How Western media connive in global evil

When I worked for Dar es Salaam's Daily News in the early 70s, we often "stole"
stories from Western news agencies. The ideological debates that the 1967 Azimio la Arusha unleashed had awakened in us deep suspicion over the agencies’ sermons on “fairness” and “independence”.

It had struck us that they themselves knowingly peddled as truths certain lies supplied by their governments portraying those governments as angels in international crisis spots and their enemies as the very Antichrist.  

Our "theft" consisted in that we wrote deeply to the wire copy to try to bring it into line with our own perspective. It was theft in the sense that the story-line was no longer the agency's. So we felt obliged to remove its "by-line" despite the fact that the original material remained its own.

Yet we were not the original sinners. For Time magazine had been an adept for decades. David Halberstam reports in The Powers-That-Be that founder-editor Henry Luce simply rejected his correspondents' interpretations of the world events as they saw them.

He completely rewrote their file to portray only the narrowest corporate American subjectivisms. Thus arose Time's famous by-line formula: "By so-and-so with file from so-and-so". But, as James Aronson reports in The Press and the Cold War, press tycoon William Randolph Hearst had already perfected this practice of turning correspondents into mere collectors of dirt.

In Scoop and The Almighty, respectively, Evelyn Waugh and Irving Wallace depict Hearst's habit of manufacturing his own wars abroad to "scoop" his commercial rivals.  He totally provoked the 19th-century Spanish-American war, his correspondents willingly destroying Spain's credibility with totally fabricated stories in which corporate America's interests were identified with God's own scheme on earth.

Phillip Knightley shows in The First Casualty how, during the American civil war, the Crimean war, the Boer war, the First World War, the Spanish civil war, the Abyssinian war, the Second World World War, the Korean war and Vietnam, press freedom was ever the first state victim.

But the media were always willing. Such celebrated correspondents as John Gunther, W. B. Yeats, Robert Ruark and Ernest Hemingway readily agreed to follow government lines.
A 1982 TV Review edition revealed how the big newspapers, notably The New York Times, at James Reston's insistence, willingly gave up their pages to President John F. Kennedy during Cuba's Bay of Pigs crisis of 1961-2.

William Rivers reports, in The Other Government, that journalists acted as Lyndon Johnson's chief f1acks in Vietnam. In a piece called A Letter to My Daughter, published by Parade on May 2, 1982, Halberstam relates the lies that Marguerite
Higgins told of him as a "Vietcong" sympathiser.

After the 1975 Angolan crisis, in which such correspondents as David Lamb and Sanford Ungar had churned out the vilest lies about Soviet, Cuban and East German mischief, Henry Kissinger finally admitted that AP and UPI had willingly used CIA agents
as correspondents.

During Falklands, the British Defence Ministry persuaded journalists to sign a document requiring them to submit all dispatches to a censor. Israel did likewise in its simultaneous (1982) rape of Beirut. In Kosovo, we saw the same disgusting
state-media collusion.

Yet, after every crisis, these same media pretend that they have been victims merely of over-enthusiasm. But hear this. Soon after September 11, CNN showed footage of Palestinians it said were rejoicing over that tragedy. Yet the picture, it turned out, had been taken in 1991.

Clearly nagged by guilt, CNN later used Christianne Amanpour to put this question of duplicity to some editors. But in vain. All called it a "national duty", admitting only that it was "mildly embarrassing".

What emerges is stark. It is not merely a "human failing" by an otherwise well-meaning press. The injustices are unavoidable because they are inbuilt into the very fabric of reporting. Profit is the nub of the motif. It is what drives those media inexorably towards corporate transnationalism. In this the government is their collective ideal, their politico-strategic instrument of both offence and defence.

Thus, as long as their overseas profit source is safe, both coo like any honey-sucking dove about freedom, objectivity and independence. But, when that source is at risk, both utter the shrillest war cry and commit the most appalling crimes against mankind.
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First published on Sunday October 28, 2001