Newsweek and other tales of a cowed media

Judging from the humming on the old Internet(s) lately, Newsweek is in a fair amount of trouble. It seems that this young upstart of a magazine, instead of being happy with its lot sitting in Time’s shadow, seems instead intent on bringing life as we know it to an end! (emphasis added by the White House). With their publication of an article documenting specific prisoner abuses in U.S. detainment facilities (known as dungeons in any other context), they incensed an administration known to be somewhat criticism-phobic. With their baseless retraction of said article at the request of the U.S. administration (known as browbeating, threatening and blackmail in any other context), they pissed off everyone else.

The lesson is, never try.

The Republican/Right-wing airwaves naturally led the charge, making sure any discussion was focused laser-tight on the real issue: how can America protect itself from traitorous news organizations in its midst? Talk TV: No Evidence Required by Robert Jensen (Common Dreams) documents one such visit with a self-nominated political pundit, Joe Scarborough. Jensen, brave man that he is, continues to visit such shows in what seems to be a vain effort to spread more liberal and even − pay attention now − fact-based points of view. He points out that Newsweek was not breaking any new ground with their article, other than offering corroboration from a “high-ranking Pentagon official”.

“ … there were other sources for Quran-desecration stories beyond the Newsweek article, and that such stories are not difficult to believe given a documented pattern of abuse in U.S. military prisons that includes sexual humiliation, beatings and murder.”

A lot of Americans probably know those “other sources” as the approximately umpteen thousand photos released from the Abu-Ghraib torture chambers. True Americans, such as those found on Fox News, are not (or no longer) aware that Abu Ghraib was anything other than a “few bad apples” and will demand that “you give me the evidence”. Being the good little liberal that he is, Jensen offered to return the next day with evidence to continue the discussion.

“The next morning I assembled a variety of documents, including the unclassified portion of the report that Vice Adm. Albert T. Church had presented to Congress in March 2005, at which time Church cited six prisoner deaths caused by abuse. I assumed that material — combined with stories about the military’s own trials of soldiers on criminal homicide charges, New York Times stories about prison homicides that were based on military investigations, and an Associated Press report that compiled the most extensive list of prisoner deaths publicly available — made my point adequately.”

As a small digression here, that is just a mountain of evidence, some of which I’ve actually read myself and, hell, I’m convinced, but that’s why liberals lose, because Americans love their remote controls and when they hear someone quoting from a document that “proves” something (quotes inserted by the White House), they move on to QVC whereas when they hear someone shouting that Newsweek is intent on destroying America, they stick around for the circus.

The next day, predictably, “Scarborough never asked [him] about it and gave [him] no opening to bring it up.” He instead pleasured himself with an uninterrupted tirade “with liberal witness”. Jensen is a trooper, though, and vows to continue appearing on TV whenever he can.

Newsweek: murderers. Bush: Teflon. Got it.

The other issue raised by the White House, already discussed here in Those Crazy Muslims (earthli News) is the one of violence caused by the publication of the article. Whereas it’s hard to imagine many Newsweek subscriptions in Afghanistan, that’s exactly what we’re led to believe as the White House strongly admonishes the magazine for causing the rioting deaths. Newsweek/It doesn’t deserve the diatribes (Star Tribune) offers the following:

“As for this short Newsweek item causing the rioting and deaths in Afghanistan, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan told Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard Myers that the violence was “not at all” tied to Newsweek, but was an insurgency seeking to prevent the national reconciliation that President Hamid Karzai is trying to promote.”

Ask Scott McClellan again whether Newsweek is responsible and he will answer fully in the affirmative, contradicting every word said by the ranking military officer in the country where the riot actually took place. And most of the American public will have this steaming hot lie served up to them by their televisions and they will swallow it in one gulp. Following a chain of logic that is two steps long and therefore quite scary and difficult to grasp, the next natural question is to ask whether Bush is then responsible for all of the deaths caused by the war that he manufactured on a heap of lies − to which McClellan answers “No.”

Tarnished Image Abroad Fails to Register notes that the denial of reality reaches only as far as the U.S. borders (which have luckily been made much more porous by the Internet(s)). Most other countries and people in the world see the “Abu Ghraib pictures [as] an icon of the occupation of Iraq”. The entire war on terror is characterized by “pictures of hooded prisoners being flown to the US base at Guantánamo Bay” and the world knows that the practice of torture is systematic and not attributable to “a few bad apples”

“ … [r]eporters found evidence that torture was not just the action of a few soldiers, but had the consent of officers … Policy statements emerged to show that Mr Bush and the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, had authorized US interrogators and military prison officials to ignore the statutory rights of detainees. In February 2002, Mr Bush ruled that the Geneva convention did not apply to the conflict with al-Qaida … it was disclosed that the US has sent detainees to be interrogated in countries which practice torture.”

All of these facts build a picture of an extremist regime with little to no regard for human life. Many would qualify that as non-American life, but an against-all-logic entry into the war with Iraq shows that American soldier’s lives are equally expendable. Despite heaps of evidence that the current administration − and, let’s face it, others as well − functions like this, the media remains cowed or beholden and sells the American public a completely fictitious history. They are able to do this because they make sure to swiftly punish miscreants − especially very established ones, like Newsweek − who step out of line.

Eloquent plea for understanding

Home from Iraq by Molly Bingham (Louisville Courier Journal) is an opinion piece by a reporter who “spent 10 months in Iraq … understanding who the people are who are fighting, why they fight, what their fundamental beliefs are” to build up a picture of this “resistance”.

She brings together several ideas, critiquing what currently passes for journalism in Iraq and at home, in America. During the reporting of the story, she encountered the same monstrous pressures brought recently to bear on Newsweek. Succumbing to that pressure amounts to being a part of the U.S. government propaganda arm.

“If you look closely, you will notice there is very little, maybe even no direct reporting on the resistance in Iraq. We do, however, as journalists report what the Americans say about the resistance. Is this really anything more than stenography?”

She covers a lot of ground succintly, offering summaries of ideas extremely familiar to anyone who’s read “Manufacturing Consent” or similar works about how corporate-owned media is destined to function. Where she’ll lose the entire audience is in asking Americans to see it from an Iraqi’s (more commonly known as “terrorists”) point of view − to try to find out why they resist America, rather than just assuming that they’re all “insane, wild Arabs” with no notion of civilization.

“Why would anyone refuse democracy? Why would anyone not want the helping hand of America in overthrowing their terrible dictator? It’s amazing to me how expeditiously we turn away from our own history. Think of our revolution. … If we as Americans fail to understand who attacks us and why, we will simply continue on this same path, and continue watching from afar as a war we don’t understand boils over.”

She concludes with the salient point that, for every reporter who does not succumb to the intense pressure/threats/joblessness that results from reporting anything other than the government-sanctioned version of reality, there are dozens who do − dozens who restrict not only their own freedoms, but those of their entire audience.