name the tragedy we have not been involved with, including the destruction of the Kurds, which we were complicit in. So that isn't the issue, and we all know that the issue is some kind of national self-interest. Given some kind of realpolitik, which I think you always have to balance those off in the real world versus an ideal world, I think there are some areas where we probably do have to do some peacekeeping, and if it were me I would tend to do more peacekeeping, but I would do a lot more of it on really humanitarian grounds. I might step in between India and Pakistan or wherever. What do you think of the coverage of the demonstrations? I've seen a fair amount of local media giving voice to demonstrators. But I haven't seen the really thoughtful alternatives to this, the people who articulate that policy. I have not seen them on any national media at all. Yesterday I went into a post office, and here was the clerk in the post office wearing an American flag and a white ribbon. And I said "What is this?S, and she said "I think that my leaders have betrayed me. Of course I support the boys and the people over there, but I think heUs betrayed me in this war.S I thought, isn't that beautiful, hereUs a lady with a federal job, standing right there meeting the public and just putting it right out front with a white ribbon. There's a lot of that. One of the things I thought about is: ShouldnUt we start a policy of wearing black arm-bands in mourning? There should be something of an alternative to a yellow ribbon. This woman with the white ribbon, I immediately knew she was trying to say something that was different from the yellow. She said, "IUm not comfortable going out there in those demonstrations.S I think that there are a lot of people like that. Almost every one of the major denominations has come out against the war. The other day I saw an NBC network feed which showed footage of Baghdad after the bombing. People stood in front of their houses that are now piles of rubble, people praying in a bombed out church, and all the narrator could talk about was how Saddam released this footage for propaganda purposes. He didn't seem to have much compassion for the misplaced people. Yet our media is using things like the oil spill and the POWUs for the same purpose, but there it's announced as the unaltered truth. There seems to be a double standard. That's that propagandistic template that we just go back to unconsciously, automatically. Even relatively intelligent people do. I think that's one thing we have to understand about propaganda. In a "free society" it's not something that's organized from above. It's a template, it's a myth, it's an archetype that we fall into, we almost fall into it automatically unless we discipline ourselves not to. To think through both sides of the issue is a discipline that is acquired, it's not a natural capacity. You have to almost think against the way we've been trained to think, you have to learn to think against it, to consider the other side. I always used to say that the image of the Arab is one that we were not critical about even before the war, that there was nowhere near the kind of pressure that BUnai BUrith or the Jewish Anti-Defamation League does, for the way the Arab images were used. We've traditionally done a great deal of Arab bashing, so you could quite well expect the FBI could do what it did. No surprise. One of the images we always had of the Arab was as a terrorist. I can go back and show you images of way before this war, where Palestinian equals Arab equals terrorist. Terrorism is one of those things where if someone doesn't have power, and they use these means, you say theyUre terrorists, but you don't say that our bombing is terrorism. I have a favorite scheme of mine I can never get anybody to do. I want to get somebody to do an annual death/violence index that would cut through a lot of the rhetoric. If you want to know what nations are bad and which are worse, and which are better, we ought to just catalog how many violent deaths a nation is responsible for in any given year. If arms that we provide to another nation are used, then IUd say that counts as half a death on their account, half a death on our account. Then we would know who's a terrorist and who's not. If you kill 30 innocent people on an airplane with a bomb and we kill 600 in bombing attacks, then we're 20 times more terroristic, because it doesn't matter how a person is killed, each life is precious to us. And a death is a death is a death . . . sort of an objective death index. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Keen Intv (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 16, Interview with Paul Krassner by Johan Carlisle (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.16 **/ ** Written 12:42 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Krassner Intv. Paul Krassner Interviewed by Johan Carlisle Paul Krassner is editor of The Realist and a stand-up comedian. Johan Carlisle is a senior editor of Propaganda Review, Investigative News Features and the Public Eye. *** January 31, 1991 Venice, California Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? Paul Krassner: Well, I think that when Bush insisted that this wouldn't be another Vietnam, I think he meant that the press wouldn't be as free to report as they were in Vietnam. So perhaps the most revealing example is that one reporter described a pilot who had just come back from a bombing as"giddy" and the military changed the word to"proud." So 1984 may be gone but it's still functioning. Do you think the US government and media war propaganda is a serious problem? If so, why? Yeah. First of all because it's shutting out all of the news. I heard on the radio that Congressman Henry Gonzalez from Texas called for an impeachment of Bush, with a very strong sounding rationale to it and I didn't see that in any newspaper. So it shuts out material, which is one form of propaganda, and then also just the way the anti-war movement is being treated. They'll show a flag being burned but they won't have any interviews with Daniel Ellsberg or Noam Chomsky or Ramsey Clark. So by omission it becomes propagandized. How do you think the propaganda has shaped events? I think it has made the anti-war movement seem unpatriotic. And it's already a brainwashed public. They thought it would be like Grenada and Panama -- wham, bam, thank-you-maUam. And I'm convinced -- absolutely convinced -- that the Bush administration knew that Saddam was going to invade Kuwait, and in fact encouraged it because they needed a cause to build up the military-industrial-media complex after the Cold War had ended. They just used Saddam Hussein as kind of an international version of Willie Horton. When I was a kid during World War II there was toilet tissue put out. On squares it had Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito, and it said"Wipe out the Axis." And now they have toilet tissue put out that says"Wipe out Saddam." Because our attention span has been so atrophied by MTV consciousness, we can only concentrate on one villain at a time. Have you any thoughts about Iraqi propaganda that youUve seen? Well, they're not sophisticated. The fact that they had Baghdad Betty warning soldiers that their wives were out dating Tom Selleck and Bart Simpson shows that they were accepting the symbolism without even knowing that it was an animated matinee idol. So I think that they were relatively unsophisticated media-wise. But nevertheless they're sharp because by Saddam Hussein calling in Peter Arnett -- and I think they called in 15 more journalists today -- he's giving himself the image that he's a worldwide figure. So he's becoming more shrewd because this will certainly impress the Arab community, which is what his goal is there. How about comparing US and Israeli propaganda and who they're targeting? Well, I don't know what the negotiations between the US and Israel are -- what quid pro quo agreements are being made that Israel is restraining itself so much. The US isn't sharing the air codes so the implication is that if Israel has a retaliatory strike they might be shot down by American airplanes just because of the radar. But I had heard before the actual outbreak of American bombers on Baghdad that Israel was planning a pre-emptive strike and the US government really pleaded with them not to because they just don't want to unravel the coalition, which is so fragile anyway. Do you think most people are aware that on Nightline whenever they have Benjamin Netanyahu or other Israeli spokespeople, they are part of a pretty well organized machine? I don't think so. I think they're under the delusion that there's dialogue going on. But it's dialogue between Attila the Hun and Napoleon. I know that FAIR did a good study of who goes on MacNeil-Lehrer, but they have these generals now, generals who get $10,000 a month to be their experts. You don't hear them interviewing Noam Chomsky or any of the other people. All you see is the anti-war movement portrayed as burning an American flag. It's really unbalanced. The one antidote is radio talk-shows, it's like the David to the Goliath of the networks, where they have ex-CIA agents calling in like to KPFK, the Pacifica station [in the L.A. area]. So there is some resistance, but generally speaking in the mass media people just have the new disease . . . called CNN fever. What about the Vietnam syndrome? There's two sides to it. One, is it a factor in terms of the pressure that the anti-war movement is applying? And, two, how are the media and the government using the concept as a propaganda theme? Oh yeah, I think the ultimate of that is that the problem with Vietnam was that it dragged on, and this is a fast-food generation that wants a microwave war. So it wouldn't surprise me if when the ground-troop battles get under way, and the US looks like it's at a disadvantage, we may end up nuking them. The public has been kind of psyched up for that to happen. Even in the counter demonstrations they have signs like,"Be a Patriot Not a SCUD." So even the names of the weapons have propagandistic content. Yeah, apparently the Pentagon had named that weapon the SCUD. They have a different first letter -- like all the fighter planes are 'F' something, and all the tanks are 'M' something, and all the missiles are 'S' something. And they came up with this name SCUD. It was effective because it creates an image. The comedians can make things about it. As a performing comedian, I'm discouraged because it's all cheerleading. Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall just do the easy-reference Saddam humor, and it's very jingoistic humor. Yeah, I've heard very few jokes about this war. What do you think that's all about? Comedians are just a subdivision of the general population, and they're concerned about their careers in show business. They certainly don't want to do anything that would be unpopular. So, they work out of fear rather than creativity. Besides myself, the only comedian who I've heard whoUs been doing anything is Harry Shearer, who is pretty uncompromising. Most of the time they'll just have jokes -- I think Jay Leno had a joke that SCUD stands for Stupid Crazy Ugly Dictator, and, you know, everybody cheers. So, it's just going to the basest of emotions. Is there anything about the media coverage of this war that strikes you as fundamentally different from other wars, about how it's being packaged? Yeah, it's being packaged like a miniseries, like a continuous miniseries -- a maxi-series, really. And as it goes along, when they find out children are being scared, they have a call-in show for children, and the reporters were wearing their bright-colored sweaters. It was very surrealistic to see kids asking,"Well, whatUs the difference between chemical and biological weapons?" . . ."Oh, well . . . that's a good question, Junior!" It's dehumanized, it's being treated like a combination of football, of sports, and video games like Nintendo, and like the CPA is running it, you know, just giving figures. What they do is -- it's like trying to keep the pulse so that they can be one step ahead of it. So if they say, oh, people will change their minds about the war when they see the body bags coming home. . . So they say, OK, we won't allow them to film the body bags coming back to Fort Dover. When the Bush people see that the people are concerned that a lot of issues arenUt being met at home, then he'll give his State of the Union speech as one big mess of buzzwords. He'll be sure to mention AIDS; he'll be sure to mention poverty. He didn't mention the S & L, he left out that buzzword. If you didn't have the sound system in English and you watched that State of the Union message with the ass-kissing politicians, it would have looked like some Nazi war rally. It's very discouraging to see how easily swayed people are. But -- like wishful thinking -- I envision truth as green blades of grass bursting through the cement, and so I still have hope that more and more truth will come out. But there was one thing on today's briefing from General Schwarzkopf -- I guess he's left over from Sergeant Bilko . They asked him, and he said"Oh, that's Bovine Scatology -- or in Marines -- B.S." And they dismiss it like that. But how many days did it take after the oil spill before we learned about it? It was three to six days before we heard about it. It seems like they're looking to cover their tracks. How do you think the media has done on its coverage of the protest movement? Very superficial. I mean we had a slogan about Vietnam that applies here too. We were against the war -- not the warriors. And theyUve tried to make it seem that the anti-war movement is unpatriotic, when it really is one of the highest forms of patriotism. Even the local shows are in on it, they'll even bring their weatherman, their meteorologist, in on their conversations about the war. So it gets trivialized in the process. End, Krassner Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Krassner Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.17 **/ ** Written 12:43 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Krassner Intv (Part 2 of 2) What about the oil companies? It seems to me that there's almost zero discussion of their role in the Middle East, and the creation of all of the Arab countries in the 20s and 30s, and their huge profits. Do you think there's a conscious censorship about that issue? There is because it doesn't make for good TV. I mean, you can see it in the Wall Street Journal, the factual stuff? Comparing the current oil spills that are so much worse than Valdez must make Exxon feel kind of ambivalent."See, we werenUt so bad after all." We haven't seen any dead bodies yet, but weUve seen dead ducks. And that will turn environmentalists against the war. It gets confusing to a lot of people because it's bringing out a lot of latent Judaism in people who say,"Well, you know, I was against the Vietnam War," but then they see that bombs are being dropped on Israel. There's no need to justify Saddam Hussein, but it's so tragic that this all could have been prevented, that it was all unnecessary except that Bush bribed the UN Security Council members. There was a great cartoon by Paul Conrad in the L.A. Times showing a soldier with his face all bandaged up and only his eyes showing through, saying,"I gave my face to save BushUs face." They would all say that we have to support the President as if he's one of the monarchies that weUre defending. Another point, as far as polls are concerned: It's almost a false pretense that an uninformed public could have accurate opinions about something this complex. Yeah, plus the way that questions are phrased. I once read a book by Darrell Huff called How to Lie with Statistics, and by shaping questions certain ways, you can change the way the focus of the answers will be. So these constant polls -- it's like a popularity contest. I thought that one day the elections would be changed so that instead of the candidates in the booth you'll just have a listing of the Harris poll, the Gallup poll, the USA Today poll, and you'll just check the poll that you like the most. And whoever they said was most popular would win the presidency. I just want to say that there are little alternatives here and there. I mentioned the Pacifica network. I heard a guy interviewed on there -- Craig Hulet, who used to be with the National Security Council -- who had a brillant understanding and analysis of it. It was at midnight, of course, and I woke up, so I called up the radio talk show hosts in three cities to let them know about it. Michael Krasny in San Francisco was one of them. He called me up to thank me for it, had the guy on for two hours and he said it caused quite a stir. So, you have to think of yourself as almost a counter-propagandist. And I saw a show called"The Nineties" that goes over PBS -- it goes on the air in April -- and they interviewed a guy from the Office of the Americas -- he's a former priest who got married and had a family -- and again another brillant, compassionate analysis. I guess that's the thing that's missing most, a sense of compassion. They demonize Saddam Hussein but you forget about Iraqi individual citizens. It's just really manipulating the emotions of the public, and the public is falling right into it. I guess theyUve been prepared for it for a long time; it's been building up to this. Did you catch the halftime of the Super Bowl? They actually pre-empted most of it for news. Disney World had thousands of kids whose parents are in the Gulf, and then they had this little boy, about a year old, singing this Bette Midler song about,"You're my idol." It was a real tear-jerker. Yeah, I saw that. It was so exploitative. It was our version of Saddam Hussein saying the kids have corn flakes and milk, and patting them on the head. I'm afraid of how effective it is on people. It just builds and builds. It's like a giant jigsaw puzzle. One of the little bits of information was that on August 1, the night before the invasion, the record was broken for the number of pizzas ordered in by the CIA. Yeah, they're calling that the new Domino Theory. Yeah, that's right. But that's a very significant thing. It means that they were monitoring the thing and they knew it. But that's been almost completely overlooked, the level of our complicity in this. Well, hereUs an example: April Glaspie, the ambassador [to Kuwait], was kind of made the scapegoat in this because she told Saddam just days before it happened that we don't have any treaties with Kuwait and this is an inter-Arab affair -- the President just wants us to have good relations with you. She had specific instructions in the cablegram from Jim Baker telling her that. So, one of the Sunday morning TV shows had Jim Baker as a guest and asked him about that. And, he said,"Oh, I canUt be responsible, I sign my name to 13,000 cables." And they just let that go. Because the journalists, like the comedians, are interested in their careers, and whatUs good career moves for them. What about terrorism? I know it's been used a lot rhetorically over the years as a propaganda technique, especially in L.A. I'm interested in whatUs going on down there because the government seems to be constantly saying that L.A. is the hotbed of Iraqi terrorism. L.A. and Detroit. In Detroit, in fact, there was one news item that at the airport -- in the restaurant there -- they were shutting down the non-smoking section because terrorists smoke cigarettes. Did you hear that? I thought I made it up. Yeah, so they could keep a better eye on them. That was one of the most bizarre bits of news I've ever heard. But the serious end of it is that they could use terrorism as an excuse to call a national emergency and put into effect House Resolution 4079. The Rex law that Oliver North fought for. Rex 84. Right, it's pretty scary how they're doing this. It's like fascism in Nazi Germany was all legal, and that's whatUs happening here -- it's becoming all legal. A friend of mine got a traffic ticket from a cop, and he was complaining that this is a police state. And the cop smiled and said,"No, this is a police world." This was in L.A.? Yeah. I know L.A.Us police intelligence unit is called the anti-terrorist division. Have they been active down there? Has there been a lot of stuff in the local media? Not that much about it. But I know that Darryl Gates went to Philadelphia to advise them when they had the attack against the Move organization. And he said here that he thinks that anybody, even a casual drug user, should be taken out and shot. For a law enforcement official to be condoning vigilante justice -- or injustice -- is pretty frightening. What about the Hitler analogy -- the way that that has been used? As I said before, it's the international version of Willie Horton. And there's a trickle-down effect. The New Republic on their cover had a photo of Saddam Hussein and they trimmed his mustache on either side so he looked more like Hitler. They needed to demonize him. Everybody is always talking about World War II, that it was a just war and we had to fight that. In the process of this, there's a book called The Rape of Kuwait, and 200,000 copies have been shipped to the soldiers in Saudi Arabia. The publisher wouldn't reveal who paid for it, but I'm sure they're masturbating over those copies there. And the fact that Bush, when he was interviewed by David Frost and on other occasions, had quoted from the Amnesty International report on Kuwait. I'm writing for The Realist now my version of BushUs letter to Saddam Hussein, which starts out:"Dear Butcher of Baghdad, in view of our previous relationship, I feel I owe you an explanation." But in that interview he points out that he read that report and he's never read an Amnesty International report before, and he hopes never to read one again. But the level of hypocrisy there -- and the media not pointing that out -- that Bush has never referred to the Amnesty International report on Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, let alone Guatemala and El Salvador. And people are so concerned with their economic situations that they don't have time to deal with these inconsistencies. What do you think people should do to try to counter propaganda around this? Write letters to the editors, call up radio talk shows, discuss it with whomever they come into contact with -- but be well-informed about it. Use tapes, computer bulletin boards, send faxes, every means of communication necessary to break through the kind of official story -- I used the phrase before the military-industrial-media complex, because I think that's what it is now. The media has been serving as cheerleaders. I think to break through that, because sooner or later what goes on in the alternative media ends up in the mainstream media and it's just trying to help accelerate that process. OK, do you have any quick jokes? I guess I was so busy at my meeting of Experts Anonymous that I couldnUt get in. And I suspect that Desert Storm will become a perfume soon. It was interesting, Bill Moyers was conducting a panel discussion on"The Press Goes to War,S and at one point he said,"CNN will interrupt this program, even in mid-sentence, if something happens." There was a thing, I guess it was on NBC, that there was torture going on in Saudi Arabia of Americans. There was one man tortured, he had six toenails torn out, because he was watching a video of Love Boat that had a woman in a bikini in the background. I guess the joke I have is that it's much harder to read Bush's lips while he's wearing a gas mask. Well, none of these GI's are using the drugs they were using in Vietnam. So they'll have post-traumatic stress syndrome of not being addicts. But everything is so relative and so arbitrary. So, you know, people are thanking God for the SCUD because it's only a conventional weapon. Or the Geneva accord says that it's OK to do whatever you want to the enemy until you catch him, and then you have to treat him nice. It's very strange. What do you think this is going to do to young people? Do you think it's really going to change their outlook on life? The surrealism of it? The Nintendo war? I think so. My daughter lives in San Francisco. She said she didn't think sheUd see another war in her lifetime. She works at KQED and she fought unsuccessfully to try to get them to show"Sesame Street" so theyUd have some alternative to all of that war stuff. They don't have that sense of geography, and they think that bombs are going to be falling here. I guess black kids in gang areas can now join a legal gang and use their AK47Us legally. But everybody sees it through their own filters. There's a show here in L.A. called"Match Night" It's a talk radio dating game, and the woman who runs it said," When I would go to anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam era they were great places to meet people. They were bigger than singles bars. And in this war I think they'll be really big again." So on her dating game she set up about 15 people to go to demonstrations. And another group would watch war coverage together on TV. So you know everybody responds to it according to their own value systems. Yeah, Newt Gingrich said an anti-war rally in San Francisco is a cheap date. Yeah, it's over-simplifying it. The irony is that they didn't want to have a linkage through negotiations, so theyUve gotten a linkage through the bomb. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Krassner Intv (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 18, Interview with Michael P{arenti by Kris Welch and Philip Maldari (KPFA Radio, Berkeley,CA) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.18 **/ ** Written 12:45 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Parenti Intv (Part 1 of 2) Michael Parenti Interviewed by Kris Welch and Philip Maldari on KPFA radio (Pacifica-Berkeley) January 31, 1991 Berkeley, California Michael Parenti is the author of Inventing Reality: Politics of the Mass Media (St. Martin's, 1988) and The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (St. Martin's, 1988). He is currently writing a book on the Battleship Maine and the causes of the Spanish-American War. *** KPFA: Can you discuss your reactions to last week's Super Bowl, with the masses of people waving flags and singing patriotic songs? It seemed to resemble Nazi Germany. Michael Parenti: Sports events are often used as hype for patriotism. I've just written an article on how sports and the weather are very political things, the way they're reported, and certainly in sporting events you see that. I saw a football game, last week's Conference Championship when the Buffalo Bills slaughtered the L.A. Raiders. It began with Army, Navy, Marine and Air Force in parade dress uniform with flags marching down the field and people all shouting "USA! USA!" . . . "Nuke Iraq!" and other enlightened kinds of things like that. "By the way, we shouldn't typify all the fans in the stands as being like that. The camera comes in on the noisy jingos who are most militaristic, but certainly that kind of thing is whipped up in sporting events very consciously. War imagery is often used in sports: "We hit them hard with our aerial offensive," and vice versa, you can hear the military saying "We've got all our players in place." The military also uses -- and the mainstream media often picks up on it -- a lot of euphemisms: "We're going to neutralize targets," and things of that sort . . . "collateral damage." "What are your observations of the way the peace movement is being portrayed in this country, and how that contributes to the patriotism? "The peace movement is being portrayed the same way every peace and anti-war movement has been. The numbers of demonstrators are being undercounted, whole demonstrations are being ignored and simply not being reported, the massive demonstrations in Europe have been given scant attention, and in some reports none at all. The counter-demonstrators are given disproportionate exposure. There'll be 100,000 of us and 100 of them and they'll get 40% of the coverage. In fact, NBC News on Saturday night did a special on the pro-war demonstrators who were all of a hundred. It said, "While groups of protestors moved across the Capitol grounds . . ." and it showed just a few stragglers, and we had a massive crowd there, and they talked about pro-Administration people, and they showed all these sound-bites, showed them walking down the street to Lafayette Park, and interviewed them. It was rather remarkable that here we had over 100,000 people and this special report was on this 100 people. These are some of the gimmicks they use. "They preface every report on the demonstrations by saying ". . . but the majority of the American people support the Administration." When they report on the compulsory pregnancy demonstrations, the anti-abortion parades, they never preface it by saying "but the majority of the people are for safe and legal abortions." They don't take the trouble to do that. The news media trivialize, marginalize, undercount, treat the peace movement as a small thing. What's impressive is that here we are in barely the second week of the war and we have masses of people out there marching and demonstrating with a variety of issues saying a great many intelligent things. I started writing down what all the different signs were saying, and they were rather remarkable things. People are speaking back. So why is the media doing this? George Bush is not calling everybody up and saying "keep it quiet"? "They sure do do that, that's one of the things that happens every day. The networks are called every day by the White House and asked what their two or three lead stories are for the evening. They have conferences, they have dinners together, they bring pressure on them quite regularly. But in any case you don't have to pressure them, it's a built-in pressure. Baker gets up and says, "This is the policy: A . . . B . . .C", all the reporters write: "This is the policy: A . . .B . . .C." They've become the mouthpieces, so it doesn't have to be any big conspiracy. If you oppose too often then you get cut out of the news pool, you get fed misinformation, you get starved out on stories. And in any case, the people who own the giant networks are the same people whose interests are being defended by this giant global military machine. NBC is a subsidiary of General Electric, and General Electric is one of the biggest military-industrial contractors in the world, one of the biggest corporations. George Bush does good things for General Electric. So there's a community of interest between those who own the world and those who own media. They're " the same people. I talked to a White House correspondent recently, and his job is to report what the President said that day. Since the President says or does something just about every day, there's no time to go around and get alternative responses, there's no time to investigate whether what the President is saying is true or false, it's just his job to report what the guy had to say that day. It's very refreshing that he said that. Then he's saying "I am a shill, I am a mouthpiece, I am an amplifier of the White House." But then don't come back and try to give us this jive about how we try to give you both sides of the story, we are free and independent and objective. You're not free, you're not independent, you're not objective. If you cannot also look at alternative sources, if you cannot note that this guy is contradicting himself, that yesterday he said A, today he's saying B, and tomorrow he's saying C, and you cannot matter of factly just point those things out, then don't tell us that you are looking at the reality of the subject from all its dimensions. Then tell us what you are . . . you are an extension of the White House propaganda corps, or White House publicity machine. End, Parenti Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 19, Parenti Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.19 **/ ** Written 12:46 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Parenti Intv (Part 2 of 2) What chance have we, in a situation of war, of finding out the truth about anything? "MP: In this war we're going to have less than ever. In the wars I remember -- World War II, Korea, and Vietnam -- there were journalists at the scene of the war reporting the actual fighting. In this war, journalists are going to be banned and they will not be allowed to report the war, they will not be allowed to report pain or suffering scenes, like any wounded coming back on stretchers. Now, why is that? There's no security reason for that, that isn't telling the Iraqis something. The reason is to control or short-circuit democracy, to deny the public any sense of reality of the costs of that war so as to not undermine support for the war. A democracy is supposed to be able to make up its mind. If the people decide that they don't like this war and they don't want this war, it should be their right not to have it. So what you have is the government making sure they have no basis for turning against the war. Last night Peter Arnett of CNN got an interview with Saddam Hussein, and among the many things he had to say was that he took sustenance from the worldwide outrage at the war, citing demonstrations around the world and here in the United States. This has the impact of making it appear that every anti-war demonstrator is serving the purposes of Saddam Hussein. In other reports of people who were against the war in Vietnam but who now support the war in the Middle East, they say, "Saddam Hussein is not a Ho Chi Minh," that this man is a brutal, terrible dictator, a man guilty of war crimes, poison-gassing his own people." They were against the war in Vietnam but "this is a war that needs to be fought, better to fight him now than five years from now." Let me point out that they said the same things about Ho Chi Minh, that he was a brutal, horrible dictator that we have to bomb and kill, and all that sort of thing. The fact that this man is so terrible and such a dictator and victimized his people does not give us license to victimize his people. You see the fact that he is such a terrible dictator, because of this dictator and a coterie of militarists -- let's say that's what they really are -- how does that give us license to go in and terror-bomb his people? Saturation bombing is what we're doing. We're now hitting villages, we're hitting townships, we're running out of targets. What about the surgical strike notion, that we only hit military targets, we have "smart" bombs, they've only hit the target that they're set to, pilots are told not to drop the bomb if they don't have a clear target, and they have minimized collateral damage? You know what you can do with that statement. By their own propaganda, the very first day, the euphoric day, the great celebration of high technological fascism, where the proficiency of the weapons seemed to be their own justification, even that day they said 80% of our targets were hit. Where did the other 20% of the missiles go? Twenty percent of 2,000 is a lot of bombs, a lot of sorties that were hitting not the precise targets that they wanted to hit, but that were hitting the buildings next door. Right then, there were reporters in the hotel in Baghdad who said, "One of these missiles came over the hotel and landed on the housing complex where the hotel employees live." That's a "precise" missile right there. The infant formula factory that was blown up, which the White House said was a chemical and biological weapon factory, the CNN reporter who was there in one rare moment of truth said, "If this is a chemical factory, why is everybody around now picking through the ruins without any safeguards, any kind of masks on?" "They're killing an awful lot of people. You can't do that kind of massive bombing without killing people. There's no such thing as battlefields anywhere in the world. All battles are fought where people live -- on farms, in cities, in townships -- and people get killed. The greatest number of casualties in World War II were civilians, an even higher number in Vietnam. The more you mechanize and technologically advance your war the more you're going to kill civilians. The argument is made by those who down deep don't want there to be a war, that now that we're in one they want it to be over as fast as possible with a minimal loss of life, and they've been convinced that the way to get this war over as fast as possible is to be very fast, very severe, and get it over with, and hopefully do it with air power so that there isn't a ground attack that chews up tens of thousands of troops on both sides. That's exactly what they're doing. They're being fast, severe, brutal, and total in bombing Iraq, and they're killing large numbers of people. Getting it over with, with a minimum loss of life means a minimum loss of American lives, and those are the only lives that they're counting. Which, by the way, is another racist thing. Even in Vietnam we all know we lost 55,000. Nobody says anything about the enormous losses throughout all of Indochina, and the same kind of thing is happening here. There's even a better way to get it all over with a minimum loss of life. I have a secret plan. It's called get the hell out of there, and you would get it over with quick, there would be no loss of life, and it would be over with and finished. You could practice Kuwaitus Interruptus. But that would be rewarding the aggressor, right? Hussein is the aggressor, he invaded Kuwait, a sovereign country . . . "That's a lot of horse crap. The idea that George Bush has the moral authority after invading Panama and terror-bombing working class poor neighborhoods, killing large numbers of civilians, occupying Panama, and arresting intellectuals, journalists and members of the Democratic Revolutionary Party and putting them in jail, and is still occupying that country in the same way that the Nazis occupied Holland -- to think that he has the moral authority to act like the arbiter in the world, and that he's actually interested in stopping aggression! . . . If he's so interested in stopping aggression, if the US is dedicated to that principle, why the hell didn't they just stay the hell out of Panama? "Why didn't they do something when Turkey invaded Cyprus? Why wasn't anything done when Syria invaded Lebanon? Why wasn't anything done when Israel invaded Lebanon in a war that cost 50,000 Lebanese lives? And the Israelis are still in southern Lebanon, syphoning water supplies out of southern Lebanon. Why wasn't anything done when the Indonesians went into East Timor and killed half the population of East Timor? The CIA supported them. They didn't condemn them, didn't go and threaten them, didn't invade any of them. So suddenly in this war this guy is turning around and he's the big Woodrow Wilson of the world. It's the biggest, hokiest position that I ever heard, and that some elements in the Security Council went along with him is pathetic. By the way, the UN never gave him sanction to do what he's doing today. The UN resolutions never said he had the right to terror-bomb Iraq. He was supposed to exercise some sort of coercion to move in and liberate Kuwait. But there's no mandate to wage an all-out massive war against the people of Iraq. I'm not talking about Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein hasn't got a piece of shrapnel in his hide, but I'm talking about the tens and thousands of men, women and children who are going to be destroyed by this war. Do you have the right because you don't like the leader of a country that you yourself say victimizes its own people, do you have the right to go and kill tens and thousands of unoffending men, women and children in that country? "Why is public opinion -- which is obviously important or they wouldn't take so much effort to manipulate it -- not moving against this war? Because there are large sectors of our public who really think that their interests are being threatened, that there are evil adversaries out there that might do something to us unless we stand up and take care of them. They actually believe that the US has been a force for good and fairness and justice in the world. They believe their leaders, and when their leaders tell them it's A they believe it's A; when they tell them it's B they believe it's B. "You don't, and the facts as you spell them out seem logical to me. They're available to everybody else. Did these people go to different schools? No, I went to the same schools, which is why I believed it for a long time, too. It takes a special effort to overcome it. -30- With permission from KPFA. For more information about listener-sponsored radio station, KPFA, see the resource section on p53. RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Parenti Intv Next, Response 20, Interview with Herbert Schiller by Eduardo Cohen (Part 1 of2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.20 **/ ** Written 12:48 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Schiller Intv Herb Schiller Interviewed by Eduardo Cohen Herb Schiller is the author of Culture, Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression (Oxford University Press,1989); Information and the Crisis Economy (Oxford, 1986); Communication & Cultural Domination (M. E. Sharpe, 1976); The Mind Managers (Beacon Press, 1973); co-author with Joseph D. Phillips of Super-State: Readings in the Military-Industrial Complex . Eduardo Cohen is the producer of "Other Americas Radio" on KPFA (Pacifica), an editor of Propaganda Review and a Vietnam veteran. January 31, 1991 San Diego, California Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? Herb Schiller: A well-orchestrated arrangement to induce as much popular support with as little information being offered as possible. And I would use as my primary evidence, although there's a lot of other material around, the speech of the President on January 29th, which was a remarkable kind of statement, with a nationalistic approach the likes of which I don't think has been made by a presidential leader in maybe almost a century. How would you compare this to some of the speeches that President Reagan might have made to support his policy in Nicaragua? Would you say they are even more nationalistic? I think so. Now, I mean I'd have to have texts to compare them, but I've just finished reading this statement and I've checked off the number of times where there are references to such things as "American leadership," "we are Americans," and "the American Century." This is an absolute recital of one form or another of national chauvinism, as I say, the likes of which I can hardly recall in my lifetime. "How do you believe propaganda will shape the outcome of events? The main thing is to try to maintain as high a level of popular approval of a policy which clearly from the outset did not have anywhere close to a unanimity in the general population. So the overall effort is to try to consolidate and strengthen and maintain as much possible support as possible. One of the things that the leadership doesn't like to mention too often, but which at least the military recognizes, is that if you don't have a fairly large popular support for whatever you're doing, it becomes ever increasingly difficult to continue. And that is why, at this particular point, all stops have been pulled out to be able to try to keep as high a level of popular support and enthusiasm, although enthusiasm, I think, is too strong a word to say the way the population now feels. One might expect governments to disseminate propaganda, particularly in times of war, but what about the role of the press in a democratic society? Has the press been sufficiently independent, or have they been, perhaps, a conduit for much of the propaganda? Well, there have been many, many books written on this in past times, and one, I think, very useful title is The First Casualty, a book which was talking about the press in earlier wars. Clearly the press becomes very quickly enlisted in the effort to maintain the position taken by the leadership of the war activity. And in this particular case (and of course I'm speaking now of a vast media system, so there are exceptions, and there are arrangements in some places which are different), but as an overall statement I would say that the overall media -- and when I say media, I'm including broadcasting (radio and television) and the printed press -- has been remarkably subservient to the objectives of the war leadership. As I say, there are very honorable exceptions to this, but if we're talking of the channels which reach the largest number of people -- the major television channels -- we have almost total subservience to the national war leadership. That's a pretty strong statement. Are there any examples of this subservience that stick out in your mind? The examples that stick out are primarily what's not reported, which could very easily be reported. Or the kinds of voices that are given access and the voices that are denied access. So it's not a question of what exactly was said, it's a question of what was not said, or who did not appear on your screen. In that regard, there's been an incredible control of the information. I'm not even speaking about the control of information coming from the war front that gets openly funneled through the Pentagon. I'm talking about the back-up here in the country and the kind of discussion programs, the kind of interview programs, the kind of meet-the-press programs, the kind of commentators on all the major channels. Go through those, as I'm sure that at some time people will do later along, and you'll see a remarkable unanimity of the voices who have been enlisted to give commentary. Take a look at the major TV channels, and who are their commentators? Mostly retired generals and former officials from the State Department. This is hardly what you might call even the beginnings of a representative picture of what some people in the country are thinking. What are the things you feel haven't been said that should have been said, or should have been covered? Well, the very question of whether we should be in the war is a question that should have had a far greater amount of discussion. The very question of why troops were dispatched in the first place should have had a very great discussion. The whole question of whether things could have been done differently over these last six months should have had a much greater amount of discussion. The questions about what are the feelings and sentiments of a great number of countries around the world should have an enormously expanded coverage. I'm not talking about what does the Chancellor and the Prime Minister of Britain or the head of Germany think, I'm talking about what do the large-scale people's organizations think, what do the mobilization for peace operations think, what do the ordinary people in the street think. We get remarkably little of that. We get the statements from the top leaderships who have been one way or another brought into this effort. We're talking about propaganda, but I haven't asked you -- a lot of people think of propaganda, and think of slightly different things -- how you would define propaganda? Well, propaganda, in my mind, is an effort made in many, many different formats, to get the audience or the target who the message is directed at, to support whatever happens to be the point of view or the message or the action or the effort involved. It's an effort of persuasion. Most discussions about propaganda in the US news media have focused almost exclusively on Iraqi propaganda. How do you compare Iraqi propaganda and US propaganda? It's difficult to compare it because we don't get most of the statements made by the Iraqi, even though we have one reporter there from CNN. Already his veracity is being questioned because he sends back at least a little bit of information that contradicts the positions taken by our war leadership. Most of the statements made by the leadership in Iraq come to us only in jumbled form -- little extracts, little pieces here and there. The foreign minister of Iraq apparently a few days ago delivered a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations, of which I can only find little sentences here and there. That whole letter would be much more interesting to see. So when you're talking about 'what are their statements?' I'm not even calling it propaganda. What are their statements? I'm having a very difficult time in being able to extract that. I mean, I read the materials, I read our press fairly carefully, and what we are getting is a very tiny, tiny trickle of that information. Don't forget, when you ask a question to compare Iraq and the United States, it's comparing a flea and an elephant. The United States has control of the world channels of information for the most part, and Iraq is just a tiny country with the most limited possibilities of expression, so whatever they say is drowned out in such a total, total volume of the forming opinions which come out of this society. I realize that you could write a book about this question, but if you could educate us briefly, how does this control of world information occur, what are some of the keys to this control of world information that the United States can exercise? Well, this, by the way, is something that is not new. I mean, the control of world information has been something that's been a fact for God knows how long, and there have been major efforts made by a large number of the world's nations going back into the 1960s and 70s and even into the early 80s to ask for a new (what they called) information order, to sort of even out the tremendous gaps of disparities that exist. Basically, it's a control of the means of transmission and also the messages that go through these means of transmission. And the control of information -- just to take one most recent example -- I mean the entire world was seeing things through the transmission through CNN. With all due respect to CNN, it has its own standards, its own criteria, its own objectives, and there are a lots of other possibilities of presenting what's happening than through just one single channel. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Schiller Intv Next, Response 21, Interview with Holly Sklar by Johan Carlisle (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.21 **/ ** Written 12:49 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Sklar Intv (Part 1 of 2) Holly Sklar Interviewed by Johan Carlisle Holly Sklar edited Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission & Elite Planning for World Management (South End Press, 1980). She is the author of Washington's War on Nicaragua (South End, 1988) and Reagan, Trilateralism & the Neoliberals (South End, 1986). Johan Carlisle is a senior editor of Propaganda Review. He is also the editor and publisher of Investigative News Features and the Public Eye. January 31, 1991 Boston *** Propaganda Review: What do you see in terms of propaganda in the Persian Gulf war? "Holly Sklar: What's going on, in a sense, is propaganda as usual. So there's not a lot of surprise in terms of the way that the war images are being manipulated. Propagandists in the Reagan administration, the Bush administration, the Pentagon in general -- probably propagandists throughout history -- have known that first impressions are often lasting impressions, and so they worked really hard to package the initial image of this war. And the media, of course, helped very much in promoting that. So you have the Pentagon essentially presenting this as Top Gun in action, the video game war, the Nintendo war -- however you want to call it -- and the media, always looking for a good photo opportunity, swallowing all of these images of the video game air war as shown on the tapes -- the bombs dropping precisely down air-vents and so forth -- and not doing much to challenge what was really going on. So you had the stage-set video game war, air war, no civilian casualties -- so that even now, when you have more news coming, little by little, very reluctantly, about civilian casualties, about allied pilots being shot down, about the targets not being hit -- or if they're hit, not being destroyed in the way that they're supposed to be -- it largely doesn't matter. It set the stage for the image of the war as one that's rather bloodless. You wouldn't know that an average of 40% of "smart" bombs miss--even when they are aiming at clear military targets. You had the CNN reporters reporting from the ground in Baghdad, essentially backing up what the Pentagon was saying -- that the missiles were coming in and zooming along and being very precise and careful and not hitting any civilians and so forth. They were saying this rather positively from their hotel perch and hardly ever saying, "We don't really know what's happening because we're not out walking around and seeing what's really going on in the city." But as people were listening for those many early hours, you had the real focus on "smart" bombs and missiles hitting very precisely, the reporters showing "we don't feel in any real danger." Occasionally Bernie Shaw let on that he felt a little in danger. But the image was -- here they're sitting there reporting, bombs are going very precisely. And a couple of days later you have bombs landing in Israel and your first real images of civilian casualties. And it's not of Baghdad, of course, it's out of Tel Aviv. "Right, I think that was a very important part of the whole thing -- to bring Israel in. The problem isn't at all that they show death, destruction and wounds in Israel. They should. The problem is that it's done in this vacuum as if that's where the only real pain is and there isn't pain on the ground in Baghdad or the rest of Iraq which was being bombed. You also have attention to Israel much higher than attention to what's going on on the ground in Saudi Arabia. I wondered what's going around in your neighborhood in terms of division in the Left around Israel and whether to support the anti-war movement. "You know, there are a number of people, certainly including myself, who said from the beginning that you can and you should take a position in terms of being opposed to the Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait. And you have to condemn the SCUD attacks on Israel. In general, though, with the SCUDs landing on Israel you have the same thing in Boston as anywhere, that more people find it easier to say that "we can justify what the U.S. is doing because this guy Saddam Hussein has to be gotten rid of" -- making the Hitler analogy easier. The other thing that it did was to reverse the growing sentiment in the United States, especially since the Intifada, that the Palestinians were being hurt and exploited by Israel -- the growing number of people in the US who were willing to entertain the idea that there needed to be a two state solution there -- that an international peace conference would be a good idea. All of these things just got pushed aside. In the San Francisco Chronicle today (1/31/91) back on page 14 was a little item about Amnesty International's new report about Israeli human rights abuses in the Occupied Territories. It could have been front page news if it had been Iraq. "Oh, absolutely. That is, Iraq since the Kuwait invasion. "I'm sure President Bush won't use that report on TV. "Right, and David Frost wouldn't follow it up. Bush was using the Amnesty report on occupied Kuwait to further the cause of propaganda, not human rights. "What about the way the media is using the so-called Vietnam syndrome as one of the many clichs and myths to frame the debate? "There are all sorts of myths coming out. There's been an acceptance by most of the media, whether quoting Bush or Quayle, that "We're not going to fight this war with one arm tied behind our back." There's been a real rewriting of the history of Vietnam so that now many people have the image, especially younger people, that the United States lost Vietnam because the soldiers weren't allowed to go all the way. This is being blamed mostly on the anti-war movement and the press. Most polls have people say, "We think that the military censorship is justifiable on military grounds and we think it's a good thing that the media not get in the way anyway." You know it's always contradictory. At the same time people will say "We think the media coverage is basically pretty good." But when the questions are asked, "To whom would you rather give the benefit of the doubt -- the media asking for more license and access, or the Pentagon?" -- they'll go with the Pentagon in terms of censorship. "The other thing about the Vietnam syndrome is it makes it seem like the United States hasn't fought any wars since Vietnam, whereas I would say that in a lot of ways the so-called Vietnam syndrome disappeared a while ago. Throughout the 80s the US military was directly engaged in war and invasion as well as more indirectly, of course, through the Contras and by supporting UNITA in Angola, in El Salvador and the Phillipines. The US invaded and occupied Grenada and Panama, bombed Libya -- all these things with US troops or airpower directly engaged. "So, in a sense, that history is erased by continually jumping directly back to Vietnam from now. For example, there's a throw-away reference to the fact that [Desert Storm commander] Norman Schwarzkopf was the deputy commander of the invasion of Grenada, as if he shined so eloquently there. No assessment of what was his role, what was that about, what can we learn from that, what does that say about where we're going now? "A lot of history gets rewritten as current events unfold -- it's being rewritten as it goes. I think there's a lot of that going on here and we have to watch out as the stage is set for the next post-Cold War era. "Are you seeing the prevalence of the myth that there was no anti-war movement in the 80s? "The myth that there was both no war and no anti-war movement. There were massive demonstrations in Washington against the war in Central America in the 80s. "What about the way the government and the media are packaging the war? "In the beginning, in the first week, you felt like the war was a mini-series. "What's on television? I'll go watch the war." I think there was a real disconnect. It was war that didn't look like war. On the one hand, if it turns very bloody, I think more people will turn against it and get upset. But on the other hand, if it gets moderately bloody, in terms of US casualties, that will already have been countered, in a sense, by the early images. I think the media played an important role in this, with reporters standing up in front of the little blue tents in Saudi Arabia, essentially giving direct Pentagon information or giving live coverage of the briefings. It's not so much news as it is just a transmission belt for censored Pentagon briefings. "Another thing is all of the past criticism of the high-tech weapons systems -- that they were going to be too complex and too expensive -- it has kind of erased all of that. There's focus on the Patriot but there's nothing mentioned about the fact that they're not using the B-1 bomber because it doesn't work. And we'll have to wait and see about the tanks that critics have said may not work. And so they've kind of wiped out the idea that the criticism of the military buying spree in the last decade was justified. In fact it makes everyone look like they were wrong to criticize -- that if the critics had gotten what they wanted, then the SCUDs would've landed. And now they're trying to use that to justify the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative. End, Sklar Intv (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 22, Sklar Intv (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.22 **/ ** Written 12:51 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Sklar Intv (Part 2 of 2) Do you think the corporate ownership of NBC by General Electric, a major defense contractor, has a direct influence on the coverage of the war? "The mass media are very much a part of our ruling elite. They're owned by major corporations, they are major corporations. Although you can sometimes make a case that some stories are or aren't on because NBC is owned by GE, for example, to me that's rather insignificant compared to the general phenomenon which is that the media basically serves the interests of those who dominate the society economically, politically and militarily. And so dissent is rather hard to come by in the mass media -- instead of a 30-second sound bite you get a 15-second sound bite and it's really lost in the general barrage of disinformation. Of course it shouldn't be a surprise that those who own the press can do what they want. I think, though, that the opposition -- those people who oppose the war on the left and in general around the country -- can do a much better job of getting their voices heard both in the mainstream media and in terms of increasing the range of the alternative media. "So I would send two messages. One, don't be surprised that the media supports the administration generally and is often a transmission belt for what it says. But at the same time, I think more people should be doing things like op-ed pieces and getting on talk shows and so on -- more systematically trying to work the local, regional and national press than is being done. Because every time there is a breakthrough and you get an op-ed or you get on a radio or TV show, you are reaching that many more people. "One of the reasons there are more right-wingers in the media is because they systematically really work the press and talk-show circuit -- not just because of the bias. They're always promoting themselves systematically to editors, talk-show bookers and producers, and the left, in general, doesn't do that. "Yes, although FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) has been distributing lists of progressive experts to the media and held large demonstrations in front of the major network headquarters yesterday [January 30] in New York. "Yes, there are exceptions and FAIR, obviously, is a good one. But I think we have a long way to go, although I think FAIR would say that they are having some success. The left doesn't put enough resources into media, whether it's promoting left ideas in the mainstream media, supporting progressive media and public relations institutions, or thinking big and creating new programs and stations with large audiences. What about the major oil companies' role in this war? It has struck me that we have had five months of pre-game coverage, so to speak, and I've seen virtually nothing in the major media about the history of the oil companies and their involvement in the Mideast and how they helped to set up the borders there. "In general, we have to assume that there is always a general historical amnesia in the media coverage. And when it's not historical amnesia it's the rewriting of history, so what you get isn't the reality of history anyway. It's kind of packaged propaganda. "An interesting illustration is that in all of the attention to Norman Schwarzkopf, there have been a few references to the fact that his father, Norman, Sr., was requested by the US government to go and help the Shah of Iran set up his police force in the 40s. And then, at least according to the Washington Post, he went back to Iran in 1953 and helped in the CIA coup against Mossadegh which reinstated the Shah's dictatorship. The point is that this information is presented in talking about how Norman, Jr., spent a year in Iran when he was a kid, had a great adventure and got introduced to Mideast culture. Not that his father was instrumental in setting up this terror force. The connection with your question about the oil companies is that there is also no mention that the coup was at the behest of British and US oil companies. "This indicates to me that the oil companies are so powerful that this information is being suppressed. "Even worse than that is the assumption that it is "our oil." There's no challenging of the idea that the US, the West in general, has the right to control either the flow of that oil or the price at which it flows. Of course, you would never have the opposite being accepted where, let's say, the Ethiopians would say, "That is our grain in the United States" or someone else saying "That's our coal." So you have this assumption at the level of the media and at the level of the US public (even leaving aside the power of the oil companies), "That's our oil and we have a right to oppose anyone who messes with the supply." "What do you think that people can do to counter this kind of propaganda and disinformation, both in their own lives and in their communities? "Well, I've already talked about more systematically promoting our views in the mass media and extending the reach of alternative media. I think people can, on the one hand, do everything they can to point to the hypocrisy of the US involvement -- the US says it's rushing to liberate Kuwait, to defend Kuwaiti sovereignty but at the same time it's supporting materially the Israeli occupation of part of Lebanon and the West Bank. Hypocrisy in terms of the US invasion of Grenada, the US invasion of Panama, and the U.S. bombing of Libya. And when it comes to terrorist bombing, one should remind people about what Seymour Hersh and others have proven was an attempt to assassinate Khadafi by bombing the capitol of another country. "In drawing out this hypocrisy, we can learn to be more complex -- just because the US is hypocritical, that doesn't mean the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait is justified. Two wrongs don't make a right. So I think you can say the US was hypocritical in its role and also that its objectives aren't the ones that are stated. The US is using this to not only recapture its influence in the Middle East, but to expand that influence vis-a-vis not just the Arabs -- who should be running sovereign countries -- but the Europeans and the Japanese. This is really the US's way to reestablish the idea that the US must be the leader of the so-called post-Cold War free world because the post-Cold War order is not going to be one of diplomacy and international law, but one which will continue to rest on US military power, but this time in a one superpower world. And that the economic power of Japan and of Europe will always be subject to this US military power. "So, I think that people can be trying to draw out the larger picture, the historical picture, the hypocrisy and so forth. But not fall into the trap of simply saying "US troops out now" and saying that it's nobody's business or only Arab business if a country invades or annexes another country. Rather, we should be saying it is the world's business just like it should be with Israeli occupation or South Africa in Namibia or Angola, with the US in Grenada and Panama, and so on. So what we want to be saying is that now is the time, truly, for an international order based on international law in which the United Nations acts effectively, not just under a West-dominated Security Council but through the General Assembly where all countries can more democratically determine U.N. actions. An international order in which the World Court is employed regularly and its decisions respected by large powers even when they lose cases (as with U.S. losing to Nicaragua). An international order in which genuine diplomacy, sanctions, and peace-keeping replace double-standard police-keeping. The other very important thing is to not define this anti-war movement -- as was too often the case with the anti-intervention movements of the 80s -- as separate from domestic struggles. Keep reminding people of both the home front of this war, in terms of how this is going to drain even more resources and more attention away from dealing with a United States that is number one militarily but is number 22, in global terms, in infant mortality. A United States where average wages have dropped 17 percent since 1973, rising homelessness, all of this. We should say that this is all part of one picture and ask people to see themselves as not part of just an anti-war movement but a movement to create a better society which will involve looking for peaceful solutions to problems and searching for economic and environmental security. And not seeing the American Dream dissolving into Top Gun as it's doing now. Keeping those connections is very important. And just to add to that, and not in a superficial way either, but in a fundamentally integrated way. "And one other propaganda thing that has struck me a lot as a rather disgusting wave of the future. We all know that the Pentagon is a real master of euphemisms but what I think is happening in this war is that you have the weaponry described in more human terms than people. So you have "smart" missiles and "Patriot" missiles, but you have civilian casualties being called "collateral damage." They talk about killing tanks but they don't really talk about killing people. "Yeah, I think it was Colin Powell who, a few days ago when describing US strategy, said, "We will kill it." He didn't say, "kill them." "Right. "So it must be a fairly conscious use of words, that they're coached to do. "I think so. And again, the stories are going to come out later, little by little, as they did in Grenada or in Panama, about civilian casualties and what the toll is among soldiers on both sides. But again, the first impression will tend to crowd out what happens later. Or by the time that you hear about it later, I guess they count on the fact that people will be so upset about US casualties that they won't care. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Sklar Intv (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 23, Reporter's Rountable (Part 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.23 **/ ** Written 12:53 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Reporter's Rountable (Part 1 of 2) *** Truth--the First Casualty of War? Excerpts from a Media Alliance Forum --"Media Coverage of the War in the Gulf and the Dissent Back Home" January 31, 1991 - New College, San Francisco Participants: Jeff Cohen -- Executive Director, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) Tom De Vries -- KRON-TV News Reporter (NBC affiliate in San Francisco) Judy Coburn -- Former war correspondent and UC Berkeley mass media lecturer Bill Wallace -- San Francisco Chronicle reporter Moderator: Reese Erlich, KQED-FM media commentator Opening Statements: Tom DeVries: I rarely see the audiences I talk to. I don't mind, but it's an unusual experience. No one's satisfied with the media. I think that's true with anyone who works in it as well as with the people who have watched the coverage of the war and the protests on both sides or all sides of the war in the last few weeks. There are no perfect children, there are no perfect works of art, and there are no perfect souffles, either. The fact is just because you can't get a perfect souffle doesn't mean you should turn down perfectly good scrambled eggs, and if you're alternative is starving to death you're a fool. The coverage of this war has been extraordinary. In my working life I've not seen anything like it. That doesn't mean to say that it's perfect, but the fact that you have criticism, some of it well-informed, means that you are well-informed and that there's a lot of information out there. In some cases there may be too much information rather than too little. We talk about protest coverage and then coverage of the war, and we're acquainted with the protest coverage, I've done a lot more of it. I can't imagine there's anyone in the United States at this moment who does not know that there is substantial protest to the conduct of the war and to the policy that led to it. The media has covered the protests, in some cases overdone parts of the coverage of that protest. I've heard a number of criticisms, friends of mine have approached me, people have called me, strangers have hit on me in the street, and I'll surely hear more of that tonight. There's argument, for example, about the numbers at the protests, just pick one. A colleague of mine says that the switchboard lights up at the station whenever we broadcast the numbers of people estimated at the Saturday demonstration. There were 60,000 according to police, 200,000 according to the protest organizers. The protest is valid whether one person believes it or 100,000 believe it. If you're arguing over numbers, you're missing the point. I'm bewildered by it. Both of those numbers are reported on the air, and they're both valid, is one number to be suppressed? I'm bewildered by it, and I'm bewildered by the focus on the numbers. Seems to me to miss the point. There is a lot of criticism about the focus and the emphasis on the violence in the demonstrations. A friend of mine who's here tonight says, "if there's a daisy field and a car accident, everybody looks at the accident." " If you and I are standing on the street and on one side of the street there are 1,000 people singing " "Give Peace a Chance" " and holding little candles in paper cups, and on the other side of the street there are 150 people throwing burning trash barrels through a department store window, what will we look at? And why would I be any different, or should I be any different, than everybody else who's in this room? It's my job to represent the public, the public would look at the violence, that's what I do. And I'd be fired if I didn't, and if you did my job and you didn't look at the violence, you would be fired too, and you should be. There's been criticism that there's been too much establishment in terms of the war and in terms of the policy around the war. My answer to that is, if you want to get as much attention as the President, elect one. The media is not here to compensate for the electoral incompetence of the American public. Most of the choices in covering demonstrations are logistical. They are not political. There are basic political decisions made, but the idea that somehow the owners of the network of which my station is affiliated, Genereal Electric, a member of the military-industrial complex, and the news management at my station, let alone me, have meetings or even talk to each other during the course of a demonstration is ludicrous. Most of the demonstrations are covered by people like myself and the photographers and the other reporters who at increasing and considerable risk, work on the streets. There has been an exchange, I don't know that this has been formalized, it may strike you and it strikes me as Faustian, but there has been a deal. And the deal in the coverage of this war, and it's only recently kind of struck me in these terms, is a trade of depth for immediacy. There has never been, and maybe should have never been, such an immediately covered war as this. It is being covered in real time. In Vietnam, we had 24 hours to think about what went on the air before it went on the air. The film was flown to Hong Kong, processed, flown to New York, there was sometimes 24, sometimes 48 hours involved. There is no time now, we are informed and watch the bombs fall. That exchange costs something. I'm not sure it was a good exchange, but as Jerry Brown said a long time ago, '"I didn't say it was a good idea, I just said it happened.' I want to point out something about that exchange, in regards to the Vietnam War, which surely for most of us was the benchmark in terms of coverage of war. The investigative reporting, which has been considerably romanticized in the time since the war ended, that most stands out is Mai Lai. Mai Lai was covered by a man who was not in Vietnam, he was in Washington. And it was done years after the fact. The fact that the war's being covered doesn't mean we'll never find out what would happen, and the fact that it isn't being covered doesn't mean we have a chance at figuring it out. In other words, I don't think you're being denied anything. I want to say one other thing. There were 161 homicides in Oakland last year, I know because I attended many of them. I've seen pictures of them, I have them on my desk, and I have never run pictures of those homicides. Certain kinds of grief and pain are private and do not belong on television. The fact that you are being denied certain pictures and reports in this war is not necessarily a mistake, it may be the right thing to do. Some things don't belong on TV, and the loss and the pain and the grief of this war, and the people who are compelled to fight it, is real, and should be protested just as much, and be felt just as deeply, whether you see the pictures or not, and the masturbatory fantasies of wanting to see the gore is a mistake. Jeff Cohen: I was told not to rebut, but I should stipulate that I didn't agree with a lot of what I heard but I really respect Tom for coming and giving his opinion. For me, Dennis Miller, the comedic anchor person of Saturday Night Live hit it right the first Saturday after the war began, he said, "you know who I really feel sorry for? It's the one retired colonel who didn't get a job this week on network TV." Tom Brokaw is not the comedic anchor-person on NBC, he's the straight anchor-person, and he said a day into the war after having introduced a retired army colonel, "there's a fairness doctrine in play here, and now I'm going to turn to a retired Navy admiral." The fact is that FAIR has documented in the past during peacetime in our studies of Nightline and MacNeil-Lehrer, and as we've been tallying up the numbers during war-time during the Persian Gulf War, it has been a steady, one-sided stream of propaganda from the conservative elite. Because of the censorship by all of the governments in the region, clearly the news that is coming back from the front is coming in dribs and drabs, and what national television has done, since they have extended coverage, is they filled that time by giving us the think tanks. There's a lot of think tanks in Washington, the one you hear all the time on television is the Center for Strategic and International Studies. There's obviously one you don't hear on television, that's the Institute for Policy Studies, that's on the other side of the political spectrum, the progressive side of the spectrum and it's virtually censored from national TV. They have a phone number, they can be found, but they aren't found by the networks. You have your columnists William Safire and George Will who are getting a whole lot of play, as well as all of the retired colonels. For balance what's happening is they're bringing on Democrats like Solarz and Les Aspin who support the war even more strongly than Bush. There are a lot of experts, we advocate for them, we say they could give you another point of view if you're really interested in diversity and a full debate about what's going on, there are these other experts and here's their phone numbers, and yet these people never seem to make it on the air, or if they do it's once every half year. One individual I have in mind is Daniel Ellsburg. He was called by ABC a week into the war when Cheney was doing a press briefing and was told when the limousine would pick him up and take him to the studio so he could be on the panel. Ellsburg was truly impressed, he feels he's got a lot to say, because during Vietnam he used to prepare Secretary of Defense McNamara to meet the press. So it's natural, I believe, if you are a TV network looking for perspective to be brought on the news, that you would bring Ellsburg to talk about Cheney right after he has briefed the press. At the last minute, Ellsburg was disinvited. It happened to him a few times in a period of 24 hours, and the panel that ultimately analyzed Cheney's press briefing on ABC was made up of Anthony Cordesman, their paid military consultant, Senator Orrin Hatch, and Judith Kipper from the Brookings Institution, she's sort of an establishment centrist. All these people have a right to be on national television, so does Ellsburg. Ellsburg is the one who's being censored. The Ellsburgs are not allowed to come and talk with the " "experts," and there are so many independent experts that are independent or critical, there's Noam Chomsky, there's Edward Said, there's Rashid Kahlidi from the University of Chicago, it's obvious who these independent experts are, and they appear so rarely on television as we've had this steady parade. You can, however, find Daniel Ellsburg on television, if you watch anti-war marches out in the streets that I liken to nature footage. They bring the leaders and the foreign policy experts that are sympathetic to the movement into the anchor booth where the real experts are dispassionately telling you what's happening. But they will show you fleeting seconds of sensational footage of Dan Ellsburg or others chanting, singing, marching. And the reason it's nature footage is that it's always outdoors, they're not allowed to come in, and it's activists shown in their apparent natural habitat. I think the fact that the debate is so narrow, the main criticism that FAIR has of the media is that we can document, week after week, whether it's war or peace, though it's worse during war, that the debate going on in the country is always broader than the debate that goes on in the media, and there's always certain points of view that don't make it on to the national debate, and we know what point of view that is. I want to finish with the San Francisco Chronicle from today. It's not enough that people grumble to each other about media coverage, when you see something like this, you should be addressing your complaints to the Chronicle. This is today's page two, it's the article about the protest at UC Berkeley yesterday which I attended as part of that teach-in, here was a situation where there were nearly 1,000 people at an anti-war rally, a dozen or two young Republicans joined from the other point of view, and the tiny minority got the headline "War Backers March on UC Protest." They also seem to get the photo, and they got the caption, "A few students backing the Gulf War . . .", and in the article the only one allowed to explain whether they are pro-war or anti-war was a pro-war person. When you take a minority issue and you make that the main thrust of your story and the main thrust of your headline, what you are doing is you're taking reality and turning it upside down. The equivalent would be taking one of those votes where Ronald Dellums and ten people are in a very distinct minority, and instead of telling the truth in the headline and saying "Congress Overwhelmingly Passes War Measure" you wrote "Dellums Takes on Congress." This should be criticized tomorrow by anyone who's got a pen or typewriter. End, Reporter's Roundtable (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 24, Reporter's Roundtable (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.24 **/ ** Written 12:54 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Reporter's Roundtable (Part 2 of 2) Moderator: Our next panelist is Judy Coburn. Judy is a free-lance magazine writer, she's covered wars in Vietnam, in the Middle East, and in Central America. She's written for publications as diverse as the Village Voice and the New York Times, she's also done broadcast reporting for PBS and Pacifica and she's currently a lecturer in mass communications at UC Berkeley. Judy Coburn: I feel a little bit like all the reporters in the Gulf who work for television stations who have to reduce that extremely complicated situation to one or two minute reports because we've only been given five minutes here. As a result I really think I can't get into what I hope to talk about, which is what it's like to actually be a war correspondent, and how much the conditions and the state of mind that you're in effect coverage. I think that's something that anybody who hasn't done it wouldn't have an understanding of. What I think I'll do instead of that is to make a few comments, if it's possible to say that I agree with the things Jeff has said and many of the things Tom has said. This may also be a little bit hard to explain. I think that what we have here is very one-sided coverage from the mainstream media. It seems to me that they've bought the Administration's view of things. My favorite metaphor is from George Lakoff, a linguist at Berkeley who's an expert in metaphors, and he says that the Administration metaphor is essentially the fairytale of the just war. You've got a hero, that's Bush, Schwartzkopf, etc. You have a villain, that's obviously Hussein. The victim is a little hard to get straight, the Administration keeps changing it, they tried out the industrialized world driven to its knees by the cut-off of Kuwaiti oil, the rape of Kuwait. An interesting exploitation of a word that's much in the news from the feminist point of view. That didn't wash too well, they tried that back in the fall, and polls were pretty much split, people didn't seem to feel the industrial world is on its knees as a result of Kuwait being taken. So then they went to something that generally does appeal to many Americans, and we can scoff at it, but the idea of Kuwait as a victim, another country being overrun, that seems to have sold better. So you basically have the pro-war people, the Administration, and most of the mainstream media with some individual exceptions, going for that one. But I'd also like to introduce the idea that much of the left, the alternative press, is in the grip of something that's equally simplistic, and that is the myth of the unjust war. Here you have the villain, Bush, often the Israelis, and so on, and I think that Hussein is sometimes seen as the hero. I've been fairly disturbed by a sin of omission at the protest demonstrations, who this guy is is simply unacknowledged, but we can all get into debates about this. But what I'd like to really talk about and encourage people to do is to abandon this kind of simplistic thinking. I think that the press should do it, right, left and center. Jeff has done a very, very good job of talking about how one-sided the mainstream media is, and asked to follow him because I would have made, perhaps less eloquently, some of the same points. I hear things on the alternative media that disturb me just as much, and I want to be very clear that I'm adding this on to the things Jeff said, I'm not criticizing the alternative press more than I am the mainstream press. On Pacifica, my old employers, the love of my life, I heard two days after the first Scud missles hit Israel, "well," said an extremely well-known Pacifica commentator, "if the mainstream media were in Iraq, they wouldn't be showing any pictures of Iraqi civilians." Now, that's just not true. Peter Arnett is hustling his ass off, and if anyone else could get in they, too, would be hustling their ass off to cover this kind of thing. That's just very simplistic. This morning on Pacifica, I heard someone say, discussing this panel after we did a little promo on it, "well, of course Tom De Vries will defend Channel 4's coverage, which has been scandalous." Both Reese and I said, not necessarily, he's done some very good reporting himself, and this Pacifica reporter said, "well, it's his job to defend Channel 4." " And I thought, wait a second. How about the idea that Tom De Vries has his own moral journalistic commitments, and his own opinions, which you might disagree with. It seems to me that's exactly the kind of thinking the Administration is engaged in about Hussein. Why do we know nothing about the Iraqis? Because it seems to me that very few of the press, or any of the policy makers, seem to be spending any time, or have the slightest inclination, to get into the heads of what's going on with the Iraqis. It seems to me that the best reporting is informed by an attempt to understand. I've made many mistakes on behalf of my ideological views, in fact the biggest mistakes I've made in 25 years as being a journalist, has always been out of a kind of political rage or ideological commitment. I think the best press coverage I have seen have been people who are really trying to understand all sides. Here we come to the things I like about Pacifica. I agree with Jeff that there have been very few leftist experts that we've heard on the air, but the ones we have seem to me have gotten into this trap which we get into often in war coverage, or crisis coverage, and that is there's black and there's white, good guys and bad guys. But we hear Michael Klare, a leftist military analyst, who actually uttered many times in this hour long interview, the phrase "I don't know." Experts never say they don't know. Or "it's not clear." " Tonight on NPR there was a fabulous report on the oil slicks in which the reporters said "these facts seem to suggest that perhaps the Iraqis maybe let the oil slicks develop, this set of facts suggests perhaps some bombing did it, there's this slick, there's that slick, in fact we don't know.' " So again, don't be afraid to not know. Just to run through a couple of other quick articles that I liked, that I think are informed by an attempt to understand, and an attempt to be compassionate, the best stuff that I've read on the Iraqis -- " what is the challenge right now, get into the head of the Iraqis -- " Jane Kramer's piece in the New Yorker on Salman Rushdie. Here she is, writing a piece, getting completely into the heads of the young Muslim intellectuals who want to kill Salman Rushdie. Jane Kramer's a writer, surely she doesn't support people who want to kill another writer. It's a brilliant piece. Milton Viorst, a very pro-Israeli writer, from my point of view, writing in the New Yorker, about his trip with Jesse Jackson to Iraq last fall, and simply writing down without intervening himself with any comments whatsoever, what Hussein and foreign minister Aziz said to Jesse Jackson. John Hockenberry of NPR, a very compassionate voice out of Israel, I have a feeling about this guy that if you dropped him down in the front lines of the Marines tomorrow he would do compassionate reporting about what's going on with them and how they feel; if you took him the next week to Iraq he'd do the same thing. That's the kind of reporting I'm looking for, and I think that it's just as important for people who are critical of the media to talk about the things that they like, to give those kinds of examples to media people rather than just getting into saying that the media is everybody's enemy. Moderator: Bill Wallace is not responsible for editorial decisions at the San Francisco Chronicle. He did say that he would be willing to comment on articles in the Chronicle as a news consumer. On the January 26 edition of the Chronicle, there was a Washington Post story that was reprinted, and the headline was "Saddam's Wife: Mystery Woman With a Grudge." The first few lines: " she's a clothes-horse, she's a bottle-blonde, she's a jealous wife with a good reason. She's Mrs. Saddam Hussein. Veiled mystery, totally overshadowed, a woman we hear nothing about." My question to Bill and the other panelists is, would such an article ever be published about the wife of a Saudi Arabian king or a Kuwaiti emir? Bill Wallace: That story reminded me of the Lynda Barry poster " "Poodle with a Mohawk." I'm at something of a loss to decide how some of the wire service copy is selected for publication. We've run two stories in recent weeks from the L.A. Times talking about terrorists loose in the United States, and terrorists in the Phillipines. I had problems with those stories, because I felt that if I had been the person that had written them they wouldn't have met standards that we would hope that a reporter from the Chronicle would adhere to. I didn't see the kind of evidence that made me believe that the stories were worth the kind of space that were given to them, certainly not in the L.A. Times. They were pretty much buried in the Chronicle, but we ran them anyway. Sometimes the selection of wire service copy really is a mystery to me, I don't know how the process works, and I haven't had a chance to really discuss it with people. I have to admit that when some of these stories appear I find them as baffling as anyone else. Jeff Cohen: I have a baffling wire service story that appeared in today's Chronicle. "Public not Braced for War Loss, Some Say." Who are the main sources in the article? Les Aspin. "I think we have expectations that are unrealistic," said Aspin, the war so far has been "essentially devoid of casualties," creating a "standard impossible to match," he said. What's interesting about this one is, Les Aspin telling us we shouldn't be overly optimistic? The article that should have run in today's Chronicle and should have gone out over the AP wire is an article that basically says "Les Aspin, totally wrong in his predictions that helped get us into this war." I'm holding now a New York Times article from January 9. Les Aspin appeared during the week before the war began, on virtually every single network every day. This is what he was saying when he played the pivotal role along with David Solarz in getting Bush the votes he needed. This is the tune he was singing back then, "Aspin said a sustained ground attack would be used as a last resort, and would come in the final phase. Mr. Aspin said the U.S. has a good chance of scoring a rapid victory, one that could be achieved in less than a month. Casualties could be in the range of 3 to 5 thousand including 500 to 1,000 dead." To me, the article that should have appeared in the Chronicle is, "Les Aspin, are you going to explain your error and how gung-ho you were when now you've totally turned around?" Bill Wallace: Very often in print media, one thing that is missing is any kind of a context to the story, and in this case if Aspin had been running for President, and he said something like this one week and two weeks later he had said something else, then it would be all over the paper, "so and so flip flops on war effort." " I don't know whether that context was actually in the AP story, I suspect we may have run a version of the New York Times story where he said there was going to be a quick end to the war. Very often when these things are put into the paper, somebody scans over them, takes a 15 or 25 paragraph story, puts it into a space, and that's the end of it. You never see what should have been in there. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Reporter's Roundtable, (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 25, "Disinformation, or The Progress of Lying" by donald Lazere (Paret 1 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.25 **/ ** Written 12:56 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Disinformation (Part 1 0f 2) Disinformation, or, the Progress of Lying by Donald Lazere Donald Lazere is a professor at Cal Poly at San Luis Obispo. *** In Some Versions of Pastoral, William Empson summarized a central theme in Jonathan Swift: "Everything spiritual and valuable has a gross and revolting parody, very similar to it, with the same name. Only unremitting judgement can distinguish between them." Swift was especially concerned with lying as a gross parody of language's accurate reflection of reality; thus the virtuous Houyhnhnms in Gulliver's Travels have neither the conception of nor a name for "lie." Swift's foremost twentieth century descendant, George Orwell, was similarly preoccupied with the semantics of lying. The function of doublethink in 1984 is to turn the meaning of words upside down; i.e., ""War Is Peace," ""Freedom Is Slavery," to the point where language is unmoored from reality and a confused populace no longer notices the disparity between words and their referents. Thus control of language leads beyond thought control to "reality control." Neither Swift nor Orwell would have been surprised by the late twentieth century refinement on semantic reality control known as "disinformation." This term was popularized in the 1980 novel The Spike, by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, a widely praised bestseller; Ronald Reagan was among its fans, and it served as a campaign tract in Reagan's unseating of Jimmy Carter. Disinformation, or "black propaganda," is the dissemination, not of simple propaganda presenting one's own side favorably, but of fabricated information calculated to smear, harass, and subvert the other side such as " "dirty tricks" in the Nixon Watergate team's lexicon or to obscure the truth about one's own misdeeds by substituting a false account attributing the same misdeeds to the other side; the two accounts are so similar that it becomes virtually impossible for outsiders to distinguish the valuable original from the revolting parody. In The Spike, disinformation is the invention of, and is used exclusively by, the Russian KGB and other members of the worldwide Communist conspiracy. As it is explained by the fictional KGB head:"The key to a successful disinformation operation is to start with a kernel, or kanva, of truth. Around that, you weave your fabric of falsehood. If you want to discredit true information, for example, the best way to do it is to circulate reports that are superficially similar, but can easily be shown to be false." The Spike is in the genre of docudrama, a purported inside history of American politics from the Sixties through the Seventies whose events and messages are meant to be taken as truth and whose fictional characters are meant to be identified with real life figures. It tells the story of a massive Soviet plot to win the Cold War by infiltrating American government, media, universities, and think tanks with KGB agents using disinformation among myriad insidious tactics. The plot is ultimately foiled by the exposs of reporter Robert Hockney, a surrogate for de Borchgrave and Moss, in spite of efforts by his editors at the New York World (the Times), who are of course KGB dupes, to "spike," or suppress, the story. Ads for The Spike proclaimed, "They don't want you to read this book; the Soviet KGB, the 'liberal' news media, the American literary establishment." The Spike itself, however, is the ultimate exercise in disinformation. It is a gross and revolting parody of the exposs of the Watergate years, in which all of the damaging revelations about the Johnson and Nixon administrations -- Vietnam, the CIA and FBI, illicit Americans actions in Chile and elsewhere abroad -- are stood on their head and transformed into the fictitious disgrace of the Carter ("Billy Connor") administration by revelations of its control by the KGB. (Cold War hardliners had it in for Carter because of his timid efforts to restrain the intelligence agencies and to enforce human rights guidelines in U.S. relationships with right wing dictatorships closely allied with the CIA.) In real life, Agnew was forced to resign; therefore, in the novel the vice president modeled on Mondale must be forced to resign, exposed as a KGB dupe. (He is replaced by the book's political hero, the ardent anticommunist Senator Seamus O'Reilly, Daniel Moynihan.) In real life, several newspapers and think tanks were revealed to be CIA fronts or to have printed the work of CIA plants unknowingly, like the New York Times; therefore, the "New York World" and the left wing "Institute for Progressive Reform" in Washington have to be KGB fronts. (This was such an obvious smear on the real life Institute for Policy Studies that the name and the city where its European branch is located had to be changed in the paperback edition to avoid a libel suit.) Any necessity to support the novel's allegations about the real IPS is sidestepped with Orwellian elegance by having the KGB head tell an agent, "It is imperative that it remain impossible for anyone to prove a direct organizational link between ourselves and the Institute. Most of the people who will be drawn into the orbit of the Institute will come because they see it as a more effective way of expressing opposition to the system of government that dragged America into Vietnam than the revolt on the streets and on the campuses." Fictional counterparts for virtually everyone who has exposed real life, right wing abuses must make appearances in the novel as KGB agents or dupes not only Ramparts and Philip Agee, but Senator Frank Church and reporters like Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam. The Spike's ideology is "The World According to G. Gordon Liddy." Its central theme is voiced by the author's raisonneur, a CIA director purged by the comsymps, who ""in the years of Watergate and the antiwar uprisings came to feel that he was witnessing the vindication of a lifetime's distrust of open government. Flower felt little sympathy for Nixon, but he knew that the assault on the presidency would not leave unscathed the other institutions on which national survival depended. Even to place those institutions under question (inherently undemocratic as they were) was, Flower believed, to open the way to their destruction. Democracy, like Vietnamese villages, must be destroyed to save it from Communism and Freedom is Slavery. That The Spike was taken seriously in reputable intellectual circles, not only as a political statement but as literature, is itself Orwellian. Its narration and description are amateurish, its characterization and dialogue on the level of a comic book. Lurid and clichd sex scenes are tossed in every few pages to attract the Jackie Collins market. The purportedly factual material in it is as fanciful as the fiction. The opening line erroneously places the bell tower on the Berkeley campus in Sproul Plaza. (The authors' mastery of California geography is further demonstrated in a reference later on to "Malibu, south of LosAngeles.") The first two paragraphs contain at least four more factual errors about Berkeley in the Sixties that obviously reflect sloppy research rather than any conceivable fictional purpose; for example, the People's Park episode mentioned as already having taken place in 1967 happened in 1969. And demonstrators are said to have given LSD-laced oranges to National Guardsmen at People's Park; this never happened. One's response after this opening is that the book must either be a joke or a KGB disinformation project to disgrace the right wing viewpoint ostensibly espoused by the authors. An additional Orwellian dimension to The Spike involves its authors' identities. De Borchgrave is a super hawkish journalist who was Newsweek's chief foreign correspondent for 16 years and is currently editor in chief of the Moonie Washington Times. His laudatory interview with and other writings about the Shah of Iran were clouded by a New York Times report in 1979 quoting the former head of the protocol section of the Iranian press office under the Shah as saying that the Iranian government had given substantial gifts to several Western reporters in return for favorable articles; the reporters included de Borchgrave, who allegedly received a pair of rugs worth $10,000 each, and Moss. (In The Spike, this episode is accounted for when Robert Hockney, the author's fictional alter ego, publishes an article in " "Reader's Companion" -- exposing Russian complicity in the overthrow of the Shah, which triggered off a savage smear campaign. The radical gossip sheet [sic] made out that he had been on the Shah's payroll. End, Disinformation (Part 1 of 2) Next, Response 26, Disinformation (Part 2 of 2) ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.26 **/ ** Written 12:58 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Disinformation (Part 2 of 2) Moss appears to have pursued on four continents a thriving career of disseminating right wing disinformation about Communist plots. The New York Times and the libertarian Inquiry magazine have reported that Moss in the early Seventies was working with a Chilean think tank, the Institute of General Studies, a CIA front that fabricated stories based on forged documents about Communist plots to nationalize the Chilean truckers (this helped set off a national truckers' strike also indirectly financed by the CIA, as the Church Committee hearings confirmed) and to infiltrate the armed forces; these became key events in the subversion of the Allende government and its replacement by the rightwing Pinochet dictatorship. The London Guardian in 1976 published correspondence indicating that Moss's 1973 book Chile's Marxist Experiment was financed by the CIA, which chose him to write it, provided the title and an outline, and paid for his trip to Chile. The Spike's jacket carries an endorsement by Richard Helms, former director of the CIA convicted of perjury for covering up his and the CIA's role in Chile. After the coup in 1973, Moss moved to England, where he wrote speeches for Margaret Thatcher and worked with an English counterpart of the Institute of General Studies called the Institute for the Study of Conflict, which had similar ties to British and American intelligence agencies, writing stories about a Russian master plan to sovietize England by 1985. He next turned up in Nicaragua, where according to ABC-TV, he was paid $40,000 a year by Somoza as editor of a propaganda news weekly. It is a shame that Swift and Orwell were not around to comment when the conservative media critics who call themselves Accuracy in Media designated Moss as "the finest investigative reporter of our era." Since The Spike appeared, De Borchgrave and Moss have not only published several fictional sequels but have combined their efforts with fellow conservatives in circles close to the CIA and National Security Council in the Reagan administration for further exercises in journalistic disinformation. Their main line has been that a "world terror network" is being orchestrated by the Soviet KGB; spinoffs have included the claim that Mehmet Ali Agca was acting as a Bulgarian KGB agent in attempting to assassinate Pope John Paul II, and that Kaddafi of Libya had dispatched a terrorist team to the United States to assassinate President Reagan. Each of these stories was granted initial credence by the New York Times and other influential media, but each in turn has been revealed to be a fabrication of the Moss/De Borchgrave network. As for the actual influence of Russian disinformation on American politics and media, there has been little hard evidence of it. Jeff Stein, in the libertarian journal Inquiry (December 29, 1980), interviewed a prime source for CIA claims, Ladislav Bittman, a former chief of propaganda for Czech intelligence who was unable to name a single story reported in the American press attributable to Communist disinformation. Indeed, Bittman said, "American culture and American business have so penetrated most of the world that the Soviets do not have much of a chance. American money talks. Even TV Guide, an organ of Nixon/Reagan conservatism under the long- time ownership of Walter Annenberg, in a cover story (June 12-16, 1982) with lurid visuals of Brezhnev, Castro, and Kaddafi and the headline, " Why American TV is So Vulnerable to Foreign Disinformation," lamely concluded about Moss and De Borchgrave's charges, "These claims have never been proved" and,"According to David Halevy [a Time foreign correspondent] and many others, there is no concrete proof that TV news has become the dupe of a massive Soviet disinformation campaign." In verified cases of Americans acting as agents for Communist or other foreign governments, they have usually turned out to be ostensible conservatives who did it for that prime principle of free enterprise, the money. Moss and De Borchgrave's unique contribution to the disinformation industry has been to extend it to literature, as well as to literary criticism. If I write that The Spike is an abominable novel, I am apt to be branded as a KGB agent conducting "a savage smear campaign." Robert Moss himself turned literary critic in reviewing the book Assassination On Embassy Row, by John Dinges and Saul Landau, in the National Review in 1982. That book was an account of the murder of pro-Allende Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1981, alleging that the killers were agents of Pinochet's secret police, an allegation later confirmed by the assassins' confession and conviction. Not only Moss but National Review editor William F. Buckley and his brother, then Senator James Buckley, had close ties to the Pinochet government; the journal had published several articles denying any Pinochet involvement in the assassination and predictably speculating that Letelier may have been killed by "a left wing Chilean group intent on disrupting Chile's relations with the United States." Moss, the Harold Robbins of disinformational literature, simply mimicked left reviews of The Spike in describing Assassination on Embassy Row with phrases like "sloppily written, jargon-loaded, and as well organized as a mangrove swamp . . . this awesomely bad book . . . this use of the vocabulary of the political gutter." The technique of parroting the other side's language is childishly simple, but it and similar refinements of disinformation can be fiendishly effective in creating a dizzying hall of mirrors. Propagandists like Moss and De Borchgrave can cover up their own disinformational activities simply by claiming that the KGB is fabricating the disinformation that their claims are disinformation. It scarcely matters whether one side is telling the truth or both are lying, since either way the air waves of public opinion have been jammed to the point where it is virtually impossible to distinguish truth from lies. Prior to the age of disinformation, conflicting accounts of the facts could best be resolved through empirical evidence gathered by independent scholars or journalists. Now, however, special interests with the resources to do so have learned that they can hire ostensibly reputable researchers to produce duplicate studies whose findings are rigged to contradict any independent findings unfavorable to those interests. Since both the media and large segments of the academic world have come to accept the research of corporate or government-sponsored think tanks and journalists as legitimate, and since independent researchers are unlikely to have the time and resources to investigate the validity of the sponsored research, the effect is once again that no one can tell the valuable original from the revolting parody. In an atmosphere where anything or nothing might be true, the public's tendency is to surrender in confused apathy to whoever controls the language and thus controls reality. To a certain extent, of course, critical judgment is bound to be subjective and ideologically biased. Conservatives can probably dispute the truth of every allegation I have made here or counter with equally damning allegations against the left, with justice in some cases. It is precisely the subjectivity fact or that disinformation deliberately exploits to throw reality up for grabs. The skepticism implicit in these vicious circles of polemics leads toward the dismal swamp of deconstructionist theory. At this stage, our only lifeline to sanity can be our firsthand experience of events. If you have witnessed deliberate distortions of your own or others' actions, statements, or writings, as I have on numerous occasions, you know who the liars are. It is always possible, of course, that you are crazy, and you come to understand all too well Swift's decline into dementia from despair of distinguishing reality from gross parody. Even if you are sane, however, there may be no way you can convince anyone else that you are, or are not lying. This is the ultimate evil unloosed from the pandora's box devised by progenitors of disinformation like Moss and De Borchgrave. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Disinformation (Part 2 of 2) Next, Response 27, Excerpts from "Unreliable Sources" ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.27 **/ ** Written 12:59 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Unreliable Sources *** Fourth Estate or Fourth Branch of Government? Excerpts from "Unreliable Sources -- a Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media" By Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon The following excerpt from Unreliable Sources -- A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, by Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, (Lyle Stuart, NY, 1990, 419 pp., $19.95) is an example of the type of in-depth analysis and reporting which fills this widely-praised book on the underlying bias and deceptive techniques of the news media. Edward Asner says in the foreward, "Unreliable Sources reveals how and why the US news media are distorting current events -- whether down the street or around the world. As media corporations grow in size and shrink in number, they are becoming more powerful and less accountable to the public. Exposing the vested interests behind this trend, the authors have provided a vital handbook for seeing through media bias. People will find themselves equipped with a set of tools for reading between the lines of news reports by newspapers, magazines, radio and television." Martin Lee is the author of Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, an investigative journalist and media critic. He is currently the publisher of Extra!, the journal of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). Norman Solomon is co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation. He is a widely published news analyst and commentator. *** The New York Times headline was just what the Nicaraguan contras needed: "Nicaraguan Rebels Say They Won Biggest Victory Over Sandinistas." Datelined Washington, the story by Bernard Trainor was based on a phone conversation with a contra source in Honduras, who claimed the contras had captured the Nicaraguan garrison at San Jose de Bocay "in their biggest victory in the six-year war." Without citing a source, Trainor asserted that "the population of the region is generally sympathetic to the contra movement." Two days later, the story crumbled. Journalists arrived at the scene and reported that while the contras hardly damaged any military targets, they did kill three children and a pregnant woman, wounded 18 civilians after spraying houses with machine gun fire, and then burned dozens of homes. Apparently these civilians were not "sympathetic to the contra movement." Where did Trainor go wrong? As usual, Trainor relied only on sources allied with the US military. That's in keeping with his background. He became the New York Times military correspondent in 1986 after a 40-year career in the Marine Corps. This was announced in a brief item, "Ex-General to Join The Times." Did it ever occur to the Times higher-ups that Trainor, a lifelong military man, might be partial to the US military establishment? By the same token, why not hire someone from Greenpeace to report on environmental issues? Or a labor organizer to report on the American workplace? Foggy Bottom Journalism Trainor is hardly the only journalist at the New York Times to travel through the revolving door that links media and government. Jack Rosenthal, editor of the Times editorial page since 1986 (and deputy editor for ten years prior to that), had been a high-ranking official in Lyndon Johnson's State Department. Leslie Gelb, another State Department veteran, edits the Times op-ed page. Gelb's former boss, ex-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, currently sits on the board of directors of the Times Company. It appears that matriculating from the State Department greatly enhances the prospects for getting a job with the Times editorial staff. Gelb took a break from the Times national security beat to serve in the Carter State Department as director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. In 1978, he helped set in motion a covert CIA program designed to get the European press to write approvingly about the neutron bomb. Government service was nothing new for Gelb, who had previously worked as a press officer for the Department of Defense. The State Department also employs journalists from other major media. NBC News correspondent Bernard Kalb was a State Department spokesperson during the Reagan administration. He resigned in a huff during the summer of 1986 when an unauthorized leak disclosed that Reagan's National Security Council had manipulated the US press by planting false information about Libyan leader Moammar Qadaffi's alleged belligerent intentions. Another PR man for Reagan's State Department was John Hughes, who subsequently took a job as an editorial columnist for the Christian Science Monitor. It's hard to tell the difference between Hughes' diatribes on Central America and State Department positions. State Propagandists US citizens don't often think of their government as promoting propaganda, but that's the acknowledged function of the Voice of America (VOA) and the United States Information Agency (USIA), both of which are subsumed within the State Department bureaucracy. The notion of serving openly as a State propagandist did not deter NBC Nightly News reporter John Chancellor from becoming VOA director during the Johnson administration. Nor did it deter Sid Davis, VOA program director under Reagan and Bush, who had been the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for NBC News. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News and columnist Carl Rowan took turns as USIA director when John F. Kennedy was President. Ironically, President Richard Nixon, an outspoken foe of the so-called liberal media, employed a number of people in his administration who ended up making it big in journalism. William Safire, Nixon's special assistant and speechwriter, became a New York Times columnist. CNN "Crossfire" and "Capital Gang" host Pat Buchanan shuttled back and forth through the revolving door, starting at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before joining Nixon's team as a Special Assistant to the President. Buchanan, a widely syndicated columnist, also served as communications director for the Reagan White House. Another news celeb with enduring fondness for Richard Nixon is Diane Sawyer. Prior to emerging as a network news star, Sawyer's professional experience consisted of a couple of years as a local TV weather forecaster in Louisville and eight years as an aide to Tricky Dick. "She had not only been a Nixon aide but a Nixon loyalist of the highest order," Peter Boyer wrote in Who Killed CBS? "When Nixon finally resigned in disgrace, she was one of the faithful on the plane that took Nixon on his long journey to San Clemente." In 1978, Sawyer began working for CBS News. A decade later, a lucrative contract lured her to ABC as co-host of "Primetime Live" with Sam Donaldson. George Will in Outer Space During the 1980 presidential campaign, commentator George Will coached candidate Reagan in preparation for his debate with Jimmy Carter -- and then praised Reagan's performance while covering the debate for ABC News without mentioning his association with the Reagan campaign team. When this fact came to light during the short-lived "Debate-gate" scandal in 1983, Will was subjected to a round of polite scolding by other journalists. But the incident didn't hurt his career; on the contrary, it enhanced his reputation among media mavens. "What brought him to outer space was exactly the thing many thought would bring him down: coaching Reagan," said Jeff Greenfield of ABC "Nightline." "To the skill and style he'd always had it added the insider magic." While quick to proclaim their independence, many reporters find it easy to empathize with Washington's concerns and are quite comfortable working for the US government. Cronyism and careerism help keep the revolving door spinning, but more important is the fact that both journalists and elected officials tend to view the world in ways that conform to the national security establishment. Within this dominant framework, personal opinions about policy specifics are less important than common biases about what constitutes legitimate "national interests." Whether conservative, moderate or liberal, mainstream journalists function within a media system dominated by government and corporate elites. Constrained by rigid institutional structures and narrow cultural assumptions, most reporters are not predisposed toward bucking the status quo. Personnel shifts between the press and government are not part of a planned conspiracy to slant the news. Nor should the brisk traffic through the revolving door be interpreted as proof that beat reporters get explicit marching orders directly from US officials. This is usually not necessary when they share similar assumptions about America's role in the world. High-level Interlocks One could city many other examples of journalists who have hitched a ride with Uncle Sam for a while. But the revolving door that matters most spins in much loftier circles, connecting big government with big media executives and upper-level management. Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson, recently retired from the board of directors of the Washington Post Company, and ex-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach currently sits on the Post board. Former cabinet-rank officials also populate the boards of other major print media, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Reader's Digest Association. (Published in 16 editions for a worldwide readership of 100 million, Reader's Digest is the most widely-circulated US-based periodical.) These high-placed executive interlocks are far more influential than job-hopping journalists who flit back and forth between politicos and the press with hardly a blink. The corporate boards of the three major television networks are studded with government power-brokers. Harold Brown, Carter's Defense Secretary, is a director of CBS, along with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. General David Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan years, is on the board of GE/NBC; so is former Attorney General William French Smith. And prior to becoming CIA Director in 1981, William Casey held sway as chief counsel and an original board member of CapCities, which gobbled up ABC early in Reagan's second term. Casey, who had been Securities and Exchange Commissioner under Nixon, continued to own $7.5 million in CapCities/ABC stock until his death in 1987. A gung-ho advocate of covert operations and a mover-and-shaker in corporate politics, Casey was part of a network of spooks who had frequently used American companies -- including mass media -- for espionage purposes. Disgruntled CIA officers disclosed that the Agency had fudged intelligence data to bolster US foreign policy initiatives when William Casey was director -- something rarely mentioned on ABC or the other corporate networks, which also worked closely with the CIA. For many years, CBS supplied cover for CIA agents posted overseas, as well as out-takes of news footage and access to its extensive photo library. General Electric, owner of NBC, was contracted by the CIA to provide estimates of Soviet military strength -- a dubious arrangement given that GE reaps huge profits from the arms race and therefore has a vested interest in perpetuating it by inflating the data. The links between the CIA and the three main TV networks are just the tip of a very spooky iceberg. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Unreliable Sources Next, Response 27, Media Missed ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.28 **/ ** Written 1:01 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Disinformation *** Fourth Estate or Fourth Branch of Government? Excerpts from "Unreliable Sources -- a Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media" By Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon The following excerpt from Unreliable Sources -- A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, by Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, (Lyle Stuart, NY, 1990, 419 pp., $19.95) is an example of the type of in-depth analysis and reporting which fills this widely-praised book on the underlying bias and deceptive techniques of the news media. Edward Asner says in the foreward, "Unreliable Sources reveals how and why the US news media are distorting current events -- whether down the street or around the world. As media corporations grow in size and shrink in number, they are becoming more powerful and less accountable to the public. Exposing the vested interests behind this trend, the authors have provided a vital handbook for seeing through media bias. People will find themselves equipped with a set of tools for reading between the lines of news reports by newspapers, magazines, radio and television." Martin Lee is the author of Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion, an investigative journalist and media critic. He is currently the publisher of Extra!, the journal of FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting). Norman Solomon is co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation. He is a widely published news analyst and commentator. *** The New York Times headline was just what the Nicaraguan contras needed: "Nicaraguan Rebels Say They Won Biggest Victory Over Sandinistas." Datelined Washington, the story by Bernard Trainor was based on a phone conversation with a contra source in Honduras, who claimed the contras had captured the Nicaraguan garrison at San Jose de Bocay "in their biggest victory in the six-year war." Without citing a source, Trainor asserted that "the population of the region is generally sympathetic to the contra movement." Two days later, the story crumbled. Journalists arrived at the scene and reported that while the contras hardly damaged any military targets, they did kill three children and a pregnant woman, wounded 18 civilians after spraying houses with machine gun fire, and then burned dozens of homes. Apparently these civilians were not "sympathetic to the contra movement." Where did Trainor go wrong? As usual, Trainor relied only on sources allied with the US military. That's in keeping with his background. He became the New York Times military correspondent in 1986 after a 40-year career in the Marine Corps. This was announced in a brief item, "Ex-General to Join The Times." Did it ever occur to the Times higher-ups that Trainor, a lifelong military man, might be partial to the US military establishment? By the same token, why not hire someone from Greenpeace to report on environmental issues? Or a labor organizer to report on the American workplace? Foggy Bottom Journalism Trainor is hardly the only journalist at the New York Times to travel through the revolving door that links media and government. Jack Rosenthal, editor of the Times editorial page since 1986 (and deputy editor for ten years prior to that), had been a high-ranking official in Lyndon Johnson's State Department. Leslie Gelb, another State Department veteran, edits the Times op-ed page. Gelb's former boss, ex-Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, currently sits on the board of directors of the Times Company. It appears that matriculating from the State Department greatly enhances the prospects for getting a job with the Times editorial staff. Gelb took a break from the Times national security beat to serve in the Carter State Department as director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. In 1978, he helped set in motion a covert CIA program designed to get the European press to write approvingly about the neutron bomb. Government service was nothing new for Gelb, who had previously worked as a press officer for the Department of Defense. The State Department also employs journalists from other major media. NBC News correspondent Bernard Kalb was a State Department spokesperson during the Reagan administration. He resigned in a huff during the summer of 1986 when an unauthorized leak disclosed that Reagan's National Security Council had manipulated the US press by planting false information about Libyan leader Moammar Qadaffi's alleged belligerent intentions. Another PR man for Reagan's State Department was John Hughes, who subsequently took a job as an editorial columnist for the Christian Science Monitor. It's hard to tell the difference between Hughes' diatribes on Central America and State Department positions. State Propagandists US citizens don't often think of their government as promoting propaganda, but that's the acknowledged function of the Voice of America (VOA) and the United States Information Agency (USIA), both of which are subsumed within the State Department bureaucracy. The notion of serving openly as a State propagandist did not deter NBC Nightly News reporter John Chancellor from becoming VOA director during the Johnson administration. Nor did it deter Sid Davis, VOA program director under Reagan and Bush, who had been the White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for NBC News. Edward R. Murrow of CBS News and columnist Carl Rowan took turns as USIA director when John F. Kennedy was President. Ironically, President Richard Nixon, an outspoken foe of the so-called liberal media, employed a number of people in his administration who ended up making it big in journalism. William Safire, Nixon's special assistant and speechwriter, became a New York Times columnist. CNN "Crossfire" and "Capital Gang" host Pat Buchanan shuttled back and forth through the revolving door, starting at the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before joining Nixon's team as a Special Assistant to the President. Buchanan, a widely syndicated columnist, also served as communications director for the Reagan White House. Another news celeb with enduring fondness for Richard Nixon is Diane Sawyer. Prior to emerging as a network news star, Sawyer's professional experience consisted of a couple of years as a local TV weather forecaster in Louisville and eight years as an aide to Tricky Dick. "She had not only been a Nixon aide but a Nixon loyalist of the highest order," Peter Boyer wrote in Who Killed CBS? "When Nixon finally resigned in disgrace, she was one of the faithful on the plane that took Nixon on his long journey to San Clemente." In 1978, Sawyer began working for CBS News. A decade later, a lucrative contract lured her to ABC as co-host of "Primetime Live" with Sam Donaldson. George Will in Outer Space During the 1980 presidential campaign, commentator George Will coached candidate Reagan in preparation for his debate with Jimmy Carter -- and then praised Reagan's performance while covering the debate for ABC News without mentioning his association with the Reagan campaign team. When this fact came to light during the short-lived "Debate-gate" scandal in 1983, Will was subjected to a round of polite scolding by other journalists. But the incident didn't hurt his career; on the contrary, it enhanced his reputation among media mavens. "What brought him to outer space was exactly the thing many thought would bring him down: coaching Reagan," said Jeff Greenfield of ABC "Nightline." "To the skill and style he'd always had it added the insider magic." While quick to proclaim their independence, many reporters find it easy to empathize with Washington's concerns and are quite comfortable working for the US government. Cronyism and careerism help keep the revolving door spinning, but more important is the fact that both journalists and elected officials tend to view the world in ways that conform to the national security establishment. Within this dominant framework, personal opinions about policy specifics are less important than common biases about what constitutes legitimate "national interests." Whether conservative, moderate or liberal, mainstream journalists function within a media system dominated by government and corporate elites. Constrained by rigid institutional structures and narrow cultural assumptions, most reporters are not predisposed toward bucking the status quo. Personnel shifts between the press and government are not part of a planned conspiracy to slant the news. Nor should the brisk traffic through the revolving door be interpreted as proof that beat reporters get explicit marching orders directly from US officials. This is usually not necessary when they share similar assumptions about America's role in the world. High-level Interlocks One could city many other examples of journalists who have hitched a ride with Uncle Sam for a while. But the revolving door that matters most spins in much loftier circles, connecting big government with big media executives and upper-level management. Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary under Kennedy and Johnson, recently retired from the board of directors of the Washington Post Company, and ex-Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach currently sits on the Post board. Former cabinet-rank officials also populate the boards of other major print media, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the Reader's Digest Association. (Published in 16 editions for a worldwide readership of 100 million, Reader's Digest is the most widely-circulated US-based periodical.) These high-placed executive interlocks are far more influential than job-hopping journalists who flit back and forth between politicos and the press with hardly a blink. The corporate boards of the three major television networks are studded with government power-brokers. Harold Brown, Carter's Defense Secretary, is a director of CBS, along with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. General David Jones, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Reagan years, is on the board of GE/NBC; so is former Attorney General William French Smith. And prior to becoming CIA Director in 1981, William Casey held sway as chief counsel and an original board member of CapCities, which gobbled up ABC early in Reagan's second term. Casey, who had been Securities and Exchange Commissioner under Nixon, continued to own $7.5 million in CapCities/ABC stock until his death in 1987. A gung-ho advocate of covert operations and a mover-and-shaker in corporate politics, Casey was part of a network of spooks who had frequently used American companies -- including mass media -- for espionage purposes. Disgruntled CIA officers disclosed that the Agency had fudged intelligence data to bolster US foreign policy initiatives when William Casey was director -- something rarely mentioned on ABC or the other corporate networks, which also worked closely with the CIA. For many years, CBS supplied cover for CIA agents posted overseas, as well as out-takes of news footage and access to its extensive photo library. General Electric, owner of NBC, was contracted by the CIA to provide estimates of Soviet military strength -- a dubious arrangement given that GE reaps huge profits from the arms race and therefore has a vested interest in perpetuating it by inflating the data. The links between the CIA and the three main TV networks are just the tip of a very spooky iceberg. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Unreliable Sources Next, Response 26, Media Missed ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.29 **/ ** Written 1:03 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, The Propaganda War at Home by Norman Solomon The Propaganda War at Home by Norman Solomon Norman Solomon is co-author of "Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media." Reprinting of this article is welcome. *** The day after hundreds of Iraqi civilians died in the US bombing of a Baghdad shelter, the Los Angeles Times began a front-page article this way: "In the shadow war of the Persian Gulf -- the battle for public sentiment -- Iraq on Wednesday delivered the equivalent of a fuel-air explosive through the images of charred Iraqi women and children." Combatants posing as observers in the fierce propaganda wars, the US news media swiftly recoiled from the heavy impact of those "images." The gory TV footage from the Baghdad shelter stimulated a quick barrage of spin control -- denial masquerading as sober analysis and punditry. That evening, on PBS, the MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour presented a five-man panel which unanimously discounted the importance of the massacre. By the next night, MacNeil-Lehrer, like the rest of the major network news shows, had largely redirected the uproar to center on whether US journalists covering the Baghdad slaughter were tools of Iraqi propaganda. In its editorial about the massacre, the New York Times expressed no grief for the victims or reproach for the killers. Instead the newspaper focused on "the public opinion damage," and gave advice about the optimum military moves "at this point in the air war." The Times concluded: "Civilian casualties hurt the allied cause; it seems reasonable to ask, why not stop bombing cities?" Under a magnifying glass, such prestigious comment might have seemed to indicate a departure from the prior mass media consensus on the war. But the objections were tactical; instead of questioning the war, they merely called for a revision of strategy. Far from weakening the American propaganda system, such variations within the big media enhance its strength. "Controversies" flare, but remain in the war parade. The biggest news outlets may not always march precisely in step with the Pentagon's ideal formation, but they are careful not to go A.W.O.L. from the US war effort. While the mega-media aren't exactly monolithic, they don't have to be. The dominant interests are well served by a narrow range of views, with occasional dissent thrown in. Mass media function to re-adjust public perceptions -- implementing mid-course corrections more effectively than a rigidly slavish press could. Thus, two days after the shelter massacre, the main headline on the Times front page dutifully provided salve to a sudden P.R. sore spot: "Allies Study New Steps to Avoid Civilians in Bombing." Meanwhile, the guile of a country under murderous air attack required acute journalistic vigilance. Reporting from Saudi Arabia on Feb. 17 amid talk of an imminent ground war, CBS anchor Dan Rather explained to viewers that when inevitable civilian casualties occur, "Saddam Hussein makes the most of it with propaganda." As key enlistees in the war drive, major media prefer to discuss the horrors of war as anything but human realities. Behind Iraqi civilians killed by "coalition" bombs, editors and anchors back home are inclined to see little more than enemy plots. Similarly, the US press had no more use for Iraq's Feb. 15 peace offer than the White House did. "Saddam Hussein could be trying to arouse false and divisive hope," the New York Times editorialized the next day. "By moving now, he could also be trying to capitalize on widespread sympathy over civilian casualties." News accounts stayed within similar bounds. The offer to withdraw from Kuwait as part of an overall settlement "was a public relations ploy by Iraq aimed at casting the allies as warmongers and searching out potential weak links in the multinational coalition ranged against it," the Los Angeles Times declared in a news article. (A few days earlier the New York Times had begun its lead page-one article by stating that Saddam Hussein was "displaying little readiness for peace." The same could have been said -- but of course wasn't -- about George Bush.) The US media's constant war footing has given rise to routinely slanted wording that is likely to go unnoted. So, for instance, Iraqi soldiers -- alluded to as abstract extensions of Iraq's much-demonized dictator -- are frequently referred to as "Saddam's troops." But the same media never refer to American soldiers as "Bush's troops." Constantly pressuring people's minds, news media portray and mold public opinion within manipulative confines. A front-paged pie chart, depicting the results of a New York Times/CBS News Poll on Feb. 15, proclaimed that 79 percent of the US public wanted to "continue bombing from air" while 11 percent wanted to "start ground war." People who did not favor either activity were reduced to non-existence; the poll listed the remaining 10 percent as "don't know" or "no answer." As outrageous as they are routine, such methods for discounting and discouraging anti-war views have caused deep alarm among peace activists. No one wants to be "marginalized." But in efforts to avoid such a fate, we may be tempted by false pragmatism. "The simple slogan 'Bring the troops home now' will not do," the Nation magazine editorialized Feb. 18, "for how can any President possibly do that, especially if he has the apparent authorization of both the world community of nations and his own Congress? He cannot, and will not, drop millions of tons of bombs on a foreign people to force their surrender, or to prepare the way for a counterattack into Kuwait, and then simply say it was all a mistake and call the whole thing off." But if we avoid making demands that President Bush "cannot" and "will not" meet, we have bought into a definition of politics as the art of the seemingly possible. Amidst the ongoing calamity of this war, however, our politics must become the art of the imperative. It is not the responsibility of the peace movement to finesse its way into the pseudo-logic propagated by the Bush administration and mass media. It is our task to unequivocally challenge the US government's claim that it has a right to intervene militarily in the Persian Gulf. By striving to fit within the media-approved range of respectable discourse, we may end up shooting the peace movement in the foot while inadvertently giving the war propagandists a shot in the arm. "For the first time since the end of World War II, the United States is in a position to 'negotiate from strength' in the true meaning of that phrase," the Nation contended. "We have demonstrated our strength beyond all doubt; we need not fear to negotiate. Superior strength can produce magnanimity, even or especially toward those who seem least to deserve it." Coming near the close of an often-eloquent editorial denouncing the war, these words gave back to the war makers much of their ground. One of the most insidious effects of how mass media frame this war's "issues" is that we are encouraged to accept -- or at least pretend to accept -- dubious premises of those who are making a killing, literally and figuratively, from business as usual. But it is not truly pragmatic to accede to the mindsets of the military-industrial-media complex. If, in our eagerness to become players, we mouth the counterfeit lingo of mass media and politicians, we may be permitted to join in a game that the anti-war movement should not be playing. The news media's cues and inducements notwithstanding, we have better things to do. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Prop War Next, Response 27, Ad Watch ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.30 **/ ** Written 1:04 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Ad Watch AD WATCH by Steven Smith Steven Smith is an artist and musician. *** When the TV is on, it just takes over everything that's going on in the room," said a friend recently, before switching the set off. It seems to be getting harder and harder to turn the darn thing off for a staggering number of Americans. Watching television, along with the other great American pastime, shopping, are becoming actual addictions. 100 million North Americans will spend a quarter of their waking lives watching television. Children may appear happy in front of the TV, but they're not content, they're anesthetized. Adbusters, a periodical devoted to media and the environment currently has a media campaign aimed at changing the way North Americans watch TV. The Vancouver-based magazine wants to dramatize the impact of so much TV watching with TV spots, radio commercials, billboards, tee-shirts and bumper stickers. Their slogan is "you are what you watch" and their logo features a squiggly-drawn man in an armchair being zapped by a lightning bolt from his TV. They want to "wake North America out of it's TV addictions, and the consumption that results." It's a highly readable magazine; informative, articulate, and eye catching, with cartoons, photos and drawings on nearly every page. The provocative articles about media and the environment are concise, short and well written, covering such topics as Life According to TV; the Production of Meaning'; Nukespeak; TV vs. Reality; the End of Nature; Oil Spill as Advertising; and, Managing the Forest of Your Mind. The other media battle they are currently fighting is saving what's left of the old growth forest in British Columbia. As the publishers state hopefully: "The battle for our inner and outer environments will rage throughout the 90's and beyond. The myth of endless growth is dissolving before our eyes. A society caught in a TV stupor is waking up." -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Ad Watch Next, Response29, Resources ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.31 **/ ** Written 1:05 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start, Resources *** RESOURCES The following is a list of organizations & publications involved in propaganda analysis. Accountable Public Broadcasting Committee (415) 641-4440 Breakthrough -- Prairie Fire Organizing Committee P.O. Box 14422, San Francisco, CA 94114 (415) 330-5310 Break the Media Blockade! 433 Kearny St., San Francisco, CA 94108 (415) 544-1169 Covert Action Information Bulletin, PO Box 34583, Washington, D.C. 20043, (202) 331-9763 Data Center and Third World Resources, Middle East Task Force, 464 19th St., Oakland, CA 94612 (415) 835-4692 [Special "Gulf War teach In Packet"-64 pages of press clips -- Single copies of the packet are $7.] Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 130 W. 25th St., New York, NY 10001, (212) 633-6700 [Call for list of media and progressive experts.] In These Times, 1912 Debs Ave., Mt. Morris, IL 61054 Investigative News Features, PO Box 1469, Sausalito, CA 94966 (415) 332-8369 [Alternative news service: send them articles, ask your local paper to subscribe.] KPFA,-FM Radio 94.1 (Pacifica) 2207 Shattuck Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704 (415) 848-6767 Media Alliance, Building D, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA 94123 (415) 441-2557 Paper Tiger TV/Gulf Crisis Project, 339 Lafayette St., NY, NY 10012 (212) 219-1025 [Order videos on the war: "War, Oil, and Power," Operation Dissidence," Getting Out of the Sandtrap," "Bring the Troops Home," "News World Order," "Manufacturing the Enemy," "Lines in the Sand," "International Dissent," "Just Say No," "War on the Home Front," "Veterans for Peace."] Paper Tiger TV West (415) 695-0931 [Produces weekly local public access TV on the war.] PeaceNet Computer Network, 3228 Sacramento St., San Francisco, CA 94115 (415) 923-0900 [Excellent resource for journalists and activists. Dozens of conferences and bulletin boards on war and protest related activities.] Propaganda Review, c/o Media Alliance, Building D, Fort Mason, San Francisco, CA 94123 (415) 441-2556 the Public Eye P.O. Box 1469, Sausalito, CA 94966 (415) 332-8369 [National Lawyers Guild Civil Liberties Committee newsletter on civil liberties, the war, covert action, the right wing, and the drug war. $3/issue, $26/13 issues.] Speak Out, a progressive speakers bureau (415) 864-4561 War News, C/o John Dupuy, 895 O'Farrell, San Francisco, CA 94109 (415) 776-1609 [Warren Hinckle has been shut out of the San Francisco Examiner so he started his own newspaper.] Following is a list of organizations involved in protesting or resisting the Gulf War. American Civil Liberties Union, (415) 621-2488 American Friends Service Committee (Mid-East Program), 2160 Lake, SF, CA, 94121, (415)752-7766 American Friends Service Committee (Youth & Militarism Project), 1407 46th Ave., Oakland, CA, 94601, 533-7554 American Friends Service Committee, 1501 Cherry St., Philadelphia, PA 19102 (215) 241-7165 Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee, 4201 Connecticut Ave., NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20008, (202) 244-2990 California Students Network Against U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, 1083 Mission, SF, CA 94103, (415) 431-4617 CAVME (Committee Against a Vietnam War in the Middle East), 255 9th St., SF, 94103, (415) 626-8053 Central Committee for Conscientious Objection, Berkeley (415) 474-3002 Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, 2208 South St., Philadelphia, PA 19146 (215) 545-4626 Clergy and Laity Concerned, 17 North State St., Room 1530, Chicago, IL 60602 (312) 899-1800 Coalition to Stop U.S. Intervention in the Middle East, 36 East 12th St., New York, NY 10003 (212) 777-1246 CISPES, 3382 26th St., San Francisco, CA (415) 648-8222 Dallas Coalition for Middle East Peace c/o The Peace Center, 3100 Martin Luther King Blvd., Dallas, TX 75215, (214) 421-4082 Emergency Committee to Stop the U.S. War in the Middle East, 2489 Mission, Rm. 28, SF, 94110, (415) 821-6545 Fellowship of Reconciliation, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960, (914) 358-4601 Fellowship of Reconciliation (Middle East Task Force), 515 Broadway, Santa Cruz, CA 95060, (408) 423-1626 Global Exchange, 2141 Mission Rm. 202, S.F., CA 94110 (415) 255-7296 Greenpeace, Fort Mason, Building E, San Francisco, CA 94123, (415) 474-6767 Gulf Peace Action Team, Box 598, Putney, VT 05346, (802) 387-2600 Hands Off!, 111 East 14th St., Room 132, New York, NY 10003 (212) 353-2445 Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies) 1095 Market St., #204, San Francisco, CA 94103 (415)863-9627 January 26th Mobilization to Bring the Troops Home Now, 255 9th St., SF, CA 94103, (415) 626-8053 Los Angeles Coalition Against U.S. Intervention in the Middle East 8124 West 3rd St., Los Angeles, CA 90048 (213) 655- 3728 National Lawyers Guild, Military HOTLINE for soldiers, their families, and those concerned about the draft. (800) 86-NO-WAR Military Families Support Network, P.O. Box 10875, Oakland, CA 94610 (415) 834-7743 Military Families Support Network, Box 11098, Milwaukee, WI 53211 (414) 964-5794 Mobilization to Bring the Troops Home Now, c/o ILGWU 255 9th St., San Francisco, CA 94103 NAJDA (Women Concerned About the Middle East), PO Box 7152, Berkeley, CA 94611 National Association of Black Veterans, Box 432, Milwaukee, WI 53211 (800) 842-4597 National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, 104 Fulton St., Rm 303, NY,NY 10038 (212) 227-0221 National Student and Youth Campaign for Peace in the Middle East c/o USSA, 1012 14th St., N.W., Suite 200, Washington, DC 20005 (202) 462-1801 New England War Tax Resistance, Box 174, M.I.T. Branch Post Office, Cambridge, MA 02139 (617) 859-0662 (617) 859-0662 New Jewish Agenda, 64 Fulton St., #1100, NY, NY 10038 (212) 227-5885 Operation Real Security, 2076 East Alameda Dr., Tempe, AZ 85282 (602) 921-3090 Palestine Aid Society, PO Box 1190, Daly City, CA 94107, (415) 591-2010 Palestine Solidarity Committee, Box 372, Peck Slip Station, NY, NY 10272 (212) 964-7299 Palestine Solidarity Committee, PO Box 27462, SF, CA 94127, (415) 861-1552 Parents Against the War, (415) 665-6572 Physicians for Social Responsibility, 2288 Fulton #307, Berkeley, CA 94704, (415) 845-8395 Pledge of Resistance, 4228 Telegraph, Oakland, CA 94610, (415) 655-1177 Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, P.O. Box 14422, San Francisco, CA 94114 (415) 330-5310 SANE/Freeze, 347 Dolores #335, San Francisco, CA 94110, (415) 621-7770 Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East, 4554 12th Ave. NE, Seattle, WA 98105 (206) 632-7207 Southern Rainbow Education Project, 46 E. Patton Ave., Montgomery, AL 36105 (205) 288-5754 United Bay Area Veterans Against War in the Middle East, PO Box 40755, SF, CA, (415) 255-7331 Veterans Peace Action Teams, PO Box 170670, SF, CA 94117, (415) 753-2130 War Resisters League, 339 Lafayette St., NY, NY 10012 (212) 228-0450 Washington Area Labor Committee Against War in the Middle East c/o SEIU Local 722, 1673 Columbia Rd., NW, Washington DC 20009 (202) 483-6221 Western Student and Youth Action Network Against the War, c/o Shahed, 200 Eshelman Hall, UC Berkeley, CA 94720 (415) 653-5442 Women's Peace Office/Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, 50 Oak, Rm. 503, SF, CA 94102, (415) 621-1371/863-7146 -30- End, Resources Next, Masthead, PR 7 ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev ** /** propaganda.rev: 17.32 **/ ** Written 1:06 pm Nov 26, 1991 by ppaull in cdp:propaganda.rev ** Start< Masthead PR7 *** MASTHEAD Managing Editor Q Issue #7, Johan Carlisle Senior Editors: Johan Carlisle, Rory Cox, Sheila OUDonnell, Claude Steiner Associate Editors: Eduardo Cohen, Loretta Graziano, Stephen Leiper,Daniel del Solar, Frederic Stout Copy Editors: Rory Cox, Stephen Leiper Design, Layout & Desktop Publishing: Johan Carlisle Illustrations Dan Hubig Special Thanks PROPAGANDA REVIEW wishes to thank the following individuals and organizations for their generous financial support: Jackson Browne, John Maher, Cheyney Ryan, W.H. and Carol Bernstein Ferry, the Tides Foundation, the Pohaku Fund, the Limantour Fund, and the National Community Funds (a project of The Funding Exchange). We also thank all those who have become sustaining subscribers. -30- RESTRICTIONS: Copyright 1991 by Propaganda Review. All rights reserved under the International Copyright Union, the Universal Copyright Convention, and the PanAmerican Convention. Unauthorized republication is prohibited but reprinting (or reposting in other conferences or networks) of all Propaganda Review articles is encouraged. Please contact Johan Carlisle (jcarlisle), Managing Editor, for permission. Copies of Propaganda Review magazine (with illustrated articles) are available for $6. [Note: issues #1 and #5 are out of print.] For more information, to order back issues, or to subscribe to PR ($20/4 issues; $40-libraries & foreign) contact jcarlisle (via e-mail on PeaceNet), call (415) 332-8369, or write to: PROPAGANDA REVIEW PO Box 1469 Sausalito, CA 94966 End, Propaganda Review 7 Next, Propaganda Review 8 ** End of text from cdp:propaganda.rev **