February 24, 2005
Danny Schechter, "Weapons of Mass Deception" Filmmaker, Declares War on the War Propaganda Machine
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
Media is the front line of the corporate system. And media transmits the values, sells the products. All of this is about selling, not telling. The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but also for new communications strategies.
...our media became a weapons systems targeted at us. Usually in war propaganda you try and confuse the enemy. In our case, this propaganda infiltrated very skillfully back into American and global public opinion, and it was done with the help of Hollywood producers, and corporate PR people brought in to help out at the Pentagon.
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The only thing more compelling than interviewing Danny Schechter is watching
his powerful new documentary film, "Weapons
of Mass Deception," available exclusively from BuzzFlash.com
through March 8. Schechter’s tour de force film puts the media in the
cross hairs for their distortion of the threat of Iraq, their failure
to challenge the administration’s claims over WMDs, and the media’s war
mongering in the buildup to the preemptive invasion. As we wrote in our
recommendation for the film, if BuzzFlash were handing out our own Oscars,
Danny Schechter's "Weapons
of Mass Deception" would win for best film exposé of the
media.
Danny Schechter is founder and executive editor of MediaChannel.org, as
well as a founder and producer of Globalvision, Inc. His career in print
and broadcast journalism has garnered him multiple Emmy awards, the IRIS
award, the George Polk Award, the Major Armstrong Award and honors from
the National Association of Black Journalists. Mr Schechter is an internationally
recognized speaker and writer on media issues. Among Mr. Schechter's books
are The More You Watch, The Less You Know (Seven Stories Press)
and News Dissector: Passions, Pieces, and Polemics (Electron
Press).
We spoke with Danny Schechter about his new documentary, about why good
journalism doesn't mean rooting for your side to win a war, and about
the American media as a roadblock to progress.
* * *
BuzzFlash: Your new film, "Weapons
of Mass Deception," documents how the American corporate media
complex helped the Bush Administration sell the notion of launching a
preemptive attack on Iraq. And more than that, the media misled the American
people into believing that there were absolutely no other options other
than a preemptive attack to protect our national security. So how was
the media able to control and narrow the discussion so much? Is it as
simple as just not talking about what other options were available in
the buildup to the war?
Danny Schechter: Journalism is supposed to be a watchdog
on power, not a lapdog. It’s not there as an echo chamber or a transmission
belt for the claims made by the government. The media has a duty to scrutinize
information, seek out other sources, try to evaluate and try to understand
what the political strategy is behind a focus on a certain issue. But
what we saw over and over again, on every single news program on every
channel for almost five months, was the demonization of Saddam Hussein.
He went from being a bad guy to a Hitler – somebody who not only was threatening
his own people, gassing them and committing human rights abuses but also
threatening the rest of the world. The media also spun the story that
the WMDs in Iraq were presented as offensive weapons that had to be disarmed
lest the world itself would be threatened.
The claim made by the Administration, as the basis for the war, was based
on two main pillars -- the first was that Iraq had WMDs and biological
and chemical weapons. And the second was the link that was implied, inferred,
and suggested between Saddam, the secular nationalist, and Osama bin Laden,
who is an Islamic fundamentalist and religious fanatic. So everything
was put together in a nice little package. And the television media in
our country, for the most part got on board and began beating the drum
and accepting the logic and need for war.
As I show in "Weapons
of Mass Deception," of the 800 experts that were on the air from
the beginning of the buildup to the war itself and all the way up to Saddam’s
statues coming down in Baghdad, out of 800 experts, only six opposed the
war. A report from FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) found that
only 3% of sources opposed the Iraq war while 71% of sources supported
the war. So the information was skewed.
Later a Senate report came out and said that all the analysts suffered
from group-think – they all thought and ruled alike on the same sources.
They all reinforced what the others were saying for a political reason.
They had an objective and they skewed the information in that direction.
Okay, governments do that. Governments always do that when they make a
claim. But the question has to be, is there a media here that can question
all of this “group-think” and challenge it?
I was with a prominent news anchor recently at the United Nations who
basically said, well, how could the media have known if the government
didn’t know? My answer is, how could every cab driver in Chicago and New
York know that there were no WMDs, you know what I mean?
In the rest of the world, there was a lot more balanced coverage. In fact,
if you lived somewhere else, you saw a different war than we saw. And
that’s one of the arguments we make in "WMD."
We say there were two wars going on. One was the war in which soldiers
fought each other. The other was a war in which journalists were in combat
for scoops, for information, and often cooperating with the government
to get access, to be embedded, to be able to get the inside look forward.
The Pentagon converted the American press -- which used to be considered
the fourth estate and a check on power --into the fourth front. That’s
how General Tommy Franks described the media in his secret war plan.
BuzzFlash: Although it jumps out at me, sadly I think
most Americans give the media the benefit of the doubt. If your objective
was to convince someone that the mainstream media acts in collusion with
the Bush administration and is failing to do its job, where would you
even begin to engage someone in that conversation when they falsely believe
that the corporate media is a watchdog?
Danny Schechter: This is how I began. I embedded myself
in my apartment, and I began watching the channels, flipping the dials
of my remote control and comparing and contrasting what was on the American
channels, what was on CBC, what was on BBC, what was the rest of the world
watching, to the best of my ability. I did this not only on TV but online,
as well, looking at countless websites.
I’m the editor of Mediachannel.org, and we have thirteen hundred media
affiliates. We have access to a lot of research and reporting. And what
I saw was the different narrative from the foreign press than there was
in the narrative we saw in the United States. And I began to see that
this was very conscious, because certain message points were reinforced
again and again. And when you saw what was happening on television, it
became not simply a journalist reporting information, but it became pundits
interpreting information and government officials reinforcing the information.
These tactics all fit into a strategy that we investigate in the film
called “information warfare” or information operations.
I thought one of the compelling facts we uncovered was a retired Air Force
colonel who did a study of the coverage of the Iraq War who concluded
that as many as 60 stories were deliberately invented or changed in various
ways to basically conceal the truth. And he’s somebody from inside the
Pentagon world.
I began to feel that I had to do more – that I had to fight fire with
fire. I had to challenge the media’s images with different images. And
I began to start this project with no money, with no support, with no
help, with no media channels willing to commission it, with no foundations
willing to fund it. And I went into my own pocket until I couldn’t afford
it anymore. Eventually I was able to attract some investors and we made
the film on one-tenth of one percent of Michael Moore’s budget. We were
a very small team based really on our passion and feeling that what we
saw emerging in the United States during this war was a state media system
– a system that was in essence accepting and promoting government claims.
And I was finding out that, in fact, the government was funding reporters
to get their politics into the media.
BuzzFlash: One of the grossest examples was the twisted
logic in the buildup to the war when Rice, Rumsfeld, Powell, Cheney, and
Bush were asked how Iraq could be considered a threat since the U.N. inspectors
couldn’t find any WMDs. And the administration’s response was, “Well,
the fact that we can’t find the WMDs proves Iraq has them, and that they’re
hiding them.” It was so transparent and yet the media swallowed this ridiculous
line of reasoning.
Danny Schechter: And the logic was even more bizarre
– Osama bin Laden speaks Arabic, hates America. Saddam Hussein speaks
Arabic, hates America. Therefore, Saddam Hussein is Osama bin Laden. If
they share ideology, then they also might share weapons to destroy America.
This hysteria and litany of “what ifs” was just a simplistic message point:
you’re either with us or you’re against us. These are the evildoers and
we’re the good guys in the world.
Our news system used to rely on information and informing people. There
would be facts that would be debated. These guys today have moved into
a storytelling mode – a Hollywood narrative technique has invaded the
realm of news and information. So what we’re presenting now is not necessarily
information designed to inform people or deepen their understanding of
how institutions work or what the choices are in the world, but rather
to convey a story line. And that story line is the Jessica Lynch story
– damsel in distress. The idea of the war being presented like a sporting
event – a sports metaphor – where generals are diagramming how we marched
into Baghdad so it looked like a Super Bowl play.
These techniques of the merger of show biz and news biz reduced the war
to an entertainment event, and everybody played their part in it. And
there was a lot of high drama. What’s going to happen? Are we at risk?
Our boys are in the field. And so, you basically shift the public’s identification
from thinking about the reasons that we’re there – whether or not we should
be there – to what’s happening to our soldiers in the field. Your loyalties
go to the soldiers and you forget about the politics and the policies
that led to the war.
That’s why I felt we had two issues here that were in tandem with each
other. One was the weapons of mass destruction and the other was "Weapons
of Mass Deception" – the way in which our media became a weapons
systems targeted at us. Usually in war propaganda you try and confuse
the enemy. In our case, this propaganda infiltrated very skillfully back
into American and global public opinion, and it was done with the help
of Hollywood producers, and corporate PR people brought in to help out
at the Pentagon.
BuzzFlash: Many Americans may find this shocking, but
good journalism – professional journalism – means that reporters shouldn’t
be rooting for your side to win a war. It’s not a journalist’s job to
support the troops, it’s the journalist’s job to tell the story truthfully
and accurately.
Danny Schechter: When journalists start talking about
“we” – expressing an identification with the policy or with the invasion,
even with the soldiers, they’ve lost critical distance, which is essential
to journalism. Secondly, jingoism and a lot of flag waving is not journalism,
and we saw this after 9/11, with all the anchormen wearing American flags
on their lapels rallying the country. And I can understand the reasons
for it. I lived near the World Trade Center. I made a film about that
as well. I can understand why people were frightened, but this fear was
manipulated by this Administration that had planned the war in Iraq before
9/11.
BuzzFlash: Clearly, we as consumers of information can
be easily manipulated through branding, advertising, the power of images
with music, and intentional framing and manipulating of language. Visuals
and impressions dominate information now. Could you explain how the networks
branded this war and how significant this was in the overall distortion
by the media?
Danny Schechter: A film called "The Power of Nightmares"
was just done by the BBC. The idea was that in the earlier part of the
century, politicians organized around dreams, around things we could hope
for – the Great Society, civil rights, women’s emancipation – issues that
were about people’s hopes and dreams. Now we have an administration that’s
organizing itself around our nightmares, around fear, and basically being
the strong father figure. This authoritarian leadership model is eroding
civil liberties, our democracy, and effectively deploying large amounts
of money from the corporate world to basically help them realize their
self interests. This is something which has come out of a country that’s
gone through a tremendous transformation over the last twenty years, where
the gap between the rich and poor is growing tremendously.
But the military-industrial interests recognized that the
scariest thing that ever happened was the end of the Soviet Union -- suddenly
that threat disappeared.
So we needed a new threat because a threat keeps that machine going. Instead
of a military-industrial complex, we now have a military-industrial-media
complex. Media is the front line of the corporate system. And media transmits
the values, sells the products. All of this is about selling, not telling.
The tradition of journalism is being eroded. And in its place we have
impressions, images, archetypes, icons, celebrities and the like. This
is how public opinion is now being massaged and manipulated. The war was
a testing ground, not only for new weapons systems and techniques, but
also for new communications strategies. This is a tremendous priority
about how you manage conflict. This goes back to the war in Vietnam, as
we show in "Weapons
of Mass Deception," where the Nixon Administration concluded
that the U.S. lost the Vietnam war because of the media.
BuzzFlash: The distortion of the war in Iraq in the media
occurred before, during and after the invasion. Let’s talk about coverage
of the war itself. Do you think mainstream news should show graphic images
of war?
Danny Schechter: That’s a difference we saw between the
Arab satellite channels and our own. Some foreign channels showed the
reality of war and the horror of people being killed. The American press
decided not to show anything. My film talks about civilian casualties
and how our military used cluster weapons -- two issues not covered in
the American press. Our press covered it up rather than covered it. And
that to me is a tragedy. I came out by saying you don’t want to gross
people out. On the other hand, we have a responsibility to tell people
what’s happening. And in this case, we didn’t.
But when we talk about this happening before the war, we have to recognize
that it’s still happening. If you look at the Iraq election, the way it
was spun and covered, we know that a lot of people came out very bravely
with their purple fingers in the air and going to vote. But what were
they voting for? Or why were they voting? They were voting in part because
they want to get the Americans out. Yet this was spun by the Bush administration
as a vindication of our policy. So the management and news media manipulation
that we saw throughout the war is still happening.
BuzzFlash: What needs to happen? Do progressives need
to wage a campaign to show the rest of the country that Americans can’t
trust the mainstream news?
Danny Schechter: What we try to provide at mediachannel.org
is ongoing, timely criticism of the media together with other resources
presenting other points of view for more diversity. I write a blog every
day on mediachannel.org looking at the media critically and looking at
what can be done about it. I’m trying, as best I can, in addition to my
books and my films, to raise these issues. But the final point I tell
the viewer in my film is, “I’ve had my say. Now it’s time for you.” I’m
trying to involve the public in these issues.
We created an outlet called "Media for Democracy," which over
75,000 people joined in order to talk back to the media and challenge
the media. We also need to support independent media such as BuzzFlash.
As the Washington Post military reporter that I quote in the film says,
“The United States has not won this war.” We need to understand why and
what’s happening there. That’s why I’m hoping "Weapons
of Mass Deception" will be an important addition to everybody’s
video shelf, and if they can help to get it into libraries, schools, and
screenings in communities and discuss it. Every time we’ve shown this,
people stay for an hour to discuss and debate it. This film is something
that really resonates with people. Obviously it’s hard to get the media
to promote and to support a film that criticizes the media.
It’s easier to bash Bush than to critique the media, but we have to move
in that direction. That’s what I’m trying to do. I joined the media thirty
years ago to address the problems of the world, but I’ve come to see that
the media is one of the problems. It’s a problem that we all have to confront
and try to do something about because having a strong, vital, independent
media is essential to a well-functioning democracy. Without it, it’s over.
And these are not issues of media only. This is what I think BuzzFlash
readers have to appreciate. These are issues of democracy. If you can’t
have a media that informs the public, how can you have a democracy? If
you can’t have a trustworthy media that critiques, analyzes, exposes,
and challenges, then what you have in essence is a propaganda system.
My hope is that BuzzFlash readers understand the need for political change
and will realize that the media is standing in the way of change. The
media is a problem now, not a solution, and we have to work for media
in our country that will support democracy.
BuzzFlash: Danny, "Weapons
of Mass Deception" is a great film. Thanks so much for talking
with us about it.
Danny Schechter: Thank you.
A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW
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Resources
"Weapons of Mass Deception" DVD, a BuzzFlash premium: http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/05/02/pre05023.html
MediaChannel.org Website: http://www.mediachannel.org/
Danny Schechter biography: http://www.globalvision.org/who/whoa.html