US Media: Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery

U.S. media interests: Champions of
profit, propaganda and puffery
By John Stanton and Wayne Madsen


A crisis without precedent is underway in the United
States. And its consequences will be far graver than those wrought
by the U.S. presidential election of 2000 and the terrorist attacks of
September 11, 2001. The collapse of the Jeffersonian "free and
uncensored press" in America endangers the liberties of all
Americans and, arguably, citizens from all walks of life around the
globe.

As the U.S. prepares to invade Iraq and preemptively strike
anywhere in the world it feels threatened, the only remaining barrier
to monstrous U.S. totalitarianism is a sickly and crippled U.S.
media, an aggressive foreign media, and the hope that the
heretofore somnambulant American public will awaken from its
stupor.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote, "Fear of
serious injury cannot alone justify suppression of free speech and
assembly. Men feared witches and burned women. It is the function
of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears." Not so in
2002, because irrationality and indoctrination sell. ABC's Diane
Sawyer's interview with a para-psychologist who talks to the "dead"
gets big billing. U.S. media interests regularly report
unsubstantiated government claims about terrorist capabilities and
threats to the populace. They ignore and, indeed, mock the
message of peaceful anti-establishment protests around the world
and here in the U.S. They editorialize on issues that please
advertisers and the profit margin. They plagiarize days' and weeks'
old news stories from the foreign and trade press and claim them as
their own. They pound home the message of "just get over it,"
whether "it" is election malfeasance, intelligence and defense
failures or corporate theft. In these environs, can it be long until a
daring American author mimics Czeslaw Milosz and pens the
American version of The Captive Mind?

With precious few exceptions, most notably the nation's "City
Papers," independent Internet sites—like the Independent Media
Center—and grassroots broadcasters such as Pacifica, U.S. print
and broadcast organs from the New York Times to the Los Angeles
Times, from NBC to Fox, and from AM radio bands to FM bands,
spew out a vile and banal concoction of information that numbs the
mind and homogenizes the thought processes of a U.S. citizenry
scurrying about to support the "war effort." So-called "news
programs" seek to pacify and assure during the commute, the
thunderstorm, the shopping spree, the murder. Weather, roads,
guns, cars, food are all endowed by newsreaders with character as
if those "things" are conscious entities. As Herbert Marcuse so
adroitly pointed out, in this environment people don't "see"
themselves, they project themselves into "things." Viewers are
commodities to the U.S. media interests. "Thought" need not apply
here.

Fantasy is Fact

Instead of reporting on how many people are killed in various
grassroots insurgencies against U.S.-backed tin horn dictators
around the world, networks now report how well movies do at the
box office. Little wonder, considering how the news networks are so
tightly welded into Hollywood's infotainment empires. Even PBS is
not immune from such corporate infiltration, even though it would
have you believe differently during its long and painful fund drives.
Consider the recent ignoble treatment of Wall Street Week host and
founder Louis Rukeyser. Because AOL Time Warner could not find
a time slice on CNN to plug its Fortune magazine, it simply gobbled
up Rukeyser's show for the magazine. Even PBS's famed
documentaries are not immune to such corporate power moves. The
highly-acclaimed wildlife show Nature has been forced to drop its
long time narrators in favor of personalities like Julia Roberts and
Meg Ryan, whose major contributions to environmental studies were
their respective complaints that life in Mongolia and the hills of
Thailand was just not as cozy as that in Beverly Hills, California.

So it's no surprise that U.S. media interests enthusiastically
embrace all the activities that move money from one hand to
another, but none that move a contrary, novel or critical idea from
one mind to another. U.S. media interests certainly have their
counterparts: the retroviruses whose ingenious method is the ability
to deceive the host cell into operating on a routine basis as if the
retrovirus is a trusted ally—a supporter.

"We work for you!," exclaims General Electric's affiliate, NBC News
Channel 4 located in the Washington, DC, viewing market. "You and
Channel 4, Working Together" is the slogan. "Start your day at 5:00
AM with us," says NBC, and they solicit viewers to end that day
with them at 1:00 AM the following morning. It's the same refrain at
CBS, NBC and ABC affiliates. Ending a day with the networks
means submitting to the musings of late night talk show hosts Jay
Leno and Dave Lettermen fawning over smarmy politicians like Dick
Cheney and John Ashcroft. If the hangover from that weren't painful
enough, the stupefying advertisements and "news" inserts that
come with viewing or listening to any broadcast programming from
U.S. media interests leaves the viewer punch-drunk. The nauseating
blend of politics, sound-bites, comedy, murder, "reality,"
"Hollywood," "news," "graphic footage"——intermixed with the
viscous commercialism that plays on procreation, death, and
productivity—-put forth by owners and news readers of infotainment
interests stands as one of the most mercenary acts in capitalist
history. And, more the pity, this charade of news reporting is
performed by those whose intelligence quotient is far below the
highest paid athletes in America.

In the midst of this wretched stew, comes the truncated 17-minute
network newscast consisting of 750-word propaganda diatribes
masquerading as editorials. And out there on the AM and FM radio
bands, the fare is three-to-four-hour invective radio commentaries,
interspersed with yuk-yuk blather with publicity-seeking politicians.
A prime example is Viacom's syndicated morning radio
show—simulcast by MSNBC—hosted by the desiccated Don Imus,
who creeks and groans like an old wooden galleon. Not only does
he offer a radio and TV platform to people like former Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to advocate the assassination of
Yassir Arafat, but he entices professional journalists to aid and abet
in such obvious politically-inspired polemics.

This same script is played out on CBS, ABC, Fox, MSNBC, PBS
and a hundred other channels, newspapers and AM and FM bands
across the land. And so it has become with U.S. media interests
who, in the wake of 9–11 (itself a worn-out and pedantic term like Al
Qaeda) and in conjunction with propagandists in the current U.S.
government, seek to transform the U.S. populace into a nation of
Chauncey Gardners. But then again, can a parasite be blamed for
thriving on the docility of its host, its supporter, in this instance the
American public?

Who Tells You What to Think?

Columbia Journalism Review and Media Channel track the owners
and minions of U.S. media interests at http://www.cjr.org/owners/
and http://www.mediachannel.org, and a visit there is most
enlightening. NBC, General Electric's marionette, owns an array of
properties from financial institutions in France to long distance
telephone services in Hungary. General Electric is a partner with
Starbucks Coffee in Talk City. Under the Walt Disney Group entity
resides ABC, which recently featured an investigative piece on
World News Tonight on whether time travel is possible. This was not
a news story but a movie advertisement: Disney was preparing to
release its remake of the movie, "The Time Machine." It must have
been tough for the quintessential Peter Jennings to turn into an
Entertainment Tonight host for a Hollywood gossip and gabfest
show masquerading as a nightly news broadcast. Disney also owns
interests in petroleum and natural gas production facilities.

The New York Times owns the Boston Globe and has a partial
interest in a sports franchise, the Boston Red Sox. Viacom is the
holder of CBS and runs everything from Star Trek properties to
Spelling Television. The Washington Post co-owns the International
Herald Tribune with the New York Times and, along with the LA
Times, runs a news service. Gannett, publisher of USA Today, owns
"insider" publications U.S. Army, Air Force and Navy-Marine Corps
Times, as well as Defense News and Military Market. They also
partner with defense contractor General Electric on web ventures.

And then there's The Unification Church's Washington Times
newspaper listed as a "project" on the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's
website. The Washington Times, along with the Dow Jones' Wall
Street Journal (Jones also owns 20 newspapers around the U.S.),
cater to a powerful constituency: God, Money, Corporations and
Republicans, although not always in that order.

Rev. Moon claims that Jesus Christ visited him in 1935 and,
according to The Unification Church website, "Jesus asked him to
complete the task of establishing God's kingdom on earth and
bringing His peace to humankind." Apparently Bush the First and
Bush the Second agree with Moon. The elder was on the Moon
payroll as a speechmaker and the younger claimed in a presidential
debate that Jesus Christ was the greatest philosopher of all time.

Finally, no mention of media would be complete without Fox News
Corporation. As reported by MediaChannel, Rupert Murdoch's
empire is so vast that he claims, "Our reach is unmatched around
the world. We are reaching people from the moment they wake up
until they fall asleep."

Pay No Attention to What the Media is Doing Behind That Curtain

With incest in the U.S. media as flagrant as it is—combined with its
subservience to the current U.S administration and military—is it
any surprise that events are scripted to suit the outcome of the U.S.
economic and national policies? The recent U.S.-backed
Venezuelan coup exposed the U.S. media interests as complicit
partners in deceiving the American public. FAIR documented the
print media's bovine coverage:

"When elements of the Venezuelan military forced president Hugo
Chavez from office last week, the editorial boards of several major
U.S. newspapers followed the U.S. government's lead and greeted
the news with enthusiasm. In an April 13 editorial, the New York
Times triumphantly declared that Chavez's 'resignation' meant that
'Venezuelan democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be
dictator.' Conspicuously avoiding the word 'coup,' the Times
explained that Chavez 'stepped down after the military intervened
and handed power to a respected business leader . . . ' Three days
later, Chavez had returned to power and the Times ran a second
editorial (4/16/02) half-apologizing for having gotten carried away."

When the corporate megaliths took over the news networks, the first
casualties were the foreign bureaus. No longer would network
journalists be able to build up a base of sources and contacts within
various capital cities and financial centers. The result is that the
networks increasingly rely on government spokespeople for "news"
that is really nothing more than propaganda. Take Afghanistan, for
example. Network and newspaper reporters are confined to Kabul
because U.S. military planners have convinced them the
countryside is unsafe. Not knowing any better and lacking any
in-country contacts, they remain in Kabul and dutifully file as news
copy every statement regurgitated by a suspicious military public
affairs officer. As Robert Young Pelton indicated in an interview with
Salon:

"Well, the military hates the media. The conundrum is that we live
and die for the Constitution and one of the elements of the
Constitution is freedom of the press—the right of the democratic
public to make decisions based on a free flow of information, without
censorship, without people rewriting history. And basically since the
Vietnam War, the military realizes that the press is the enemy,
because the press is actually faster and more intelligent than the
military is. They can assess a military situation long before the
military figures it out."

This story has been replayed in cities and countries around the
world. Last June, the world media bought the story issued by the
government of Nepal that a love sick, drunk, and deranged Crown
Prince executed his entire family, including his mother and
father—the King and Queen. Not reported was that incoming King
and new Crown Prince were brutal thugs bent on turning the country
into a virtual province of neighboring India. The Hollywood-inspired
news media liked the O.J. Simpson and Robert Blake angle of the
story instead and, without even a cursory independent investigation,
decided the official government explanation would suffice. It's the
same story line in Washington, DC.

Rewriting the Record

The recent pro-Palestinian and anti-globalization march in
Washington was ignominiously ignored by the U.S. media interests.
Only C-SPAN covered it live. However, when the ranks of the
protestors swelled to over 75,000, C-SPAN cut away its coverage to
air a taped three-day old speech by the head of the International
Monetary Fund. Undoubtedly, C-SPAN, like many other networks
that have offered unbiased coverage of Middle East news, felt the
wrath of a powerful lobby group called CAMERA—the Committee for
Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America—a virtual
propaganda arm of the Israeli government known for berating any
reporter who criticizes Israel. It effectively uses is financial clout to
get wayward media elements to fall in line with Israel's party line.

Another dangerous trend is cable news addiction to Bush. The
Three Stooges of cable news broadcasting—CNN, FoxCable, and
MSNBC—all break away for live coverage whether Bush is hamming
it up in the mountains of New York State or disembarking from his
helicopter. Gone underreported is the doctoring of White House
transcripts by staffers who excise Bush's intellectual blunders at
press conferences and speeches and who, in effect, are rewriting
the record. And U.S. military movements in support of the failed
coup in Venezuela received scant attention. History is replete with
examples of authoritarian leaders surrounding themselves with
cameras and one-sided news coverage. Consider Leni Riefenstahl's
constant filming of Hitler and how the coverage extended to every
German movie house. Or Soviet TV's ad minutiae coverage of
Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. Every time they visited a
tractor factory in Minsk or a poultry plant in Kiev, the story was
prominently featured on the nightly "Vremya" news.

As U.S. military planners, politicians and corporations continue their
global pacification campaign against a now trumped up Al Qaeda,
they have already planned for the invasion of Iraq and, perhaps,
other members of the Axis of Evil. To garner public support for
boundless U.S. military operations—from which new exploitable
markets magically appear—the war machine has received the
enthusiastic support of U.S. media interests whose task, it seems,
is to keep the public busy and acquiescent. In reality, most
Americans are extraordinarily averse to war, yet the U.S. media
interests upon which they rely for "thought" are the integral
operatives for U.S. war propaganda and concomitant public
indoctrination. Nazi celebrity Herman Goering would be right at
home in the U.S. in 2002, working with U.S. media interests to
suppress dissent and bring home a glorious victory for the
Homeland:

"Why of course the people don't want war! Why should some poor
slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get
out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the
common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England,
nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is
the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always
a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a
democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a
communist dictatorship . . . Voice or no voice, the people can
always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All
you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and
denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the
country to danger."

John Stanton is a Virginia-based writer on national security affairs
and Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative
journalist who writes and comments frequently on civil liberties and
human rights issues.