Reykjavík Grapevine - 27.06.2003, Blaðsíða 27

A familiar, oft repeated formula for
sidelining journalists who persist in
raising embarrassing facts was quickly
employed. After angry denials from
Washington and a smear campaign in
the national press, the reporter was
withdrawn from El Salvador. Bonners
report was later fully confirmed by the
U.N. Truth Commission who exhumed the
mass graves. Throughout Reagan’s Latin
American adventures, had news media
spent less time slavishly cheerleading
Washington and the Pentagon and more
time actually investigating the full truth
about Washington sponsored terror,
many of the most brutal crimes against
civilians, paid for by the U.S. taxpayer,
might have been prevented.
Lies, damn lies and news media
In terms of sustained and deliberate
manipulation of the facts, the 1991 Gulf
War could well become the model for
media complicity in government’s decep-
tion of the public, so successful was its
practice. The first fully televised war
and one that made a household name
of CNN, it heralded the advent of the
embedded journalists, round the clock
coverage and satellite technology to
ensure on the spot reporting and instant
live feeds. Yet western medias portrayal
of the war was one of the greatest works
of jingoistic fiction since the memoirs of
Henry Kissenger. The root cause brings
us back to this insidious notion of con-
flict of interest. Take General Electric for
instance, a U.S. owned, multi-national
corporation and one of the largest com-
panies in the world. Among its assets are
two of America’s biggest news networks
ABC and NBC. To this conglomerates
formidable portfolio we can also add a
whole chain of arms factories, supply-
ing parts for patriot missiles and other
weapons used in Iraq. This all worked
out quite neatly for ol’ G.E.; while one
arm of this corporate giant was literally
making a killing from the war through
expensive contracts with the Pentagon,
another arm of the same company was
reporting the war on television. Needless
to say, both networks were enthusiastic
supporters of the slaughter, obediently
accepting dubious official reports and
even outright suppression of facts and
events damaging to the popularity of a
lucrative war. When NBC reporter Jon Al-
pert unearthed video footage of civilian
devastation in Basra caused by massive
bombing in residential areas, the NBC
news president Michael Gartner promptly
suppressed the footage and banned Alp-
ert from ever working for NBC again. As
ever the Allies’ deliberate campaign of
disinformation and wholesale lies is now
a matter of public record. It was exposed
belatedly by the same news media who
accepted it unquestioningly in the first
place, but of course much too late to do
any good. Such considerations mattered
little to corporate news media and the
allied governments whose agendas were
mutually served. Bush and Thatcher, for
domestic political reasons, wanted war,
the likes of General Electric, profits. The
human price? About 700,000 largely in-
nocent lives, a statistic that you won’t be
hearing on NBC, CBS or Sky News any
time soon.

The public strikes back?
In the face of such corporate and official
media domination, how can we reassert
our right to independent, accurate news
and reporting? How can the average
citizen get behind the news and past the
headlines to find the real story? Not sim-
ply the right or the left view but the 27
other angles any event worth investigat-
ing will surely have, A task that seasoned
media watchers find difficult, never mind
an average citizen, trying to hold down
a job, raise a family and still find time
the make sense of the world around
him. This was one of the issues I raised
with Robert Crenshaw, author of Media
Watch, a comprehensive analysis of bias
in mainstream broadcasting.
He responded that although the
growing emasculation of diverse and
fearless independence in reporting is a
grave threat to our basic freedoms, the
average citizen is still left with a choice,
to lazily accept the official source or the
corporately framed view or to strive
to find those alternative and untainted
sources that still exist. Crenshaw cites
examples like the Internet, alternative
bookshops, independent publishers and
organisations like F.A.I.R., Oxfam and Hu-
man Rights Watch who avoid corporate
and interest vested sponsorship.
Martin Luther King was just one of
many great twentieth century leaders
who considered full and frank reporting
not only a right but also a duty in the
sense that citizens cannot afford be pas-
sive agents but must struggle to assert
this vital freedom. It is a clear if depress-
ing example of Kings prescience that in
the age of the military/industrial/Media
Complex this responsibility has become
an ever more onerous and daunting
one.
- the reykjavík grapevine -26 june 27th - july 10th, 2003 - the reykjavík grapevine - 27june 27th - july 10th, 2003
No TV please, we’re Icelandic
While Icelandic television has recently begun to take on the formulaic structures of
free market television this is a fairly recent phenomenon. From 1966 when Iceland’s
national channel came on the air for the first time until the mid eighties, Icelandic
govt policy with regard to television was somewhere to the left of Ho Chi Minh.
From the outset strict regulatory laws were introduced to protect a vulnerable
population from the dangers of excessive exposure to the box. These included the
compulsory closedown of the national channel every Thursday. As well as being a
catchy slogan “no telly on Thursday” this ensured that the nations children created
their own fun at least once a week. The solitary national station also shut for the
entire month of July. The government of the day, in their wisdom, decided that the
population should be forced to do something better with their month of 24 hour
daylight than sit in a drape-drawn room watching re-runs of Starksy and Hutch.
Nowadays, in the face of rampant free-market ideology and endless choice for-the-
sake-of-it, such benign Stalinism is of course no longer possible. In any case there’s
the reasonable argument that adults being treated as such should be left to make
up their own minds and when all else fails there is always the off button.
Whom does the corporate media ultimately
serve, its paymasters or the truth?
WE’RE ON A MISSION FROM GOD
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