Date: Thu, 09 Mar 1995 17:10:41 -0800 (PST) From: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Subject: Cohen and Solomon on congress ...................................................................... The following are several "Media Beat" columns written by Jeff Cohen (FAIR's executive director) and Norman Solomon (a FAIR associate). If you would like to see their weekly column appear in your local paper regularly, let the editorial page editors know. Dailies can get the column from Creators Syndicate, a mainstream syndicate (310-337-7003). Alternative weeklies can get it from AlterNet (415-284-1420). You can find more of this type of media criticism in EXTRA!, FAIR's magazine. To subscribe, call 1-800-847-3993. Be sure to let them know you heard about it on-line. You might want to ask about getting the book "Adventures in Medialand" -- a collection on Cohen and Solomon columns -- as a premium. Info on FAIR material on-line can be gotten by sending a blank e-mail message to: fair-info@igc.apc.org. "ITAL" means italics. January 11, 1995 DOWNPOUR OF MEDIA CLICHES THREATENS TO FLOOD NATION By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon We interrupt this newspaper for a special bulletin! A media flood warning is now in effect for the entire United States. A torrential January storm continues to dump large quantities of media cliches on the American public. And the floodwaters are still rising. But there's nothing natural about the current downpour of political cliches. In recent years a lot of work has gone into seeding the clouds. The new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, has described his goal as "reshaping the entire nation through the news media." You can assume that the media climate is backing up the sewers when the same cliche appears on the covers of the country's two biggest news weeklies. That's what happened with the Jan. 9 editions of Time magazine ("Exclusive: How Gingrich plans to pull off his revolution") and Newsweek ("Gingrich's Revolution"). Which brings us to the most popular -- and possibly weirdest -- media cliche of the year so far: * "Revolution" The news media can't seem to stop using the word "revolution" to describe the activities of Gingrich and fellow Republicans. Our Nexis computer search found that -- during the first 10 days of this year -- U.S. newspapers used "revolution" in over 270 articles while reporting on Gingrich. No longer able to utilize the worn-out description of Gingrich as a "bomb-throwing backbencher," the news media now insist that he is leading a "revolution." If the Republicans are igniting a "revolution," it must be the first one in world history aimed at giving the entrenched interests that run the country still more entrenched power. Since when is it a "revolution" to make things even more cushy for the wealthy and powerful, while making the rest of us even more vulnerable to their prerogatives? * "Big government" We keep being told that the Republicans are sworn foes of "big government," determined to downsize and eliminate federal bureaucracies. Our computerized search found references to Gingrich and "big government" in 61 newspaper articles during the first 10 days of January. But news reports on "big government" virtually ignore the most costly and wasteful federal bureaucracy -- the Defense Department -- spending $270 billion this year on the military (almost as much as the amount spent by the rest of the world combined). President Clinton has urged a hefty increase, and the new GOP majority in Congress wants to hike the department's budget even more. A rarely mentioned fact is that the Pentagon purchases two- thirds of the U.S. government's goods and services. And it issues 70 percent of all federal paychecks. But when was the last time you heard a media outlet mention the Pentagon in a discussion of deplorable "big government"? And when was the last time you saw a tough national news report on the F-22 fighter jet, which moves forward even though the General Accounting Office concluded that it is now unneeded and should be put off? The jets are to be assembled by Lockheed, adjacent to Gingrich's congressional district in Georgia. * "Middle class" This one is an old standby, but it has gained renewed currency in recent weeks as the Republican and Democratic parties battle to don the mantle of champion for the "middle class." But who, precisely, is part of the "middle class"? To hear many politicians -- and journalists -- tell it, the "middle class" is just about anyone who isn't below the official poverty line and doesn't qualify as a millionaire. Reporting from Southern California in 1993, under the headline "GOP Blitz Against Budget Puts Democrats on Defensive," The New York Times explained on its front page that President Clinton was not offering much to "people earning more than $115,000, which is middle class in this high-cost region." Six figures a year, and part of the beleaguered middle class. * "Reform" Of all the cosmetic buzzwords applied by American journalists and pundits, none is more opaque than "reform." It means, simply, a favorable gloss for any change of government policy in any direction -- even if it involves the undoing of genuine reforms. Our forecast for this political season calls for continued rhetorical downpours, heavy at times, with only occasional periods of clarity. But don't despair -- and don't worry about carrying a rhetoric-proof umbrella. Once you decode the main cliches, the torrents of media blather will roll off you like water off a duck's back. July 20, 1994 TOBACCO WARS: THE FIRST CASUALTY IS CANDOR By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon In the midst of an escalating media war over tobacco this summer, the cigarette industry has complained loudly about bad press. But the industry has benefitted from shoddy journalism -- as key facts keep disappearing in clouds of smoke. Take the case of "America Tonight," the prime-time CBS news magazine co-hosted by Deborah Norville. Tobacco companies can't advertise on TV. But if they could, no paid ad would have as much propaganda value as the one-sided "news" segment on July 6 ridiculing Canada's cigarette taxes. The segment -- which focused on cigarette smuggling from the United States to Canada -- lit up myths that the U.S. tobacco lobby has been packaging to block higher cigarette taxes in our country. Proponents say that cigarette tax hikes reduce smoking while raising revenues. But no proponents appeared on the broadcast. Opponents, though, were quite visible. In sync with them was CBS correspondent Bob McKeown, who seemed to interview himself at one point: "Did those high taxes convince Canadians to kick the habit? No. Last year, smoking in Canada actually increased for the first time in a decade." If McKeown had interviewed anyone at the Canadian Cancer Society, CBS viewers might have learned that since 1982 -- the year cigarette taxes began rising in Canada -- smoking has decreased about 40 percent, even more among teenagers. CBS reporter McKeown continued his self-interview: "The government's hopes for more tax revenue? Well, they went up in smoke, too. Because what high cigarette taxes in Canada did do was create a billion-dollar smuggling industry all along the Canada-U.S. border." Wrong again. Cigarette tax revenues rose from $2.26 billion in 1982 to $6.3 billion in 1993 (in Canadian dollars). This occurred despite decreased smoking and increased purchases of cigarettes on the black market. (Cigarette taxes in Canada during this period climbed from an average 59 cents to $3.86 per pack.) One of the on-air experts in the broadcast was Rod Stamler, identified by CBS only as "a former top officer of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police." Unnoted was a more relevant and current affiliation: Stamler is a paid consultant on cigarette smuggling for a firm retained by the Canadian Tobacco Manufacturers Council. CBS presented Stamler saying that organized crime was involved in the smuggling. But no one on the broadcast pointed out how the Canadian tobacco industry encouraged the smuggling - - by overexporting, to the U.S., cigarettes which re-entered Canada illegally. Nor did anyone suggest that smuggling was fostered not by cigarette taxes being too high in Canada -- but too low in the United States. So biased was the "America Tonight" segment that it was hard not to recall the controversial 1989 moonlighting appearance by co-host Deborah Norville (then a TV anchor for another network) at a Philip Morris USA convention in Hawaii. She was paid to anchor a mock TV show: "Norville tossed soft questions at Philip Morris executives and read promotional copy," reported the New York Times. Also unmentioned on the broadcast was the fact that CBS is owned by tobacco tycoon Laurence Tisch. New smoke in the cigarette wars has been generated by a multimillion-dollar blitz of full-page newspaper ads from tobacco companies, many assailing the prospect of higher cigarette taxes. Philip Morris USA, America's top cigarette producer, bought ads in 40 dailies to reprint -- beneath the headline "Were Your Misled?" -- a lengthy article from the new magazine Forbes MediaCritic. The article challenged the Environmental Protection Agency on its statistical survey of 30 studies examining a link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer in women whose husbands smoke. The EPA's 1993 finding -- that environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) causes lung cancer and damages the respiratory health of children -- went beyond statistics. The EPA also cited evidence that ETS contains carcinogenic compounds and can cause cancer in laboratory animals and damage to DNA...and that non-smokers absorb and metabolize significant amounts of ETS. The key to the Philip Morris ad strategy was the appearance of objectivity. After all, this was no tobacco industry propaganda -- it was a reprint of a seemingly unbiased article. "In any controversy," the ad concluded, "facts must matter." But one fact unmentioned in the ad was that Philip Morris and its subsidiary, Kraft General Foods, donated over $10,000 in 1993 to the research group that employed the Forbes MediaCritic writer. (Do facts really matter to Philip Morris? "Company Vice President Steve Parrish says he doesn't care how many independent scientists back EPA," reported Associated Press. "He'll never believe secondhand smoke is bad.") Forbes is known for publishing hatchet jobs on Ralph Nader and other business critics. Its launch of a quarterly on media ethics last year was akin to Bob Packwood starting a publication on sexual etiquette. At the same time Forbes MediaCritic was denouncing the EPA over secondhand smoke, Forbes magazine published a peculiar article -- titled "Thank you for smoking...?" -- which argued that smoking may sometimes be good for your health. The writer was identified only as "Nonsmoker, but tolerant." We too are tolerant nonsmokers. But we're intolerant of deception. July 27, 1994 30-YEAR ANNIVERSARY: TONKIN GULF LIE LAUNCHED VIETNAM WAR By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon Thirty years ago, it all seemed very clear. "American Planes Hit North Vietnam After Second Attack on Our Destroyers; Move Taken to Halt New Aggression," announced a Washington Post headline on Aug. 5, 1964. That same day, the front page of The New York Times reported: "President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and `certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam' after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin." But there was no "second attack" by North Vietnam -- no "renewed attacks against American destroyers." By reporting official claims as absolute truths, American journalism opened the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War. A pattern took hold: continuous government lies passed on by pliant mass media...leading to over 50,000 American deaths and millions of Vietnamese casualties. The official story was that North Vietnamese torpedo boats launched an "unprovoked attack" against a U.S. destroyer on "routine patrol" in the Tonkin Gulf on Aug. 2 -- and that North Vietnamese PT boats followed up with a "deliberate attack" on a pair of U.S. ships two days later. The truth was very different. Rather than being on a routine patrol Aug. 2, the U.S. destroyer Maddox was actually engaged in aggressive intelligence-gathering maneuvers -- in sync with coordinated attacks on North Vietnam by the South Vietnamese navy and the Laotian air force. "The day before, two attacks on North Vietnam...had taken place," writes scholar Daniel C. Hallin. Those assaults were "part of a campaign of increasing military pressure on the North that the United States had been pursuing since early 1964." On the night of Aug. 4, the Pentagon proclaimed that a second attack by North Vietnamese PT boats had occurred earlier that day in the Tonkin Gulf -- a report cited by President Johnson as he went on national TV that evening to announce a momentous escalation in the war: air strikes against North Vietnam. But Johnson ordered U.S. bombers to "retaliate" for a North Vietnamese torpedo attack that never happened. Prior to the U.S. air strikes, top officials in Washington had reason to doubt that any Aug. 4 attack by North Vietnam had occurred. Cables from the U.S. task force commander in the Tonkin Gulf, Captain John J. Herrick, referred to "freak weather effects," "almost total darkness" and an "overeager sonarman" who "was hearing ship's own propeller beat." One of the Navy pilots flying overhead that night was squadron commander James Stockdale, who gained fame later as a POW and then Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. "I had the best seat in the house to watch that event," recalled Stockdale a few years ago, "and our destroyers were just shooting at phantom targets -- there were no PT boats there.... There was nothing there but black water and American fire power." In 1965, Lyndon Johnson commented: "For all I know, our Navy was shooting at whales out there." But Johnson's deceitful speech of Aug. 4, 1964, won accolades from editorial writers. The president, proclaimed The New York Times, "went to the American people last night with the somber facts." The Los Angeles Times urged Americans to "face the fact that the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated the hostilities." An exhaustive new book, "The War Within: America's Battle Over Vietnam," begins with a dramatic account of the Tonkin Gulf incidents. In an interview, author Tom Wells told us that American media "described the air strikes that Johnson launched in response as merely `tit for tat' -- when in reality they reflected plans the administration had already drawn up for gradually increasing its overt military pressure against the North." Why such inaccurate news coverage? Wells points to the media's "almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information" -- as well as "reluctance to question official pronouncements on `national security issues.'" Daniel Hallin's classic book "The `Uncensored War'" observes that journalists had "a great deal of information available which contradicted the official account [of Tonkin Gulf events]; it simply wasn't used. The day before the first incident, Hanoi had protested the attacks on its territory by Laotian aircraft and South Vietnamese gunboats." What's more, "It was generally known...that `covert' operations against North Vietnam, carried out by South Vietnamese forces with U.S. support and direction, had been going on for some time." In the absence of independent journalism, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution -- the closest thing there ever was to a declaration of war against North Vietnam -- sailed through Congress on Aug. 7. (Two courageous senators, Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, provided the only "no" votes.) The resolution authorized the president "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." The rest is tragic history. Nearly three decades later, during the Gulf War, columnist Sydney Schanberg warned journalists not to forget "our unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident." Schanberg blamed not only the press but also "the apparent amnesia of the wider American public." And he added: "We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth." Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and the authors of "Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits" (Common Courage Press). September 21, 1994 JIMMY CARTER AND HUMAN RIGHTS: BEHIND THE MEDIA MYTH By Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon Jimmy Carter's reputation has soared lately. Typical of the media spin was a Sept. 20 report on "CBS Evening News," lauding Carter's "remarkable resurgence" as a freelance diplomat. The network reported that "nobody doubts his credibility, or his contacts." For Jimmy Carter, the pact he negotiated in Haiti is the latest achievement of his long career on the global stage. During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be "the soul of our foreign policy." Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different. Inaugurated 13 months after Indonesia's December 1975 invasion of East Timor, Carter stepped up U.S. military aid to the Jakarta regime as it continued to murder Timorese civilians. By the time Carter left office, about 200,000 people had been slaughtered. Elsewhere, despotic allies -- from Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines to the Shah of Iran -- received support from President Carter. In El Salvador, the Carter administration provided key military aid to a brutal regime. In Nicaragua, contrary to myth, Carter backed dictator Anastasio Somoza almost until the end of his reign. In Guatemala -- again contrary to enduring myth -- major U.S. military shipments to bloody tyrants never ended. After moving out of the White House in early 1981, Carter developed a reputation as an ex-president with a conscience. He set about building homes for the poor. And when he traveled to hot spots abroad, news media often depicted Carter as a skillful negotiator on behalf of human rights. But a decade after Carter left the Oval Office, scholar James Petras assessed the ex-president's actions overseas -- and found that Carter's image as "a peace mediator, impartial electoral observer and promoter of democratic values...clashes with the experiences of several democratic Third World leaders struggling against dictatorships and pro-U.S. clients." From Latin America to East Africa, Petras wrote, Carter functioned as "a hard-nosed defender of repressive state apparatuses, a willing consort to electoral frauds, an accomplice to U.S. Embassy efforts to abort popular democratic outcomes and a one-sided mediator." Observing the 1990 election in the Dominican Republic, Carter ignored fraud that resulted in the paper-thin victory margin of incumbent president Joaquin Balaguer. Announcing that Balaguer's bogus win was valid, Carter used his prestige to give international legitimacy to the stolen election -- and set the stage for a rerun this past spring, when Balaguer again used fraud to win re-election. In December 1990, Carter traveled to Haiti, where he labored to undercut Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the final days of the presidential race. According to a top Aristide aide, Carter predicted that Aristide would lose, and urged him to concede defeat. (He ended up winning 67 percent of the vote.) Since then, Carter has developed a warm regard for Haiti's bloodthirsty armed forces. Returning from his recent mission to Port-au-Prince, Carter actually expressed doubt that the Haitian military was guilty of human rights violations. Significantly, Carter's involvement in the mid-September negotiations came at the urging of Lt. Gen. Raoul Cedras -- who phoned Carter only days before the expected U.S. invasion and asked him to play a mediator role. (Cedras had floated the idea in an Aug. 6 appearance on CNN.) Carter needed no encouragement. All summer he had been urging the White House to let him be a mediator in dealings with Haiti. Carter's regard for Cedras matches his evident affection for Cedras' wife. On Sept. 20, Carter told a New York Times interviewer: "Mrs. Cedras was impressive, powerful and forceful. And attractive. She was slim and very attractive." By then, Carter was back home in Georgia. And U.S. troops in Haiti were standing by -- under the terms of the Carter- negotiated agreement -- as Haiti's police viciously attacked Haitians in the streets. The day after American forces arrived in Haiti, President Clinton was upbeat, saying that "our troops are working with full cooperation with the Haitian military" -- the same military he had described five days earlier as "armed thugs" who have "conducted a reign of terror, executing children, raping women, killing priests." The latest developments in Haiti haven't surprised Petras, an author and sociology professor at Binghamton University in New York. "Every time Carter intervenes, the outcomes are always heavily skewed against political forces that want change," Petras said when we reached him on Sept. 20. "In each case, he had a political agenda -- to support very conservative solutions that were compatible with elite interests." Petras described Carter as routinely engaging in "a double discourse. One discourse is for the public, which is his moral politics, and the other is the second track that he operates on, which is a very cynical realpolitik that plays ball with very right-wing politicians and economic forces." And now, Petras concludes, "In Haiti, Carter has used that moral image again to impose one of the worst settlements imaginable." With much of Haiti's murderous power structure remaining in place, the results are likely to be grim. Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon are syndicated columnists and authors of "Adventures in Medialand: Behind the News, Beyond the Pundits" (Common Courage Press).