That's how I lost faith in the mainstream media
During and after the 1991 Gulf War, the media in the U.S. was prohibited from photographing or filming images of coffins of dead U.S. soldiers. The measure was only lifted in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded U.S. soldiers was also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such recordings in the huge archive of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier tried to climb out of a burning tank.
Three seconds of thousands of videos shot in that war. Three seconds that – as can be clearly seen – were due to a mistake by an editor who had set an IN or OUT incorrectly, so that material became visible that should actually have been censored.
Scenes of defeat have not been shown since Vietnam. So there are no more defeats, because the TV news compressed into two and a half minutes is what makes history in our minds
In his 1920 book "Liberty and the News", the American journalist and media theorist Walter Lippmann stated:
"The newspaper columns are public information carriers. If those who control it claim the right to determine what should be reported and for what purpose, then the democratic process comes to a standstill."
(Lippmann, p.24)
Just a few years ago, I couldn't have imagined that my morning walk to the mailbox to get the newspapers would be accompanied by a quiet counterpoint of reluctance and boredom. I like to have paper in my hand for my morning coffee instead of looking at a screen. Reading, however, is decreasing from year to year. On the one hand, this is due to the fact that many topics no longer interest me, for example the eternal soap opera of British royals, the daily obligatory LGBTQ problems, the me-too sensitivity of groupies at rock concerts or parliamentary investigations to find out why banks are hitting the wall in the financial casino.
However, the real problems of most people, the war in Ukraine, the escalating conflict between the USA and China, i.e. events that are currently changing the lives of millions of taxpayers and burdening future generations (rearmament, inflation, energy policy, sanctions policy, asylum, etc.) are presented in our leading media with such a reduced perspective that it leaves me stunned. The denial of reality takes place with a matter-of-factness bordering on rabies.
Out of 100 articles, there are not 5 from the point of view of the other warring party
As an example, I took the trouble to check the Zürcher Tages-Anzeiger, to which I subscribe, for one-sidedness. From Russia's attack in February 2022 to the end of 2022, I looked at around a hundred articles directly about the Ukraine war. By the hundredth report, I was exhausted by the same thing over and over again. Almost all of them describe the suffering and heroism of Western Ukraine in the Russian war of aggression and – in shrill colours – the crimes of Russia.
Connoisseurs of weapons systems and geostrategy incessantly repeat why Russia must be defeated, and the investigators know little more than the hunt for some Russian who could still have their assets expropriated.
For every hundred articles, I didn't find five that informed what was happening on the other side of the front. The suffering of pro-Russian Ukrainians from the missile strikes and artillery fire of pro-Western Ukrainians is not worth mentioning. The people behind the front line don't seem to exist for our big media. It is reported exclusively with the optics of NATO, i.e. with the optics of an armaments lobby that functions worldwide as a crowbar of the United States.
The one-sidedness of the reports stems from the one-sidedness of the sources. In addition to the inevitable British intelligence (whether 007 is cooperating remains in the dark so far), the daily sources of our "notification" are: President Zelensky and his entourage in Kiev, as well as his friends in Brussels, London, Washington and the associated experts and NATO think tanks. The Russians appear mainly as criminals who deny their crimes.
And when a dam breaks that largely floods Russian defensive positions and territory occupied by Russia, all German talk shows, but also the Swiss radio magazine "Echo der Zeit", immediately find experts who know that it was the Russians who destroyed the dam. Just as it is the Russians who are shooting at themselves in the nuclear power plant they occupy. "Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind," says Shakespeare in King Lear.
In the years leading up to the Russian attack, OECD observers recorded daily artillery detonations, and in February 2022, hundreds of explosions per day. The fighting in eastern Ukraine between 2014 and 2022 has claimed far more than ten thousand lives. So this war didn't start in February 2022.
Have our newspapers reported on it? They have largely swept it under the carpet. They only see what they already know. This means that they always know what they are going to see. In other words, what I can read in the newspapers every morning. And thus what I don't have to read anymore because I already know what it is before I open the newspaper.
"Don't be fooled by your own"
In the autumn of 1983, more than a million people demonstrated all over the Federal Republic of Germany against the stationing of atomic bombs. Even in several countries that were members of NATO, a majority of people opposed further nuclear armament, because it was clear that the much-vaunted "balance of terror" had long been guaranteed by the British and French A-bombs. During the debate in the Bundestag, opposition leader Willy Brandt said that his party, the SPD, was being bombarded with letters of protest:
"These are West Germans and East Germans, these are Europeans and Americans, these are mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, workers and entrepreneurs, artists and soldiers, housewives, pensioners, and there are scientists and engineers of all academic degrees. I wonder who benefits if the commitment and collective expertise of these fellow citizens is thrown away with all the arrogance of power."
The FDP-CDU majority in the German parliament voted for the people's vote in the garbage can and decided to station nuclear medium-range missiles. Although these were abolished as part of a disarmament agreement, US nuclear warheads are now stored at Büchel Air Base in the Eifel region. German Air Force pilots train their use as part of so-called "nuclear sharing". It is no military secret that Russia has always been, and still is, the main target.
In the same year, 1983, Christa Wolf's book "Kassandra" was published, a text about a seer who, before her death, reflects on the downfall of her homeland Troy:
"You can know when the war will begin, but when will the pre-war begin? If there were rules, they would have to be passed on. To bury in clay in stone, to pass it on. What would it say? Among other sentences, it would read: Don't be deceived by your own."
I let myself be deceived by my own, but it took me a long time to realize it. The "Süddeutsche Zeitung", the "Frankfurter Rundschau", the "Neue Zürcher", the "Spiegel" and other newspapers were my leading media when I learned journalism.
The big media, both fee-financed and private, have failed miserably in all the wars I've witnessed. Their job would have been to question the actions of governments, but they have in many cases proven to be loudspeakers of government propaganda and warmongers in unjustified and senseless wars.
The Balkan Wars opened Pandora's box
My first major professional crisis, if I remember correctly, came during the Balkan Wars. I couldn't sleep at night when I realized that the blue was being lied down from the sky. Tuzla was my key experience at the time. The city in Bosnia was defined as a safe zone in 1993. Blue helmets were stationed there. The Bosnian Muslim population was to be protected from Serbian attacks. Nevertheless, the Serbian artillery fired on the city. These attacks were daily news on the radio news for months. The Western media was overflowing with outrage over the shelling of the safe area.
I fell out of the clouds when, in 1995, peacekeepers told me: "The Serbs sometimes shoot in there, but the artillery in Tuzla also shoots out every night at the surrounding Serbian villages."
Tuzla was supplied with weapons by the United States at night and in the fog. There were restricted military areas where UN units were denied access. The same government in Washington that outwardly played the role of "honest broker" to bring about an end to the war secretly organized so-called "black flights" to arm the Bosniak military.
When a Norwegian peacekeeper officer noticed this in 1995 and made it public, he was ordered to remain silent and was transferred as a punishment. The British broadcaster ITN/Channel 4 had filmed a report about the matter, which I took over for a magazine of the SRG programme Switzerland 4.
My attempts to draw the attention of the Swiss media to the revelations were met with indifference. In Bosnia as well as in Kosovo, NATO determined what could and could not be known. Carla Del Ponte, chief prosecutor in The Hague, later complained that she ran into a wall with her request for access to NATO's secret operations.
It wasn't until much later that I learned that leading U.S. PR agencies were feeding the press with horror stories about Serbian concentration camps and Holocaust plans, which a gigantic media apparatus was chasing around the world in a matter of seconds. In their study "Operation Balkans: Advertising for War and Death", the political scientists Jörg Becker and Mira Beham have found well over a hundred such PR contracts in US archives. The mission was to portray the Serbs as perpetrators and the others as victims. James Harff, head of PR agency Ruder Finn, described his job as follows:
"Our craft is to spread news, to circulate it as quickly as possible (...) Speed is crucial. Because we know very well that the first message matters. A denial no longer has any effect."
Mira Beham: War Drums. Media, War and Politics. 1996. p.172 ff.
PR agencies make the case for war and death
Harff showed a certain professional pride to Jacques Merlino, a deputy editor-in-chief of France 2, when he candidly described how his agency did its job "with a great bluff" by getting three powerful Jewish lobby organizations in the United States to warn of an impending Holocaust in the Balkans in advertisements in the New York Times.
"With one move, we were able to simplify things and present them as a story of the good guys and the bad guys (...) And we won, because we chose the right target, the Jewish audience. Immediately, there was a noticeable change in the use of language in the media, accompanied by the use of terms that had a strong emotional charge, such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, and so on, and all this evokes a comparison with Nazi Germany, gas chambers and Auschwitz. The emotional charge was so powerful that no one dared to argue with it."
Consequently, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer toured Europe with the slogan "Never again Auschwitz" and his Defense Minister Scharping told the people that it was known that the Serbs "play football with the severed heads of their enemies." A photo that went around the world as proof of Serbian atrocities and as an argument for NATO's war of aggression showed a horribly emaciated man with a naked torso behind barbed wire. It was reminiscent of the photos of German extermination camps in 1945. The recording was – as was later proven – a fake. At that time, the Trnopolje refugee centre in question was not cordoned off by a barbed wire fence, nor were there any half-starved people there.
Nothing has changed. The war generates the same propaganda tools over and over again. In 2022, a "writer from East Germany" living in Ukraine named Christoph Brumme wrote a regular "diary" in the "NZZ am Sonntag" in which he predicted, among other things, that the Russians would set up concentration camps in Ukraine and that Putin was a second Hitler. He was probably seriously ill and would stage his suicide with an atomic bomb. And so on.
The category of "embedded journalists" had already emerged during the Gulf War of 1991, and there is hardly a term that better describes how this profession can degenerate into a kind of prostitution. In his study "Second Front: Censorship and propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War German", US journalist John R. MacArthur has shown how the media was kept on a leash and how the public was deceived.
The symbiosis of the big media and their governments became completely self-evident after the attack of 9/11. This was defined as an attack by an enemy power and, according to this logic, first attacked Afghanistan, then Iraq. A "war on terror" was launched worldwide, and once the clean-up was underway, "oppressed peoples were liberated" in Libya and Syria as well. The results can be seen in all these countries.
As early as 1987, the renowned science journalist and peace activist Norman Cousins gave the ideological mission of the superpower USA a name: "The Pathology of Power".
A fabricated rape story in Libya
It is incomprehensible to me how journalists, who have so often been lied to by governments, continue to spread the political prescriptions from above as if they were the tablets of the Ten Commandments. In June 2011, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told the cameras that she now had proof that Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi was using "systematic rape" as a strategy. At that time, civil war was raging in Libya. The Libyan army tried to put down an uprising that had escalated in the wake of the so-called "Arab Spring" since February 2011. The U.S. and its NATO allies have been bombing the country since March 2011 in order to help the Libyan people oppressed by Gaddafi and "enforce a no-fly zone," according to the official argument.
Living proof of the accusation of rape was a Libyan woman named Eman-al Obeidi. The woman had gained access to the luxury hotel Rixos Al Nasr in Tripoli on March 26, 2011. Hotel staff and security guards tried to prevent her from making contact with the journalists who were sitting there at breakfast. The woman screamed that she had been kidnapped and raped by Gaddafi's militiamen at a checkpoint three days earlier.
Libyan government spokesman Musa Ibrahim later said that Ms. Obeidi was initially thought to be intoxicated and mentally disturbed. Then it was established that their statements were credible. The case is in the hands of the judiciary. It is an ordinary crime and not a political crime.
Ms. Obeidi has been interviewed by CNN and numerous other media outlets. It figured as proof of the wickedness of the Libyan head of state, Gaddafi. The major media hardly thought it worth mentioning that Libyan doctors had cared for the woman, had confirmed the rape and that the Libyan police had arrested suspects shortly afterwards.
In 2011, at an Amnesty International office in Zurich, I asked what was true about the allegations. I was told that Amnesty had been investigating Libya for several months and had found no confirmation of the allegation of mass rape. The spokesman for the Libyan organization Human Rights Solidarity Libya, which was close to the insurgents, also told me on the phone: "We have no evidence. The only concrete case is that of Ms. Obeidi."
In the meantime, the crap had gone on and the story experienced an almost frenzied proliferation in practically all Western media. My Google search on Sunday, July 20, 2011, showed 21 million results. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Luis Moreno Ocampo, provided an excellent lubricant for the media apparatus by remarking that he did indeed have "information" about mass rape. When asked by a journalist what he thought of reports that Gaddafi had Viagra imported so that his soldiers could rape, the chief prosecutor did not reply: "Leave me alone with such nonsense." Instead, he said the perfidious sentence that evidence was still being collected: "Yes, we are still collecting evidence."
The fantasy continued to proliferate for weeks. The Swiss newspaper "Le Matin" took the creative story-telling to the point of photographing a king-size bed with lamp and bedside table: supposedly a room in an underground bunker where, according to the paper, Gaddafi abused his female victims. During this time, I have not met a journalist who said that he was ashamed of the fact that his career choice made him part of this industry.
"Atrocity Management" is as old as war itself.
The demonization of the enemy is a tried and tested instrument that is as old as war itself.
In his standard work "Images of War, War of Images", the historian Gerhard Paul used more than 200 illustrations to illustrate how modern visual media burned war into the collective memory as iconography. According to Gerhard Paul, reality is lost to the same extent as the images are perfected and standardized.
Crimes against children are always effective in the media. This ranges from Kuwaiti "nurse Najirah," who told a U.S. Congressional Human Rights Committee that she had seen Iraqi soldiers tear out the tubes of incubator babies, which later turned out to be an invention of the PR agency Hill & Knowlton, to the human rights commissioner Denisova in Kyiv, who lost her job in June 2022 because it became clear that she had spread lies. Among them is the claim that she has evidence that Russian soldiers raped small children.
The portrayal of the enemy as a bestial monster seems an unavoidable stereotype of war propaganda. During the First World War, the story that German soldiers had snatched a baby from a Belgian woman, chopped off his hands and then eaten it was a perennial favorite in the French and British press.
When the enemy is a monster that embodies evil itself, wars are easier to justify. In more than forty years of journalistic work, I have had to realize that the major media usually disseminate such propaganda narratives uncritically and are only very late or never willing to admit their mistakes. The New York Times, which asked its readers for forgiveness for misinformation about the Iraq war, is the only case I know of.
In 19 years of working at Swiss television SRF, I have not heard of any case in which a programme has apologised for false news. With the exception of the Meteo broadcast, when the weather forecast was wrong.
In 2011, I drew the attention of Amnesty International Switzerland to the fact that there were no television images of the destruction caused by NATO air strikes in Libya. The Libyan government's television studios were reduced to rubble in the first wave of attacks. As a result, the NATO command center in Naples was able to prevent emotional images of victims pulled from the rubble from being shown on Western TV channels. The major media didn't notice the problem, or they ignored it.
The Amnesty spokesperson replied to me at the time that they were also very concerned about this one-sidedness of the presentation. In the evening, when I had finished the report for the Tagesschau with the editor at the editing suite, the head of the Tages, said at the acceptance that this sentence of the Amnesty spokesman had to be removed from the report. When I asked him why, he said: "Otherwise the audience might think that Gaddafi is not so evil and that he is still in the right in the end."
A new era of censorship has dawned
The corporate media and the fee-financed broadcasters dominate the news market. They all claim to be the Fourth Estate, which keeps a close eye on the powerful, and that this is what makes democracy possible in the first place. My experience is that they are much more believers in a kind of religious community that sees itself as an axis of good. Anyone who does not want to share their worldview is hushed up, defamed or simply banned.
In this sense, governments and their media are working efficiently. The 27 countries of the European Union have banned the Russian news channels RT and Sputnik. Anyone who disseminates or receives them can even pay a fine of up to 50,000 euros in Austria. That's how easy it is to believe that the simplicity of opinion can be enforced. Protest or criticism from the major editorial offices of the Fourth Estate? Zero.
While this war is discussed controversially on Russian social media* with astonishing harshness, Western media are trying to drum into us with obsessive diligence that anyone in Russia who says anything against this war will be imprisoned. "Ten years in prison for thinking" is the headline of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung (6 June 2023).
In Kiev, opposition media are simply banned. Is it necessary to report on it? Obviously not. This is then dealt with casually, almost as a digressive detour, in eight words: "Since the beginning of the war, Ukrainian broadcasters have been showing a joint program" (Zürcher Tagesanzeiger, 28 July 2022). Programme? It almost sounds like community service.
There is a system to concealment. Nowhere is this more evident than in the silence that our leading media maintain about the rampant censorship of social media. A few weeks after the EU banned Russian broadcasters, Google announced that it would block all Russian-linked media worldwide. As is often the case with Big Tech, the pressure allegedly came from the company's own workforce: "Google employees had urged YouTube to take additional punitive measures against Russian channels."
Millions of posts disappear from the platform. Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was involved in Edward Snowden's revelations, has pointed out this extreme censorship campaign and the billions of dollars involved:
"It is hardly surprising that the monopolies of Silicon Valley exercise their censorship power in full compliance with the foreign policy interests of the U.S. government. Many of the major tech monopolies – such as Google and Amazon – routinely seek and obtain highly lucrative contracts with the US security apparatus, including the CIA and NSA. Its top managers maintain close ties with top representatives of the Democratic Party. And congressional Democrats have repeatedly summoned tech executives before their various committees to threaten them with legal and regulatory reprisals if they don't make censorship more in line with the party's political goals and interests.
If you read the Twitter Files, you know how the system works. A discreet intervention by the FBI can cause leading media outlets to put politically sensitive issues on hold until the "danger", in this case an election defeat for candidate Joe Biden, is averted.
What shocked me then and still stunned me today is the cauldron that is reflexively set in motion by a media mob when a few dare to swim against the tide and question the published opinion. The political scientist Mira Beham had told me that she had been banned from writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung because she dared to argue that in the Balkan conflicts one could not get any further with the perpetrator-victim scheme, that the matter was more complex. Nowadays, a renowned journalist like Patrick Baab loses his teaching position at Kiel University if he dares to report from the Donbass "from the wrong side of the front".
Orwell's dystopian vision of "Newspeak" and "Ministries of Truth" is well on its way to becoming reality. We are indeed witnessing a turning point in this respect, even if the German Chancellor meant something different when he used the term.
The word lying press does not describe the matter
The media scientist Uwe Krüger has documented that most of the alpha animals of the established media are members of NATO and US-related institutions. Of course, there is the factor of coercion and adaptation, such as the well-known fact that every employee at Axel Springer Verlag ("Bild", "Die Welt") must agree to the statutes that call for support for the transatlantic alliance and solidarity with the United States.
At the same time, one should be careful with the abusive term "lying press". The matter is infinitely more complicated. On the one hand, as far as the news channels are concerned, there is a system that is based on shortening and excessive speeds. The philosopher Paul Virilio spoke of an "industry of forgetting" that incessantly bombards with new news what has just been reported. A news apparatus that produces highly shredded fragments of events cannot provide contexts and backgrounds, even if well-meaning journalists wanted to.
And they want it. In my entire life, I have hardly met any media people who wanted to falsify or report dishonestly. People don't lie, but they are mostly convinced of what they say and write. Throughout their life history, in their education and in their social contacts, they are shaped and integrated into the worldview of their environment.
There is this "huge chunk of truth" that the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand called "implanted memory":
"We are all born into a universe of fields of discourse that have been shaped by the ideological power struggles of previous generations. Even before the historian can acquire the tools for critical questioning, all the history, politics and Bible lessons at school, the national holidays, commemorative days, public ceremonies, street names, memorials, television series and other spheres of memory form his imagination. There's a huge chunk of 'truth' in his head that he can't just get around."
Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Jewish People. p. 40
The problem of an industry that is supposed to serve the daily search for truth under the name of journalism is familiar to every magician and sleight of hand: perception is not determined by actual events, but by expectations. Of a huge chunk of "truth".
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*Initially, there was also talk of Russian talk shows. However, for some time now, no guests have been invited to these who fundamentally question the war in Ukraine.
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This post appeared on GlobalBridge on June 13.
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Author: Helmut Scheben
Helmut Scheben (*1947 in Koblenz, Germany) studied Romance languages and literature in Mainz, Bonn, Salamanca and Lima. In 1980 he received his doctorate in philosophy. at the University of Bonn. From 1980 to 1985 he worked as a press agency reporter and correspondent for print media in Mexico and Central America. From 1986 he was editor of the weekly newspaper (WoZ) in Zurich, and from 1993 to 2012 editor and reporter at Swiss television SRF, including 16 years in the Tagesschau.
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Source
https://www.infosperber.ch/medien/medienkritik/so-verlor-ich-den-glauben-an-die-etablierten-medien/
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