| Main Feature Story - Friday, April 11, 2008
Feature: Yesterday's papers
The media puts Iraq all snug into bed—while visions of celebrities dance in our head...
by Samantha Campos
It's been five years.
The Iraq war has cost over 4,000 American soldiers their lives. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. The price of oil has more than tripled. And total economic costs of the war through 2008, according to the congressional Joint Economic Committee, have already reached $1.3 trillion.
And yet, ongoing news about the war has nearly dropped off the mainstream media radar. The Project for Excellence in Journalism, which tracks reporting by several dozen media outlets, reported that Iraq accounted for only 3 percent of prominent news coverage so far this year.
There are actually more stories about how the Iraq war has disappeared from the headlines than there are stories about the Iraq war. After all, there's Spitzer's hooker, Obama's reverend and the car-crash that is Britney Spears's life to battle with for coverage on the front pages of America.
Critics say mainstream media can't be trusted. They say that with so many newspapers and broadcast networks consolidated and controlled by corporations, we're not getting investigative journalism or decentralized reporting—we're getting a puppetry of the press.
Inverness-based scholar, media critic and political activist Norman Solomon has been writing and researching about how big companies, mainstream media and the government conspire to spawn and distribute the seeds of war. In fact, he believes there has been a 50-year pattern of presidential distortion, exaggeration and propaganda that has led to the very media complicity that makes war palatable to the masses.
A nationally syndicated columnist on media and politics, Solomon is also the author of several books, including Made Love, Got War, Wizards of Media Oz and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. His 2005 book, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, is the basis for a Sean Penn-narrated documentary of the same name released last year. It debuted in New York last month, and is currently screening throughout Marin, including April 19, 2pm at the Rafael Film Center.
The Pacific Sun spoke with Solomon about War Made Easy, "the surge" in Iraq and the myriad shenanigans of mainstream media.
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Iraq has dropped largely from the front pages in recent months, after dominating the news for four years—why the sudden shift?
Conventional media wisdom feeds on itself. What a lot of journalists "know" is what other journalists are saying, and so the spin cycle goes. Meanwhile, overall, media coverage tends to be in sync with the range of opinion heard most often from Republican and Democratic leaders in Washington. Seventeen months ago, in the immediate aftermath of the congressional election, the media verdict was that Democrats won the House and Senate because the Iraq war had become so unpopular. But by mid-November, there was a huge media assault against the option of swiftly withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.
And none of the presidential candidates want to stake their campaigns on it.
In the last several months, there's been a cyclical effect: News outlets say the war is receding as a political issue; the remaining Democratic presidential candidates say less about the war; journalists point to them saying less as evidence that the war is receding as a political issue. Meanwhile, in the words of a song that Donovan wrote 40 years ago, the war drags on.
The accepted wisdom in the media is that "the surge" has worked—but what does that really mean?
The ingenious PR scam called "the surge" was a way to escalate the war without using words like "escalation." While he upped the number of occupying troops, Bush removed less obsequious generals from the official war theater and cast General Petraeus as the new star. More air strikes and violence courtesy of U.S. taxpayers, combined with a cease-fire called by Muqtada al-Sadr, enabled Bush to claim that "the surge is working." Petraeus dutifully echoed the script. But the upsurge of bloodshed in Basra and Baghdad in late March showed how dubious such claims are. More fundamentally—what does "the surge is working" really mean?
We'll bite. What does "the surge is working" really mean?
With enough use of American high-tech firepower, the warfare in Iraq can be normalized into a stalemate with a long-term baseline of horrific carnage. Killing people does render them unable to resist. Shows of military force can tamp down resistance to some degree. But the basic situation remains—most Iraqis, according to opinion polls, say they want U.S. forces out of their country—while, ironically, the argument from the White House is that the U.S. troops are in Iraq to promote democracy.
The White House's framing of the war as "promoting democracy" falls in line with much of what you talk about in "War Made Easy."
The book really deals with what you could call the media spin cycle for war. And even as I was writing it, we were in part of that spin cycle. And when the book came out in 2005, I think it was becoming more and more clear that this war was not going to be over anytime soon, and that there were these chronic patterns of media manipulation and propaganda that had gotten the U.S. into war and was keeping the U.S. in war.
What inspired "War Made Easy"?
I went to Iraq three times before the war, already having moved to West Marin almost exactly 10 years ago. The effort, basically, was to try to prevent the war from happening. So I founded a nonprofit institute—the Institute for Public Accuracy—and we sponsored three trips to Iraq. The first one was September 2002—it was a delegation of a few people, including a former and present member of Congress.
All of those trips were an effort to say, "Look, it's possible to talk to the Iraqi government; it's not necessary to only threaten to attack." And then, of course, the invasion happened five years ago. And through the course of that research and experience, and with my background as a journalist and activist, the War Made Easy book took shape.
What reaction have you received over the documentary?
It's been shown in Marin County, San Francisco and Oakland to Albuquerque to Minneapolis, New York, Amsterdam. Many times I've been in the room of people watching it, and it's just very different—I think partly because of the medium and partly because of what the film is itself. There's a very visceral reaction. The film, I think, has an intellectually analytic component. It's also a very emotional experience for people quite often. And so people are very responsive—many times I see people leave and they're crying. It's also a feeling, "OK, I need to take a new look at what history has brought to us and where we are now and what I can do about it."
Has any of this process changed your perspective, or deepened your focus in any way? Do you sense a feeling of disconnect between places like Marin and a war on the other side of the world?
Ironically, the global aspect of the film—coming to terms with wars that have happened in many parts of the world, and my own travels in connection with the film—have rooted me more in the North Bay. Because ultimately I've gotten a very strong response from neighbors in Marin and Sonoma counties—and that's helped to draw me more into community-based activism in Marin County and increasingly in Sonoma County, as well. Because where we live is crucial to this entire process. Our representatives in Congress are able to be there because of whatever is or isn't happening in our own communities, in terms of activism and awareness. We need to hold accountable our elected officials, from city councils to boards of supervisors to Congress and senators. And to me that means a deeper communication with people in our own community. So in part because I've gotten so much response locally from this film, it's drawn me more into this entire process in North Bay.
How does one become a "media watchdog"?
As a teenager, I grew up reading the newspaper during the Vietnam War and wondering, "Wow! This seems to be true. Is this true?" And so my interest was always as a journalist, from high school on. When I left high school, I did some work for a very mainstream weekly paper. And then after I spent some time in college, I went back to journalism. And so for me, journalism and activism has always been in tandem.
Do you feel journalists should also be activists?
Yeah, in the best of all worlds. I remember in the late '80s, Chinese journalists were marching for human rights and journalistic rights. And in this country, we're encouraged to have that separation. But, you know, the First Amendment, human rights—it should all be part of the same thing. And I just think that activists, if they're well-informed and attentive, are some of the best media critics. Because if you really know the issue, then you're attuned to what the shortcomings are of the mainstream media coverage.
But even journalists seem to buy into what the mainstream media dictates.
Well, we're all in that milieu, you know? It's terrain that we walk through professionally and as media consumers. And I think taking a fresh look is always crucial.
Talk about the Institute for Public Accuracy.
We're a nonprofit organization; I founded it almost 11 years ago. We began doing media work in April of 1998, after some groundwork. We're about to mark our 10th anniversary of actually doing news releases. We put out about 200 news releases a year. We have an office in San Francisco and one in D.C. You might say we're a pro-bono PR agency; we never charge people for being on our news releases, we never charge media outlets. And so we're really, in a sense, doing some of the work that journalism should be doing itself—just to find sources that aren't the usual suspects.
Who are the "usual suspects"?
Well, you know, there is this "Rolodex syndrome" where bookers for TV and radio shows, or editors and reporters, tend to flip through the same names and sources day after day and year after year. So in a sense they are the usual suspects and often they're very good but they're not the whole picture. And so I think widening the array of people who are seen and heard on television shows is really important. So the Institute for Public Accuracy is a part of that process.
How many of the not-so-usual suspects are in the Institute's Rolodex?
We have a database of about 2,000 experts from California and around the country and really, internationally. So when there's breaking news, we offer those voices. For instance, when the outbreak of fighting happened in Basra a few days ago...
You called General Petraeus to ask how it was going...!
We got with a guy named Raed Jarrar. He's an Iraqi-American who works with the American Friends Service Committee in Washington, D.C. And so we put out a release yesterday where he puts his perspective on "what does this all mean?" So when we're listening to mainstream news, they have the retired generals...and so we have the release out to augment that.
What advice would you give the public for diversifying their media outlets? You're obviously very critical of the mainstream media—would you go so far as to urge people to bypass it?
I would say augment the mainline media with other sources and think for yourself. While my work is very critical of an outlet like the Chronicle or the New York Times, I also really urge reading them. It's a contrast-and-compare issue. And so I recommend people read the alternative weeklies, go to the Web sites and read the outlets like Common Dreams, Truth Out, Alternet. Yes, listen to [NPR's] All Things Considered, but also listen to Democracy Now. And do your own thinking.
But what about the people who will only listen to Air America? Or who only watch FOX News?
Diversity of media is a real inoculation against the ailment of narrow sources. I think we can be our own media critics, and I think it's an essential part of gaining a deeper understanding of this historical moment, what we can do to affect the future for the positive, in a positive way.
People are so bombarded with different sources of information—sometimes the easiest, quickest source is the one that gets noticed.
It is a challenge to keep thinking outside of the box. As the song goes, you know, "a spoonful of sugar" helps the media medicine go down. And we get a lot of sugar, you know—you turn on the TV and most corporately backed media outlets, there's a lot of sort of easing of the process so that the "entertainment" is superficially attractive. It's just kind of like whipped cream—you're hungry, you get whipped cream and it's like, yeah, I maybe even got calories, but what is it? [Laughs]
Will the public ever see the media as the Emperor Who Has No Clothes?
I think seeing the skin of mass media is part of understanding the political moment. In a sense, it's its own unwitting message as to the way some powerful forces are tilting the news. We have a free press, we have a lot of democratic processes—so it's a lot more intricate process than a dictatorship, or some wizard behind the curtain. It's a complex configuration of economic and political forces, and our own acculturation. And through our own passivity, we magnify the manipulation. By deepening our understanding, we can counteract the manipulation. And that's where the war issue, I think, is so crucial.
You have also said that trusted outlets like the "Washington Post" have done far more damage than the FOX network.
During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, many people who didn't trust FOX were inclined to place enormous trust in the New York Times and the Washington Post. As War Made Easy goes into in some detail, those purportedly great newspapers largely boosted the claims that an invasion would be necessary. There was some good journalism in those papers, but it tended to be buried on back pages.
The front page of the Times and the op-ed page of the Post were particularly war-friendly, and hundreds of newspapers around the country ran pieces from the Times and the Post on a daily basis. Add to that dynamic the fact that the New York Times and Washington Post have tremendous impacts as agenda-setters for the rest of the so-called "quality" media.
What appears on the front page of the Times and Post in the morning is likely to be a jumping-off point, later in the day, for outlets like The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and All Things Considered—as well as for the commercial networks. The result is a media echo chamber with enormous volume for the most powerful officials in Washington. The supposed watchdogs in the media routinely serve a lapdog function, with controversies mostly reduced to arguments about timing and tactics rather than fundamental policies.
Are you optimistic the damage of the Bush administration can be undone?
Despite all the obstacles, we have the potential to pull together a progressive majority in the country—and that, in turn, could bring us a genuine progressive majority in Congress. Doing the necessary grassroots activism may seem like a long hard slog, but I can't think of anything more worthwhile. And the North Bay is an area where we have near-optimum conditions to show what can be done to activate real civic participation. That's why I'm so glad to be doing grassroots political work here in Marin County.
Are you concerned the pendulum could swing too far left—that a large Democratic majority could be as equally one-sided as what we've seen from the right?
A healthy social movement doesn't claim that people should all be doing the same thing. I don't believe in "silver bullet" solutions. We're diverse in our interests, talents and temperaments. Here's an analogy: An old-growth forest doesn't have just a few types of plants and bushes and trees; it has a profusion of diversity. That's ecological health and genuine balance—in the woods and in a social movement. If we organize effectively, we're nurturing the attitudes and relationships and well-grounded institutions that can sustain us in healthy ways for the long haul.
So much needs to happen, and no one person or group can do more than a small bit. Can you imagine a forest asking, "What plant should we all be?" or "What kind of tree should we all try to become?" What's most important is that we reject the standard passivity—that we live in assertive and cooperative ways to actively sustain life.
And where will that leave the mainstream media?
The only consistent message from commercial media outlets is to encourage us to go out and buy things. But democracy isn't a spectator sport; democracy is about actively creating. The consequences of passivity or activism aren't abstract—they're profoundly human. I put it this way in an article I wrote a few months ago: "In media-speak and political discourse, the human toll of corporate domination and the warfare state is routinely abstract. But the results—in true human terms—add rage and more grief on top of grief."
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