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Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was one of several distinguished guests, including Seymour Hersh, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Phil Donahue, Naomi Klein and other prominent media professionals.
...Hersh claimed the Iraq War was increasingly being conducted “off the books” by mercenaries, retired military personnel, and private contractors beyond the scope of accountability.
... “Body bags aren’t going to stop him,” Hersh said, referring to Bush.
...According to...Congressman (Sanders), this media distortion is no accident; as fewer and fewer corporations control more and more media outlets, viewpoints are increasingly channeled and contrived to benefit narrow commercial interests at the expense of the public good.
...Klein defined the obsessive prominence of the Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo cases in the media as “spasms of collective mourning.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of a conference entitled “Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?” on May 10th and 11th, 2005. The Conference focused on the impact of media conglomeration and corporate control on the dissemination of news in the United States.
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was one of several distinguished guests, including Seymour Hersh, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Phil Donahue, Naomi Klein and other prominent media professionals.
The Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research sponsored the conference in conjunction with various University of Illinois academic departments and the Center for Advanced Study/MillerComm series. University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney, Executive Director of I.I.M.P.R., was instrumental in organizing the conference.
According to McChesney, the press’ failure to provide unbiased information in the lead-up to the Iraqi War repeated similar tendencies from previous American wars. Early in the history of the American Republic, founders saw the dangerous consequences of unchecked military power, and sought to balance the threat with public accountability for decision-makers, in a strong press protected by the 1st Amendment.
McChesney also criticized large media corporations for claiming to act in the public’s name while using their powerful lobbying influence to limit media ownership and control.
Kicking off the conference was Seymour Hersh, famous for reporting the My Lai massacre from the Vietnam War, and more recently recognized for breaking the inmate abuse story at Abu Ghraib.
Hersh claimed the Iraq War was increasingly being conducted “off the books” by mercenaries, retired military personnel, and private contractors beyond the scope of accountability.
The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist revisited the Abu Ghraib story, noting how prosecution focused on the prosecuted guards as “bad seeds,” while ignoring the possibility of any illicit behavior from higher-ups in the chain of command. Hersh alluded to photographs of inmates engaged in homosexual acts as an intentional violation of Arab cultural precepts, as a “way to the soul of the Arab man.”
Hersh highlighted the inaction of the Bush Administration in a timeline which began with photographs of abuse at the prison taken in September, 2003, and culminated in a disk sent up the chain-of-command in January, 2004, which Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called “a catastrophic blow to winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis,” should it be made public. Steering responsibility for Abu Ghraib toward Rumsfeld, Hersh claimed the Defense Secretary had been “de-programmed”—judging from a lack of any coherent response to the briefings he’d been through which must have addressed the events at Abu Ghraib.
The Arab world now sees the US as a “sexually perverse society” because of the photos, Hersh said.
The investigative journalist alluded to disturbing recent events in Iraq—including the reconstitution of Saddam’s secret police formerly known as the Mukhabarat. As for the January elections in Iraq, Hersh said voting was conducted exclusively along religious and tribal lines, and threatened to cut Iraq into pieces, under militia rule. The US is apparently looking the other way as Kurds assert military control over strategic oil fields in Northern Iraq.
Information has been increasingly hard to come by through traditional sources, Hersh said. Information on targets hit and the quantities of bombs dropped in Iraq has become unavailable since the bombing campaign accelerated in the Fall of 2004, unlike Vietnam, where Hersh said data had been readily available.
Hersh referred to attempts by the US military to limit information on Iraqi casualties in Fallujah, preceding the US attack on the city in November, 2004, as referenced in the English paper The Guardian (1). According to the accounts of Dr. Ali Fadhil, doctors in Fallujah had been tied up and their cell phones taken, as to prevent casualty data from escaping the US zone of control around the city.
Hersh alluded to many of the current problems in Iraq as the direct result of military action by the US which targeted key Iraqi ministries early in the Occupation. The “machinery of occupation” has undoubtedly contributed to the “insurgency”, a term Hersh said had been spun to give the mistaken impression of a US victory, followed by some form of rebellion against a legitimate government—terminology which avoids any notion of resistance to illegitimate foreign occupation.
On the domestic front, Hersh said Bush is convinced that democracy can be brought to Iraq, despite clear indications from his advisers that his goals for the nation are not being achieved. “Body bags aren’t going to stop him,” Hersh said, referring to Bush.
Hersh said a “devalued Congress” stood little chance of stopping the war, and that Bush was like a revolutionary who lacked the ability to absorb information (or at least that which conflicts with Bush’s “Trotsky-ite” vision of successfully exporting political change to Iraq.)
Hersh said Venezuela stood next in line for “democracy-building,” in an allusion to Bush’s favored rhetoric justifying direct intervention by the US in the Global War on Terror. Hersh concluded that the Iraq War has been—and would be—a devastating experience.
According to Hersh, “our democracy is more fragile than we think” and “our leadership isn’t as strong as we think.” He said those who put American lives at stake should be held to the highest possible standard, and the public should avoid accepting what government leaders say.
Congressman Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, spoke at the conference’s evening session May 10th. Sanders’ fiery criticism of Bush Administration focused on its subservience to strong corporate interests while ignoring the plight of low- and middle-income workers.
Contemplating a run for Senate in 2006, Sanders alluded to media as a prism through which a comprehensive host of environmental, Women’s rights, foreign policy, health care, and economic issues are publicly discussed. Congress had failed its function to educate the people, he said.
Sanders noted the absence of TV programs on labor issues, and took the overwhelmingly negative coverage of labor to be the direct result of media executives’ disregard for unions. According to the Congressman, this media distortion is no accident; as fewer and fewer corporations control more and more media outlets, viewpoints are increasingly channeled and contrived to benefit narrow commercial interests at the expense of the public good. He urged fighting for localism, where the citizenry has more say in what they see and hear, because local media sources contain greater diversity in their content than major media companies.
Congressman Sanders defined the consolidation of media control as a “progressive issue,” one where the consequences of corporate-driven marketing could include “selective ad adoption” and “deflecting reality.”
Following the spirited Sanders was Naomi Klein, columnist for The Nation magazine, who provided a run-down of miscalculations made by the Bush Administration in Iraq and the gruesome consequences of the invasion.
Apparently torture has been used as a “state terror weapon,” Klein said, saying Iraqis had been familiar with torture under Saddam, and that they interpreted the torture as a “warning against dissent.” The release of torture pictures was clearly meant to send a message to Iraqis, Klein said, giving them a choice between cooperating with the US, or being sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Klein claimed that American media reported on issues selectively chosen by the military leadership in Iraq. This position coincides with movement limitations put on journalists in Iraq, who must rely on Iraqi “fixers” to report on stories originating from outside the tightly controlled Green Zone in Baghdad.
Hushed in the American media’s coverage of the war were acts of non-violent resistance by Iraqis, Klein said. Labeling any and all forms of resistance as violent would benefit the occupation, Klein concluded, and therefore the captive media in Iraq had been “hushed up”—encouraged to avoid reporting on less violent means of resistance.
On the corporate media, Klein alluded to an effort to “manage our shock” in order to carefully manage the humanity and compassion of the viewing public. Klein defined the obsessive prominence of the Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo cases in the media as “spasms of collective mourning.”
Ending the first night of the event was a speech by Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now. The veteran progressive media star blasted the hypocrisy of corporate media judging itself. She urged individuals to determine what they wanted to see and hear for themselves, to “un-invent the media.”
Six- to nine-second sound bites were wholly inadequate for addressing foreign policy alternatives, she explained, despite their ritualistic use in media and the consequences of oversimplification in international issues.
On Iraq, she claimed, “the Pentagon has deployed the US media.” Goodman believes a high degree of internal dissent exists within the army; and that the combination of militarism and the media had created an “unholy alliance.”
In most poignant form, Goodman described her experience in a massacre of East Timorians in November, 1991, at the hands of the Indonesian military wielding M16 rifles recently given them by the United States. Goodman narrowly avoided execution herself: she claimed that the origin of the soldiers’ guns had saved her while identifying herself as an American. [In 1975, with Australian approval, the Indonesian government invaded the small, oil-rich nation; this led to a brutal occupation where a third of the people of East Timor died, according to Goodman. The East Timorians realized their monumental struggle for independence in May, 2002.]
“Oil is the source of so much pain,” she said.
A series of workshops were held on the second day of the Conference, focused on discussing public policy concerns and media issues. Panelists included Roberta Baskin (Center for Public Integrity), Orville Schell (Dean of Graduate School of Journalism, University of California-Berkeley) and other prominent media figures.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a broad variety of graduate and undergraduate programs in journalism and related fields. The Urbana-Champaign area offers a burgeoning local independent media; radio, TV, print, and New Media resources are devoted to social activism and community involvement.
Sources
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1387316,00.html
...Hersh claimed the Iraq War was increasingly being conducted “off the books” by mercenaries, retired military personnel, and private contractors beyond the scope of accountability.
... “Body bags aren’t going to stop him,” Hersh said, referring to Bush.
...According to...Congressman (Sanders), this media distortion is no accident; as fewer and fewer corporations control more and more media outlets, viewpoints are increasingly channeled and contrived to benefit narrow commercial interests at the expense of the public good.
...Klein defined the obsessive prominence of the Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo cases in the media as “spasms of collective mourning.” University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the site of a conference entitled “Can Freedom of the Press Survive Media Consolidation?” on May 10th and 11th, 2005. The Conference focused on the impact of media conglomeration and corporate control on the dissemination of news in the United States.
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman was one of several distinguished guests, including Seymour Hersh, Rep. Bernie Sanders, Phil Donahue, Naomi Klein and other prominent media professionals.
The Illinois Initiative for Media Policy Research sponsored the conference in conjunction with various University of Illinois academic departments and the Center for Advanced Study/MillerComm series. University of Illinois Professor Robert McChesney, Executive Director of I.I.M.P.R., was instrumental in organizing the conference.
According to McChesney, the press’ failure to provide unbiased information in the lead-up to the Iraqi War repeated similar tendencies from previous American wars. Early in the history of the American Republic, founders saw the dangerous consequences of unchecked military power, and sought to balance the threat with public accountability for decision-makers, in a strong press protected by the 1st Amendment.
McChesney also criticized large media corporations for claiming to act in the public’s name while using their powerful lobbying influence to limit media ownership and control.
Kicking off the conference was Seymour Hersh, famous for reporting the My Lai massacre from the Vietnam War, and more recently recognized for breaking the inmate abuse story at Abu Ghraib.
Hersh claimed the Iraq War was increasingly being conducted “off the books” by mercenaries, retired military personnel, and private contractors beyond the scope of accountability.
The Pulitzer-prize winning journalist revisited the Abu Ghraib story, noting how prosecution focused on the prosecuted guards as “bad seeds,” while ignoring the possibility of any illicit behavior from higher-ups in the chain of command. Hersh alluded to photographs of inmates engaged in homosexual acts as an intentional violation of Arab cultural precepts, as a “way to the soul of the Arab man.”
Hersh highlighted the inaction of the Bush Administration in a timeline which began with photographs of abuse at the prison taken in September, 2003, and culminated in a disk sent up the chain-of-command in January, 2004, which Defense Secretary Rumsfeld called “a catastrophic blow to winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis,” should it be made public. Steering responsibility for Abu Ghraib toward Rumsfeld, Hersh claimed the Defense Secretary had been “de-programmed”—judging from a lack of any coherent response to the briefings he’d been through which must have addressed the events at Abu Ghraib.
The Arab world now sees the US as a “sexually perverse society” because of the photos, Hersh said.
The investigative journalist alluded to disturbing recent events in Iraq—including the reconstitution of Saddam’s secret police formerly known as the Mukhabarat. As for the January elections in Iraq, Hersh said voting was conducted exclusively along religious and tribal lines, and threatened to cut Iraq into pieces, under militia rule. The US is apparently looking the other way as Kurds assert military control over strategic oil fields in Northern Iraq.
Information has been increasingly hard to come by through traditional sources, Hersh said. Information on targets hit and the quantities of bombs dropped in Iraq has become unavailable since the bombing campaign accelerated in the Fall of 2004, unlike Vietnam, where Hersh said data had been readily available.
Hersh referred to attempts by the US military to limit information on Iraqi casualties in Fallujah, preceding the US attack on the city in November, 2004, as referenced in the English paper The Guardian (1). According to the accounts of Dr. Ali Fadhil, doctors in Fallujah had been tied up and their cell phones taken, as to prevent casualty data from escaping the US zone of control around the city.
Hersh alluded to many of the current problems in Iraq as the direct result of military action by the US which targeted key Iraqi ministries early in the Occupation. The “machinery of occupation” has undoubtedly contributed to the “insurgency”, a term Hersh said had been spun to give the mistaken impression of a US victory, followed by some form of rebellion against a legitimate government—terminology which avoids any notion of resistance to illegitimate foreign occupation.
On the domestic front, Hersh said Bush is convinced that democracy can be brought to Iraq, despite clear indications from his advisers that his goals for the nation are not being achieved. “Body bags aren’t going to stop him,” Hersh said, referring to Bush.
Hersh said a “devalued Congress” stood little chance of stopping the war, and that Bush was like a revolutionary who lacked the ability to absorb information (or at least that which conflicts with Bush’s “Trotsky-ite” vision of successfully exporting political change to Iraq.)
Hersh said Venezuela stood next in line for “democracy-building,” in an allusion to Bush’s favored rhetoric justifying direct intervention by the US in the Global War on Terror. Hersh concluded that the Iraq War has been—and would be—a devastating experience.
According to Hersh, “our democracy is more fragile than we think” and “our leadership isn’t as strong as we think.” He said those who put American lives at stake should be held to the highest possible standard, and the public should avoid accepting what government leaders say.
Congressman Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, spoke at the conference’s evening session May 10th. Sanders’ fiery criticism of Bush Administration focused on its subservience to strong corporate interests while ignoring the plight of low- and middle-income workers.
Contemplating a run for Senate in 2006, Sanders alluded to media as a prism through which a comprehensive host of environmental, Women’s rights, foreign policy, health care, and economic issues are publicly discussed. Congress had failed its function to educate the people, he said.
Sanders noted the absence of TV programs on labor issues, and took the overwhelmingly negative coverage of labor to be the direct result of media executives’ disregard for unions. According to the Congressman, this media distortion is no accident; as fewer and fewer corporations control more and more media outlets, viewpoints are increasingly channeled and contrived to benefit narrow commercial interests at the expense of the public good. He urged fighting for localism, where the citizenry has more say in what they see and hear, because local media sources contain greater diversity in their content than major media companies.
Congressman Sanders defined the consolidation of media control as a “progressive issue,” one where the consequences of corporate-driven marketing could include “selective ad adoption” and “deflecting reality.”
Following the spirited Sanders was Naomi Klein, columnist for The Nation magazine, who provided a run-down of miscalculations made by the Bush Administration in Iraq and the gruesome consequences of the invasion.
Apparently torture has been used as a “state terror weapon,” Klein said, saying Iraqis had been familiar with torture under Saddam, and that they interpreted the torture as a “warning against dissent.” The release of torture pictures was clearly meant to send a message to Iraqis, Klein said, giving them a choice between cooperating with the US, or being sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Klein claimed that American media reported on issues selectively chosen by the military leadership in Iraq. This position coincides with movement limitations put on journalists in Iraq, who must rely on Iraqi “fixers” to report on stories originating from outside the tightly controlled Green Zone in Baghdad.
Hushed in the American media’s coverage of the war were acts of non-violent resistance by Iraqis, Klein said. Labeling any and all forms of resistance as violent would benefit the occupation, Klein concluded, and therefore the captive media in Iraq had been “hushed up”—encouraged to avoid reporting on less violent means of resistance.
On the corporate media, Klein alluded to an effort to “manage our shock” in order to carefully manage the humanity and compassion of the viewing public. Klein defined the obsessive prominence of the Michael Jackson and Terri Schiavo cases in the media as “spasms of collective mourning.”
Ending the first night of the event was a speech by Amy Goodman of Pacifica Radio’s Democracy Now. The veteran progressive media star blasted the hypocrisy of corporate media judging itself. She urged individuals to determine what they wanted to see and hear for themselves, to “un-invent the media.”
Six- to nine-second sound bites were wholly inadequate for addressing foreign policy alternatives, she explained, despite their ritualistic use in media and the consequences of oversimplification in international issues.
On Iraq, she claimed, “the Pentagon has deployed the US media.” Goodman believes a high degree of internal dissent exists within the army; and that the combination of militarism and the media had created an “unholy alliance.”
In most poignant form, Goodman described her experience in a massacre of East Timorians in November, 1991, at the hands of the Indonesian military wielding M16 rifles recently given them by the United States. Goodman narrowly avoided execution herself: she claimed that the origin of the soldiers’ guns had saved her while identifying herself as an American. [In 1975, with Australian approval, the Indonesian government invaded the small, oil-rich nation; this led to a brutal occupation where a third of the people of East Timor died, according to Goodman. The East Timorians realized their monumental struggle for independence in May, 2002.]
“Oil is the source of so much pain,” she said.
A series of workshops were held on the second day of the Conference, focused on discussing public policy concerns and media issues. Panelists included Roberta Baskin (Center for Public Integrity), Orville Schell (Dean of Graduate School of Journalism, University of California-Berkeley) and other prominent media figures.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a broad variety of graduate and undergraduate programs in journalism and related fields. The Urbana-Champaign area offers a burgeoning local independent media; radio, TV, print, and New Media resources are devoted to social activism and community involvement.
Sources
(1) http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1387316,00.html