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ARTICLES
BOOKS & AUTHORS, DAWN, December 20, 2001
Media language and politics
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Ey Ajmal Kamal
T HESE days one hears more often than ever before about truth being the first casualty of war. The war, in this case, being the ongoing unilateral bombing of one of the world’s most destitute nations by a coali tion of world’s most powerful forces led by the United States. Looking from a differ ent angle, however, this war becomes merely a link in a long chain of events. Truth, it would seem, becomes a casu-alty much before the actual hostilities start.
Before you begin to homb (or gas) a whole population which has done absolutely nothing to deserve this, you need to prepare the ground for it. In the words of Professor Amartya Sen, “to see the disaster of September 11 as being caused by, say, people shel tered or harboured by Afghans, places all people in Afghanistan in the same descriprive category, and this can play a very important part in making it acceptable for normal human beings with usual sensibilities whether in America or in Europe or even in South Asia – to accept that some inno cent people in that identified group may well have to die in an operation that has to fol law the killing of innocent Americans by criminals har boured in Afghanistan.
Of course, the innocent Afghans are not taken in any way to be the target, but merely seen as collaterally damaged Afghans, whose lives cannot be spared if Osama bin Laden is to be caught or killed, and his organized terrorism is to be ended. The gross imposition of the identity of Afghans does not, of course, have any direct military value, but the civil acceptance or the public indulgence of acts with bru tal consequences on an iden tified group can have momentous effects”
This “civil acceptance” or the “public indulgence” can-not be achieved by the politi cal establishment alone, It has to be aided in no small nall measure by the mainstream media. To state the obvious, media in our times have acquired the absolute power to make anything visible or invisible at the choice of their managers. The unbe the lievable connivance of the US media with the political establishment has been con sistently exposed by people such as Edward S. Herman.
A Professor Emeritus of Finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a contrib utor to 2 Magazine since its founding in 1988, Edward Herman is the author of numerous books, including a number of corporate and media studies. These include Corporate control, corporate power (1981), the two volume
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gence with which Indonesia’s Suharto is dealt with, although there is nothing much in the real sense to dis tinguish between the two, except of course that the US political establishment prefers to see the two in dif
ferent lights. The Cambodian genocide, Herman says, had two phas es, in the first of which
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The US US mainstream media, in deference to the politicians’ preferences, com pletely black out the role of the US in the Cambodian genocide and attribute all deaths to Pol Pot. For the US backing and active support to him after he lost power, the media’s weapon is eva-
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This pattern, Herman notes, parallels exactly the finding in Manufacturing con sent that in the case of “wor thy” victims, like Jerzy Popieluzke in communist Poland, the Times and its con freres are unrelenting in the search for responsibility at the top, but in the case of “unworthy” victims, like the four religious women mur
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and ‘self-defence’ in bombing Iraq, an honest media would attack this with frenzy and with a lot of laughter, too, But they accommodate very well to language that is sup portive of the ongoing estab lishment.”
This connivance of the media with the official US policy imperatives nowhere more blatant than is in the case of the Middle East. The US media are extremely pro-Israel. As an ally, Israel receives more than three billion dollars a year in US aid. Herman points out that even in the times of a budget crunch, the media do not allow a discus sion of this aid. Israel’s image as a state retaliating to ter rorist attacks has also been created by the media. That this image is not based on
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Political economy of human rights (1979) and ar Manufacturing consent: the political economy of the mass methia (1988), both of which he co-authored with Noam Chomsky, as well as The ter rorism industry: the experts and institutions that shape our view of terror (1989), which he co-authored with Gerry O’Sullivan. He edits Lies of our times (LOOT) available at the website of Z Magazine: http://www.zmag.org/. A search on the website by the author’s name and/or topic
will reveal a list of articles. Prof Herman is of the con-sidered view that “media col laboration with the govern ment in fostering a world of doublespeak is essential, and this collaboration has been regularly forthcoming”. To a question by David Bersamian in an interview that given the political economy of the media and the propaganda model, as outlined in Manufacturing consent, isn’t he beating a dead horse, Herman says, “Yes, you’re beating a dead horse. But most people aren’t aware that the horse is dead.”
An excellent example of how, by employing language in the service of misinforma tion and distortion, media tion can make two similar sets of events look entirely differ-ent, is Professor Herman’s essay “Pol Pot’s death in the propaganda system”. In this essay, available under the head of “Fog Watch” at the 2 Magazine website, Herman analyses the treatment given to the media to Cambodia’s arstwhile despot Pol Pot and contrasts it with the indul
1969-1975 the US Air
Force dropped over 500,000 tons of bombs on rural Cambodia, killing scores of thousands, creating a huge refugee population, and radi-calizing the countryside. The number of US-caused deaths in the first phase is compara ble to, or greater than, CIA and other serious estimates of Pol Pot killings by execu-tion (50,000-400,000), According to Herman, focus ing solely on Pol Pot and making the US an innocent bystander in the Cambodian genocide requires well-con-structed blinders. Furthermore, following their ouster by the Vietnamese in December 1978, Pol Pot’s forces found a safe haven in Thailand, a US client state, and for the next 15 years or more were aided and protect-ed there by Thai, Chinese, British, and US authorities.
Suharto, on the other hand, came to power in 1965 accompanied by a slaughter of over 700,000 people. This was cold-blooded killing, designed to wipe out a mass movement that was seen as a political threat, without even a vengeance motive. Suharto also invaded East Timor in 1975, and over the years was responsible for the death of perhaps 200,000 200,000 of a popula tion of some 700,000. So Suharto was guilty not only of a huge internal slaughter comparable in scale to that of Pol Pot, he also engi neered a genocide in a neigh bouring country. But of course all of Suharto’s killing was done with the approval and active support, or acqui
escence, of the US govern
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PLEASE click above for over 235 articles by topic, authar, etc. Herold: Civilian Victims (long) Lamb: The Slaughterhouse Karacs: Humanitarian Crisis Dillon: Hunger Spin Younge: Lots of Wars Kolhatkar: War Against Ngha Fisk: My Beating Podur: Can Anything Stop the Killing?
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sion. Whil While Pol Pot has been described in the editorials and news columns as “crazed”, a “killer”, “war criminal”, “mass murderer”, “blood-soaked”, and as hav ing engineered a “reign of terror” and “genocide”, Suharto was occasionally referred to as a “dictator” and running an “authoritari an” regime, he is often a “moderate” and even “at heart benign” never a “killer” or “mass murderer” or one responsible for “geno cide
The linguistic double stan dard is maintained reliably throughout the mainstream media. In the case of Pol Pot, there is no uncertainty: edito-rials and news articles uni formly make him and the Khmer Rouge leadership clearly and unambiguously responsible for the killings of 1975-78. But in the case of the “good genocidist”, we move to an ambiguous responsibility, which means none at all: “a 1965 coup led to the massacres of hundreds of thousands of supposed communists”, where we have the passive voice and no agent doing the killing, or “a
wave of violence that took up to 500,000 lives and led Suharto to seize power from Sukarno in a military coup”, where the massacre not only has no no agent, but is falsely situated before the takeover of power by Suharto.
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dered by “our” client govern ment in El Salvador in 1980, the media lose their interest in identifying those in charge.
Many people consider George Orwell’s contribution vital in comprehending how our post-1984 world works, This fact is also brought out by Professor Herman’s book Beyond hypocrisy: decoding the news in an age of prope ganda (1993) in which he quotes Orwell from his essay “Politics and the English lan guage”: “In our time, politi cal speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible…. Thus political language has to consist large ly of euphemism, question begging and sheer, cloudy vagueness.”
Professor Herman’s book includes a “doublespeak dic tionary”. This lexicon defines “aggression” as “invasion of another country by someone other than ourselves without our approval” Professor Herman was interviewed by David Barsamian after the publication of this book. This July 14, 1993 conversation is also available in the Z-Net resources. During the course of the interview Herman says: “If you had a really first class media, an adversary media, a really good one, the use of Orwellian language would be under real con-straints. When they talk about ‘collateral casualties
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facts is highlighted by Herman when in in one of of his books he charted the number of Israelis killed by acts of PLO terrorism vs the number of Arabs and Palestinians killed by Israeli sta aeli state terror ism and found that the data “yielded a ratio of something like 1 to 25…
In terms of the numbers, it’s clear that Israel outdoes the PLO and the Palestinians by a huge factor. It carries out what I would call whole sale terror. Palestinians carry out retail terror operations.” However, Israel’s image in the West as a victim of ter-rorism is more of an ideologi cal position. Needless to say, the media wholeheartedly goes along with this ideology.
However, it would not be worth its while if we use all this detailed and extremely ned critique well-reasoned critique ow the mainstream media works in the US, to feed the ever increasing demand for anti-Americanism – which has been termed as “opium the masses” by a Pakistani columnist residing in Washington. The work of Professor Herman should open our eyes to the relation ship of politics and media closer to home. One would find amazing similarity in the way the so-called “popular and officially sanctified notions are sustained by the electronic and print mediu flying in the face of facts.