The News Media and the Antiwar Movement

[rodeodance]

Published on Monday, September 26, 2005 by CommonDreams.org
The News Media and the Antiwar Movement
by Norman Solomon

It's reasonable to estimate that more than a quarter of a million people demonstrated against the Iraq war on Saturday in Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco and other U.S. cities. The next day, the Washington Post front-paged a decent story that described "the largest show of antiwar sentiment in the nation's capital since the conflict in Iraq began." But more perfunctory back-page articles were typical in daily papers across the country. And over the weekend, many TV news watchers saw little or nothing about the protests.

Hurricane Rita was clearly a factor. But even without dramatic natural disasters, the news media are ready, willing and able to downplay news about war -- and the antiwar movement -- for any number of reasons. Conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill or in newsrooms can tamp down media coverage of a surging movement. What's crucial is that the movement not allow its momentum to be interrupted by media treatment.

If "journalism is the first draft of history," the journalism of corporate media is usually the quickie top-down view of history that's told from vantage points far removed from progressive movements. Media technologies and styles aside, what we're experiencing now from major U.S. news outlets is not very different from the coverage of the Vietnam War. A persistent myth is that mainstream American news outlets were tough on the war in Vietnam while boosting the antiwar movement. And these days -- after a summer of plunging poll numbers for President Bush along with the profoundly important media presence of Cindy Sheehan -- many people seem to think that the news media have turned against the war makers in Washington. But overall the media realities are something else. Actual history should make us wary of any assumption that the press is apt to be a counterweight to militarism. .......



http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0926-22.htm

[BlueJac]

1. It is a uphill battle but........

it will take time to break the backs of the neo-cons. I email MSN, CNN and demand coverage. Keep plugging away and never give up.

[newswolf56]

2. Solomon is absolutely right, especially about the Vietnam War.

At first only alternative newspapers like The Village Voice covered the anti-Vietnam War protests. Also alternative radio like WBAI. Basically, if you didn't live in New York City -- or at least in a town big enough to have a viable underground press -- you didn't know there was an anti-war movement: it was relegated to the back pages by the mainstream papers in NYC, totally ignored by mainstream broadcast media there, and just-as-methodically suppressed by mainstream media -- print and broadcast alike -- everywhere else in the United States. (I can't count the number of times I witnessed some newcomer to the City look around at the tens of thousands of marchers and exclaim, "wow, back home I thought I was the only one -- this really blows my mind!")

The very first mainstream-media opposition in the U.S. came from Jimmy Breslin via the late (and very much lamented) New York Herald Tribune -- probably the finest English-language daily newspaper ever published. Breslin went to Vietnam a hawk and spent a lot of time there with Marines he knew from his Brooklyn boyhood -- fighting Marines who were in fiercely contested hot-spots along the DMZ. As a result of his experiences, which included several fire-fights, Breslin underwent a total change of heart, and he shared his transition via his columns, which The Herald-Trib courageously featured on the main section-front and sometimes even down the left-hand side of Page One. By the time Breslin came back from Vietnam he was an impassioned dove, denouncing the war as a shameful squandering of human life and U.S. Vietnam policy a murderous fraud. This was in late 1965, and those columns -- because of their age unfortunately never available on-line -- were probably Breslin's best writing ever.

But the rest of mainstream media remained stubbornly pro-war -- or sullenly silent -- for at least three more years. Finally of course the movement grew large enough that mainstream media couldn't ignore it -- protests were threatening advertising revenues -- and at that point the Cronkites began climbing aboard Breslin's train. (It has always bothered me that Cronkite gets credit as the first change-of-heart mainstream newsman when Breslin -- then one of the best, hardest-hitting English-language writers in the world -- was miles and light years ahead of him.)

Don't look for any Breslins or even Cronkites today because things are far more restricted: compared to the 1960s, today's editors have no freedom at all. This is because during the '60s only about 10 percent of all mass media was monopoly owned, while today about 95 percent of all U.S. media is owned by only six corporations -- basically the same all-powerful plutocrats who put George Bush in power. Our free press is therefore history -- nothing now but the propaganda apparatus of the same oligarchy that with equal triumphant glee brought us Bush, Iraq and the genocidal aftermath of New Orleans. Thus I would expect media to behave accordingly: total suppression of the story, or total distortion of it (by making every protester look like a froth-at-the-mouth A.N.S.W.E.R. bigot), or maybe -- as in The Washington Post this morning, just enough accurate/fair reporting to preserve the myth of the "free press" -- but as Norman Solomon says, limited to a "top-down view."


Edit: typo.