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Aaron Brown, Why Do Networks Parrot the Right Wing Spin?
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BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
by Robert
E. Crawford
Dear Folks:
Aggressively interviewed by Democracy Now, Aaron Brown did a creditable job of defending his CNN war coverage -- some whoppers notwithstanding -- but possibly he was able to do so because the discussion focused on what guests were and were not invited onto CNN, and what questions were asked of them regarding the specific issue of the Iraq war. The studio generals were a fairly shameless exercise in sycophancy, to be sure -- but the interviewers' fixation on them allowed Brown to fritter away most of this interview insisting that the generals were a moot point because they were on stage to analyze the war, not judge it once it was under way.
Rather than seeing him grilled about his wartime guests, I'd like to have seen him pinned down on the larger issue of why the networks themselves have so consistently parroted the right wing spin on everything -- not just this war -- since late 2000. With apologies to the suffering and the dead in Iraq, who mean little to our present leaders in any event, this war is just a small part of that picture -- and indeed, may serve as merely the purest crystallization of a much larger Bush strategy of conquest by confusion. For example, consider that the tax cuts promulgated on the opening day of the war may represent the end of federal government in the United States, except as a funding agent for the military -- the end of the body which integrated the schools of America, brought electric power to every tarpaper shack in the hinterlands, and built the interstate freeway system. Who would have the bald-faced temerity to argue that the timing of this tax proposal was accidental? And yet, this landmark event was virtually ignored by a media too excited about riding in real live tanks to pay any attention to the death of the Republic back home.
Consistently -- for two years now -- this administration has kept the nation reeling with a carefully paced barrage of bad news, some of it unbelievably bad, much of it only thinly and contemptuously garnished with a bit of neo-conservative spin. Our media has consistently parroted that spin with barely a glance at the stupendous lies and destructions and disasters behind it, time and time and time again. Why, Aaron?
That the media are directly complicit is one possibility, but you'd think someone would have cracked and leaked it by now -- and all we've really had in that direction was Dan Rather's admission in a foreign interview that after 9-11, concerns over the perception of patriotism had kept reporters from asking the tough questions. Not much of a leak, and not in itself much of an indictment of the media -- especially if you accept a trustworthy president as a given in a time of national crisis.
It seems more likely that the explanation for our media's lay-down behavior may lie in the very confusion produced by the administration's strategy of endless barrage. Against a constant, uproarious backdrop of bewildering attacks on everything we have understood as a civilized and humane people, the only clear, calm, unhurried message is coming out of Ari Fleischer's mouth. The President will decide on that issue at the appropriate moment. The President understands the need for action. The President is fully engaged in this crisis. The President is at peace with the slaughter of the Iraqi people and sleeping like a baby. The President becomes even more disciplined than usual when times are tough. The President will rest on the seventh day.
It's a torrent of self-serving lies, some of them laughably thin and pathetic, some of them laughably bloated and grandiose, but it's clear and calm and splatters out in handy mouthfuls that regurgitate easily across the evening news desk. If you want to question matters beyond that, why hell, where do you even begin? If you do find a place to begin, listen for the so-called Mighty Wurlitzer of the neo-conservative media machine to start ramping up like an air-raid siren, drowning you out and damning you to a black traitor's hell in the bargain. Look for your network's White House correspondent to find his chair at the back of the room tomorrow, next to Helen Thomas's. Look for an envelope with white powder in it, coming to a mailbox near you. Look for an envelope from the IRS.
The media's behavior bespeaks weary mediocrity and cowardice, not complicit evil. It's hard to make sense out of the news -- and when the news is contrived to be as confusing and disorienting as possible by people who have the power to make news out of whole cloth, and make your whole family disappear into thin air to boot, it's just easier to repeat what you're told and hope the people telling you are as competent and well-intended as they keep assuring you they are...hope that all those disgruntled experts and Nobel prize-winning alarmists and intellectuals and your own nagging gut instincts are dead wrong.
To return to the war itself: the habit of accepting that right wing spin was so ingrained by the time the Iraqi conflict was being ginned up that as a nation, in the hands of our compliant media, we were hustled right by such dramatic developments as the "Bush Doctrine" of pre-emptive warfare, a colossal overturning of the fundamental assumptions of civilization itself; the fact that Colin Powell was directly confronted with producing faked evidence and simply dismissed the issue as irrelevant; the fact that all of Bush's oft-cited "diplomatic effort" was directed at enlisting support for a war, not at finding a peaceful solution. How about the media's treatment of the Project for a New American Century, and the connection between their " Rebuilding America's Defenses" and the Iraqi war? (What treatment? Good question.)
When you think about it, the right wing may have put the road map to our own destruction right under our noses -- may in fact be laughing about the irony right now. The actual creators of "Shock and Awe" have explained several times that it's been misrepresented by the Pentagon and misunderstood by laymen -- that it's more than "Blitzkrieg," because it's a focused, overwhelming attack on key elements of the enemy's total infrastructure. It includes noise and carnage, to be sure -- but it's much more than that. It's wholesale, concerted disinformation. It's constant confusion, misdirection, and disorientation. It's toilets backing up, the power going down, the policeman disappearing from his beat, and commandos moving up on your house in the dark. It's numbing chaos on the receiving end -- and meticulous orchestration on the delivering end. When you think about it, Shock and Awe -- like Aaron Brown's sins as a journalist -- could be about much, much more than a war on Iraq. It's really a pretty good model of the Republican assault on America.
Robert E.
Crawford
Halfway,
OR
A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY
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