* BECOMING THE MEDIA: PART 1 OF 2

THE HOT POTATO
Serving Up a Weekly Helping of
Sustainable & Organic Gardening, Food, Health, and Community

by Adam Brockman & Aireen Joven, March 2007, # 8

THIS WEEK’S DISH: BECOMING THE MEDIA: PART 1 OF 2

“I think we must remember that media homogenization serves the state. Media’s role in democracy is to hold the state accountable. I trust that public media collaboration will challenge the mainstream media and demand that they too become what should be the role of all the media - that is to be the exception to the rulers.” — Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!

IN LATE 1999, I (Adam) was relaxing in the living room of my apartment on Chicago’s Near-South Side when a friend of my roommate’s walked in and excitedly popped a videotape into the VCR. On the screen, I saw images of the WTO (World Trade Organization) protests in Seattle earlier that year, but they were not the same as the ones that I had seen on some of the mainstream corporate news stations. Appalled and disgusted, I watched as peaceful protestors, who had not incited any violence, were teargassed, pepper-sprayed, beaten by police, and forcefully arrested. I watched a young woman get shot, point-blank, in the face with a teargas canister as she sat in front of a police barricade, breaking no laws, exercising her constitutional right to freedom of demonstration.

My roommate’s friend had been to the WTO protests; it was either him or a friend of his that had made the videotape. He had witnessed firsthand the brutality of the police, the obvious degradation and disregard for law and democracy. Because of his bravery and commitment to make the truth be known, I was now able to witness these same crimes with my own eyes. And yet, if all I had seen, read, or heard, like millions of other Americans, was the coverage on CBS, ABC and CNN, and in The New York Times, for example, I might never have known the truth of what really happened during those four days in Seattle. It seemed every major corporate news station underreported and/or misrepresented the real story of those protests (1).

The brutal police crackdowns were not covered in depth, but only touched on as appropriate responses to “violent protestors” (2), although a Seattle police spokesperson, in an interview with CNN’s Lou Waters, confirmed that pepper spray was first used against nonviolent protestors exercising civil disobedience who had refused to disperse on police orders (though he and Waters clearly condoned the brutal reaction by police) (3). The use of violence by police later provoked isolated incidences of violence (which resulted in no injuries) by protestors. Violence by protestors was then seized upon and widely reported by the corporate media, while the depth and horror of the police-initiated violence got little more than approval, but no serious probing, condemnation, or honest coverage. Seattle physician Richard DeAndrea reported, “They [the police] were using rubber bullets. Some of the damage I saw from these rubber bullets took off a person’s jaw, smashed teeth … Lots of tear gas injuries, lots of damage to [the] cornea, lots of damage to the eyes and skin” (4). There were plenty of reporters from all of the major networks on the ground during the WTO conference, and the independent news outlets and journalists were all over the story, so where was the corporate media’s coverage of this brutality? Why was it missing from the five o’ clock news? And why were the real reasons that people were protesting the WTO in the first place never explored? If the mainstream media had bothered to ask the protestors why they were there, the detrimental policies of “free trade” - rather than fair trade - that have wreaked so much havoc on developing economies, the environment, and democracy worldwide might have been given the public forum that they deserve.

WHERE’S THE STORY?

Over the years, I began to see a disturbing pattern of underreporting, skewed coverage, and inappropriate political cheerleading from the mainstream corporate media, including the following examples:

• The widespread election fraud and disenfranchising of African-American voters during the 2000 and 2004 elections: unreported or misrepresented by the mainstream media. Why did the exit polls, a statistically proven voting safeguard used to check for vote fraud, show Kerry winning in New Mexico, Ohio, Iowa, and Nevada, and, consequently, winning the 2004 presidential race (5)? These states, all of which use easily hackable electronic voting machines, officially went to Bush (6). Six other states showed wide disparities between exit poll numbers and the official tally, all in Bush’s favor (7). Why was there no reporting when the National Election Pool and CNN changed the exit poll numbers to fit the official count (8)? These glaring indiscrepancies should have been enough to overturn the election and warrant a criminal investigation, and yet when it got any mention in the corporate media, it was to undermine the significance and credibility of those presenting legitimate analysis, or paint them as “conspiracy theorists” (9).
• Glaring indiscrepancies in the official story of 9/11(10), including reports by three British news sources about several of the alleged hijackers turning up alive in the Middle East and Turkey (11): ignored by the mainstream media, while spurious and flawed testimonies from so-called “experts” were parroted and a national fervor for revenge and war was trumped up instead. Mainstream media continue to incorrectly cite the names of individuals as hijackers who later were found to not be hijackers.
• Revelations about the CIA’s involvement in dealing heroin and cocaine in every major city in the United States to fund covert operations (12), and the connections between their drug-dealing and the real reasons for going to war in Afghanistan, now the largest exporter of heroin in the world (13): unreported by the mainstream media, while the Taliban-Al Qaeda connection has been erroneously repeated as the real reason without sufficient debate.

Most recently, Project Censored, an independent media analysis group, published its top 25 most censored news stories of 2007. Number 2 on the list: “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Members of Iran’s Nuclear Team.” According to the article, Halliburton, whose former CEO is Dick Cheney, has sold key components for a nuclear reactor to an Iranian Oil company whose Vice Chairman is a key member of Iran’s nuclear team, up until as recently as January 2005 (14). What was the 24th most censored story? “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose 3000 percent” in 2004. According to a Congressional inquiry, Cheney’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock options with Halliburton represent a conflict of interest, even though the official record claims that Cheney donates the after-tax profits to charity (15).

So, why are we not hearing about these and so many other very important stories in the corporate media? Why do we get to hear nearly every single detail about Anna Nichole Smith’s life and death while revelations about the U.S. military’s widespread use of chemical and radioactive weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan (in the form of white phosphorus and depleted uranium) go unreported (16)? Why are the voices of the Iraqi people on the ground, 75% of whom want the U.S. military to leave their country for good, 65% of those wanting it to happen immediately (17), not being heard in the Iraq War debate? If coverage of important stories is indeed being skewed or deliberately omitted by the corporate media, then why, and what can we do to make sure that we are kept informed of the truth?

WHO OWNS THE MEDIA?

At this moment in U.S. history, most of the news that you see, hear, and read is controlled by a handful of corporations. AOL Time-Warner (Time, Warner Brothers, CNN), Disney (ABC, ESPN, Miramax Films), NewsCorp (Fox, National Geographic Channel, HarperCollins, MySpace), Vivendi Universal (Universal/BMG Music), Bertelsmann of Germany (Random House), Viacom/CBS (Simon & Schuster, Showtime), and General Electric (NBC, Universal Studios) own a huge majority of the total media market (18)., including newspapers, magazines, books, radio and T.V. stations, and movie studios. First of all, this is an obvious problem because it limits the diversity and lack of choice of the media that we consume. Each corporation has it’s own agenda to fulfill, shareholders and corporate advertisers to appease, and even the Democratic and Republican Parties, as many contribute significant amounts of money to one or both political parties.

At the top of each corporation’s agenda is the bottom line: profit. A corporation is legally bound to put profit first. When profit is put first, however, everything else must come second, including fair, accurate, and even relevant reporting. Why Anna Nichole Smith’s death and other celebrity scandal are given so much airtime has nothing to do with news-worthiness and everything to do with ratings. Scandals bring ratings, and ratings bring profit, but rarely if ever contribute to a better informed public and a more democratic society. With seven profit-driven media outlets accounting for perhaps over 90% of the market, what we are getting is only a handful of perspectives, screened for profitability and filtered through decision-makers who answer to the CEOs and shareholders of wealthy, multinational corporations. This inevitably effects the quality of our news.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

In 1997, a Fox news affiliate in Tampa, Florida (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp) fired two reporters and suppressed a story about one of Fox’s major advertisers, Monsanto, concerning the negative health effects of Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH). Monsanto, who had genetically engineered BGH (also discussed in The Hot Potato #3), caught wind of the story prior to airing and threatened a lawsuit if it aired (19). This is one example of the potential conflict of interest that can arise when a corporate news outlet is faced with the decision to give a negative report on one of its corporate advertisers, especially if that advertiser happens to be a powerful multinational corporation. In this case, money talked, and a possibly life-saving, critical health story was pulled in the interest of profit.

Fox news has a reputation for being anything but “fair and balanced” in it’s reporting (20), and if you take a look at its campaign contributions, it’s not hard to discover why. From 1999-2002, NewsCorp gave 62% of its $1,785,868 in campaign contributions to the Republicans and 38% to Democrats. On the flipside, Time-Warner gave 63% of its $6,205,502 in contributions to Democrats and 36% to Republicans (21). This is equally alarming: how can we expect a company that gives tens of thousands of dollars a year to both political parties to offer fair and critical insight into the views and policies of its leaders? What is more worrisome than who gave what to which political campaign is the fact that each of the major media outlets are financially involved in partisan politics at all. How can we expect news corporations that are so financially invested in the campaigns of both major political parties to offer critical coverage of policies that both parties overwhelmingly support, including the WTO, continued human rights abuses against Palestinians via political, financial, and arms “aid” by the U.S. to the Israeli military and government, and the war & occupation of Iraq?

In 2003, when the FCC, under then chairman Michael Powell (Colin Powell’s son), was considering, but did not completely pass, sweeping deregulations of media ownership which would have made it even easier for media conglomerates to tighten their hold on the market, lobbying by the top corporate conglomerates virtually went through the roof. Lobbying from the parent companies of the top five cable and T.V. news stations (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox) rose 73 percent between 1998 and 2003, and in 2000 it had already hit a combined $27 million. Clear Channel, owner of nearly 1200 radio stations, some T.V. stations, and thousands of billboards nationwide, spent $2.28 million on lobbying in 2003, an increase of 19,000% in just two years’ time (22). The reasons for this massive spending were as obvious as the reasons for campaign contributions: in politics, money buys influence, and vice-versa. Despite the serious threats to an open, diverse, democratic and decentralized media presented by the proposed 2003 deregulations, all of the major media outlets worked against the best interests of the people they are supposed to be serving by trying to buy their way to greater control and more profits.

Yet another conflict of interest involves media parent-companies and subsidiaries who have a vested interest in spinning or omitting military coverage. A case in point is General Electric, owner of NBC and MSNBC. G.E. also designs, manufactures, and supplies parts and maintenance for weapons systems to the U.S. military. Between 1990 and 2002, G.E. had $43 billion in post-war contracts with the Pentagon, the highest of any U.S. corporation, and in 2004 they ranked 8th with $2.8 billion dollars in Pentagon contracts (23). This should raise some eyebrows concerning NBC’s overwhelmingly pro-war coverage and absence of anti-war voices in the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq (24), and in the following months, except perhaps MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”. How can we expect a news station whose parent company has a multi-billion dollar vested interest in weapons contracts to give us fair and accurate coverage of a war?

PARROTING THE WAR

When it came to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, not just NBC, but every major media outlet in the country seemed to fall into a sort of trance, repeating the same mantras about weapons of mass destruction and the desirability of war that were being chanted by top officials of the Administration and both political parties. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a media watchdog group, did a study that showed in the week before and after then Secretary of State Colin Powell made his WMD-threatening case for war with Iraq at the U.N., the four major nightly newscasts - ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS’s “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”, conducted 393 interviews focused on the pending war. Though a majority of Americans were against the war at the time, only 3 people out of these 393 interviewed, or less than 1 percent, were opposed to war (25). Another study by FAIR shows that in the three weeks leading up to the invasion, only 3 percent of U.S. sources on the evening news of ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, Fox, and PBS expressed skepticism on the impending war, even though more than a quarter of the American people were still against it (26).

This is an appalling failure on the part of the mainstream media to provide anything close to “fair and balanced” coverage. Where were the voices of those opposed to war, at a time when they were so critically needed in the public discourse? Marginalized, at best. Now we know that all of the stated reasons for going to war with Iraq were lies, and yet these same lies were repeated over and over and given exclusive coverage in the days leading up to the Iraq war. These lies, concocted by Bush Administration officials and parroted by the mainstream media, helped manufacture a war that since March 2003 has cost the lives of over 655,000 Iraqis (which equates to about 500 expected violent deaths per day in Iraq) (27), the deaths of 3,161 U.S. soldiers as of Feb 27th, 2007, as well as the lost lives of soldiers, journalists, and NGO workers from around the world, the countless wounded and maimed for life, and spread across Iraq’s desert, towns, and major cities radioactive, depleted uranium dust clouds that will be around for billions of years (28). These numbers have yet to stop going up, and we have yet to see corporate media accomplish what Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now!”, an independent news program with a larger audience than even CNN, describes as the role of media in a democracy - to hold the government accountable while representing the voice of the people. The best representative of the voice of the people is the people themselves, hence the wise slogan oft-repeated by The Independent Media Center, an international network of collectively run media outlets (www.indymedia.org) - “Be The Media!”

Who covered the largest worldwide anti-war protests in history from the point of view of the people speaking out for peace? Where were the voices of truth to be heard in the midst of all the sabre-rattling and false accusations? Where are these voices today? In Part 2 of “Becoming the Media”, we will focus on the corporate media’s coverage and self-censorship in the Iraq War & Occupation, provide more insight into the machinations of the media-military-government complex, and most importantly, focus on the role that independent media is playing in keeping Americans and the world informed, empowered, and aware of the diversity of voices that exist in shaping the destiny of our communities and our country. Until next week, the hot potato is in your hands. Pass it on!

NOTES:
1. See Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)’s WTO Seattle archives for a look at corporate media coverage and quotes, www.fair.org.
2. Quote by Dan Rather. See Ackerman, Seth, “WTO Coverage: Prattle in Seattle,” FAIR Media Advisory, Jan/Feb 2000.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. See www.exitpollz.org for a wide variety of sources on the election fraud, including CNN’s own exit polls as they appeared on election day, showing Kerry winning the presidency.
6. See www.blackboxvoting.com for a look at the hackability of electronic voting machines, recently banned in favor of paper ballots in the state of Florida.
7. Freeman, Steven F., Ph.D., “The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy,” University of Pennsylvania, 10 Nov 2004.
8. Keefer, Michael, “Footprints of Electoral Fraud: The November 2 Exit Poll Scam,” Centre for Research on Globalisation, 5 Nov 2004, www.globalresearch.ca.
9. Quoted phrase used by The New York Times, The Washington Post, and others. See Whiten, John, “Subverting, Not Preserving, Democracy,” Extra! magazine by FAIR, July/Aug 2006.
10. These discrepancies are documented in detail on www.fromthewilderness.com, www.911truth.org, www.physics911.net, and several well-done documentaries including Loose Change (dir. Dylan Avery, Loose Change: Final Cut scheduled release 2007), and books including Crossing the Rubicon by Michael C. Ruppert (New Society Publishers, 2004) and The New Pearl Harbor by David Ray Griffin, Ph.D., (Interlink, 2004).
11. Harrison, David, “Revealed: the men with the stolen identities,” Telegraph, 23 Sep 2001; Fisk, Robert, “‘Suicide hijacker’ is an airline pilot alive and well in Jeddah,” The Independent, 17 Sep 2001; and “Hijack ’suspects’ alive and well”, BBC News, 23 Sep 2001. The BBC story was suspiciously retracted 5 years later.
12. See Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, (Seven Stories Press, 1999). See also the film The Truth and Lies of 9/11 by Michael C. Ruppert (2001), and Ruppert’s well-researched website, www.fromthewilderness.com for a detailed history of CIA drug-dealing and its links to the current war in Afghanistan.
13. See the DEA’s “National Drug Threat Assessment 2006″ for statistics.
14. Leopold, Jason, “Halliburton Secretly Doing Business With Key Members of Iran’s Nuclear Team,” www.globalresearch.ca, 5 August 2005, republished at www.projectcensored.org.
15. Byrne, John, “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Rose 3,281 Percent Last Year, Senator Finds,” Raw Story, October 2005, republished at www.projectcensored.org.
16. See Dahr Jamail’s firsthand, eyewitness accounts and photographs of white phosphorus, a chemical weapon similar to napalm, being used on civilian populations in Iraq at www.dahrjamailiraq.com. The U.S. military and NATO admit to using depleted uranium, the detrimental health effects of which are widely known and are documented by the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility at www.ccnr.org. See also Bertell, Dr. Rosalie, “Gulf War Veterans and Depleted Uranium,” May 1999.
17. Paley, Amit R., “Most Iraqis Want US to Leave Now,” San Francisco Chronicle, 27 Sep 2006.
18. See “Concentration of Media Ownership,” Wikipedia, and Media Channel’s “Media Ownership Chart,” www.mediachannel.org.
19. Akre, Jane, “An Uphill Battle: Our Lawsuit Against Fox,” PR Watch, 2000, reprinted at www.organicconsumers.org.
20. See Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, exposing Fox News’ often blatantly distorted coverage, (dir. Robert Greenwald, 2004).
21. Statistics from www.capitaleye.org, “Top 25 Media Companies’ Campaign Contributions, 1999-2002″, based on data released from the Federal Election Commission, 28 April 2003.
22. Above statistics from Lynch, Alexander, “U.S.: the Media Lobby,” www.alternet.org, 11 March 2005.
23. See FAIR’s website, www.fair.org, for statistics on G.E. and links to NBC’s spinning of war coverage.
24. Ibid.
25. Goodman, Amy. “Introduction,” Project Censored 2004, ed. Peter Phillips and Project Censored, citing FAIR study.
26. From a speech by Bill Moyers to the 2005 National Conference on Media Reform, citing FAIR study.
27. According to a survey by Iraqi physicians and overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published in British medical journal, The Lancet, October 2006. See also Brown, David, “Study Claims Iraq’s ‘Excess’ Death Toll Has Reached 655,000,” Washington Post, 11 October 2006.
28. 4.5 billion years is the half-life of uranium-238 or depleted uranium, the radioactive substance used in armor piercing rounds by the U.S. military. Figure from the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, www.ccnr.org.

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