Sunday, March 23, 2003

The News Media of Oceania Coverage of the war has shown how completely propaganda has superceded traditional news reporting on the major television networks.   Just like in Orwell’s world of 1984, the omnipresent media focuses a continual barrage of propaganda, always refining, filtering, interpreting events to shape the public response.   Here are a few items that struck me as being virtually non-existent in the U.S. propaganda media, but widely reported in the areas outside American control.   Civilian casualties:  virtually no mention is made of civilian casualties on the major networks, except to endlessly repeat that the U.S. is trying to minimize them.  The rest of the world sees pictures of dead and injured children, sees reports of 50 dead civilians in Basra, and sees interviews with wounded civilians at Baghdad hospitals.   Prisoners of War:  U.S. commentators and government can hardly contain their outrage over the Iraqi television footage of dead Americans and U.S. prisoners. They constantly claim that Iraq is violating the Geneva convention.  Only one report, that I am aware of, mentioned that the U.S. has refused to apply the Geneva convention to its prisoners in Guantanamo and Afghanistan.  These prisoners continue to have no rights, such as notification to their governments that they are being held, or the right of visits by representatives of the Red Cross.  So the rest of the world sees it as the height of hypocrisy for the U.S. to invoke the Geneva convention for its own prisoners, but to refuse to acknowledge the Geneva convention for those it holds incommunicado in Guantanamo.    Attack by a Muslim on the commander of the 101st brigade:  The most interesting story here, in a fragging incident reminiscent of Vietnam, is that the soldier who rolled three grenades into his commanders tent was opposed to the war, a recent convert to Islam, and acted out of purely political reasons.  This rational was buried in the U.S. stories, because the army does not want to face the fact that it may have an internal security problem on its hands among the many black soldiers who identify with Islam.  Outside the propaganda veil, it was widely covered.   News vs. Analysis:  the majority of air time in the U.S. is now given over to bloviating by talking heads about the good points of U.S. strategy, armaments, intelligence, political leadership, morale, you name it.   The idea that the hapless British, dismissed by Rumsfeld, have now suffered the indignity of being shot out of the sky by the Americans, and are very angry about it, doesn’t make the talking heads.  Instead, it is the jolly oh we’re all in this together and accidents will happen.   To their credit, the U.S. military command is taking questions from the foreign press, including Arab reporters at their briefings in the client states.  These questions have been the only places where faulty logic underlying the U.S. position has been exposed, with one reporter asking Gen. Franks how he expects to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people when he is massively  bombing  Baghdad.   Anyway, it appears that the internet and foreign news sources are the only place to get a real picture of the war—and we will probably have to live with consequences of the American domestic propaganda campaign for many years to come.   One of the biggest difference between the active anti-war protestors and the passive war supporters is  information access.  The former make huge attempts to find out the situation, while the latter often do no more than respond to the 1984 style emotional cues:  now is the time to condemn Iraqi barbarism against the Geneva Convention (hiss); now is the time to salute the brave American soldiers, and now is the time to applaud the fantastic new technology.   The U.S. cannot accept the fact that in their own country, Iraqi irregular forces, dressed as civilians, may be fomenting a guerrilla type war against the U.S.  That this should start the first week of the war is an ominous sign.    All the worst abuses in Vietnam came about because the whole population and the “enemy” were one and the same.  If the U.S. makes the population of Iraq the enemy, as they may do, then we have a repeat of that famous strategy of “destroying the village in order to save it.” 11:34:01 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2003 Toby Sackton. Last update: 4/2/2003; 11:23:15 PM.