The Common Ills: It Happens Every Day

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

It Happens Every Day

Pacific Media Center carries the following item today:

Ex-CNN Reporter: I Received Orders to Manipulate News to Demonize Syria and Iran [Apparently, MSNBC and Faux got the same orders.] 30 Mar 2013 Ex-CNN reporter Amber Lyon revealed that during her work for the channel she received orders to send false news and exclude some others which the US administration did not favor with the aim to create a public opinion in favor of launching an aggression on Iran and Syria. Lyon was quoted by the Slovak main news website as saying that the mainstream US media outlets intentionally work to create a propaganda against Iran to garner public opinion’s support for a military invasion against it. She revealed that the scenario used before launching the war on Iraq is being prepared to be repeated where Iran and Syria are now being subject to constant ‘demonization’.

Not at all surprising and not the only one to receive such orders at that or any other outlet. However, CNN does have a pattern of this. Or have we forgotten the column Eason Jordan wrote for the New York Times after the start of the Iraq War?

Well you make him a liar
Turn him into a robber
Well it happens every day
-- "It Happens Every Day," written by Carly Simon, first appears on her Hello Big Man

And it happens day after day in a variety of ways. In England, for example, they can openly talk about the BBC Arabic and Guardian newspaper documentary James Steele: America's Mystery Man In Iraq (those unable to stream or who need closed captioning for streaming to be of any value can refer to Ava and my "TV: The War Crimes Documentary"). Today, Australia's ABC offers it under the title "Searching For Steele." But unless you listen to Law and Disorder Radio, forget about catching US coverage of it.

Some will rush to note that the increasingly useless Amy Goodman covered it. No, she didn't cover it, she obscured it. As Ava and I reported, she had decreed ahead of time that the term "counterinsurgency" would not come up in the discussion. She didn't want it to come up on the show at all but short of bleeping the word out of the documentary, she couldn't prevent it. The documentary is about counter-insurgency, a policy the US implemented. It is war on a native people. It is what outraged Bradley Manning and led him to leak documents to WikiLeaks.

But Goodman decreed it would not be mentioned -- a lot of academic circles exist around counter-insurgency especially Harvard's the Carr Center which Goodman is tight with. When the Guardian journalist Maggie O'Kane attempted to squeeze in the term "counterinsurgnecy," Goodman immediately stopped her and switched topics.

Here's right-winger Eliot Cohen telling in a Foreign Policy roundtable last month when Amy Goodman wouldn't:

The first thing is just to remind us all, counterinsurgency is a kind of military operation. There's an American style to counterinsurgency; there was a German style to counterinsurgency; there's a Soviet or Russian style to counterinsurgency. It's just a kind of operation that militaries do, and I think particularly in the popular discussion there's this tendency to call counterinsurgency the kind of stuff that's in the manual.
[. . .]
And finally, having played a very modest role in helping get the COIN manual launched, I've got two big reservations about it. Actually three. One is a technical one, which is it underestimated the killing part of counterinsurgency and particularly what Stan McChrystal and his merry men were doing [with special operations]. I think that is a large part of our counterinsurgency success. We killed a lot of the people who needed to be killed, or captured them, and that's not something you want to talk about. You'd rather talk about building power plants and stuff, but the killing part was really important, and I think we have to wrestle with that one because it's obviously problematic.

Even on the so-called "war and peace report," we can't discuss counter-insurgnecy. Excuse me, Goody will let Juan Cole come on to praise it. She's done that in the past. She jsut won't allow her audience to know what it really is nor will she allow it to be questioned.

So it's not at all surprising that Amber Lyon is revealing that CNN will not allow her to report certain truths and that she was asked to slant coverage.

Yesterday protests in Iraq marked the 100th day. How much coverage have you seen of that from CNN? Pretty much none, right.

Remember when Eason Jordan confessed to how they couldn't cover certain things because it would displease Saddam Hussein. Jordan wrote about how some people might be killed blah blah balh. But the real concern was that CNN might get kicked out of Iraq. Here's how Danny Schechter summarized it in real time:

He was an excellent newsman although he did admit that CNN did not publicize Iraqi attacks on his staff in the Saddam days to keep CNN's office open. He also admitted "vetting" (i.e. getting approval for) CNN military experts who commented on the invasion on air.

Who will write the column ten years from now confessing that CNN deliberately ignored the reports from Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, deliberately ignored the ongoing protests, deliberately downplayed Nouri al-Maliki's thuggery?

And I don't mean to act as if CNN is the only outlet doing this. It's not. But today it gets the spotlight.

If you're not getting how bad it is, grasp that last month, Iraq got more ink and airtime from the US press than it did in all of 2012 combined. But how many told you James Steele: America's Mystery Man In Iraq or Amnesty International's latest report [PDF format warning] "Iraq: A Decade of Abuses"?

They gabbed and gabbed about something, but let's quit pretending it was Iraq. They sat on their rockers and called, "Come over here kids and let me relive ten years ago because my thoughts on that are more important than what goes on Iraq today. I'm outraged, I tell you. So outraged. Not outraged enough to continue to follow Iraq. But outraged enough to dip into nostalgia."

In all their endless, worthless babbel, when did they work in the topic of birth defects? Or when did they note Human Rights Watch's "Iraq 10 Years Later, Creeping Authoritarianism"?

They didn't. The supposed reflection on what's happened to Iraq, due to an illegal war, was instead time for them to trot out their own personal memories of 2003 and pretend like that somehow addressed the pain and suffering Iraqis live under today.

The following community sites -- plus Antiwar.com, Adam Kokesh, Pacifica Evening News, Black Agenda Report and Chocolate City -- updated last night and this morning: