“A human brain lay beside the highway. It was
scattered in the sand, blasted from its owner’s head when the Americans
ambushed.”
These are words we seldom read when told, by our ‘objective’ media, about the state of the war in Iraq. Why not? Well, you, the paying customer, shouldn’t have to read anything of the sort. It’s the sort of news that will put you off your brunch. Thankfully, the military are more than adept at protecting you from such reality.
Anyway, surely we get plenty of reality television shows as it is and that I’m a celebrity is gruesome enough. I mean, watching a minor celebrity munch on a cockroach, that’s hard to watch. Doubt if they should be showing that before the watershed. I thought there were rules about such coverage.
Ok reader return to the opening quote taken from British journalist, Robert Fisk‘s article about the Iraq War, from the Independent, in 2003. That is the reality of Iraq and all wars: death and destruction. Those controlling media output are scared of showing you how horrific war actually is. The military are not only at war with regimes but also with you. They have hijacked vocabulary to such an extent that invasion becomes liberation, slaughtered children become collateral damage.
The Vietnam War was the last where the media had a freer range to obtain information and report more of the horror of war. In the aftermath of Vietnam it was the media that were seen to have been instrumental in the American defeat. The media has been tightened up radically since then.
The first Gulf War saw the media in effect quarantined, and holed up in a hotel, away from proper access to information. The military selected certain people from the press to be taken and shown what they wanted them to see. Simply put: the military using the media as their weapon for mass propaganda.
The current war in Iraq saw the media press the Pentagon for greater access. The result was a formal structure of embedded correspondents. However, unless there is access to other resources, the embedded reporter will gain nothing but a controlled and limited knowledge of the reality. The true horror of Iraq then reaches us in a packaged and sanitised form that has the public unaware of the unimaginable atrocities taking place in Iraq.
A study by the school of journalism at Cardiff University-showed that 90% of BBC’s references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them and that, by clear implication Bush and Blair were right. Just the misinformation the military wants in the mainstream.
Weapons of mass destruction or as the Americans and British call there on WMD’S: deterrents were the justification for invading Iraq. The media passed this on like somebody might pass the salt. It was picked up and delivered without a second thought.
Where the high ideals of the fourth estate, there to hold governments to account? What we got was government using the media as a mouth piece. The subsequent and on-going death and destruction in Iraq has been met with the bomb of silence.
Silence, for example, about the plight of Iraq’s children who are dying in hospitals for lack of the most elementary equipment:
“Save the Children estimate that 59 in 1,000 newborn babies are dying in Iraq, one of the highest mortality rates in the world. Up to 260,000 children may have died since the 2003 invasion.” (Colin Brown, ‘The battle to save Iraq’s children,’ The Independent, January 19, 2007)
Despite the fact that the war in Iraq is reported daily in most U.S. newspapers and networks around the world, the Australian journalist, John Pilger stated: “We get the illusion that we are seeing what might be happening in Iraq. But what we’re getting is a massive censorship by omission; so much is being left out,” he said. “We have a situation in Iraq where well over 100,000 civilians have been killed and we have virtually no pictures. The control of that by the Pentagon has been quite brilliant. And as a result we have no idea of the extent of civilians suffering in that country.”
A New York Times editorial declared: “If we had known then what we know now, the invasion [of Iraq] would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” It was the journalists’ job to have known it then. They did not do their job but did instead what those in power wanted them to do; misinform the public, resulting in unimaginable suffering.
The suffering has continued yet the military, so very skilful with how they deal with the press; continue to use the media as their tool. Censorship is the ammunition they use on those at home. If we think of war as a painless, technological affair-we’ll find it easier to support it.
Robert Fisk also points to the censorship being imposed on the Iraqi media. The U.S. administration has set up a committee for press censorship in Iraq, which means the Iraqi press can publish anything to remind people about the terror of Saddam, but is not allowed to write freely about current events crucial to them and their future.
The media is under tight control around the world. In Australia Rupert Murdoch controls 70 percent of the media and just five corporations manage broadcasters in the US. ”We live in an age of information,” John Pilger said. ”Yet the media is not attacking the ruling system. The media has never before been so controlled, and propaganda is all around. Most of us don’t even see it.”
Richard Falk at Princeton has described the process. We are indoctrinated to see foreign policy, he wrote, “through a self-righteous, one-way moral/legal screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence.”
Edward S Herman in his landmark essay, “The Brutality of Evil”, said the function of the media was to “normalise the unthinkable.” The function of the media has to be to tell of the true horrors of war, the death and destruction which take place in epic proportions in Iraq and elsewhere. The military are winning the battle for the right kind of publicity in Iraq. If more people know it as a battle they are waging, perhaps the power of public opinion can fight back.
