Are you as shocked as I am about the NY Times article: "Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand?"
...which tells us that once again the American people are being lied to with the help of our media about all things involving war. War---War---War. OK, I wasn't shocked at all, but it is a truly shocking story. Do these people have any decency left? There should be an investigation into the use of paid shills on our airwaves who are substituted for investigative journalists---used for the sole purpose of distorting the truth to push the company line.
We constantly discuss on the blogs questions like "what are the greatest threats to our Democracy," and the more and more I ponder it, the more and more I put my finger on the delivery system known as the media. In honor of yet another travesty perpetrated on the American people by our lying media---I bring you Norman Solomon's very fine: "War Made Easy."How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death because he was hip to this problem long before the NY Times took a look.
I asked Norman to write a post for C&L on this issue because he was so far out in front of it. He delivered the above video clip from the movie "War Made Easy" with transcript plus the comment below.
While it’s a positive step, the big front-page New York Times article on Sunday -- “Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand” -- is tardy by several years and now makes a remarkable detour around the active role of the television networks themselves in implementing systemic disinformation efforts for starting and continuing war. As I say in the documentary film War Made Easy, “Nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it.” And that just begins to tell the sordid and bloody tale.
This kind of stuff is 24/7 wartime wallpaper for cable news. The extent of the war-propaganda problem is such that the Times just scratched the surface. For a look at some grim media cases-in-point and samples from War Made Easy, go to: www.WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org
From the War Made Easy
transcript:
SEAN PENN [narrator]: CNN's use of retired generals as supposedly independent experts reinforced a decidedly military mindset, even as serious questions remained about the wisdom and necessity of going to war.
NORMAN SOLOMON: Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting. But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it. You had a top CNN official named Eason Jordan going on the air of his network and boasting that he had visited the Pentagon with a list of possible military commentators, and he asked officials at the Defense Department whether that was a good list of people to hire.
EASON JORDAN [speaking on CNN]: Oh, I think it's important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict. I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we're thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.
NORMAN SOLOMON: It wasn't even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people on its own network, “See, we're team players. We may be the news media, but we're on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.” And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press, and that suggests that we have some deep patterns of media avoidance when the U.S. is involved in a war based on.
Thank you Norman. By the way, is C&L allowed to be critical of these generals? Will I be censured by Congress too?
