September 2003 Week 4

By Eric Margolis, Toronto Sun

MIAMI -- I've long considered CNN's Christiane Amanpour an outstanding journalist. Last week, my opinion of her rose further when she ignited a storm of controversy when asked by a TV interviewer about the U.S. media's coverage of the Iraq war.

Breaking a taboo of silence in the mainstream media, Amanpour courageously replied, "I think the press was muzzled and I think the press self-muzzled. Television ... was intimidated by the (Bush) administration and its foot soldiers at Fox News."

Right on cue, faithful to Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering's advice to attack all dissenting views as treason, Fox accused Amanpour of being a "spokeswoman for al-Qaida." I felt for Amanpour, having myself been slandered by the U.S. neo-conservative media as "a friend of Saddam" for disputing White House claims about Iraq - whose secret police had threatened to hang me on my last visit to Baghdad.

The warlike momma's boys at the neo-con National Review actually had the chutzpah to call me "unpatriotic." Columnists at my own paper pilloried me for opposing the Iraq misadventure. Now, as White House lies and distortions are being exposed daily, these critics are not man enough to admit that their parroting of administration war propaganda - Amanpour politely calls it "high level disinformation" - was foolish and unprofessional.

Christiane Amanpour is absolutely right. The U.S. media was muzzled and censored itself.

I experienced this firsthand on U.S. TV, radio and in print. Never in my 20 years in media have I seen such unconscionable pressure exerted on journalists to conform to the government's party line.

Criticism of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, photos of dead American soldiers or civilians killed by bombing, were forbidden or downplayed.

The tone of reporting had to be strongly positive, filled with uplifting stories about liberation and women freed from repression. Criticism, sharp questions and doubt were verboten.

The bloated corporations dominating the U.S. media feared antagonizing the White House, which was pushing for the bill - just rejected by the Senate - to allow them to grow even larger.

Reporters who failed to toe the line were barred or had their access to military and government officials limited, virtually ending some careers. Many "embedded" reporters in Iraq and Afghanistan became little more than public relations auxiliaries.

Critics of administration policies in Iraq and Afghanistan were systematically excluded from media commentary, particularly on national TV.

Experts' fabrications

Night after night, networks featured "experts" who droned on about Iraq's fearsome weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to the U.S., about Iraq's links to al-Qaida, the urgency to invade Iraq before it could strike at America and a raft of other fabrications.

Such "experts" echoed the White House party line and all were dead wrong. Yet, amazingly, many are still on the air, continuing to misinform the public, using convoluted arguments to explain why they were not really wrong even when they were.

I do not exaggerate when I say that much of the U.S. media from 9/11 to the present closely resembled the old Soviet media I knew and disrespected during my stays in the USSR during the 1980s.

The American media, notably the sycophantic White House press corps and flagwavers at Fox, treated President George Bush and his entourage with adulation and fawning servility similar to what the Soviet state media once lavished on Communist Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev.

When dimwitted Brezhnev made the calamitous blunder of invading Afghanistan, the Moscow media rapturously described the brazen aggression as "liberation" that recalled the glories of World War II. The U.S. media indulged in the same frenzied foot-kissing, and the same silly WW II comparisons over Bush's foolhardy invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

President Bush and his neo-conservative handlers led America into these twin disasters precisely because two of the key organs of democracy - an independent, inquiring media, and assertive Congress - failed miserably to perform their duty.

They allowed themselves to be cowed into subservience. They failed to expose and vigorously oppose the sinister, pro-totalitarian Patriot Act that so endangers America's basic liberties.

Or, like Fox, a reincarnation of William Randolph Hearst's jingoistic yellow press, they served as White House mouthpieces, eagerly stoking war fever and national hysteria, retailing to the public all the administration's wholesale disinformation about Iraq.

In a shocking attempt to silence dissenting voices, U.S. forces bombed the news offices of al-Jazeera TV in Baghdad, Basra and Kabul, killing and wounding some of its staff. "The CNN of the Arab World" had been contradicting too many White House claims.

Al-Jazeera's senior correspondent, Tayseer Alouni, has been arrested in Spain and charged with aiding terrorism by interviewing Osama bin Laden.

The U.S. previously accused Alouni of being pro-Iraqi; Iraq expelled him for being "anti-Iraqi."

In my books, that makes him an honest, courageous journalist, just like Amanpour.

So long as Bush was riding high in the polls, the media fawned on him. But now that many Americans are beginning to sense they were lied to or misled by the White House, Bush's popularity is dropping, and the media's mood is becoming edgy and more aggressive. The muzzles may soon be coming off.

Eric can be reached by e-mail at margolis@foreigncorrespondent.com.

Copyright © 2003, CANOE, a division of Netgraphe Inc.

Reprinted from The Toronto Sun:
http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/
margolis_sep21.html

Iraqi Defectors Convince Bush that Earth is Flat

Bush Lays Off Congress; will Outsource Lawmaking to India

President Bush's Inspectors Find No Weapons to Support his Claims about Imminent Threat