[THS] Robert Parry: US News Media's Latest Disgrace

[Peter Webster]

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/042108E.shtml

US News Media's Latest Disgrace
    By Robert Parry
    Consortium News

    Monday 21 April 2008

    After prying loose 8,000 pages of Pentagon documents, the New
York Times has proven what should have been obvious years ago: the
Bush administration manipulated public opinion on the Iraq War, in
part, by funneling propaganda through former senior military officers
who served as expert analysts on TV news shows.

    In 2002-03, these military analysts were ubiquitous on TV justifying
the Iraq invasion, and most have remained supportive of the war in the
five years since. The Times investigation showed that the analysts were
being briefed by the Pentagon on what to say and had undisclosed
conflicts of interest via military contracts.

    Retired Green Beret Robert S. Bevelacqua, a former Fox News
analyst, said the Pentagon treated the retired military officers as
puppets: "It was them saying, 'we need to stick our hands up your back
and move your mouth for you.'" [NYT, April 20, 2008]

    None of that, of course, should come as any surprise. Where do
people think generals and admirals go to work after they retire from the
government?

    If they play ball with the Pentagon, they get fat salaries serving on
corporate boards of military contractors, or they get rich running
consultancies that trade on quick access to high-ranking administration
officials. If they're not team players, they're shut out.

    Yet, what may be more troubling, although perhaps no more
surprising, is how willingly the U.S. news media let itself be used as a
propaganda conduit for the Bush administration regarding the ill-
advised invasion of Iraq.

    Fox News may have been the prototype of the flag-waving "news"
outlet that fawned over pro-war retired military officers and mocked
anti-war citizens.

    But the same imbalance could be found at the major networks, like
NBC where then-anchor Tom Brokaw spoke in the first person plural as
he sat among a panel of retired brass on the night of the Iraq invasion -
March 19, 2003 - and said: "In a few days, we're going to own that
country."

    The blame also goes far beyond the TV networks, to the most
prestigious print publications. The New York Times famously promoted
fictional stories about Iraqi aluminum tubes for building nuclear
weapons, and the Washington Post editorial page remains to this day an
ardent cheerleader for the war.

    So, the real question is not how widespread the ethical lapses of the
U.S. news media were - both in palming off self-interested ex-generals
as objective observers and for failing to demonstrate even a modicum of
skepticism in publishing false articles that paved the way to war.

    Rather, the urgent question is what must be done if the United
States is to reclaim its status as a functioning constitutional Republic in
which a reasonably honest news media keeps the public adequately
informed.

    Having spent most of my career on the inside at places such as the
Associated Press and Newsweek, it's been my view for many years that
the mainstream U.S. news media can't be reformed, that it is beyond
hope.

    Though there are still good journalists working at major news
companies - and the better news outlets do produce some useful
information, like Sunday's story in the Times - the central reality is that
corporate journalism is rotten at the core and won't stop spreading the
rot throughout the U.S. political process.

    That's why for the past dozen-plus years at Consortiumnews.com, we
have called for a major public investment in honest journalism, so
information can be produced that it is both professional and
independent of the kinds of external pressures that have deformed
today's mainstream press.

    We must find new ways to tell the news.

    The Reagan Era

    The scope of the problem dawned on me in the late 1980s, as I
watched the widespread criminality of the Iran-Contra and related
scandals - ranging from money-laundering, gun-smuggling, drug-
trafficking and acts of terrorism - get swept under the rug because they
implicated senior U.S. officials.

    During those years, I witnessed the Washington press corps - which
still basked in the glory of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers - rushing
headlong toward becoming little more than a propaganda funnel for the
powers-that-be.

    Indeed, in 1992, my first book, Fooling America, argued that the
Watergate-Vietnam-era press corps was undergoing a historic
transformation into a snarky conveyor of ill-considered conventional
wisdom.

    The book also made the case that this transformation was not
accidental, nor was it driven just by corporate greed and journalistic
careerism (though there was plenty of both). There also was a powerful
ideological component.

    Behind the scenes, the Reagan administration had constructed a
domestic framework modeled after CIA psychological warfare programs
abroad. The main difference this time was that the psy-op took aim at
the American people with the goal of managing how they perceived
events, what insiders called "perception management."

    From documents that I uncovered during the Iran-Contra scandal, it
was clear that the motive behind this extraordinary operation was the
bitterness that conservatives felt toward the mass protests against the
Vietnam War and toward American journalists whose reporting
supposedly had undermined the war effort.

    So, Ronald Reagan's team made it a high priority to rein in
troublesome journalists and to reverse the so-called "Vietnam
Syndrome," the American people's revulsion over any more foreign
military adventures.

    The documents revealed that the domestic operation took shape in
the early 1980s under the guidance of CIA Director William Casey, who
even donated one of the CIA's top propagandists, Walter Raymond Jr.,
to manage the program from inside President Reagan's National
Security Council staff.

    Other factors fed into the success of this propaganda operation,
especially the rise of a bright group of political intellectuals known as the
neoconservatives. They proved especially adept at using McCarthyistic
tactics to marginalize and silence dissent.

    The crowning achievement of this decade-long effort came during
the first Persian Gulf War of 1990-91. President George H.W. Bush
believed that a successful U.S.-led ground offensive could finish the job
of bringing the American people back from their post-Vietnam malaise.

    However, after months of devastating aerial bombings, Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev had persuaded Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to
withdraw his troops from Kuwait with no more killing, and Gen. Norman
Schwarzkopf and other front-line U.S. commanders favored the deal.

    But Bush rebuffed the offer, instead ordering the ground attack that
slaughtered tens of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops during a 100-hour
campaign. [For details, see the Colin Powell chapter of "Neck Deep."]

    When the ground war ended, Bush offered an insight into his central
motivation. In his first comments about the U.S. victory, he declared:
"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all."

    Amid the war euphoria, some American journalists who had thought
a less violent solution should have been pursued - including
conservative columnist Robert Novak - offered cringing self-criticisms
about their mistaken doubts.

    The only sustained criticism of President Bush on the war came from
the neocons, like Charles Krauthammer, who complained that Bush
should have let the killing go on, that he stopped the ground war too
soon, that he should have conquered Baghdad and occupied Iraq.

    In my book, Fooling America, I told the story of this decline and fall
of the U.S. news media, from its glory days of Watergate to its groveling
days of the early 1990s. But 16 years ago, few people wanted to hear
the story - or believe it.

    The common view at the time was that the Washington press corps
was still the aggressive watchdog of Watergate fame and, if anything,
was too "liberal." Though I had a major publisher in Morrow, the book
got little circulation and was trashed by key book reviewers, including
one from the Washington Post.

    The thought that the heroic Washington press corps was changing
into something cowardly and reckless was an idea whose time had not
yet come.

    [Fooling America has long been out of print, but some of the material
can be found in Robert Parry's later books, "Lost History," "Secrecy &
Privilege" and "Neck Deep."]

    Repeating History

    In the investigation of how the Pentagon used TV military analysts to
sell the Iraq War - thus allowing George W. Bush to "complete the job"
left unfinished by his dad - the New York Times also traced the
administration's P.R. theories back to the Vietnam War and to the early
days of the Reagan era.

    "Many [TV military analysts] also shared with Mr. Bush's national
security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation's
will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that
happen with this war," the Times reported in the article by David
Barstow.

    "This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox
News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had
specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in
1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the
nation from 'enemy' propaganda during Vietnam.

    "'We lost the war - not because we were outfought, but because we
were out Psyoped,' he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to
psychological operations in future wars - taking aim not just at foreign
adversaries but at domestic audiences, too.

    "He called his approach 'MindWar' - using network TV and radio to
'strengthen our national will to victory.'"

    But the danger of "MindWar," aimed by the U.S. government at the
American people, is that it turns inside-out the concept of a democratic
Republic in which a well-informed people exercise meaningful control
over their government.

    Instead, you end up with a duplicitous government using
propaganda, fear and intimidation to whip the people into line. Rather
than the government being the servant of the people, the people
become the servant of the government.

    Then, as undemocratic regimes have shown throughout history -
with the voice of the people silenced - insiders get a free hand to carry
out foolhardy policies and to line the pockets of their friends.

    With the U.S. taxpayers now looking at an open-ended Iraq War with
the total cost possibly reaching $3 trillion, it shouldn't be too hard to
figure out who the "winners" were in this "MindWar."

    Often they were the same TV military analysts and news media
pundits who were advocating for the invasion more than five years ago.
Almost everyone of them has made out like bandits, many with fat stock
portfolios and posh vacation homes, not to mention appreciative CEOs
back at corporate central.

    The "losers" should be equally apparent. Besides the fleeced
American taxpayers, there have been more than 4,000 U.S. soldiers
dead, another 30,000 wounded, and hundreds of thousands of dead
and maimed Iraqis.

    This bloody march of folly began some three decades ago when the
U.S. news media began surrendering its responsibility to keep the
people informed and instead opted for the easier and more lucrative
role of acting as propagandists for the powerful.

    The New York Times article is just further proof of that sorry reality.

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    Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, "Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush," was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, "Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq" and "Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth'" are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

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