Corporate Ownership and Interlocking Directorates of Large Media Companies
From FAIR - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=7&issue_area_id=6

In corporate medialand, history could be supremely relevant when it focused on Hussein’s torture and genocide, but the historic assistance he got from the U.S. government and American firms was apt to be off the subject and beside the point.

Spinning civilian deaths

By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as “collateral damage” flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned and even more rarely seen civilians killed by U.S. firepower.

At the outset of the Gulf War, NBC’s Tom Brokaw echoed the White House and a frequent chorus from U.S. journalists by telling viewers (1/16/91): “We must point out again and again that it is Saddam Hussein who put these innocents in harm’s way.” When those innocents got a mention, the U.S. government was often depicted as anxious to avoid hurting them. A couple of days into the war (1/17/91), Ted Koppel told ABC viewers that “great effort is taken, sometimes at great personal cost to American pilots, that civilian targets are not hit.” Two weeks later (1/29/91), Brokaw was offering assurances that “the U.S. has fought this war at arm’s length with long-range missiles, high-tech weapons . . . to keep casualties down.”

With such nifty phrasing, no matter how many civilians might die as a result of American bombardment, the U.S. government—and by implication, its taxpayers—could always deny the slightest responsibility. And a frequent U.S. media message was that Saddam Hussein would use civilian casualties for propaganda purposes, as though that diminished the importance of those deaths. With the Gulf War in its fourth week (2/9/91), Bruce Morton of CBS provided this news analysis: “If Saddam Hussein can turn the world against the effort, convince the world that women and children are the targets of the air campaign, then he will have won a battle, his only one so far.”

In American televisionland, when Iraqi civilians weren’t being discounted or dismissed as Saddam’s propaganda fodder, they were liable to be rendered nonpersons by omission. On the same day that 2,000 bombing runs occurred over Baghdad, anchor Ted Koppel reported (1/23/91): “Aside from the Scud missile that landed in Tel Aviv earlier, it’s been a quiet night in the Middle East.”

News coverage of the Gulf War in U.S. media was sufficiently laudatory to the war-makers in Washington that a former assistant secretary of state, Hodding Carter, remarked (C-SPAN, 2/23/91): “If I were the government, I’d be paying the press for the kind of coverage it is getting right now.” A former media strategy ace for President Reagan put a finer point on the matter. “If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event,” said Michael Deaver, “it couldn’t be done any better than this is being done.”

“Through the same lens”

When the media watch group FAIR conducted a survey of network news sources during the Gulf War’s first two weeks, the most frequent repeat analyst was ABC’s Anthony Cordesman. Not surprisingly, the former high-ranking official at the Defense Department and National Security Council gave the war-makers high marks for being trustworthy. “I think the Pentagon is giving it to you absolutely straight,” Cordesman said (Newsday, 1/23/91).

The standard media coverage boosted the war. “Usually missing from the news was analysis from a perspective critical of U.S. policy,” FAIR reported (Extra!, Winter/91). “The media’s rule of thumb seemed to be that to support the war was to be objective, while to be anti-war was to carry a bias.” Eased along by that media rule of thumb was the sanitized language of Pentagonspeak as mediaspeak: “Again and again, the mantra of ‘surgical strikes against military targets’ was repeated by journalists, even though Pentagon briefers acknowledged that they were aiming at civilian roads, bridges and public utilities vital to the survival of the civilian population.”

As the Gulf War came to an end, people watching CBS saw Dan Rather close an interview with the 1st Marine Division commander by shaking his hand and exclaiming (2/27/91): “Again, general, congratulations on a job wonderfully done!”

Chris Hedges covered the Gulf War for the New York Times. More than a decade later, he wrote in a book (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning): “The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” Truth-seeking independence was far from the media agenda. “The press was as eager to be of service to the state during the war as most everyone else. Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie.”

Variations in news coverage did not change the overwhelming sameness of outlook: “I boycotted the pool system, but my reports did not puncture the myth or question the grand crusade to free Kuwait. I allowed soldiers to grumble. I shed a little light on the lies spread to make the war look like a coalition, but I did not challenge in any real way the patriotism and jingoism that enthused the crowds back home. We all used the same phrases. We all looked at Iraq through the same lens.”

Legitimating targets

In late April 1999, with the bombing of Yugoslavia in its fifth week, many prominent American journalists gathered at a posh Manhattan hotel for the annual awards dinner of the prestigious Overseas Press Club. They heard a very complimentary speech by Richard Holbrooke, one of the key U.S. diplomats behind recent policies in the Balkans. “The kind of coverage we’re seeing from the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN and the newsmagazines lately on Kosovo,” he told the assembled media professionals (Palm Beach Post, 5/9/99), “has been extraordinary and exemplary.” Holbrooke had good reasons to praise the nation’s leading journalists. That spring, when the Kosovo crisis exploded into a U.S.-led air war, news organizations functioned more like a fourth branch of government than a Fourth Estate. The pattern was familiar.

Instead of challenging Orwellian techniques, media outlets did much to foist them on the public. Journalists relied on official sources -- with non-stop interviews, behind-the-scenes backgrounders, televised briefings and grainy bomb-site videos. Newspeak routinely sanitized NATO’s bombardment of populated areas. Correspondents went through linguistic contortions that preserved favorite fictions of Washington policymakers.

“NATO began its second month of bombing against Yugoslavia today with new strikes against military targets that disrupted civilian electrical and water supplies. . . . ” The first words of the lead article on the New York Times front page the last Sunday in April 1999 (4/25/99) accepted and propagated a remarkable concept, widely promoted by U.S. officials: The bombing disrupted “civilian” electricity and water, yet the targets were “military.” Never mind that such destruction of infrastructure would predictably lead to outbreaks of disease and civilian deaths.

On the newspaper’s op-ed page, columnist Thomas Friedman (4/23/99) made explicit his enthusiasm for destroying civilian necessities: “It should be lights out in Belgrade: Every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.” [The same tactic -- on steroids -- was applied to entire Iraqi cities as well as in Gaza and Lebanon. - CR]

American TV networks didn’t hesitate to show footage of U.S. bombers and missiles in flight -- but rarely showed what really happened to people at the receiving end. Echoing Pentagon hype about the wondrous performances of Uncle Sam’s weaponry, U.S. journalists did not often provide unflinching accounts of the results in human terms. Yet reporter Robert Fisk of London’s Independent (4/24/99) managed to do so:

Deep inside the tangle of cement and plastic and iron, in what had once been the make-up room next to the broadcasting studio of Serb Television, was all that was left of a young woman, burnt alive when NATO’s missile exploded in the radio control room. Within six hours, the [British] Secretary of State for International Development, Clare Short, declared the place a “legitimate target.” It wasn’t an argument worth debating with the wounded -- one of them a young technician who could only be extracted from the hundreds of tons of concrete in which he was encased by amputating both his legs. . . . By dusk last night, 10 crushed bodies—two of them women—had been tugged from beneath the concrete, another man had died in hospital and 15 other technicians and secretaries still lay buried.

During the invasion, the major network studios were virtually off-limits to vehement American opponents of the war.

For the most part, U.S. networks sanitized their war coverage, which was wall-to-wall on cable. As usual, the enthusiasm for war was extreme on Fox News Channel.  After a pre-invasion make-over, the fashion was similar for MSNBC. (In a timely manner, that cable network had canceled the nightly Donahue program three weeks before the invasion began.  A leaked in-house report -- AllYourTV.com, 2/25/03 -- said that Phil Donahue’s show would present a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war. . . . He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The danger, quickly averted, was that the show could become “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”)

At the other end of the narrow cable-news spectrum, CNN cranked up its own pro-war fervor. Those perspectives deserved to be heard.  But on the large TV networks, such voices were so dominant that they amounted to a virtual monopoly in the “marketplace of ideas.”

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This article is excerpted from Norman Solomon’s book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). The first chapter of the book can be found at WarMadeEasy.com.