[Mb-civic] A Televisual Fairyland

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0118-24.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 18, 2005 by the Guardian/UK  
A Televisual Fairyland
The US Media is Disciplined by Corporate America 
into Promoting the Republican Cause
 
by George Monbiot 
  
On Thursday, the fairy king of fairyland will be recrowned. He was 
elected on a platform suspended in midair by the power of 
imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through 
ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most 
powerful person on earth. 

How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of 
make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on 
hard-headed materialism? To find out, take a look at two squalid 
little stories which have been concluded over the past 10 days. 

The first involves the broadcaster CBS. In September, its 60 
Minutes program ran an investigation into how George Bush 
avoided the Vietnam draft. It produced memos which appeared to 
show that his squadron commander in the Texas National Guard 
had been persuaded to "sugarcoat" his service record. The 
program's allegations were immediately and convincingly refuted: 
Republicans were able to point to evidence suggesting the memos 
had been faked. Last week, following an inquiry into the program, 
the producer was sacked, and three CBS executives were forced to 
resign. 

The incident couldn't have been more helpful to Bush. Though there 
is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the 
collapse of CBS's story suggested that all the allegations made 
about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the 
news. CBS was furiously denounced by the rightwing pundits, with 
the result that between then and the election, hardly any 
broadcaster dared to criticize George Bush. Mary Mapes, the 
producer whom CBS fired, was the network's most effective 
investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the 
Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the 
forger was either a moron or a very smart operator. 

It's true, of course, that CBS should have taken more care. But I 
think it is safe to assume that if the network had instead broadcast 
unsustainable allegations about John Kerry, none of its executives 
would now be looking for work. How many people have lost their 
jobs, at CBS or anywhere else, for repeating bogus stories released 
by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth about Kerry's record in 
Vietnam? How many were sacked for misreporting the Jessica 
Lynch affair? Or for claiming that Saddam Hussein had an active 
nuclear weapons program in 2003? Or that he was buying uranium 
from Niger, or using mobile biological weapons labs, or had a hand 
in 9/11? How many people were sacked, during Clinton's 
presidency, for broadcasting outright lies about the Whitewater 
affair? The answer, in all cases, is none. 

You can say what you like in the US media, as long as it helps a 
Republican president. But slip up once while questioning him, and 
you will be torn to shreds. Even the most groveling affirmations of 
loyalty won't help. The presenter of 60 Minutes, Dan Rather, is the 
man who once told his audience" "George Bush is the president, he 
makes the decisions and, you know, as just one American, he 
wants me to line up, just tell me where." CBS is owned by the 
conglomerate Viacom, whose chairman told reporters: "We believe 
the election of a Republican administration is better for our 
company." But for Fox News and the shockjocks syndicated by 
Clear Channel, Rather's faltering attempt at investigative journalism 
is further evidence of "a liberal media conspiracy". 

This is not the first time something like this has happened. In 1998, 
CNN made a program which claimed that, during the Vietnam war, 
US special forces dropped sarin gas on defectors who had fled to 
Laos. In this case, there was plenty of evidence to support the story. 
But after four weeks of furious denunciations, the network's owner, 
Ted Turner, publicly apologized in terms you would expect to hear 
during a show trial in North Korea: "I'll take my shirt off and beat 
myself bloody on the back." CNN had erred, he said, by 
broadcasting the allegations when "we didn't have evidence beyond 
a reasonable doubt". As the website wsws.org has pointed out, it's 
hard to think of a single investigative story - Watergate, the My Lai 
massacre, Britain's arms to Iraq scandal - which could have been 
proved at the time by journalists "beyond a reasonable doubt". But 
Turner did what was demanded of him, with the result that, in media 
fairyland, the atrocity is now deemed not to have happened. 

The other squalid little story broke three days before the CBS 
people were sacked. A US newspaper discovered that Armstrong 
Williams, a television presenter who (among other jobs) had a 
weekly slot on a syndicated TV show called America's Black Forum, 
had secretly signed a $240,000 contract with the US Department of 
Education. The contract required him "to regularly comment" on 
George Bush's education bill "during the course of his broadcasts" 
and to ensure that "Secretary Paige [the education secretary] and 
other department officials shall have the option of appearing from 
time to time as studio guests". 

It's hard to see why the administration bothered to pay him. Williams 
has described as his "mentors" Lee Atwater - the man who, under 
Reagan's presidency, brought a new viciousness to Republican 
campaigning - and the segregationist senator Strom Thurmond. His 
broadcasting career has been dedicated to promoting extreme 
Republican causes and attacking civil rights campaigns. 

What makes this story interesting is that the show he worked on 
was founded, in 1977, by the radical black activists Glen Ford and 
Peter Gamble, to "allow black reporters to hold politicians and 
activists of all persuasions accountable to black people". They sold 
their shares in 1980, and the program was later bought by the 
Uniworld Group. With Williams's help, the new owners have 
reversed its politics, and turned it into a recruitment vehicle for the 
Republican party. Williams appears to have been taking money for 
doing what he was doing anyway. 

These stories, in other words, are illustrations of the ways in which 
the US media is disciplined by corporate America. In the first case 
the other corporate broadcasters joined forces to punish a dissenter 
in their ranks. In the second case a corporation captured what was 
once a dissenting program and turned it into another means of 
engineering conformity. 

The role of the media corporations in the US is similar to that of 
repressive state regimes elsewhere: they decide what the public will 
and won't be allowed to hear, and either punish or recruit the social 
deviants who insist on telling a different story. The journalists they 
employ do what almost all journalists working under repressive 
regimes do: they internalize the demands of the censor, and 
understand, before anyone has told them, what is permissible and 
what is not. 

So, when they are faced with a choice between a fable which helps 
the Republicans, and a reality which hurts them, they choose the 
fable. As their fantasies accumulate, the story they tell about the 
world veers further and further from reality. Anyone who tries to 
bring the people back down to earth is denounced as a traitor and a 
fantasist. And anyone who seeks to become president must first 
learn to live in fairyland. 

George Monbiot's website is www.monbiot.com 

© 2005 Guardian Newspapers, Ltd.

 

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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act."
   ---   George Orwell


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