The Bush administration may not be in full meltdown just yet, but as the heat gets turned up, the president's approval ratings are going down. And none of this is due to any major exposes or hard-hitting stories by the corporate media, for whom Bush has been wasting lots of political capital, standing by the FCC's rules changes on media ownership that much of the public and both Houses of Congress, including the vast majority of Republicans, have opposed.
Everything that is now becoming more evident to larger numbers of Americans about the Iraqi expedition—from the absence of WMDs to the fact that there was no post-war plan—was indeed stated by critics time and again during the build-up to the war. But it mostly got soft-peddled by the Paula Zahns and Tom Brokaws of the world, put in its own place further down in the broadcasts, while 'Countdown: Iraq' and other colorful, war-mongering graphics blared from the screen. The corporate media hacks are as guilty of keeping people in the dark as the Bushies are of misleading the public. We're only seeing coverage now of some of the administration's lies and foibles because months after Bush landed on an aircraft carrier and declared the war over the public is becoming suspicious. Rather than leading the debates by prominently presenting crucial information, our profit-driven media only dribbles out what people want, when they want it.
Even the International Atomic Energy Agency's determination that there was no evidence of yellowcake uranium sold to Iraq by Niger was floating around the internet before the war commenced and months before it made a splash in the mainstream press, forced by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's eventual New York Times op-ed piece on the matter this past July. That was well after the U.S. went into Iraq, killed lots of people and put American soldiers in harm's way.
It's hard now not to make the connection between corporate news organizations' cheer-leading of Bush's war and their titans' desire to have the FCC rules changed, allowing single companies to own more newspapers and television stations. The honchos at AOL Time Warner and News Corp. may scoff at that, but perception is everything: The media bowed to Bush and Bush bowed back.
Even when CNN's star correspondent Christiane Amanpour said during an interview on Tina Brown's CNBC talk show that her own network, competing with Fox News, engaged in 'self-censorship' regarding the war, it took five days for the blunt criticism to become a story, finally landing in USA Today and pretty much going nowhere from there.
What went unnoticed was that this wasn't the first time Amanpour, whose star-power gives her a smidgen of autonomy and the ability to break ranks now and then, has made this type of criticism. During the march to war last spring I caught Amanpour on CNN International—which is only broadcast on CNNfn in this country on the weekends, when CNNfn has no programming and the cable station needs to be filled with something. Most people don't know it, but Amanpour often hosts a weekly show on CNN International, a show that is just too smart and unglamorous for American CNN.
So there was Amanpour interviewing that icon of TV news, Walter Cronkite, and both pretty much lambasted the American press for not being critical of the administration. And Amanpour included her own network in the scathing assessment. You'd think it would have made a bit of news at the time—the granddaddy of TV journalism and the most respected TV war correspondent in the world sitting around and slamming the networks, including CNN itself. But, while the discussion was broadcast around the globe on CNN International, in this country the exchange started and ended on that Saturday afternoon on the vastly unwatched CNNfn, with no other reporters picking up on it.
I suppose it was progress that eight months ago Amanpour's words went nowhere while today they did get somewhere. But even now the story flamed out quickly, as Fox played the faux-patriotism card. In response to Amanpour's calling Fox Bush's 'foot soldiers' in her critique of CNN's self-censorship, a Fox flack responded that they'd rather be called that than be 'al Qaeda's spokeswoman.' If you criticize Bush or his foot soldiers, you're aiding al Qaeda, end of discussion.
The facts aren't reported even in that rare instance when Bush & Co. are being upfront, it seems. Bush's admission in the past two weeks that there is no connection between 9/11 and Saddam—something the administration floated for months and Dick Cheney stoked again on Meet the Press—was only covered by a few newspapers, according to Editor & Publisher. With most of the public actually believing the connection and with Howard Dean and other Democrats pointing out the Bushies' role in furthering the myth, the White House realized it needed to finally clear the air and do some damage control on Cheney's deceptions. But the Bushies' grip on the media is so tight that even when they grudgingly speak the truth, it doesn't seem to get reported.
The corporate media's interest in those FCC rule changes is coloring coverage even at the most staunchly liberal news organizations. The New York Times, which has a raging hard-on when it comes to bashing Bush on the war, goes completely limp when it comes to covering the FCC and its chairman Michael Powell. The Times, which lobbied hard for the FCC's new rules on media ownership so as to bolster its own corporate interests, gave an insidious, softball interview to Colin's offspring last week. In the sappy piece by Stephen Laboton we hear all about Michael Powell's 'frustration' and 'surprise,' and how his poor family is trying to cope with the pressure he is under. The public is simply not informed, according to the condescending article—rather than possibly right—and Powell misjudged the misplaced 'distrust' the public has for the media, and charged that smaller broadcasters were 'provoked' to play a major role in opposing the new rules.
'[T]here is little practical difference between the old rule that limited the networks to owning stations reaching no more than 35 percent of the nation's households, and the new rule, that raises the cap to 45 percent,' the Times lectures us.
The Times, of course, thankfully hasn't let its agreement with the Bushies on the FCC rules get in the way of its criticisms of Bush on everything else. But then again, the Times has a lot less to gain from the FCC—and thus a lot less favor to curry—than Time Warner, News Corp., General Electric, Viacom and the rest of the huge conglomerates that want to keep gobbling up media companies.
Is it any wonder that their news organizations were soft on Bush and the war?
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