Disinformazione strategica

[Franco Marenco <franco.marenco@casaccia.enea.it>]

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/cnn-n06.shtml#top

CNN tells reporters: No propaganda, except American

                       By Patrick Martin
                       6 November 2001

In an extraordinary directive to its staff,
Cable News Network has instructed reporters
and anchormen to tailor their coverage of
the US war against Afghanistan to downplay
the toll of death and destruction caused
by American bombing, for fear that such
coverage will undermine popular support
for the US military effort.

A memo from CNN Chairman Walter Isaacson
to international correspondents for the
network declares: "As we get good reports
from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, we
must redouble our efforts to make sure
we do not seem to be simply reporting from
their vantage or perspective. We must talk
about how the Taliban are using civilian
shields and how the Taliban have harbored
the terrorists responsible for killing close to
5,000 innocent people."

"I want to make sure we're not used as a
propaganda platform," Isaacson declared in
an interview with the Washington Post, adding
that it "seems perverse to focus too
much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan."

"We're entering a period in which there's
a lot more reporting and video from
Taliban-controlled Afghanistan," he said.
"You want to make sure people understand
that when they see civilian suffering there,
it's in the context of a terrorist attack that
caused enormous suffering in the United States."

In a second memo leaked to the Post,
CNN's head of standards and practices, Rick
Davis, expressed concern about reports on
the bombing of Afghanistan filed by
on-the-spot reporters. Davis noted that it
"may be hard for the correspondent in these
dangerous areas to make the points clearly"
about the reasons for the US bombing. In
other words, the CNN official feared
that overseas correspondents might be
intimidated by local opposition to the
US military intervention and allow such
sentiments to influence their reports.

To ensure that every CNN report always
includes a justification of the war, Davis
prescribed specific language for anchors
to read after each account of civilian
casualties and other bomb damage. He suggested
three alternative formulations:

* "We must keep in mind, after seeing
reports like this from Taliban-controlled areas,
that these US military actions are in
response to a terrorist attack that killed close to
5,000 innocent people in the US."

* "We must keep in mind, after seeing reports
like this, that the Taliban regime in
Afghanistan continues to harbor terrorists
who have praised the September 11 attacks
that killed close to 5,000 innocent people in the US."

* "The Pentagon has repeatedly stressed that
it is trying to minimize civilian casualties
in Afghanistan, even as the Taliban regime
continues to harbor terrorists who are
connected to the September 11 attacks that
claimed thousands of innocent lives in the US."

Davis concluded with an ultimatum to journalists
concerned that they may sound like
parrots for the White House: "Even though
it may start sounding rote, it is important
that we make this point each time".


The Tailwind capitulation


A turning point in the transformation of CNN
into a thinly disguised outlet for Pentagon
propaganda was the 1998 controversy over
the network's broadcast of an investigative
report entitled "Valley of Death." The program
dealt with allegations that the US
military used chemical weapons in Laos in 1970
during the Vietnam War. Produced by
April Oliver and Jack Smith, and narrated
by Peter Arnett, it provided considerable
evidence that Operation Tailwind, as the
military called it, involved the use of sarin, a
deadly nerve gas.

But coming amidst a series of US provocations
against Iraq over allegations that
Saddam Hussein's regime was developing weapons
of mass destruction, the CNN
program threatened to cut across a major
objective of American foreign policy. A storm
of protest was whipped up by far-right
elements, including former military officers, and
both former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
and former Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs Colin Powell denounced the television report.

CNN's response was complete capitulation.
Network founder Ted Turner, still the
largest stockholder in the parent Time-Warner
conglomerate, made abject apologies to
the Pentagon. CNN repudiated the exposÈ,
fired its two producers, and reprimanded
Arnett who, to his shame, distanced himself
from the program and claimed he was not
responsible for its allegations.

Less than a year later Arnett himself was
fired. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
had been widely acclaimed for his on-the-spot
reporting from Baghdad during the Gulf
War. His dismissal, in the midst of the war
on Yugoslavia, was followed by another
demonstration of the ties between the network
and the national security apparatus.
CNN's chief correspondent in the former
Yugoslavia, Christiane Amanpour, married
State Department spokesman James Rubin, the
Clinton administration's principal
liaison with the Kosovo Liberation Army
guerrillas. Both continued in their jobs as
full-time apologists for the war on Yugoslavia,
one at the State Department podium,
the other in front of a CNN camera in the Balkans.


"Human shields" and other lies


While CNN's policy may be the most crudely
expressed-or the only one recorded in a
corporate memorandum that has become
public knowledge-its stance is characteristic
of the entire American media, which serves
in the Afghanistan war as 24x7
propagandists for American imperialism.

Isaacson's reference to "civilian shields" is
typical of the cynical lies spread by the
American government, with the obedient support
of the media. This claim was first
broached during the Persian Gulf War, when US
officials routinely dismissed reports of
horrific civilian casualties caused by the
US bombing of Iraq, claiming that Saddam
Hussein had ordered tanks, warplanes and
entire chemical and biological weapons
facilities to be moved into residential neighborhoods.

The most notorious US atrocity of that war
was the destruction of a bomb shelter in the
Al-Amariya neighborhood of Baghdad, in which
hundreds of civilians were killed, the
majority of them women and children. The Pentagon
claimed that Al-Amariya was a
top secret command-and-control center for the
Iraqi military, and that the women and
children had been deliberately planted
there as "human shields." Subsequent
investigation revealed that these claims were spurious.

This did not stop the media from uncritically
accepting similar statements about the US
bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, when civilian
casualties were invariably blamed on the
government of Slobodan Milosevic. The same kind
of lies are now circulated about
Afghanistan, with reports that the Taliban
regime is moving heavy weapons and
military detachments into mosques and relief
centers-in order to justify in advance the
next American atrocity.

The myth of "human shields" is only one example
of the torrent of lies that flows out of
the White House, Pentagon and CIA, swallowed
and regurgitated by the US media
without a qualm.

White House political adviser Karl Rove and
press spokesman Ari Fleischer were
caught lying about why Bush took so long to
return to the White House September 11
after the suicide hijackings hit the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon. These
officials peddled the story that the White
House had received a credible threat to Air
Force One. It later emerged that there was
no such threat, and the story had been
concocted to provide a plausible explanation for
Bush's embarrassing conduct. Now
the same administration issues alerts about
terrorist threats for the entire United
States without a single major media voice
asking why, given the previous lies, these
alerts should be believed.

The administration initially pledged to release
conclusive evidence of Osama bin
Laden's role in the terrorist attacks-Colin
Powell made the promise on national
television-but reversed itself abruptly. The
supposed evidence has never been
produced. The American media raised no hue
and cry, and continues to repeat the
official claims that the guilt of bin
Laden is incontrovertible.


White House, Pentagon shape coverage


With the onset of the bombing campaign, the
effort by the White House and Pentagon
to dictate terms of press coverage of the
war was stepped up. Bush's national security
adviser Condoleeza Rice called the five
television networks asking them to limit
coverage of statements by Osama bin Laden.
Other officials suggested these
statements might contain coded instructions
to terrorists. The networks immediately
issued a pledge of cooperation.

White House officials have responded to
press criticism of the Bush administration's
handling of the anthrax attacks by seeking
to rebuke reporters whose questions
express skepticism about the government
response. Campbell Brown, an NBC White
House correspondent, said a top White House
official telephoned her to complain of a
hostile question to newly appointed Director
of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. "To get
an unsolicited phone call from a senior
official at this White House is very unusual,"
she told the Washington Post.

The top executive at ABC News, David Westin,
was raked over the coals for remarks
at a forum at the Columbia University
journalism school where he was asked whether
the Pentagon was a "legitimate military
target." Westin replied by distinguishing
between his personal revulsion at the loss
of life on September 11 and his
responsibility as a journalist to describe
the event accurately, including the motivation
of those responsible for the attack, who
may have regarded the Pentagon in that light.

The forum was broadcast by C-SPAN, and
Westin's comments were lambasted by
Internet gossip Matt Drudge, the New York
Post, and other voices of the right wing.
Westin issued a public statement October
31, declaring, "I apologize for any harm that
my misstatement may have caused."

In the war zone itself, the Pentagon
systematically violates its own ground rules for
press coverage, which prescribe that the
media should have access to all major units
and locations. Only a handful of reporters
are on the ground in Afghanistan, and these
operate under the type of self-censorship
revealed in the CNN memo. Reporters are
barred from many US naval warships in the
Indian Ocean as well as air bases in the
Middle East and Central Asia.

While the usual justification for such
practices is the safety of the troops, the
Pentagon has never documented a single
incident where press coverage compromised
"operational security." Seventeen news
organizations were aware that the US was
about to launch bombing raids on Afghanistan
at least 24 hours before the attacks
began October 7, but not a single one
broke the story in advance.

Richard Reeves, a veteran liberal journalist,
described the informal wartime muzzling of
the press in a recent column titled, "Truth
in the Packaging of War News." He cited a
1982 Naval War College advisory on press
treatment, which prescribed the following
rules: "Sanitize the visual images of war,
control media access to theaters, censor
information that could upset readers and
viewers, exclude journalists who would not
write favorable stories."

This was predictable for the military,
Reeves wrote, but his main criticism was of the
submissive response of the media. "My gripe
is with my own business," he explained.
"The press, in general, prefers appearing
authoritative in war coverage to admitting that
we are being manipulated and lied to-and
that we do not actually know what is going
on, particularly in the early combat of any war."