[Imc] Fw: [gangbox] Fwd : [WW] SCRIPTING THE BIG LIE : PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA PROLIFERATES

[david johnson]

-----Original Message-----
From: The Infamous Vinnie Gangbox <gangbox at excite.com>
To: gangbox at yahoogroups.com <gangbox at yahoogroups.com>
Cc: PUBLICLABOR at yahoogroups.com <PUBLICLABOR at yahoogroups.com>
Date: Sunday, November 25, 2001 5:17 PM
Subject: [gangbox] Fwd : [WW] SCRIPTING THE BIG LIE : PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA PROLIFERATES


From: <wwnews at wwpublish.com> (WW) 
Message-ID: <061201c175d9$be57c260$0a01a8c0 at station2> 
Subject: [WW]  Scripting the Big Lie: Pro-war propaganda proliferates 
Date: Sun, 25 Nov 2001 12:50:48 -0500 
Content-Type: text/plain; 
    charset="iso-8859-1" 
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit 

------------------------- 
Via Workers World News Service 
Reprinted from the Nov. 29, 2001 
issue of Workers World newspaper 
------------------------- 

Scripting the Big Lie 

PRO-WAR PROPAGANDA PROLIFERATES 

By Heather Cottin 

The titans of the military-industrial-media complex are 
working around the clock trying to annihilate the truth so 
people in the United States won't care what happens to the 
people of Afghanistan. Using every propaganda vehicle, the 
Bush administration is driving hard to control the minds and 
hearts of the public here and, if possible, around the 
world. Those who would oppose them are run over. 

In a briefing, Bush spokesperson Ari Fleischer warned 
reporters that, in times like these, "people have to watch 
what they say and watch what they do." CNN and other major 
commercial news organizations are obeying Fleischer's 
admonition. 

During the bombing of Afghanistan, network news outlets 
endlessly repeated, "Taliban claims are nearly impossible to 
verify." CNN has ordered reporters to frame reports of 
civilian deaths with reminders that "the Pentagon has 
repeatedly stressed that it is trying to minimize" such 
casualties, and that "the Taliban regime continues to harbor 
terrorists who are connected to the Sept. 11 attacks that 
claimed thousands of innocent lives in the U.S." 

In a special report Nov. 5 that took other media to task for 
letting the world know about the slaughter of innocents in 
Afghanistan, Fox News anchor Brit Hume said, "Civilian 
casualties are historically, by definition, a part of war, 
really. Should they be as big news as they've been?" 

Mara Liasson from National Public Radio agreed, "Look, war 
is about killing people. Civilian casualties are 
unavoidable." 

U.S. News & World Report columnist Michael Barone added, "I 
think the real problem here is that this is poor news 
judgment on the part of some of these news organizations. 
Civilian casualties are not, as Mara says, news. The fact is 
that they accompany wars." 

A memo circulated to editors at the Panama City, Fla., News 
Herald and leaked to Jim Romenesko's Media News warned: "DO 
NOT USE photos on Page 1A showing civilian casualties from 
the U.S. war on Afghanistan. DO NOT USE wire stories which 
lead with civilian casualties from the U.S. war on 
Afghanistan ... play down the civilian casualties, DO IT." 

PROPAGANDA EXTRAVAGANZA 

A New York Times article on Nov. 11 delineating the "Battle 
to Shape Public Opinion" explained in detail how the Bush 
administration was setting up "a round-the-clock war news 
bureau" in Washington, London and Islamabad to help develop 
a "message of the day." 

The Times called the effort a "21st-century version of the 
muscular propaganda war that the United States waged in the 
1940s." 

The State Department brought in former advertising executive 
Charlotte Beers to sell the U.S. line. This message 
"dovetails with the domestic news management" under the 
supervision of Karen P. Hughes, the White House 
communications director. Beers holds meetings with foreign 
correspondents "closed to American journalists." 

"We can't give out our propaganda to our own people," said 
Price Floyd, deputy director of media outreach at the State 
Department. Heavens, no. 

According to the Times, the State Department and Defense 
Department aren't allowing any real information out about 
military operations. "Clark Hoyt, the Washington editor for 
the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, said 'American forces are 
engaged in combat overseas, and we are basically shut out.'" 
The Frankfurter Rundschau wrote, "Substantial amounts of 
information about current military actions and their 
consequences is subject to censorship by parties to the 
conflict." 

MOVIEGOERS, BEWARE! 

This is total war, even if incredibly one-sided, and the 
administration has drafted Hollywood. 

The heads of the Warner Brothers television studio and of 
the CBS and Fox broadcasting networks are actively 
collaborating in a scheme to spread the U.S. government's 
message through the movies. 

The New York Times reported on Nov. 11 that several dozen 
top Hollywood executives met with Karl Rove, President 
Bush's senior adviser, to find "common ground on how the 
entertainment industry can contribute to the war effort, 
replicating in spirit if not in scope the partnership formed 
between filmmakers and war planners in the 1940s." 

The Sunday Herald of Scotland noted, "Hollywood stars and 
scriptwriters are rushing to bolster the new message of 
patriotism, conferring with the CIA and brainstorming with 
the military about possible real-life terrorist attacks." 

Many of the "stars" are thrilled. Actor Tom Cruise, 
concerned about his upcoming role as a CIA operative in his 
next movie, wants to show the "CIA in as positive a light as 
possible." Sylvester Stallone is working on the script for a 
fourth Rambo film in which he parachutes into Afghanistan to 
battle leaders of the Taliban (New York Post, Nov. 13). 

You can't make this stuff up. 

Michael Macedonia of the army's Simulation, Training and 
Instrumentation Command was enraptured with the prospect of 
using Hollywood as a propaganda tool. "You' re talking about 
screenwriters and producers. These are very brilliant, 
creative people. They can come up with fascinating insights 
very quickly," he told the Sunday Herald. 

Actually, Hollywood has always been a willing tool for war 
propaganda. Many people know nothing about the world except 
what they see in war films. These are carefully planned and 
funded. For example, a little-known think tank, the 
Institute for Creative Studies at the University of Southern 
California, received funding of $45 million from the U.S. 
Army in 1999, writes the Sunday Herald. 

The New York Times noted, "Efforts to create public service 
spots for TV and movie theaters, documentaries on terrorism 
and home security, live shows for American troops featuring 
Hollywood performers and perhaps some involvement in helping 
spread the American message abroad, provides an opportunity 
for the studios to reassert their patriotism" while being 
"good business." 

Hollywood, as big business, is in tune with the 
sensibilities of the oil companies. The owners of the major 
studios are the same capitalists who own the defense and oil 
industries, which are the major beneficiaries of the war for 
the Middle East and Central Asia. There is no contradiction 
between Hollywood's goals here and Pentagon strategy. They 
are all profiting from this war. This is just war by other 
means, war on people's hearts and minds. 

ATTACK ON ACADEMIA AND CULTURE 

The Bush administration's minions are meanwhile on the 
attack against students and professors who oppose the war in 
Afghanistan. 

The Boston Globe reported on Nov. 13 that a "conservative 
academic group founded by Lynne Cheney, the wife of Vice 
President Dick Cheney, fired a new salvo in the culture wars 
by blasting 40 college professors as well as the president 
of Wesleyan University and others for not showing enough 
patriotism in the aftermath of Sept. 11." 

"College and university faculty have been the weak link in 
America's response to the attack,'' says a report by 
Cheney's newly created American Council of Trustees and 
Alumni. The report names names and criticizes professors for 
making statements "short on patriotism." 

Not content with creating what one professor called tactics 
"reminiscent of McCarthyism" against university professors, 
the administration has called in the intelligence agencies 
to beef up the attack on culture and the free expression of 
ideas. 

On Nov. 7, FBI and Secret Service agents visited the "Secret 
Wars" exhibit at the Art Car Museum in Houston, Texas. 
Secret Wars is an exhibition investigating artistic dissent 
to covert operations and government secrets. 

Donna Huanca, a worker at the museum, said, "It was a very 
scary experience. ... They were interested in where we got 
our funding, how many people come in in a day, what the 
traffic was like, how did we advertise. They let us know 
that they are watching us now." 

Tex Kerschen, the museum's curator, said to Independent 
Media, "The FBI are going to move in as quickly as they can 
to investigate any kind of dissent." 

BOMBING TELEVISION STATIONS--AGAIN 

With television, movies, the print media, academia and 
cultural outlets on the run, the U.S. government found it 
still had one formidable opponent in its war on public 
opinion. One news service has been able to present a 
different view of the war in Afghanistan. Called by some 
"the CNN of the Middle East," Al-Jazeera is a 24-hour 
television station based in Qatar that reaches more than 35 
million Arabs around the world, including 150,000 in the 
United States. The station provided the only television 
transmission from Afghanistan until the BBC arrived just 
before the fall of Kabul. 

The Associated Press on Nov. 13 reported that a missile 
destroyed the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. While the Defense 
Department claimed it was targeting the building because 
there was supposedly an Al-Qaeda meeting going on, critics 
noted that it was unlikely that Al-Qaeda would have hung 
around Kabul after the Taliban had fled. One Al-Jazeera 
spokesperson said, "They know where we are located and they 
know what we have in our office and we also did not get any 
warning." 

Nearby offices of the AP and the BBC in Kabul were damaged 
in the same attack. Pictures of correspondent William Reeve 
diving under his desk to avoid fall-out from the blast have 
been shown on BBC television. There were no military 
installations nearby, and the bombing in the civilian 
neighborhood came after Taliban forces had pulled out of the 
city. 

Following the attack, the BBC reported Nov. 16 that 
Washington had "asked Qatar to rein in the influential and 
editorially independent Arab Al-Jazeera television station, 
which gives airtime to anti-American opinions." In a sharp 
response, Al-Jazeera said its Kabul office had been 
deliberately targeted by U.S. bombers, according to the 
British newspaper on Nov. 17. On the defensive, Air Force 
Director of Public Affairs Col. Brian Hoey replied, "We 
would not, as a policy, target news media organizations--it 
would not even begin to make sense." 

The bombing of a Yugoslav television station in the spring 
of 1999 was a "different issue," Hoey said. 

But it is not a different issue. It is war. The Bush 
administration has declared war on the truth and 
consciousness. It needs to generate public support for 
ongoing military intervention in the Middle East and Central 
Asia. And disinformation just isn't enough. So the military 
is bombing renegade media outlets while the capitalist media 
bombard the people with lies and disinformation. 

But no amount of movies or propaganda will make U.S. youths 
willing recruits for a new land war in Asia. They are not 
going to buy it. Patriotic fervor tends to wane. Washington 
will lose this propaganda campaign. In a shrinking economy, 
working people can't afford a war that in the end helps only 
the oil companies, the military industries and the 
corporations. 

- END - 

(Copyright Workers World Service: Everyone is permitted to 
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this document, but 
changing it is not allowed. For more information contact 
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: 
ww at workers.org. For subscription info send message to: 
info at workers.org. Web: http://www.workers.org) 











______________________________________________________________________________
Send a friend your Buddy Card and stay in contact always with Excite Messenger
http://messenger.excite.com



Yahoo! Groups Sponsor 
            ADVERTISEMENT
                         
             
             

GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE

GANGBOX homepage:

http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/

comments? email: <gangbox at excite.com>

"UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER" 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/imc/attachments/20011125/03305600/attachment.html>