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Lies propaganda Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12122002/news/2707.htmhttp://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12122002/news/2707.htm
American media called instruments of war propaganda
By Jesse J. DeConto
jdeconto@seacoastonline.com
PORTSMOUTH - What’s been going on in Iraq for the past 10 years?
The American people know that U.S. forces handily defeated the Iraqi military in 1991 and that American bombs have already begun to drop on Iraq a decade later. What has happened since then and why the need to return?
These are questions for which few Americans have the answers, yet informed citizenship depends on them, according to University of New Hampshire professor and media analyst Joshua Meyrowitz.
He spoke to a crowd of more than 200 visitors, including many students who made the trip from Durham to Portsmouth’s South Church Monday night. The presentation was sponsored by Seacoast Peace Response.
Meyrowitz argued that by reporting mostly what government sources say, the American media have become instruments of war propaganda, thereby crippling their audience’s ability to find the truth or to hold their leaders accountable. Journalists in bed with the government have spawned an impaired version of free speech, but Americans take freedom for granted, so they don’t pressure the media to protect it, he said.
"These rights are used as an excuse not to use them," Meyrowitz said. "Our students and our citizens in general are the people who use them the least."
Meyrowitz revealed his personal reasons for holding journalists to a higher standard. His uncle was among the Jews murdered by the Nazis, while both German and American journalists failed to report what was really going on.
"If the media doesn’t cover it, the citizens don’t worry about it," the professor said.
Prior to World War II, even the New York Times, with its Jewish executives and many Jewish reporters and editors, referred to the Nazis’ victims as "unfortunates," rather than Jews.
More recently, the New Republic altered a photograph of Saddam Hussein, helping to justify another war on Iraq."They doctored his mustache to make him look like Hitler," Meyrowitz said.
The UNH professor revealed the expensive public relations campaign that he said persuaded the American public to support the first Persian Gulf War. What galvanized America around the war, Meyrowitz said, was the televised testimony of a young Kuwaiti girl who tearfully told members of Congress she’d seen Iraqi soldiers storm Kuwaiti hospitals and remove infants from their incubators.
As it turned out, the girl, named Nayirah, was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States. She lived in Washington, D.C., and was recruited by the high-powered Washington public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. It had received more than $11 million from the state of Kuwait under the auspices of a private group called the Citizens for a Free Kuwait, which wanted to incite the war on Iraq. After the war, several international human rights organizations checked out the incubator story and found it to be false.
U.S. journalists were not allowed to investigate the story prior to the war, in the name of protecting the U.S. military, but Meyrowitz said this information would not have been useful to Iraqi intelligence.
"The Iraqis knew they weren’t tearing the babies off the incubators," he said.
Although most Americans banked on the overriding narrative that had big bad Iraq bullying innocent little Kuwait, Meyrowitz said the tiny but wealthy nation had been using British angle-drilling technology to siphon oil from underneath Iraqi soil.
What’s worse than all the misinformation leading to America’s declaring war on Iraq, Meyrowitz said, is the silence of the American media since 1991.
"The New York Daily News has more sports reporters than there are Western reporters in the entire Middle East outside Israel," Meyrowitz said.
UNICEF statistics show that one in 10 infants born in Iraq never reach age 1, largely because the war decimated the country’s infrastructure and ongoing economic sanctions have prevented recovery, Meyrowitz said.
He shared copies of an article by Thomas Nagy in The Progressive revealing that the United Nations has maintained the sanctions even though they knew as far back as 1991 they would prevent Iraq from purifying its water supply.
"Iraq depends on importing specialized equipment and some chemicals to purify its water supply, most of which is heavily mineralized and frequently brackish to saline," Nagy quoted U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency documents. "Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease."
Monday night, Meyrowitz asked if any experienced journalists wanted to comment on why such facts have remained secret. Sarah Brown, a controversial former town councilor in Kittery, Maine, said that when she was working as a journalist in Russia she found that European reporters were much more willing to ask the hard questions than the Americans were. U.S. journalists generally took an official’s word for things and only pursued stories that directly affected American interests.
Brown said Americans are not trained to think globally, and Meyrowitz said our journalists are afraid to question the overarching ideology that says America is the greatest country in the world and our enemies are simply evil.
Meyrowitz showed a video clip of CNN’s Larry King interviewing CBS news anchor Dan Rather. King asked Rather, a well-traveled journalist, why so many people around the world seem to hate America.
"They hate us because they’re losers," Rather said. "There are just evil people in some places."
Meyrowitz said this sort of attitude prevents national journalists from reporting truthfully.
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