NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9507

Text File | 1992-12-21 | 5.6 KB | 91 lines

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From: [e-mail] (Greg Marks)
Subject: Freedom is Slavery
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Date: Sat, 19 Dec 1992 23:24:45 GMT
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    In Friday's Los Angeles Times we see how the major media approach the
problem of describing Freedom House.  The Times article ("69% of Mankind
Called Free; Ethnic Strife Clouds Gains," p. A16) notes the conclusions of the
group and waits nine paragraphs before describing it at all.  The paper calls
Freedom House "a nonprofit human rights organization established in 1941 to
combat the rise of Nazism and right-wing extremism."  Were that all I knew
about the group, I probably would approve of it.
    As I mentioned before, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's "Manufacturing
Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media" documents the activities of
Freedom House.  Chomsky and Herman explain the function of Freedom House as
one of five filters through which information must pass before it can become
disseminated news.  The group is a "flak machine," providing negative feedback
in various forms to media that fail to serve the interests of concentrated
power.  The book states:
    "Freedom House, which dates back to the early 1940s, has had interlocks
with AIM [Accuracy in Media], the World Anticommunist League, Resistance
International, and U.S. government bodies such as Radio Free Europe and the
CIA, and has long served as a virtual propaganda arm of the government and
international right wing.  It sent election monitors to the Rhodesian elections
staged by Ian Smith in 1979 and found them 'fair,' whereas the 1980 elections
won by Mugabe under British supervision it found dubious.  Its election
monitors also found the Salvadoran elections of 1982 admirable.  (footnote:
See Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, "Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged
Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador" (Boston: South
End Press, 1984), Appendix 1.)"
    "... In 1982, when the Reagan administration was having trouble
containing media reporting of the systematic killing of civilians by the
Salvadoran army, Freedom House came through  with a denunciation of the
'imbalance' in media reporting from El Salvador."  (footnoted)
    "Although the flak machines steadily attack the mass media, the media
treat them well.  They receive respectful attention, and their propagandistic
role and links to a larger corporate program are rarely mentioned or analyzed."
    Appendix 3 of "Manufacturing Consent" refutes Freedom House's major
work, Peter Braestrup's "Big Story," which purports to prove that the U.S.
media "lost" the Vietnam War.  The entire appendix is worth reproducing, but
I will restrict myself to a couple excerpts.
    "Braestrup refers sarcastically to 'insights into Vietnamese
psychology,' as when Morley Safer, watching marines burning down huts in Cam
Ne, concluded that a peasant whose home was destroyed would find it hard to
believe 'that we are on his side.'  How does Safer know?  Perhaps the peasant
enjoyed watching the flames.  Not all such 'psychoanalyzing' is derided,
however, as when General Westmoreland explains that 'the people in the cities
are largely indignant at the Vietcong for violating the sanctity of the Tet
period and for their tactics which brought about damage to the cities,' or when
he expounds on the peasant 'state of mind.'  Note the Safer is not criticized
for accepting the tacit assumption that the press is an agency of the invading
army ('*we* are on his side')."
     "Exuding contempt and derision, the study informs us that 'no one'
except for George McArthur (AP) and Don Oberdorfer (Knight) 'reported ... on
what happened to Hue's civilians under Vietcong rule.'  Again demonstrating his
 considerable gift for self-refutation, Braestrup cites reports on Vietcong
executions, kidnappings, burial of executed civilians in mass graves, etc., in
Hue under Viet Cong rule by Newsweek, UPI, Washington Post, William Ryan,
Reuters, New York Times, Time, London Times, and the NBC 'Today' show.  On page
283, Braestrup writes that 'The television networks, as far as our records
show, made no mention of the executions at all'; on page 472, he refutes this
claim, noting that on February 28, in an 'aftermath film report from Hue ... at
battle's end,' the NBC 'Today' show 'hinted at the Hue massacre with this
statement: "Hundreds of government workers were killed and thrown into
temporary graves."'  A rather broad 'hint,' it would seem.  The example is
typical of the Freedom House style of handling evidence."
    "... we have here not a work of scholarship but rather a government
propaganda tract.  ...  The impact of the Freedom House study comes from the
impression of massive documentation and the huge resources that were employed
to obtain and analyze it.  Case by case, the examples collapse on inspection."
    Elsewhere in the book, Chomsky and Herman extrapolate the Freedom
House critiques of the U.S. media to coverage of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in the Soviet paper Ogonyok, and conclude that it would be
considered at least as adversarial and defiant of authority as any U.S. paper;
they note that Soviet defense minister General Dimitri Yakov blasted it on
precisely those grounds.

                Greg Marks
                ([e-mail])