As we approach the Monday holiday, we're hearinga Pentagon lawyer suggest that Martin Luther King would support the war in Afghanistan. That makes it an ideal time torecall a 1995 column by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime associate Norman Solomon (Media Beat, 1/4/95). The full column appearsbelow, and is archived here. The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader." The remarkable thing about [...]
Sep
15
2009
'War-Stoking Mindset Is Replicating' in Big Media
By 1 Comment
Of deteriorating governmental control in Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 9/8/09) says that "a stale witticism calls Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai 'the mayor of Kabul.' Now, not even." He points to the "corrupt, inept and–with massive election fraud–now illegitimate" administration as a "notable work product" of "those who believe in making war": After 30 years, the results are in: a devastated city…. Meanwhile, a war-stoking mindset is replicating itself at the highest reaches of official Washington–even while polls tell us that the pro-war spin has been losing ground. For the U.S. public, dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan has [...]
Aug
31
2009
Corporate Media 'Default Position': 'War Must Go On'
Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that "have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan." True, "the comparisons are often valid," Solomon finds, "but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned–the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it": This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time…. In fact, overall, the [...]
Aug
16
2009
Media's Afghan 'Metrics' Exclude 'Value of Human Life'
As "official Washington is buzzing about 'metrics'" of success in the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (ZNet, 8/13/09) notes of media's persistent question, "Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?"–"Don't ask the dead": On August 7, under the headline "White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success," a New York Times story made a splash. "As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won." Don't ask the dead. They don't count. The Times article went on: "Those [...]
Jul
24
2009
Sands of Healthcare Truth Beneath 'Oceans of Media'
By 1 Comment
Noticing that "days ago, buried in a chart under the headline "How the Health Care Bills Compare," the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information," Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill's "public plan that would 'compete with private insurers,'" as "the Times chart explained on July 18": The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'" Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of [...]
Jul
20
2009
On Cronkite as (Belatedly) 'Courageous Truth-Teller'
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Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that "media eulogies for Walter Cronkite–including from progressive commentators–rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968." An "obit omit" Solomon deems "essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller": But facts are facts, and history is history–including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war. In [...]
Jul
02
2009
Big Media 'Lenses…Ground With Ideology, Nationalism'
Noticing that "the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline 'Names of the Dead,'" Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently "there wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations." Having observed wartime media long enough to know that "that's the way routine death stories go," Solomon has also observed that "reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the [...]
Jun
19
2009
If It Bleeds, It (Sometimes) Leads
By 1 Comment
Looking beyond "the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news" Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs "Media's Love/Hate Affair with Violence"–as exemplified by the kind of violence–rarely occurring in the light of day–that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all kinds of violent acts are happening in the nation's prisons and jails. The violence that some guards inflict on prisoners is even less apt to make the news than what stressed-out prisoners do to one another. Various forms of what could be called "institutionalized violence" [...]
Jun
14
2009
On the WaPo's 'Tacit Faith in Massive Violence'
By 1 Comment
Writing that "it takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation," FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Huffington Post, 6/8/09) tells us that, when last Sunday's edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline "Iraq War Deaths," the newspaper meant American deaths–to Washington's ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American. Ask for whom the bell tolls. That's the implicit message–from top journalists and politicians alike. A few weeks ago, some prominent U.S. news [...]
May
01
2009
The Sham That Is 'Objective' Corporate Journalism
By 1 Comment
In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how "mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming," Robert Parry writes that one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept of objective journalism by routinely ignoring those principles, which demand that a reporter set aside personal prejudices (as best one can) and approach each story with a common standard of fairness. The truth is that powerful mainstream news organizations have their own sacred cows and [...]
Apr
20
2009
MSM: Pioneers in Selective Memory
Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory," inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly "could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain" to look back on how "American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time": The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out "specific types of memory" are lagging way behind. Don't need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. [...]
