Time to turn TV on again By Doug Henwood Who needs a state broadcaster when networks provide the propaganda?
ASIDE FROM a few aftershocks, like the episodes of religious self-flagellation, the war in Iraq is mostly over, and the American media are returning to their normal preoccupations. So I am finally working up the nerve to turn on the TV news again. It was an extraordinary few weeks on American TV that people living outside its signal area might not fully appreciate.
It is an article of faith here in the US that we have the freest, liveliest press in the world. If only that were true. During the first Gulf War, Christopher Hitchens - the former Hitchens, that is, before he graduated to doing private briefings at the White House - said of the TV coverage that a state broadcasting system could not have done any better. That is not exactly right: private ownership confers a fraudulent aura of independence, and American news outlets, especially the broadcast media, have worked tirelessly, propagandising a chronically ill-informed American public.
The undisputed champion of the war's sales effort was the Fox News Channel (owned by News Corp, parent company of The Times). FNC advertising brags that it offers "real journalism, fair and balanced" - which is pretty funny if you actually watch. The moment the war started, Fox declared that the "liberation of Iraq" had begun. Its reports on the war could have been written by the White House press office, but the instincts of Fox staffers probably made that unnecessary.
The other cable networks were hardly better. CNN was calmer, but rarely informative. The third-ranked cable news channel, MSNBC, tried to ape Fox's jingoism. A few weeks before the war, MSNBC dumped the liberal host Phil Donahue, even though he had the network's highest ratings. A leaked consultant's report warned management that his anti-war stance might give the network a reputation as "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag". MSNBC hired Michael Savage, who declared that anti-war protesters were committing "treason".
So what's a passionate anti-warrior to do? Turn off the TV, mostly, and read the papers, surf the web and scour the so-called alternative media. The better papers did a half-decent job. Inconvenient things, such as civilian deaths, were reported in the quality broadsheets, although not always on the front page. But historical and political contexts and other complicated things were mostly eclipsed by news of the military campaign.
Off the beaten track, the underfunded Pacifica Radio network was indispensable. (Fairness dictates that I disclose that I present a show on Pacifica.) And the internet proved a lifeline: articles from the UK broadsheets were furiously e-mailed around.
How does this all balance out? Support for this war, though strong, was lower than during the last Iraq adventure. The cable networks enjoyed their usual wartime ratings rise, viewership of the major networks' nightly newscasts fell and viewership of BBC America grew. It takes time and effort to track down the unusual sources - and dedicated peaceniks hungrily did the work. But for most Americans, the jingoism of the cable networks set the national tone.
How that tone felt is nicely captured in this story. In mid-March, a teenager attending a rodeo in Texas failed to stand, along with the rest of the crowd, during a playing of Lee Greenwood's Proud to be an American, a dreadful country song that has become a kind of private-sector national anthem for the yahoo demographic. A patriot standing behind the defiantly seated teen started taunting him and tugging on his ear. The two ended up in a fight, and then under arrest.
The song's core argument is contained in its two most famous lines: "I'm proud to be an American/where at least I know I'm free." But the oft-overlooked opening reads: "If tomorrow all the things were gone/I'd worked for all my life". And that is precisely the condition in which many Americans are finding themselves. More than two million jobs have disappeared in the past two years. Millions of Americans have seen their retirement savings wiped out by the bear market, and more than a million filed for bankruptcy last year. Most states and cities are experiencing their worst fiscal crises since the 1930s. Yet these barely register as political issues. Maybe the war's end will change that.
The author edits the Left Business Observer in New York.