The Military-Industrial-Media Complex

[JohnyCanuck]

The Military-Industrial-Media Complex
Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective

By Norman Solomon

SNIP

One way or another, a military-industrial complex now extends to much of corporate media. In the process, firms with military ties routinely advertise in news outlets. Often, media magnates and people on the boards of large media-related corporations enjoy close links—financial and social—with the military industry and Washington’s foreign-policy establishment.

Sometimes a media-owning corporation is itself a significant weapons merchant. In 1991, when my colleague Martin A. Lee and I looked into the stake that one major media-invested company had in the latest war, what we found was sobering: NBC’s owner General Electric designed, manufactured or supplied parts or maintenance for nearly every major weapon system used by the U.S. during the Gulf War—including the Patriot and Tomahawk Cruise missiles, the Stealth bomber, the B-52 bomber, the AWACS plane, and the NAVSTAR spy satellite system. “In other words,” we wrote in Unreliable Sources, “when correspondents and paid consultants on NBC television praised the performance of U.S. weapons, they were extolling equipment made by GE, the corporation that pays their salaries.”

During just one year, 1989, General Electric had received close to $2 billion in military contracts related to systems that ended up being utilized for the Gulf War. Fifteen years later, the company still had a big stake in military spending. In 2004, when the Pentagon released its list of top military contractors for the latest fiscal year, General Electric ranked eighth with $2.8 billion in contracts (Defense Daily International, 2/13/04).

Given the extent of shared sensibilities and financial synergies within what amounts to a huge military-industrial-media complex, it shouldn’t be surprising that—whether in the prelude to the Gulf War of 1991 or the Iraq invasion of 2003—the U.S.’s biggest media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests had combined to strengthen and arm Saddam Hussein during many of his worst crimes.

SNIP

Chris Hedges covered the Gulf War for the New York Times. More than a decade later, he wrote in a book (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning): “The notion that the press was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as part of the war effort.” Truth-seeking independence was far from the media agenda. “The press was as eager to be of service to the state during the war as most everyone else. Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of the time, and that is lie.”

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2627

[Radical Activist]

1. And we wonder why Russert never seriously questioned the war

and never apologized to people he marginalized for their anti-war stance like Kucinich.

[JohnyCanuck]

2. Well maybe some of us did,

but many others of us already knew why.

[wvbygod]

4. Many still wonder why Che never apologized to those he murdered

and why he enjoyed killing people so much.

[Radical Activist]

7. And that has what to do with it exactly?

[seemslikeadream]

11. Did he do it in your name?

[laststeamtrain]

3. Yep. The MIC is now the MIMC.

Has been for a while.

Pronounced: Mimsy.

It's especially clear in the case of GE/MSNBC. DoD/Media giant.

Let's see, who was their top dog. Tim Russert, right?

He was a man with a big heart. About the size of a roast beef at the end.

He took the Jack Welsh money & did what he was told.

I think that's called 'whore'.

[JohnyCanuck]

5. Issues of corporate power are not on the agenda

This article is a bit old (published in 2001), but I don't think much has changed in the intervening years from what I can tell.

What's Not Talked About on Sunday Morning?
Issues of corporate power are not on the agenda

By George Farah and Justin Elga

SNIP

Unfortunately, the talkshows’ failure to cover or even mention the ADM case is routine. Reviewing the issues discussed on four shows representing different networks—NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC/PBS’s McLaughlin Group and ABC’s This Week—we found that the exclusion of topics relating to corporate power is the norm. To conduct our study, we read every transcript of the four Sunday morning talkshows aired from June 1995 to May 1996 and during the last seven months of 1999. We then tallied the issues discussed and the guests invited. Any issue, whether it was women’s soccer or welfare reform, was recorded if substantial time or conversation was devoted to it; our study identified 1,170 instances when a topic was raised.*

Missing conversations

Aside from welfare reform, the most talked-about issues of the 1995–1996 period were horse-race politics. The shows gave cursory treatment to or never addressed basic issues related to corporate power, even when these issues were plainly central to the political economy. Neither military spending nor the arms industry was selected as a topic for discussion, for example, while the effect of military base closings on President Clinton’s reelection campaign was an issue for debate. The highest-ranked issue concerning corporate power was campaign finance reform, ranked 33; it was discussed less than Bob Packwood’s affair with his aide and far less than Steve Forbes’s flat tax.

SNIP

Of the 20 most popular guests on political talkshows aired between June 1995 and May 1996, seven were senators, four were representatives, four were Clinton administration members, four were presidential candidates, one was the head of the Republican Party and one was a campaign manager. Of the top 20 guests on shows aired during the last seven months of 1999, 10 were presidential candidates, six were senators, four were representatives, two worked in the Clinton administration and two were governors.

When such a staggering majority of guests on Sunday morning political talk shows are government officials, government is essentially listening to government. Issues raised outside the halls of Congress, from the detrimental impacts of globalization to the failed war on drugs, are disqualified. Rather than participating in substantive discourse with labor leaders, consumer advocates, political activists, professors and public interest lawyers, corporate-financed Democrats vigorously engage corporate-financed Republicans in horse-race disputes concerning “centrist” issues, like Chinese espionage and welfare reform, acceptable to their corporate patrons. (my emphasis /jc)

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2822

[Octafish]

6. GE: We bring death through big things to life.

GE: War profiteers who have the ability to lie about their war profiteering to the entire American people. And government, who's leaders are in on the action, let them get away with their lying.

My Repuke friend who went to Europe came back and said she was amazed at the difference in coverage between CNN over there and in the USA.

[JohnyCanuck]

8. See how corporate media talking heads betrayed their fellow citizens

and the very concept of democracy itself by being willing spinners and regurgitators of blatant propaganda and war hysteria over the public airwaves. They were obedient servants of the Bush administration, relentlessly pushing the administration's pro-war agenda onto the public. Check this video clip at the -02:58 mark onwards to see what I mean.

http://video.yahoo.com/watch/182654/1125580

Dan Rather: "What you have is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states."

[slipslidingaway]

9. Thanks for posting!!!

"...In American televisionland, when Iraqi civilians weren’t being discounted or dismissed as Saddam’s propaganda fodder, they were liable to be rendered nonpersons by omission. On the same day that 2,000 bombing runs occurred over Baghdad, anchor Ted Koppel reported (1/23/91): “Aside from the Scud missile that landed in Tel Aviv earlier, it’s been a quiet night in the Middle East.”

News coverage of the Gulf War in U.S. media was sufficiently laudatory to the war-makers in Washington that a former assistant secretary of state, Hodding Carter, remarked (C-SPAN, 2/23/91): “If I were the government, I’d be paying the press for the kind of coverage it is getting right now.” A former media strategy ace for President Reagan put a finer point on the matter. “If you were going to hire a public relations firm to do the media relations for an international event,” said Michael Deaver, “it couldn’t be done any better than this is being done.”

[Echo In Light]

10. K&R Media Control

"The Gulf War ... was made popular by an immense propaganda barrage unleashed by the Pentagon, the media, and government, creating an ideological milieu in which 45 percent of the population said it would be prepared to use nuclear weapons against Iraq. Military actions were, transformed into a grotesque national spectacle, a great celebration of war-making."
Carl Boggs

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/Media_Control.html

[windoe]

12. I remember an article about someone who had spent time in Iraq

and said coming back to the US it was like traveling to Disneyland, the way people were so completely in a fantasy bubble. (can't remember where I saw this article)