Letters to the Editor
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Correction--not 'cost leader'
I got a "term of art" wrong in an earlier post. "cost leader' should have been "loss leader".
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/lossleader.asp
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@ omooex
Nothing you just said was untrue, but I think that you should cut 19 year-olds some slack, whether they were drafted in 1968, or volunteered in 2008. The social engineers of our Imperium Americanum deserve the blame, not them.
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They don't even know not what they do, Glenn.
Most of the TV (news) shows I've witnessed recently are not geared for news in the traditional-classical sense at all (& I will testify to that effect, too.). They are more like political gossip Clubs, along with indepth study in the fine arts of politics - hardball politics (is there any other kind?). ... And the club is very small.
I have read the entire NYT article and have encouraged several friends to also read it. I believe it is a Major revelation in the sense it was [even] on the front page of the Times and so comprehensive.
My questions about it would concern;
1. Will the NYT go back through it's past publications, especially during the run-up to the Iraq war, and highlight the articles/opinions/op-ed's that were little more than Gov. propaganda? etc.
*2*. Where in the Hell is Congress on these Revelations! Don't they have any thing to say about the Gov. fooling/tricking everybody about WAR. shit.
bah.
asides~ William, my Yiddish is rusty but I wanted to tell you, you ain't nothing but a kosher sweet heart. ~ jkalos the jedi too. :)
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More From Norman Solomon
I've got a lot on my plate today, and haven't read through all the comments, so apologies if someone else has brought this up, but there's an article by Normon Solomon avaialble at FAIR's website that's an excerpt from the book that the film is based on, which provides a pretty sound context for viewing this most recent story.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627
Extra! July/August 2005
The Military-Industrial-Media Complex
Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective
By Norman Solomon
A few excerpts:
After eight years in the White House, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address on January 17, 1961. The former general warned of “an immense military establishment and a large arms industry.” He added that “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”
One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.
Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant. In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”
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Given the extent of shared sensibilities and financial synergies within what amounts to a huge military-industrial-media complex, it shouldn’t be surprising that—whether in the prelude to the Gulf War of 1991 or the Iraq invasion of 2003—the U.S.’s biggest media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests had combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes.
“In the 1980s and afterward, the United States underwrote 24 American corporations so they could sell to Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction, which he used against Iran, at that time the prime Middle Eastern enemy of the United States,” Ben Bagdikian wrote in The New Media Monopoly, the 2004 edition of his landmark book on the news business. “Hussein used U.S.-supplied poison gas” against Iranians and Kurds “while the United States looked the other way. This was the same Saddam Hussein who then, as in 2000, was a tyrant subjecting dissenters in his regime to unspeakable tortures and committing genocide against his Kurdish minorities.” In corporate medialand, history could be supremely relevant when it focused on Hussein’s torture and genocide, but the historic assistance he got from the U.S. government and American firms was apt to be off the subject and beside the point.
Spinning civilian deaths
By the time of the 1991 Gulf War, retired colonels, generals and admirals had become mainstays in network TV studios during wartime. Language such as “collateral damage” flowed effortlessly between journalists and military men, who shared perspectives on the occasionally mentioned and even more rarely seen civilians killed by U.S. firepower….
In the spring of 1999, FAIR studied coverage during the first two weeks of the bombing of Yugoslavia and found “a strong imbalance toward supporters of NATO air strikes.” Examining the transcripts of two influential TV programs, ABC’s Nightline and the PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, FAIR documented that only 8 percent of the 291 sources were critics of NATO’s U.S.-led bombing. Forty-five percent of sources were current or former U.S. government and military officials, NATO representatives or NATO troops. On Nightline, the study found, no U.S. sources other than Serbian-Americans were given air time to voice opposition (FAIR study, 5/5/99).
Summarizing FAIR’s research over a 15-year period, sociologist Michael Dolny underscored the news media’s chronic “over-reliance on official sources,” and he also emphasized that “opponents of war are under-represented compared to the percentage of citizens opposed to military conflict.”
“Waving the flag”
Those patterns were on display in 2003 with the Iraq invasion, when FAIR conducted a study of the 1,617 on-camera sources who appeared on the evening newscasts of six U.S. television networks during the three weeks beginning with the start of the war (Extra!, 5–6/03):
Nearly two-thirds of all sources, 64 percent, were pro-war, while 71 percent of U.S. guests favored the war. Anti-war voices were 10 percent of all sources, but just 6 percent of non-Iraqi sources and only 3 percent of U.S. sources. Thus viewers were more than six times as likely to see a pro-war source as one who was anti-war; counting only U.S. guests, the ratio increases to 25 to 1.
Less than 1 percent of the U.S. sources were anti-war on the CBS Evening News during the Iraq war’s first three weeks. Meanwhile, as FAIR’s researchers commented wryly, public television’s PBS NewsHour program hosted by Jim Lehrer “also had a relatively low percentage of U.S. anti-war voices—perhaps because the show less frequently features on-the-street interviews, to which critics of the war were usually relegated.” During the invasion, the major network studios were virtually off-limits to vehement American opponents of the war.