Concerning what we call “the media” today, it is the best of times, it is the worst of times. First, the worst. . ..
I’ve been studying the US press since it elected Ronald Reagan back in 1980. Since then, our “free press” has often failed completely to keep We the People properly informed, instead colluding, avidly, in one state propaganda drive after another (with some of us trying, vainly, to oppose it).
Let me be clear: throughout those years, as even now, there was much excellent work produced by serious reporters. But when the chips were down, the state about to strike, and people needing most to hear some truth, there wasn’t any to be heard—at least not enough to make a difference.
Thus our “free press” unanimously justified the 1983 invasion of Grenada, the 1989 invasion of Panama, the first US Gulf War in 1990 (unanimously hailing it as a miraculous success), and the intervention in Yugoslavia in 1999 (unanimously blacking out the horrors of NATO’s “humanitarian” bombing there).
Such unity against The Enemy dates back to World War I, when our free press was first systematically deployed for propaganda purposes. To treat us not as citizens to be informed, but as subjects to be mobilized for war, was the purpose of most “news” about “the Hun” in World War I, the Soviets from 1917, the first Red Scare in 1919, and,eventually, the long Cold War, pitting us against the Red Colossus that would crush our freedom, rights and property—and our free press.
There is, of course, some irony in that last threat because “our free press” itself was often just as bellicose, authoritarian, repetitive and hostile to dissent as its chained counterparts behind the “Iron Curtain.” Far from hailing those who tell the awful truth, as in All the President’s Men, the US press has often banished them. In 1939, George Seldes, veteran foreign correspondent, was savaged by newspapers nationwide for blasting their fantastic claims about the Soviet invasion of Finland, in a four-part series that no major magazine would touch, so it ended up in the New Masses (where it was mostly read by Communists). Although his study was confirmed by the Institute for Propaganda Analysis at Columbia University, Seldes realized that he would never find a proper readership unless he went outside the daily press, and so he started up In Fact, his independent newsletter, which ran from 1940 to 1950.1
1. F. Stone had a similar experience in 1952, on the publication of The Hidden History of the Korean War— a meticulous dissection of precisely how and why the US had allowed that war to start, and then kept it going. Because his book went far beyond the usual story of the war’s beginning (“North Korean aggression”), and noted the atrocities by US forces (as in “Operation Killer”), it was turned down by over two dozen publishers; and when it finally did come out on Monthly Review Press, our “free press” largely greeted it with silence— until a hit piece by liberal journalist Richard Rovere in the New York Post, which pushed Stone out into the wilderness for years, forcing him to follow Seldes’s lead with I. F. Stone’s Weekly, which ran from 1953 to 1971.2
Nor was it only wayward journalists who got that treatment. “Some long-cherished illusions of mine about the great free press in our country underwent a painful reappraisal during this period,” wrote Jim Garrison, noting how, in 1967, the media went after him en masse for seeking to crack open the conspiracy to murder President John F. Kennedy: “As far as I could tell, the reports and editorials in Newsweek, Time, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Saturday Evening Post and on and on were indistinguishable,” all deploying the same abusive memes—“irresponsible,” “ambitious,” “circus”—to tarnish him, and cloud the issue. (Garrison got much the same reception on NBC’s The Tonight Show, where he more than held his own against an oddly hostile Johnny Carson.)3
Thus, from World War I until the eve of September 11, 2001, “our free press” was more a nice idea than a reality, as “our” real press, for the most part, failed repeatedly, and often with calamitous effects, to keep We the People properly informed about the doings of our government, so as to help us keep it under our control. Instead, throughout that century the US press, with rare exceptions, served the interests of the state against the people, while keeping the people completely in the dark about it.
It’s history that we badly need to know, and not because it’s over— on the contrary. That history may help us grasp why “our free press” today is even worse than it was back when the United States was still a semi-functional democracy. Now that the Cold War is formally over, leaving “us” supreme throughout the world, “our free press” is more authoritarian, repressive, and irrational than ever—far less like what the Framers had in mind than what George Orwell satirized as “the Ministry of Truth” in 1984.
Like that dystopian bureaucracy, the US press today repeatedly asserts that “black is white,” and “2 + 2 = 5,” while tuning out whatever facts might somehow complicate the story.
“A forcefulness not seen since the Cold War”
Take Russia—that is, the “resurgent Russia” that “invaded Ukraine” and then “seized Crimea,” out of Vladimir Putin’s “obsessive quest to make Russia great again,” a “dangerous obsession” deeply threatening not only to “Ukraine’s fledgling democracy,” but also to “European peace and stability,” and “world peace” overall (“Russia has bolstered its military and asserted itself on the world stage with a forcefulness not seen since the Cold War, ratcheting up tensions with the West”), and so on.4
Thus “our free press” has turned the truth completely upside-down. Contrary to that image of Ukraine as Putin’s trembling prey, with his designs endangering “world peace,” the hard truth is that the US struck first, by managing the coup that ended “Ukraine’s fledgling democracy”—ousting the elected president in favor of a junta rife with neo-Nazi activists and neoliberal technocrats (cf. Chile, c. 1973).
All this the US press unanimously misreported as a “revolution” by “pro-Europe Ukrainians” clamoring for Western freedom and prosperity—a pretty story that the press maintained by leaving out whatever ugly details didn’t fit it. Despite the glaring evidence of rampant neoNazi violence throughout that “revolution,” and the overt Nazi pedigree of certain parties angling to take power, the Times, Washington Post, Time, Daily Beast, and others laughed it off as “Russian propaganda.”5
That this “revolution” was a US-sponsored coup came clear on February 7, 2014, when someone posted a bugged phone chat between Victoria Nuland, an assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, US ambassador to Ukraine. The two discussed the crisis not as interested observers but as managers, with Nuland loftily deciding which of Ukraine’s pols should “go into the government,” and which should not (and if Europe won’t help seal the deal, well: “Fuck the EU”).6
More evidence of high manipulation came out a month later, in a hacked conversation between Urmas Paet, Estonia’s foreign minister, and Catherine Ashton, European Union chief of foreign policy. Paet was troubled by some news about the slaughter in Maidan Square on February 20, 2014, when snipers had killed scores of protesters— a massacre attributed to the police force of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s pro-Russian president, forcing him to flee the country. But “all the evidence” now told a different story—and the new regime would not look into it: “It’s really disturbing that. . . they don’t want to investigate what exactly happened,” Paet said, noting a “stronger and stronger understanding,” among Ukrainians, that, “behind [the] snipers. . . it was not Yanukovych, but it was somebody from the new coalition.”7
“Our free press” either spiked those stories outright, or downplayed and distorted them.8 Having thus rewritten the beginning of the crisis, they took to hammering Putin endlessly for his “invasion of Ukraine” and “seizure of Crimea”—two now-notorious crimes that never happened.
While Russia did provide the separatists in East Ukraine with some light arms, and Russian nationals have joined the fighters on their own, so far all “evidence” of an “invasion of Ukraine” has been exposed as fake.9 Nor did Putin “seize” Crimea, but held a referendum there, so voters could choose whether to join the new regime in Kiev, or stay with Russia— and they voted overwhelmingly (95.7 percent) to stay: a startlingly lopsided outcome that the exit polls confirmed, while the vote was certified as honest by a team of international observers.10
Gallup reconfirmed that preference three months later, and a German pollster reconfirmed it yet again some eight months after that; even Forbes conceded that “the Crimeans are happy right where they are,” while the State Department and the Times keep pointing to that “annexation” as another Russian crime against humanity.11
Thus, again, “our free press” stands united with a state intent on war—a partnership more dangerous than ever, given Russia’s massive nuclear capacity. The propaganda makes it hard for most of us to see “Euromaidan” for what it really was—a first strike by the United States: Ukraine now holds de facto membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), putting that belligerent alliance right in Putin’s face (despite the US promise, back in 1990, not to move it “one inch eastward”).
And that is only one of several provocations by the US (and EU) since 2014, all ignored or understated by our corporate press. As I write this, the existential danger of that serial harassment has been making news online—and nowhere else. On May 31, 2016, a group of Russians living in America published “A Russian Warning,” which included this passage:
We now feel that it is our duty, as Russians living in the US, to warn the American people that they are being lied to, and to tell them the truth. And the truth is simply this: If there is going to be a war with Russia, then the United States will most certainly be destroyed, and most of us will end up dead.12
Beyond its urgent point, that warning is significant for what it says about the US press today, and its decline from an imperfect medium of information for the people into a near-total weapon of the state against the people. That “our free press” would just churn out that propaganda, rather than expose its lies, investigate its motives, and explain its dangers, tells us that the US press itself is just as captive to the state as Russia’s under Stalin, or China’s now, or North Korea’s, although the bond here is informal, or covert.
“Our free press” as a clear and present danger
While ever fewer of us recall them, and very few can even picture them, there have been moments when our journalists were not all hitmen on behalf of US foreign policy. Even those who shared the basic creed of Cold War anticommunism (journalists more tractable than Stone and Seldes) could sometimes probe specific policies, and talk to “enemies” with some respect. Since such professional detachment can be hard in time of war, those moments mostly came in times of peace, or once the war had lost its promise: in the 1930s, the postwar 1940s, the early 1960s (under JFK), and in that vital interval from 1968 (the Tet Offensive) to 1980 (“Morning in America”).
The US press today is something else—an outright adjunct of the State Department and the Pentagon (and an implicit adjunct of the Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]). While there are still tough journalists out there, they’ve mostly been ejected from the cockpits of our journalistic Air Force, somewhat like Stone and Seldes long ago: e.g., Seymour Hersh, once at the Times, now writes for the New Yorker and London Review of Books ; Robert Parry, once at AP and Newsweek, now runs Consortiumnews, an independent website; and Sharyl Attkisson, once at CBS, now has a syndicated TV show on Sundays.
Such ousters have now left “our free press” wholly unified in its commitment to “report” whatever tripe the state may hand them, from Putin’s “seizure of Crimea” and “invasion of Ukraine,” to Assad’s “barrel bombs” and “moderate opposition,” to North Korea’s hack of Sony Pictures, to (brace yourself ) the “Tiananmen Square Massacre”—a bloodbath that the Times et al. have been “remembering” poignantly since 1989, notwithstanding all those witnesses who claim there wasn’t one (including Nicholas Kristof, the Times’ own Beijing bureau chief ).13 s As US naval forces fence with China’s in the South China Sea, the “memory” of “Tiananmen” helps make that distant provocation (as if China had its navy in the Caribbean) seem wholly justified, and worth the risk.
And while such propaganda readies us for war, so does the media’s inexorable projection of the USA as everything that Russia/China/ North Korea/Syria are not —i.e., a democratic nation spreading peace and freedom everywhere. The press maintains that myth of national benevolence with stories like the one about the three good-lookin’ troops—two white, one black—who took out that Islamist on the train in France (not something you see every day!), and countless scenes of soldierly benevolence among the locals in Afghanistan. Hollywood keeps selling us the same heroic story.
And yet it’s not so much by running any such material that the Times et al. sustain this myth of national benevolence. Rather, it’s primarily through what they don’t report that “our free press” depicts the USA as wholly good and always in the right, protecting people everywhere, like those three dudes did on that train in France (and like Ben Affleck does in Argo ).
Thus the US press purveys a version of world history as heavily redacted as a Federal Bureau of Investiation file released through proper channels. Search the archives of the Times et al., and try to find some mention of the US and/or CIA in what you’ll read or watch about the hellhole that is Guatemala, or Honduras, or Angola, or El Salvador, or Haiti, or about the genocidal massacre in Indonesia back in 1965, or about the brutal era of “the generals” in Brazil (1964– 85), or about those tortured under Pinochet in Chile (1973–90), or about the memory of the junta’s “dirty war” in Argentina (1976–83), or about the bloody modern history of Iran, or Greece, or Congo, or South Africa—just to name a few of all those places where “we” did lasting harm that most of us have never heard of—because our schools won’t go there, either.
Nor does the US press provide an honest view of our own modern history. While always quick to yell when Russians “whitewash the system’s horrors” under Stalin, the Times et al. say little of “the system’s horrors” over here. The Times has mentioned MKULTRA—the CIA’s horrific mind control program—twice since 1999 (once in the Arts section, once in a Religion column), while “Operation Chaos,” the CIA’s domestic spying program under presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, has not come up since 1985. The Times has always been far less inclined to note such “horrors” than to defend the Agency, as it infamously did in 1996, when it joined the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times in attacking Gary Webb’s exposé of the CIA’s involvement in the cocaine trade out of Nicaragua.
Recently the Times has gone much further in abetting CIA propaganda. On July 8, 2016, in a mood piece on the panic throughout Dallas after the mass shooting of policemen there, the Gray Lady offered this astonishing historical aside:
Fifty-plus years ago, the gunman in Dallas was a troubled ex-Marine with a mail order rifle. This time, the police said it was a troubled former Army reservist with more serious weaponry who was identified as Micah Johnson, 25.14
Thus “America’s Newspaper of Record” bluntly reaffirmed the thesis of the Warren Report—that a lone, troubled gunman with a military background assassinated JFK—an official fantasy that decades of meticulous research have long since thoroughly debunked. That the Times would take that stand again, despite its manifest absurdity, suggests that there are certain stories that “our free press” (“left” press included) will not tell, no matter how well-documented, even though—or, it would seem, because— those stories are the most important for us all, concerning the survival of American democracy, as well as our survival on this Earth.
Far from giving them the close attention they deserve, the press keeps trying to kill those stories by dismissing them as “conspiracy theories”—a tactic that the CIA devised in 1967, precisely to discredit new books questioning the Warren Report. As Lance deHaven-Smith explains in Conspiracy Theory in America, from that point on the epithet was used increasingly to stifle all discussion—and to chill investigation by the press—of many crimes committed by the agents of a state intent on war abroad and “order” here at home, despite the Constitution, and the laws.15
And so, having laughed off the conspiracy to kill John Kennedy (and thereby let ’er rip in Vietnam, and keep the Cold War boiling),“our free press” did the same with Robert Kennedy’s assassination, then Martin Luther King’s. And after the 1970s—an interim when state conspiracy did not seem so far-fetched, what with Watergate and the Church Committee hearings into CIA and FBI abuses—the press mocked on, “debunking” the October Surprise, and minimizing Iran/ Contra, and attacking Gary Webb for his “conspiracy theory” about the CIA’s drug-running, and pooh-poohing the idea that TWA Flight 800 had been accidentally shot down by the US Navy. And then “our free press” outdid its awesome whitewash of the Kennedy assassination by accepting the official story of 9/11, and mocking those who question it, just as with the Warren Report since 1964.
The press has done the same with our computerized elections, brightly certifying the official count in contest after contest, however bad the smell, and even when the evidence of electronic fraud is overwhelming. Although they’ve had their eyes shut since the 1970s,16 it was not until 2000—the year Bush/Cheney took the White House— that the US press began to jeer election fraud as a conspiracist delusion, as they’ve been doing ever since, right through the flagrant manufacture of Hillary Clinton’s “victory” over Bernie Sanders in 2016 (a fraud denied with equal vigor by the Nation and the New York Times ).17
Thus the US press consistently blacks out what we most need to know, about the doings of our government, the true intentions of our “enemies,” and the condition of our own democracy—and that’s not all. While putting us at risk collectively by courting war, “our free press” also puts us each at personal risk, by blacking out all inconvenient truths about our health.
By “inconvenient,” I mean “damaging to corporate profits.” Thus the US press, with few exceptions, once routinely blacked out any news about the risks of smoking, since the press depended on its lavish advertising revenues from the cigarette industry. As we all know from TV shows like Mad Men, such commercial censorship kept people dangerously unaware of what their smokes were doing to them, back when roughly half the population smoked, including most reporters, and many doctors.
Although the press no longer advertises cigarettes, it still routinely blacks out inconvenient truths—a profitable reflex far more lethal than it was back in the 1950s, since what we don’t know now can kill us even if we never smoke, get lots of exercise, and eat organic.
Thus, while we all know about the health risks of junk food, highcaffeine drinks, and alcohol, we all don’t know the true extent of Fukushima’s toxic effluent, right here in the United States, or about the risks of radiation from our cell phones, as well as our TVs, radios and microwaves—and WiFi (whose use in nursery schools was banned in France in January 2016). Worse yet, we all don’t know the dangers of the very “healthcare” that’s supposed to keep us well, since “our free press” is even more protective of Big Pharma (and the Centers for Disease Control) than it was of “Big Tobacco” fifty years ago; and so it jeers alternative therapies as “quackery” while skirting the risks of profitable drugs.
And so, concerning what we call “the media” today, these are, without a doubt, the worst of times. Yet they’re the best of times as well; because, while “our free press” has never lied so much, or buried so much truth, it’s never been so easy for so many to see through those lies, and to dig up so much truth themselves.
This is one great advantage of our digital technology: that it enables us to fact-check all that propaganda in a flash, and find the other side, or sides, of every story—even those that seem, at first, to be the only story. Whereas, fifty years ago, you would have had to trek outside the state’s hermetic fiction of the Kennedy assassination, to visit certain libraries, or witnesses, or other students of the crime, today it’s possible to do all that, or much of it, online—moving instantly beyond the Times /CNN story of the latest crackpot gunman, “upset victory,” enemy aggression or whatever else, to get some different sense of what, if anything, went down.
This is not to minimize the disadvantages of this new virtual mobility. While “the truth is out there,” first of all, there’s also tons of crap out there—including lots of propaganda tailor-made precisely for that sphere. And while it keeps us all in touch with one another, we’re also dis connected by this new virtual “community,” and all too easily distracted “there” as well (and also under absolute surveillance, with every search recorded).
Nevertheless, our digital capacities have freed us, or can free us, from the tyranny of those official narratives, allowing us to test them as we never could before; and this has weakened the authority of those who craft those stories, and who try to force them on us by assuring us that any other narrative is a “conspiracy theory”—a meme that isn’t as intimidating as it used to be, especially for younger people.
In short, our digital technology enables us to slip the bonds of “our free press,” and do what Project Censored has been doing so brilliantly, and teaching all the rest of us to do, for forty years—finding out those stories that we need to know, for our own good, and for the good of all, and that we would know, if our own press, or its masters, didn’t censor them.
MARK CRISPIN MILLER is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and publisher of News from Underground (markcrispinmiller. com). His books include Boxed In: The Culture of TV, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder, and Fooled Again: The Real Case for Election Reform. He is also editor of the Forbidden Bookshelf series for Open Road Integrated Media.
An extended version of this Foreword appears as an article at www.projectcensored.org.
http://www.projectcensored.org/Notes
“Ukraine’s fledgling democracy”: Joerg Forbrig, “Ukraine’s political suicide,” Politico, February 5, 2016, (http://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-political-suicide-government-corruptionconflict/). According to Forbrig, “Russia . . . attacked Ukraine, annexed Crimea, stoked separatism in Donbas, and terrorized the rest of the country.”
“Russia has bolstered”: Catrin Einhorn, Hannah Fairfield and Tim Wallace, “Russia Rearms for a New Era,” New York Times, December 24, 2015.
As a stalwart British adjunct of America’s “free press,” the Guardian has struggled manfully to find some evidence of an “invasion,” thereby reconfirming that there isn’t any. For example, see Ewen MacAskill, “Does US evidence prove Russian special forces are in eastern Ukraine?” Guardian, April 22, 2014.
As for the verdict of the international observers, it’s hard to find reports unbiased one way or the other, and the story overall was heavily blurred to start with by the refusal of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) to recognize the de facto Crimean government, and, therefore, to send observers there, as that government invited them to do.
For an impartial survey of the findings by those monitors who did observe the vote—and a (grudging) acknowledgement that it was evidently honest—see Ken Hanly, “Op-Ed: The Crimea referendum and International observers,” Digital Journal, March 22, 2104, http:// www.digitaljournal.com/news/politics/op-ed-the-crimea-referendum-and-internationalobservers/article/377812
Kristof’s view was privately confirmed by an unnamed Chilean diplomat (who, working for the government of Gen. Pinochet, would not have been too soft on China). His “eye-witness account” was noted in two cables from the US embassy in Beijing to the State Department: Included in the cache of documents released by WikiLeaks in June, 2011, those two cables were ignored by “our free press,” appearing only in the Telegraph. See Deirdre English, “Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth,” Workers World, June 29, 2011, http://www.workers.org/2011/world/tiananmen_0707/.
See also Jay Mathews, “The Myth of Tiananmen and the Price of Passive Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, September/October, 1998; Gregory Clark, “Sri Lanka and Tiananmen: Time to Accept the Truth,” Japan Times, June 11, 2009; and “A Student’s Account of the Tiananmen Incident,” Multiple Texts, May 26, 2009, http://multipletext.com/2009/5_Tiananmen_incident_witness.htm.
That there was lethal violence beyond the Square there is no doubt—although the evidence suggests a scene more complicated than the simple “massacre” invoked by “our free press” ad infinitum. (There was intense street fighting all throughout Beijing, with many soldiers killed along with protesters.) While it would serve us all—Chinese and Americans alike—to know the truth about what happened in Beijing, it obviously wouldn’t serve the propaganda purposes behind those endless “memories” of that “massacre.”
On the theft of the 2004 election, see John Conyers et al., What Went in Ohio: The Conyers Report on the 2004 Presidential Election (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005); Mark Crispin Miller, Fooled Again: The Real Case for Electoral Reform, paperback edition (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Steve Freeman and Joel Bleifuss, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2006); Robert J. Fitrakis, Harvey Wasserman and Steven Rosenfeld, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election (New York: New Press, 2006); Richard Hayes Phillips, Witness to a Crime: A Citizen’s Audit of an American Election (Election Defense Alliance, 2006), available for download at http://electiondefensealliance.org/richard_hayes_phillips.
On election fraud in the United States since 2004, see Mark Crispin Miller, ed. Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the Subversion of American Democracy (New York: Ig Publishing, 2006); See also the ongoing work of Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman at Free Press http://freepress.org/profile/bob-fitrakis-and-harvey-wasserman, Greg Palast http://www.gregpalast.com, Bev Harris (BlackBoxVoting.org), and Richard Charnin https://richardcharnin.wordpress.com, and the 2016 documentary I Voted? (directed by Jason Grant Smith).