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Today's
Stories
August 28,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
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August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
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Weekend
Edition
August 28 / 29, 2004
(But
More Generals, Please...)
Media
Declares War on Anti-War Protests
By
MICKEY Z.
The August 26, 2004 New York Daily News
headline blared: ANARCHY, INC. The idea, of course, was to paint
the upcoming RNC protests with the broad brush of corporate media
propaganda. An influential ingredient of wartime spin is shaping
public perception of the anti-war movement. As a result, coverage
of demonstrations is usually a tepid combination of low crowd
estimates and footage of police arresting "unruly"
protestors.
"War, and the threat of
war, sells newspapers," says media analyst Danny Schechter.
"Peace does not. The 'action' of war builds TV ratings.
In contrast, the quieter work of diplomacy and negotiations is
boring and not highly visual. War gives journalists a chance
to show how brave they are in a macho sport where only the strong
survive. Peace is far headier, an intellectual's vocation, a
game for lawyers, softies and sissies."
Protest for peace also suggests
the turbulence of the 1960s...turbulence that led Lyndon Johnson
to conclude, "The weakest link in our armor is American
public opinion. Our people won't stand firm in the face of heavy
losses, and they can bring down the government." The protests
didn't end with the Sixties. At a 1971 anti-war demonstration
in Washington, DC, 14,000 protestors were arrested. As author
H. Bruce Franklin notes, 14,000 would have been considered a
"good size march in 1965."
Clearly, our "memories"
of that era must be purified.
"The antiwar movement
has been so thoroughly discredited," says Franklin. "One
would never be able to guess from public discourse that for every
American veteran of combat in Vietnam, there must be twenty veterans
of the antiwar movement."
One reason for this is the
media distortion of who opposes war. Protest is portrayed as
a hobby for affluent white college students...a slight detour
on the road to Yuppiedom. Not true, says Franklin: "A Gallup
poll in January 1971 showed that 60 percent of those with a college
education favored withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75
percent of those with a high school education favored withdrawal,
and 80 percent of those with only a grade school education favored
withdrawal."
Context like this may not be
ready for primetime, but retired generals are.
When Schechter says, "Hawks
rule the TV studios even as doves line the streets," he
referring to the growing number of men in uniform embedded on
the nightly news-especially during U.S. military interventions.
It's difficult to discover much of anything about the peace movement
from a corporate media that relies almost entirely on retired
military men as wartime commentators. While such veterans may
have obvious advantages in discussing military strategy, it's
vital to remember that few if any anti-war "experts"
are paid by networks and granted a national audience.
During the 1999 U.S./NATO bombing
of Yugoslavia, one of CNN's military analysts, Lt. Gen. Dan Benton,
U.S. Army (Ret.), gave us an illustrative example of what the
networks are paying for:
"I don't know what our
countrymen that are questioning why we're involved in this conflict
are thinking about. As I listened to this press conference this
 morning, with reports of rapes,
villages being burned, and this particularly incredible report
of blood banks, of blood being harvested from young boys for
the use of Yugoslav forces, I just got madder and madder. The
United States has a responsibility as the only superpower in
the world, and when we learn about these things, somebody has
got to stand up and say, 'That's enough, stop it, we aren't going
to put up with this.'"
Such analysis ignores (deliberately
or otherwise) the existence of wartime spin.
As the bombardment of Yugoslavia
continued, Pacifica's Amy Goodman posed this question to CNN's
senior vice president for political coverage Frank Sesno: "If
you support the practice of putting ex-military men-generals-on
the payroll to share their opinion during a time of war, would
you also support putting peace activists on the payroll to give
a different opinion during a time of war?"
"We bring the generals
in because of their expertise in a particular area," Sesno
replied. "We call them analysts. We don't bring them in
as advocates. In fact, we actually talk to them about that-they're
not there as advocates."
From January 30, 2003 to February
12, 2003, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) examined
such "analysts," the "on-camera sources who appeared
in nightly news stories about Iraq on ABC World News Tonight,
CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News and PBS's NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer." FAIR found 267 of the 393 on-camera sources were
from the U.S. and 75 percent (199) were either current or former
government or military officials. "Only one of the official
U.S. sources-Sen. Edward Kennedy-expressed skepticism or opposition
to the war," says FAIR, but the best Kennedy could muster
was self-interest masked by vagueness. "Once we get in there,
how are we going to get out?" he asked on NBC Nightly News
on February 5, 2003...conveniently neglecting any mention of
the legality of such an intervention.
Consistent with the media military
invasion described above, of the 393 sources, 297 were either
current or retired officials and only four were skeptics or opponents
of war. "Such a predominance of official sources virtually
assures that independent and grassroots perspectives will be
underrepresented," FAIR concluded.
Where's "Anarchy, Inc."
when you need it?
This article is excerpted from
Mickey Z.'s book, "The
Seven Deadly Spins: Exposing the Lies Behind War Propaganda"
(Common Courage Press). For more information, please visit http://www.mickeyz.net.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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