People who are concerned about the state of the U.S. news media in
2006 might pause to consider those who have lost their lives in the midst
of journalistic neglect, avoidance and bias.
We remember that while TV and radio news reports tell the latest
about corporate fortunes, vast numbers of real people are struggling to
make ends meet -- and many are in a position of choosing between such
necessities as medicine, adequate food and paying the rent.
We remember that many Americans have lost their limbs or their lives
in on-the-job accidents that might have been prevented if overall media
coverage had been anywhere near as transfixed with job safety as with,
say, marital splits among Hollywood celebrities.
We remember that the national and deadly problem of widespread
obesity is in part attributable to constant advertising for products with
empty calories and plenty of fat.
We remember that despite public claims by tobacco companies, the ads
that keep trying to glamorize smoking continue to lure millions of young
people onto a long journey of addiction to cancer-causing cigarettes.
We remember that superficial news reports and commentaries,
routinely describing war in flat phony antiseptic terms, are helpful to
the U.S. war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq -- where the deaths of
American troops, while horrific, are small in number compared to the
civilian deaths as a result of daily slaughter catalyzed by U.S. military
activities.
We remember that each war death takes a precious life, and media
outlets rarely convey more than surface accounts of the actual grief of
loved ones left behind.
We remember that massive amounts of front-page space and
unchallenged air time on television and radio are used by the president
and other top administration officials, who speak glibly about patriotism
and sacrifice while their long records of deception continue to underlie
insistence that sacrificed lives must be honored by sacrificing more
lives.
We remember that lies from the White House, widely parroted and
commonly touted as credible by news media, have preceded every major U.S.
military action in the last five decades, including invasions of Vietnam,
Laos, Cambodia, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan and
Iraq.
We remember that after the United States led the NATO bombing of
Yugoslavia for 78 days in the spring of 1999, more than a few American
journalists joined with Pentagon commanders to hype the fact that no
American lives were lost in combat during that time -- as if the killing
of people on the ground was of scarcely any human consequence.
We remember that onslaughts of media spin followed by exuberant
coverage of high-tech U.S. air attacks can shift public sentiment
drastically almost overnight. That’s why opponents of reckless and deadly
policies should draw little comfort from the Pew Research Center’s
mid-May report that at the moment “the American public strongly prefers
non-military approaches to dealing with Iran’s nuclear technology
program,” with just 30 percent in favor of “bombing military targets in
Iran.”
We remember that, no matter how much glorious rhetoric and how many
chronic euphemisms are brought to bear on public opinion, most of war’s
victims are not -- by any definition -- combatants or enemies. As New
York Times reporter Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent, has pointed
out, “In the wars of the 1990s civilian deaths constituted between 75 and
90 percent of all war deaths.”
We remember that, although it received scant and fleeting U.S. media
coverage when released by the Lancet medical journal in late October
2004, a study using sample-survey techniques found that about 100,000
Iraqi deaths had occurred over an 18-month period as a result of the
U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq -- and, according to the study’s
data, more than half of those who died were women and children killed in
air strikes.
We remember that it’s easy for hot-dogging pundits to sit in TV
studios or in newsrooms to cheer on the use of cutting-edge technology by
the Pentagon. Those pundits leave it to others to bury the dead and to
deal with the anguish of losing relatives and friends.
We remember that standard journalism fails to do much to put us in
touch with human realities of war.
______________________
The paperback edition of Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy:
How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is being published
in early summer. For information, go to:
www.WarMadeEasy.com