Arab world now faces invasion
by American TV
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MEDIA WATCH BRIEFS
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Media nix — from Blix to Kucinich
to Dixie Chicks

By Norman Solomon

Apr. 24— Hans Blix, Dennis Kucinich, and the Dixie Chicks are in very different lines of work — but they’re in the same line of fire from big media for the sin of strongly challenging the president’s war agenda.

Let’s start with Blix, who can get respectful coverage in American media — unless he’s criticizing the US government. Belatedly, in mid-April, he went public with accusations that the Bush administration faked evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And Blix declared that the United Nations — not the US government — should deploy arms inspectors in Iraq now.

But presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer retorted: “I think it’s unfortunate if Hans Blix would in any way criticize the United States at this juncture.” The White House message was clear — and it reached the media echo chamber.

So, on the Apr. 22 edition of CNN’s “Moneyline” program, host Lou Dobbs (with an American flag pin in his lapel) summed up a news report this way: “Blix appearing for all the world to look like a petulant UN bureaucrat about a month to go before his retirement.”

Mainstream US reporters rarely apply an adjective like “petulant” to petulant administration officials like, say, Ari Fleischer. But then again, Fleischer doesn’t challenge US foreign policy.

Dennis Kucinich does. The four-term US representative from Ohio is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination. And some media pundits find his anti-war views outrageous.

A few weeks before President Bush launched an undeclared war on Iraq, “liberal” Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen declared his own war on Kucinich. The main trigger for Cohen’s wrath was that the member of Congress had dared to identify oil as “the strongest incentive” for the impending war.

Cohen claimed to be shocked, shocked, shocked. The first word of his column was “liar.” From there, the Post columnist peppered his piece with references to Kucinich as an “indomitable demagogue” and a “fool” who was “repeating a lie.” But Cohen would have done well to re-read a front page of his own newspaper.

Five months earlier, on Sept. 15, a page-one Post report carried the headline “In Iraqi War Scenario, Oil Is Key Issue; US Drillers Eye Huge Petroleum Pool.” In the article, Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the US-backed Iraqi National Congress, said that he favored the creation of a US-led consortium to develop oil fields in a post-Saddam Iraq: “American companies will have a big shot at Iraqi oil.”

The same Post article quoted former CIA Director James Woolsey — a Chalabi supporter who, according to a Legal Times story, has been on the payroll of Chalabi’s group. Woolsey said: “France and Russia have oil companies and interests in Iraq. They should be told that if they are of assistance in moving Iraq toward decent government, we’ll do the best we can to ensure that the new government and American companies work closely with them. If they throw in their lot with Saddam, it will be difficult to the point of impossible to persuade the new Iraqi government to work with them.”

As many business pages have long highlighted, it’s actually quite reasonable to identify oil as key to US policy toward Iraq. But such talk from a presidential candidate causes some people to become incensed. That hardly makes Kucinich a “liar.” On the contrary, it simply makes him a pariah in the media realms patrolled by the likes of Richard Cohen.

Similar media gendarmes are on patrol over the airwaves. The giant corporate owner of more than 1,200 radio stations, Clear Channel, syndicates talk radio host Glenn Beck to scores of stations nationwide — and Beck is enraged about Kucinich. Days before the all-out war on Iraq began, Beck discussed spontaneous combustion and then said: “Every night I get down on my knees and pray that Dennis Kucinich will burst into flames.”

Beck has been a chief on-air organizer of de facto pro-war rallies promoted by Clear Channel, a monopolistic corporation with close ties to President Bush. Those rallies included vilification of the Dixie Chicks, a country music group that earned the wrath of hyper-patriots several weeks ago when lead singer Natalie Maines, a Texan, said she was ashamed to be from the same state as Bush.

While the controversy did not do much harm to sales of their music, the Dixie Chicks have suffered a sharp drop in air play. Most fans don’t seem to mind the anti-war sentiment, but some radio industry executives sure do. “What’s clear is that in these days of highly concentrated media ownership,” says the Chicago area’s Daily Herald, “there is an immense amount of pressure to not make waves.”

In a new statement that voiced support for the Dixie Chicks as “terrific American artists expressing American values by using their American right to free speech,” rocker Bruce Springsteen condemned “the pressure coming from the government and big business to enforce conformity of thought concerning the war and politics.”

Being a dissenter from conventional wisdom has always involved risks — but rarely have major media powerhouses in the United States been so eager to dismiss thoughtful opinions with the wave of a patriotic wand.

Norman Solomon writes a syndicated column on media and politics. He is co-author (with Reese Erlich) of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You, published this year by Context Books.

Source: Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

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Arab world now faces invasion
by American TV

By Oliver Burkeman

Washington, DC, Apr. 24— Washington’s battle to win public support in the Arab world has begun in earnest with the first broadcasts of what officials say will become a 24-hour satellite television network aimed at changing minds throughout the region by American-style morning chat-shows, sports, news, and children’s programs.

Not so well hidden within the Bush administration’s published $74.7 billion supplemental appropriations request to pay for the war and homeland security is a $30.5 million request for a new broadcast news network in the Middle East — the Middle East Television Network.

The money is to provide start-up costs for such a network, which will broadcast news and information with a pro-American spin in Arabic via satellite to televisions across the region.

Faced with allegations that the channel will be a propaganda arm of the US government, the broadcasting magnate setting it up, Norman Pattiz, vowed that it would remain independent.

Iraq and the World, the prototype channel being beamed into the country from a US air force plane, began showing American evening news bulletins this week.

A full-service version should be broadcasting 24 hours a day to 22 countries in the Middle East by the end of the year, Pattiz, chairman of Westwood One, said.

Faces familiar to US audiences, including Dan Rather of CBS and Tom Brokaw of NBC, are appearing with their words translated into Arabic.

The aim is “to counter the negative images being broadcast right now, the incitement to violence, the hate radio, the journalistic self-censorship,” Pattiz told the Guardian.

The broadcasts are on separate channels to those being used by the Pentagon and the state department, and are run by a the US Broadcasting Board of Governors, a body of citizens appointed by the president, of which Pattiz is one.

“We don’t do propaganda,” he insisted.

“We’ll do anything that any legitimate news organization in the world might do,” he said — including al-Jazeera.

While information programs will occupy most of the schedule, softer formats will play a crucial role in the broader cultural campaign, Pattiz said.

Jerry Springer can abandon any hope of a new market, though. “We won’t have the same kind of inflammatory talk television you see on al-Jazeera,” Pattiz said.

“It likes to present itself as the CNN of the Middle East, but I think of them more as CNN meets Jerry Springer. Except people in the US find Jerry Springer amusing, and in the Middle East ... people can lose their lives over that kind of rhetoric.”

Pattiz’s sureness of touch helped his company earn $551million last year supplying programs to radio and TV stations. But his confidence that the approach can be easily exported to the world of public diplomacy is far from shared, and is derided by some as naive or counter-productive.

“It’s part of this enormous faith, this unquestioned faith, that when the people in the Middle East are introduced to American values and style, and look and feel, they will fall for it,” said Michael Wolff, a media columnist for New York magazine. “And it’s virtually unchallenged. It’s almost missionary-like.”

The network’s planners were obsessed with al-Jazeera and the idea that it was indoctrinating a generation of viewers, said Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab studies at Georgetown University in Washington.

“Think about the assumptions involved in that — that the Arabs just sit in front of TV sets and al-Jazeera just pumps this information into them?”

The operation betrayed the widespread belief that “the primary problem to the hackneyed question, ‘why do people hate us?’ is that they don’t understand us.”

“A small amount of that is true, but the primary problem is policy... US policy towards Israel, towards Iraq, [and] support for authoritarianism.”

Source: Guardian (UK), Add. info. from Europemedia.net

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