How the Media Works to Normalize the Unthinkable

Comment by Larry Ross, June 4, 2006

Famous independent journalists tell us how our mass media make wars possible.

As an introduction to this article I've extracted important quotes from the journalists as follows:

John Pilger said: "journalists have played a critical role in sustaining wars. Starting them and sustaining them" and that "there's almost an obsession, on controlling what journalists have to say...what we're getting is a massive censorship by omission"...The war in Vietnam .."was an invasion...huge numbers of civilians were killed. And in effect it was a war against civilians and that was never told and that's exactly true of Iraq." ..."Jo Wilding, a British human rights worker, was in Fallujah all through that first attack. Jo Wilding's dispatches were some of the most extraordinary I've read, but they were never published anywhere."....."The unspoken task of the reporter in Vietnam, as it was in Korea, was to normalize the unthinkable. And that has not changed."...."The BBC, which promotes itself as a sort of nirvana of objectivity and impartiality and truth, has blood all over it's corporate hands....in the lead up to the war, 90% of the BBC's references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them"...."A BBC newsreader described the invasion (of Iraq) as a 'miscalculation'. Not illegal. Not unprovoked. Not based on lies. But a miscalculation. Thus the unthinkable is normalized.."When journalists report it as a respectable geopolitical act and promote the idea that it is to bring democracy to this country, then they're normalizing the unthinkable." ... To Pilger the most significant way journalists are used by government is in what he calls a "softening up process" before military action. Currently journalists are softening up Iran, Syria and Venezuela" ....95% of the 100 media commentaries surveyed expressed hostility to Chavez, with terms such as "dictator" "strongman and "demagogue" Pilger said.

Charlie Glass, a former ABC  America correspondent in the Middle East "spoke about the censorship he encountered as an American TV reporter covering the Middle East." particularly "the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982"..."THAT IS WHY VERY FEW PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT'S GOING ON IN THE MIDDLE EAST." "Glass believes this kind of censorship has led to a chasm of misunderstanding within the U.S. public."

Robert Fisk said: "...I've always believed that your major newspaper should be called "American Officials Say". The you can just scrap all the reporting and have the Pentagon talking directly"...."The purpose of this kind of journalism is to diminish the real reasons behind the Middle East conflict."..Television connives at war because it will not show you the reality."  The Iraq war..."is a catastrophe and every reporter working in Iraq knows it, but they don't tell you that."

Seymour Hersh, " has just published his report on the Bush administrations secret plans for an attack on Iran....This is a President whose got his own vision, whether he's talking to God ..he has his own messianic view of what to do and he's not done" warned Hersh  ......Concerning a war with Iran Hersh warned ..." he's probably going to do it, because somebody up there is telling him this is the right thing to do."

 

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Normalizing the Unthinkable

John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Charlie Glass, and Seymour Hersh on the failure of the world's press

By Sophie McNeill, June 3, 2006

The late journalist Edward R. Murrow might well have been rolling in his grave on April 21. That's because Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a lecture that day in Washington, DC to journalists at the Department of State's official Edward R. Murrow Program for Journalists.

For the Bush administration to use the memory of a person who stood up to government propaganda is ironic to say the least. Secretary Rice told the assembled journalists that “without a free press to report on the activities of government, to ask questions of officials, to be a place where citizens can express themselves, democracy simply couldn't work.”

One week earlier in New York City, Columbia University hosted a panel on the state of the world's media that would have been more in Murrow's style than the State Department-run symposium. Reporter and filmmaker John Pilger, British Middle East correspondent for the Independent Robert Fisk, freelance reporter Charlie Glass, and investigative journalist for the New Yorker Seymour Hersh appeared together at this April 14 event.

Continue...

 

See Also: The Banality of Evil by Edward S. Herman