One of Tom Lehrer’s finest songs was a parody in the style of
Richard Dyer-Bennet’s often lugubrious ancient Irish ballads, in
which a child confesses to having killed her parents and baked her baby
brother in a stew; she admits this as she cannot tell a lie, because
lying is a sin.
Well, the New York Times cannot tolerate Jayson Blair‘s
performance because lying is a sin, a “grave breach of journalistic
standards” (Executive Editor Howell Raines), an “abrogation
of the trust between the newspaper and its readers” (Board Chairman
Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.).
But the New York Times itself, both as a media
institution and the product that is delivered in its name on a daily
basis, is built and thrives on structures of disinformation and selective
information that constitute Big Lies. These structures do involve occasional
direct lies, but far more important is their base in the conduiting of
lies issued by official sources, lies by implication, and lies that are
institutionalized by repetition and the refusal to admit contradictory
evidence. It is possible to institutionalize a very big lie without actually
telling a direct lie, although one can usually find them well represented
as well.
Thus, for an old but enlightening example, the New York Times swallowed
enthusiastically the Cold War propaganda claim that the KGB and Bulgarians
had organized the shooting of Pope John Paul II in May 1981.
The paper
kept this propaganda gambit alive for years despite a mass of conflicting
facts, not by lying but by the “preferential method” of news
reporting in which the facts that fit the propaganda line are reported
but inconvenient facts are ignored and contesting analyses bypassed.
Even when CIA official Melvin Goodman testified at congressional hearings
in 1991 that the CIA knew that the KGB and Bulgarians had nothing to
do with the shooting because the CIA had penetrated the Bulgarian secret
services, the NYT suppressed this piece of information. In 1991 the paper
reported that Allen Weinstein had gone over to Bulgaria to inspect files
to find out the truth of the case, but it failed to report that he returned
empty-handed.
There were occasional direct lies transmitted by the paper
on this issue, but the Big Lie—the distinct impression conveyed
by the paper in news and editorials that the KGB and Bulgarians were
behind the papal shooting—was based on selectivity in choice of
fact, the massive suppression of evidence, and confining opinion to those
pushing the propaganda/disinformation theme (see Manufacturing Consent,
2002 edition, chap. 4 and Introduction).
This case was hardly exceptional. Throughout the Cold War, literal
structures of lies dominated news coverage. One such structure was designed
to inflate the Soviet threat, by exaggeration of Soviet military capabilities
and claiming a Soviet intention and plan to conquer the world. This threat
inflation was regularly displayed in allegations of “gaps” in
weapons and “windows of vulnerability,” with the media regularly
passing along these claims uncritically, then reporting--very quietly,
and with a time lag sufficient for procurement contracts to be let--
that there had been no gap after all, but then allowing no lesson to
be learned on the need for scepticism when the next gap was proclaimed.
In 1975 the CIA claimed that the Soviets had doubled their rate of
military spending, and a CIA leadership (George Bush)-selected team of
hardliners (Team B) issued a report in December 1976 alleging that the
Soviets had achieved military superiority and were getting ready to fight
a nuclear war. These claims were reiterated during the Reagan years.
The CIA did finally admit in 1983 that their estimate of Soviet military
expenditures had been mistakenly high, and Tom Gervasi made a very convincing
case that the Soviets had inferior arms and defensive intentions in his
1986 book "The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy".
But the NYT cooperated
fully in disseminating this structure of lies.
The paper did no investigative work and reporting on the truth of the
claim of higher Soviet military spending, and their leading journalists
dealing with defense issues (Richard Burt and Drew Middleton) regularly
conduited claims of a growing Soviet threat. When the Team B report was
issued in December 1976, displacing an internal report by CIA professionals
that was more restrained, a front page article in the Times took the
claims at face value, took no note of any political bias or purpose,
allowed no contesting comment, and displayed no hint of the slightest
scepticism or investigative effort.
During the Reagan era buildup, the
paper continued to fail to investigate these claims. Tom Gervasi noted
that in one important case where there was a conflict between Reagan
claims and Pentagon data, a Times reporter said that the facts were “difficult
to pin down.” But Gervasi pointed out that although billions of
dollars were at stake, the paper made no effort to pin the facts down.
They didn’t look closely at the data and compare it with the claims,
nor did their reporters interview anybody; they simply dropped the subject.
Gervasi had one opinion column in the NYT in 1981, and was thereafter
ignored; his outstanding 1986 book was never reviewed in the paper. Superhawk
and scare-monger Richard Perle, by contrast, had seven op-ed columns
in the Reagan-Bush years. The editorials supported a “prudent” military
buildup, but this support rested on a major structure of lies and failure
to investigate and report honestly that amounted to propaganda service
to state policy (see further, my “All the News Fit to Print, Part
1: The Cold War,” Z Magazine, May 1998).
Coverage of the Vietnam war also rested on a structure of lies.
Contrary
to a mythology of a media hostile to the war, the NYT and its confreres
all adopted apologetic premises from the beginning of U.S. intervention
and only moved into a qualified opposition as the elite split on the
war’s costs and benefits—to the United States.
The NYT always
took it as a given that the United States was resisting somebody else’s
aggression as it sought to impose a government of its choice on the resistant
population; it accepted throughout that this country was protecting “South
Vietnam,” even against the “internal aggression” of
its own people; and it has never explained why the United States used
napalm and chemical warfare only against the people in the south that
it was allegedly saving.
In my favorite classic, James Reston, the most
eminent NYT reporter and author of many of its editorials on Vietnam,
stated that we were in Vietnam because of our “guiding principle” that “no
state shall use military force or the threat of military force to achieve
its political objectives.” As there was massive evidence that the
U.S. puppet had no indigenous support and that he and his U.S.-sponsor
relied entirely on U.S. military force to achieve their political objectives,
Reston was stating a lie of Orwellian proportions.
Reston and his paper also accepted the various “demonstration
elections” held in Vietnam as credible, despite the ongoing war
and state terror, exclusion of all dissident candidates, and a clear
war-promotional intention; they took as honest the various “peace
moves” carried out by President Lyndon Johnson, which were designed
to keep dissenters quiet during the ensuing escalation of the war; they
swallowed whole the Nixon-Kissinger interpretation of the Paris Peace
agreement of 1972, according to which it was the enemy that misinterpreted
and exploited the language of the agreement, not Nixon and Kissinger;
and they got on the MIA-POW bandwagon that Nixon constructed to prolong
the war, accepting the lies that this was a “humanitarian” not
a political issue, and that the POW’s were “hostages.”
From
1950 into the 21st century the NYT has adhered to a structure of lies
on the Vietnam war, which helps explain why it has never described the
U.S. assault as “aggression” or suggested that this country
owes reparations for aggression and the very serious war crimes committed
by Johnson, Nixon and their subordinates (see further my “All the
News Fit to Print, Part 3, The Vietnam War,” Z Magazine, Oct. 1998).
It is also easy to identify a structure of lies underlying the NYT
treatment of the Kosovo war and its background.
There was the usual demonization,
with the demon portrayed as solely or uniquely responsible for the ethnic
cleansing and killings, in exact accord with the demands of the imperial
state. German, Austrian and U.S. responsibility for the dismemberment
of Yugoslavia and the sequel of killings was and remains disappeared
in the NYT.
Also absent has been reference to the important role of Tudjman
and Croatian nationalists seeking both independence and lebensraum at
the expense of the Krajina Serbs, Izetbegovic and his close Bosnian Muslim
allies (plus his external allies, who included Osama bin Laden) striving
for Muslim domination of Bosnia, and the KLA in Kosovo seeking independence
as part of a search for a “Greater Albania.”
Tudjman, Izetbegovic
and the KLA all saw that it would be easy to get the U.S. and NATO to
fight their cause, but the NYT never did. Lord David Owen did see this
as he tried to negotiate a settlement in Bosnia, where he found Milosevic
much more amenable to negotiation than Izetbegovic and his U.S. supporters.
This is why the important negotiator David Owen got minimal attention
in the NYT, whereas party-liners like David Rieff and Michael Ignatieff
were accorded much space.
And just as the Soviet press failed to challenge
the Moscow trials of 1936, so also the NYT has never doubted that the
Hague Tribunal dealing with Yugoslavia is dispensing justice (see Diana
Johnstone, Fools Crusade, Pluto and Monthly Review, 2002; Herman, “The
Milosevic Trial,” Z Magazine, April and May, 2002).
A major structure of lies has long provided the framework for NYT news
and opinion on Israel and Palestine.
Thus the durable representation
of Palestinian actions as terrorism, whereas Israel only retaliates and
engages in counter-terror, is a lie by the blatantly biased assessment
of causation and by the paper’s simple refusal to apply an invidious
word to (Israeli) actions that conform exactly to standard definitions
of the term.
For years the NYT claimed that the PLO refused to recognize
Israel, which was false certainly since 1976; at the same time the paper
did not point out that Israel refused to recognize ANY Palestinian authority,
and that Israel had used both the false claim and the Israeli refusal
as an excuse to avoid a negotiated settlement.
The NYT failed to recognize
that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was in no way a response
to “terrorism,” but on the contrary was to destroy any negotiation
threat—a point clear to Israeli analysts and even easily read from
official Israeli statements, but not compatible with Israeli apologetics
and therefore not to be found in the NYT.
The Times has never used the
words “ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s steady
encroachment on Palestinian lands for the benefit of Jewish settlers,
although they used the phrase lavishly and with indignation to describe
Serb actions in Kosovo.
Israel’s massive violations of Fourth Geneva Convention rules
on proper behavior in “occupied territories” have been entirely
ignored by the paper, and the meeting of the signatories of the Geneva
Convention in Switzerland in December 2001, boycotted by the United States
and Israel, was also black-holed by the NYT.
For the Times, the United
States is the proper arbiter of the Israel-Palestine relationship, presumably
unbiased as it stands alone with Israel funding Israel’s ethnic
cleansing and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention, vetoing monitors
for the occupied territories and any UN protests or actions to protect
the cleansees.
The paper’s downplaying of the ongoing brutal repression
in the West Bank and Gaza strip, and Israeli attacks on and ouster of
human rights activists and journalists, is perfectly geared to minimizing
public attention and concern and therefore permitting a virtual genocidal
process in the occupied territories (Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror,
Seven Stories, 2003; Herman, “Toward A ‘Final Solution’ in
the Occupied Territories?,” Z Net Commentary, Feb. 11, 2002).
In the case of the U.S.-British invasion and occupation of Iraq in
2003, once again the NYT has served as an agent of power rather than
an independent institution capable of asking hard questions and providing
a genuine public sphere.
In the pre-invasion months as well as during
the invasion, the paper provided lavish space to each claim and utterance
of the war party, no matter how repetitive and self-serving. The administration
told numerous lies, pressed the intelligence services to come up with
desired answers no matter what the evidence, and threatened and bullied
dissenters, but as in the past with those falsified “gaps” and
other “lies that were not shot down,” the NYT failed to toughen
its standards on what constitutes news, it failed to put together serious
analyses of the lie sequence, and continued to be conveniently gullible.
No awkward discussions of international law and the UN Charter prohibition
of war as an instrument of policy.
If the propaganda line was that Iraq
had weapons of mass destruction, the paper featured these claims, even
to the point of giving front page space to Judith Miller’s notorious
report on an Iraqi scientist who claimed that everything Bush had asserted
was true—but with Miller never interviewing the man, only conduiting
claims he allegedly made as filtered through Bush administration officials
(“Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, One Iraqi Scientist is Said
to Assert,” April 21, 2003).
While giving space to any Bush or Rumsfeld allegation unsupported by
evidence, the paper failed even to mention the revelation in John Barry’s
Newsweek report of March 3 that Hussein Kamel, a top-ranking Iraqi defecting
official close to the seat of power (he was Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law)
and who had run Iraq’s nuclear, chemical, biological and missiles
programs, had told his interrogators in 1995 that Saddam had destroyed
all of his chemical and biological weapons stocks and missiles to deliver
them.
The paper did not find newsworthy former top weapons inspector
Scott Ritter’s claim that 90-95 percent of Saddam’s chemical
arsenal had been destroyed and that anything left was sludge, and neither
Ritter nor Hans Von Sponeck have ever been given op-ed space in the paper,
although better qualified than almost all NYT commentators to discuss
the facts bearing on Iraq weaponry.
Similarly, Denis Halliday has also
been absent from the op-ed slate. This fits another propaganda pattern:
suppression of the fact that the sanctions policy enforced by the UN
(read, U.S. and Britain) had killed vast numbers of Iraqi civilians.
In accord with its propaganda service the NYT now provides a steady diet
of articles that feature graves of Saddam’s victims, which helps
justify the invasion.
Mention of the even greater number of victims of
the sanctions, which Halliday has described as “genocidal,” would
interfere with this propaganda theme, so the NYT avoids it..
In sum, the really important lies are imbedded in a structure of word
usages, frames of reference, and selection of facts and qualified commentators.
These structures of lies can perform miracles of propaganda service:
they can make massive ethnic cleansing into a “fight against terrorism, “ and
they can transform an invasion of a virtually disarmed victim of 12 years
of “sanctions of mass destruction” (whose 500,000 dead children
were “worth it” [Madeleine Albright]), in clear violation
of the UN Charter and opposed by a vast global majority, into a triumph
of humanitarian intervention and liberation. In this context, the indignation
at the misdeeds of Jayson Blair would seem to reflect a major case of
missing a large forest for a small shrub.
First published in Z
Magazine / Znet sustainer program.
Edward
S. Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Back
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