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.
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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