BANGKOK, 17 April 2003 — While wars are fought in pitched battles on the ground, sea, and air, the crucial fight for “hearts and minds” is now waged in the media.
It is journalists that must weed out nonsense from truth. But according to critics of the mainstream American media, the free press failed to pose tough questions to the George W. Bush administration when it claimed the regime in Iraq posed “a grave and growing danger” to the United States of America.
Analysts say this aided the march to war.
The road to convince the American public of the imminent threat posed by Iraq was stepped up in September 2002. The US administration put out a 31-page security policy statement saying “to forestall or prevent hostile acts, it will, if necessary act pre-emptively”. America maintains the option of pre-emptive action to counter a “sufficient threat to our national security”, the document said. The message was quickly spread using the media. US Vice President Dick Cheney was one of five top administration officials to hit the airwaves the following Sunday on major US television talk shows. “We do know, with absolute certainty, that he (Saddam) is using his procurement system to acquire the equipment he needs in order to enrich uranium to build a nuclear weapon,” Cheney told the NBC network’s “Meet the Press” program.
“And increasingly, we believe the United States may well become the target of those activities. The cost of military action, if that’s what it comes to, would be significantly less (now) than having to deal with it after we’ve been struck once again by a deadly system.”
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was more animated on CNN’s “Late Edition”. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”
There is no proof even today that Iraq was building a nuclear arsenal.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared on the CBS network’s “Face the Nation” the same Sunday in September 2002.
“Imagine a Sept. 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It’s not 3,000 (dead) — it’s tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children,” Rumsfeld said. Yet, Iraq’s links to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network and evidence of its weapons of mass destruction are nowhere to be found. According to long-time media critic and renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology linguistics scholar, Noam Chomsky, after Sept. 11 about 3 percent of the American people held Iraq responsible for the carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania.
“Government-media propaganda managed to raise that to about 50 percent,” Chomsky recently told India’s Frontline magazine in an interview. “Now if people genuinely believe that Iraq has carried out major terrorist attacks against the United States and is planning to do so again, people will support the war. “It is a truly spectacular achievement of propaganda.”
Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) contacted The New York Times, the Cable News Network (CNN), the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times for comment on the criticism. Only CNN and The New York Times responded to decline.
“I don’t believe it’s appropriate for us to comment on our own coverage,” said Catherine Mathis, vice president of The New York Times communications department.
While examples of the US administration tying Iraq to terrorism plans on American soil abounded in the nation’s press prior to the invasion, media critics point out challenges to these accusations by reporters were virtually non-existent.
“Bush administration spokesmen have made several cases for waging war against Iraq, and the US press has tended to present all those cases to the public as if they were gospel,” veteran New York Times journalist Tom Wicker wrote before the US and its allies attacked Iraq.
“The American press seems sometimes to be playing on the administration team, rather than pursuing the necessary search for truth, wherever it may lead.”
As one example, Steve Rendall of the New York-based media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) highlighted the sacking of liberal talk-show host Phil Donahue from the MSNBC network in February. He called it a deliberate attempt to silence a lone anti-war voice by a major US television network.
Executives said poor ratings sunk Donahue’s program, but a leaked MSNBC report puts the claim into question. “He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives,” the MSNBC document — obtained by media analyst Rick Ellis — said.
