• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2726 0

aims of the national leadership, the workings of the nominal democracy, and the integrity and value of the MSM. The worldwide protests against the prospective war against Iraq in 2002–2003 caused the media to speak of “world public opinion” as a “second superpower” contesting the war-making first superpower.10 This second superpower was helped along by the continuing rapid growth of the Internet with its critical blogs, political and social web sites, and widening e-mail communication on an individual as well as group basis. In the States, an Internet-based operation such as MoveOn.org has shown that large numbers can be mobilized around political issues, and many web sites and blogs together constitute a “new blue media” that provides a great deal of critical opinion, comment, information, and occasional counter-pressure on the MSM.11 However, the “new blue media” is still relatively small in size, fragmented, and does not have the audiences, advertising support, and broad infrastructure of the rightwing media. The latter, in addition to a large number of supportive blogs, has among other assets Fox TV and Fox Radio, Sinclair Broadcasting, the Clear Channel radio network, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the New York Post, the Washington Times, and a 10–1 advantage in airtime on talk radio, reaching many millions of listeners.

This rightwing echo chamber is powerful and intimidating and influences the MSM in a way no liberal or left institutions can match.12 Thus, during the 2004 presidential campaign this collective, led here by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, was able to damage John Kerry’s presidential bid by discrediting his service-record in the Vietnam War, based on strictly concocted and refutable evidence—heavily publicized and not refuted by the MSM13—while helping make sure that the media essentially ignored George W. Bush’s record of Vietnam War evasion and truly discreditable performance in the Texas Air National Guard.14 This ability to damage Kerry while protecting Bush in a terrain of Kerry strength and great potential vulnerability to Bush remains a model of rightwing media propaganda capabilities, unmatched by anything liberals or the left have ever accomplished. This same power has been important in reducing the willingness of the MSM to challenge propaganda campaigns of the warmakers.

Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction and Threat

The Iraq invasion-occupation, and the follow-up preparations for a war with Iran, supply us with further useful illustrations of the applicability of the propaganda model. Here the model’s utility flows from the fact that in both cases the arguments and justifications for an attack have been laughably thin and evidence that would undermine the cases was plentiful and compelling. In both instances the attacks actually carried out or planned were in clear violation of the UN Charter and hence “supreme international crimes.” Furthermore, in the Iraq case a substantial fraction of the public was hostile to the war before it began, and in a unique action several hundred thousand people in the United States (and several million globally) protested in the streets to try to prevent it. This necessitated and elicited a massive propaganda effort on the part of the administration to sell the war, with fear-mongering, intimidation, and an extraordinary level of deceit about the evidence and threats posed by the demonized villains.

In short, the Iraq invasion was a case in which available information, international law, public opinion, and the public interest should have made the media skeptical and critical from the very start, whereas fulfillment of the aims of the administration and war party required media propaganda service. That propaganda service was forthcoming; and what should have been an invigorated “public sphere” with intense debate became an administration conduit and/or cheerleading section.15 Part of the reason for this was the Bush administration’s post-9/11 fear-mongering, with periodic terrorism scares, intimidation, and rousing of patriotic ardor, which