The bar hasn't been lowered, it's disappeared - US journalism [View All]

[JohnyCanuck]

Conversation with David Barsamian

Omar Khan, Electronic Iraq, 24 February 2005

Journalist, author, and lecturer, David Barsamian is perhaps best known as the founder and director of Alternative Radio, a weekly one-hour public affairs program that began in 1986 and today reaches millions of listeners from on top of an alleyway garage in Boulder, Colorado. Like Dahr's Dispatches, Alternative Radio is a news medium sustained solely by the support of individuals.

Omar Khan: You've said of the media that "most of the censorship occurs by omission, not commission." Can you illustrate this in the case of US news coverage of Iraq?

David Barsamian: There is a structural relationship between media and state power. They are closely linked. Who are the media? Not just in the United States, but around the world, they're a handful of corporations that dominate what people see, hear, and read. They have been able to manufacture consent, particularly in the United States, for imperialist wars of aggression. That's exactly what I call Iraq—an illegal, immoral war. I'll just give you one example: the New York Times, this great liberal newspaper, had 70 editorials between September 11, 2001 and the attack on Iraq, March 20, 2003. In not one of those editorials was the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Tribunal, or any aspect of international law ever mentioned. Now, those guys know that these things exist, and that's a perfect example of censorship by omission. And so if you were reading the New York Times over that period, during the buildup to the war, you would not have had the sense that the United States was planning on doing something that was a gross violation of international law, and national law for that matter.

The reporting on Iraq has been so atrocious: people talk about how the bar has been lowered in journalism. I don't think it's been lowered. I think it's disappeared. It's not visible anymore. The servility and sycophancy of journalism has reached appalling levels, and the catastrophe that's unfolding in Iraq is a direct result of this. There are huge consequences for not reporting accurately. And, sadly, it's the Iraqi people that are paying in huge numbers, and Americans to a lesser extent.

http://electroniciraq.net/news/1886.shtml