David Barsamian: Young People Don’t Pay Attention to the US Corporate Media
Tue Dec 30, 2014 9:41
TEHRAN (FNA)- David Barsamian, a leading Armenian-American radio
journalist, believes that as a result of the good performance of
alternative press, the young Americans don’t pay attention to the
propaganda of the corporate, mainstream media anymore.
David Barsamian, who is the founder and director of Alternative Radio
broadcast from Boulder, Colorado, tells Fars News Agency that the
journalists in the United States don’t need to be censored or
monitored by the government, because they are accustomed to a
full-fledged self-censorship.
Mr. Barsamian says that the US government orchestrated a large project
of media propaganda against its own people to rationalize and justify
its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq: “[o]f course the case of Iraq is
very instructive because it’s almost like a textbook example of the
uses of propaganda.”
“The population here in the United States was subjected to months and
months of propaganda and the great danger that it posed to the United
States; that Saddam Hussein was somehow connected to events of
September 11, and that he was somehow connected to the Al-Qaeda; all
of these things were completely ludicrous and anyone that knew
anything about West Asia and the history of Iraq and Saddam regime
would have laughed at these assertions,” he noted.
David Barsamian is a radio broadcaster, writer and journalist who has
conducted series of extensive, in-depth interviews with prominent
progressive intellectuals and thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Edward
Said, Howard Zinn, Eqbal Ahmad and Arundhati Roy. His radio program is
broadcast on more than 150 radio stations across the United States and
in other countries. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named Mr.
Barsamian one of its “Top Ten Media Heroes.”
To discuss the workings of the mainstream, corporate media in the
United States, the relationship between the White House and the mass
media and the growing influence of the alternative media, FNA spoke to
David Barsamian on the phone. The interview was conducted long before
the US declared removal of the sanctions and normalization of ties
with Cuba and, interestingly, Barsamian has a note to make in this
regard. The following is the full transcript of the interview.
Q: My first question is on the growth of progressive media in the
United States. Why do you think the corporate media that are owned by
multinational companies are pushing for an aggressive US foreign
policy, advocating for new wars, military expeditions and trying to
entangle the US government into new military adventures? How is it
possible to counter such an approach taken by these corporate,
mainstream media?
A: Well, I wouldn’t agree with your premise that it’s the media
corporations that are the catalysts for the US imperialist foreign
policy. It’s the other military corporations that have a much more
major influence. The media play two roles in the United States. We
have two types of media here. One is a Weapon of Mass Destruction to
keep people’s attention focused on the latest divorce in Hollywood,
the marriage or the adoption of a Malawi baby and things like that.
Then we have an elite media, which is the New York Times, National
Public Radio, PBS, the Washington Post and other journals like that in
general which support US interventions based on the feeling that the
United States has a unique role to play in the world that no other
nation can substitute for what the United States can do
internationally. So the military corporations such as Lockheed Martin,
Northrop Grumman, Boeing, United Technologies, Raytheon and all the
others benefit greatly from the US militarism, conflict and war. The
Middle East, your part of the world and West Asia are flooded with US
arms. Hardly a month doesn’t go by when there is some new arms deal
negotiated between these military corporations and United Arab
Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other feudal Persian Gulf
monarchies.
Q: You know that the majority of mainstream and elite media, as you
put it, claim to be independent of the government and maintain that
their editorial policies are not influenced by the authorities and
those in power. Is it really the case that PBS, CNN, New York Times,
Washington Post and NPR are free and independent outlets that
contribute to the free flow of information regardless of what is
dictated to them?
A: Well, the rhetoric of course is that the corporate media are
adversarial, confrontational, and even hostile to state power. But the
evidence doesn’t support that. They have embedded an internalized
basic assumption such as the belief that the capitalist economic
system is the only way you can organize an economy. They accept the
role that the US has a right to intervene everywhere in the world, to
have military bases anywhere in the world, to declare its interest
anywhere in the world. They accept all of these things. They have
internalized these embedded assumptions. And now the only disagreement
they have is over tactics. I give you one example. The United States
has imposed a unilateral embargo on the island nation of Cuba in the
Caribbean for well over 50 years. It’s routinely condemned in the
United Nations by votes of 191-2, the two beings the United States and
Israel. No other country supports this. Now, the New York Times, which
is our best newspaper, had an editorial just a few days back,
criticizing the Cuban embargo as now largely ineffective; that it is
just window-dressing and that it is time for the embargo to end. New
York Times supported the embargo for many many years and now that it
sees it as ineffective, it’s recommending that the Obama
administration end the embargo. So that’s the kind of a discussion
that exists between the corporate and state. They criticize the
tactics but not the strategy. So embargos are fine, unilateral actions
by the United States are fine; but then occasionally, they are
criticized as not being effective or being too extreme, for example.
There are so many instances of this that I can talk about for the next
three days. There’s an enormous amount of hypocrisy between what the
media claim to be doing and what they are actually doing. They are
pro-imperialist, they are pro-capitalist, they are pro-US hegemony,
and none of this has changed since the United States has become the
global superpower.
Q: How does the US government respond to the unpopular stories run by
newspapers and magazines, including the intelligence and security
revelations or articles and commentaries that are critical of the
White House and Pentagon? What about the alternative media’s coverage
of the daily events and their reaction to the government’s handling of
the current affairs? We haven’t seen cases of American newspapers
being closed down or banned because of publishing what the White House
people dislike, but they certainly have their own instruments of
controlling the mass media and punishing the “wrongdoers.” Am I right?
A: Well; the answer to the first part of your question is that, state
largely ignores the alternative media; it doesn’t pay attention to it,
but occasionally, it has to, as in the case with Julian Assange and
Wikileaks; as in the case with Edward Snowden and the vast amount of
information that he has made available to the people of the world in a
very courageous act of independence and media freedom. So in those
instances, in fact, the government tried to control the flow of
information, claiming that national security was at stake and the
media corporations should cooperate. Occasionally, the government has
imposed censorship on different media during the release of the
Pentagon papers, for example, when the Nixon administration tried to
block the New York Times and the Washington Post from publishing, but
the Supreme Court ruled that the public had a right to know, and that
this was an interference with the freedom of the press and so the
Pentagon papers were in fact released.
In other instances, I know of one in Guatemala when the US was
preparing to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Jacobo
Arbenz, the New York Times cooperated in not publishing the
information it had that the US was going to stage a coup in Guatemala.
There are other examples of this, but basically they don’t have to
impose rigid restrictions on journalists and editors, because the
journalists and editors censor themselves. They are part of the power
elite and part of the problem, and so they know the boundaries; they
know the redlines; they know what can be reported on, and what can’t
be reported on. So, to give you an example of the catastrophic war in
Iraq, I just heard yesterday on Democracy Now, which is an alternative
news program here in the United States, that is based in New York,
Phil Donahue was on – he is considered a liberal TV and radio talk
show host – he said the Iraq War was a blunder. This is the limit of
liberal criticism; it can be called a mistake, a tragedy, a blunder.
Just today, George W. Bush was interviewed on National Public Radio,
and there was no question asking him if he should be indicted for war
crimes and brought before the International Criminal Court for
violating Iraq’s sovereignty on multiple occasions. Well, according to
liberals like Phil Donahue, this was a blunder. But I have to
disagree. This wasn’t a blunder. It was a war crime and the people
responsible should be held accountable. We should have universal norms
of justice. You cannot accuse one state of violating the sovereignty
of another state; for example, the United States has taken a very
virtuous position on Russian intervention in Ukraine and the
annexation of Crimea, which was part of the Soviet Union until 1954
when the then Ukrainian Prime Minister gave Crimea to Ukraine. So,
that kind of intervention is considered illegal, criminal and has to
be condemned, but when Israel invades or bombs other countries like
Tunisia, Libya, Iraq, Lebanon and continues to occupy the West Bank
and carry out major human rights violations and war crimes, that’s not
considered worthy of attention by whoever is in the White House and
none of the corporate media here report on these vast contradictions
and hypocrisies. We don’t need censors in this country. We censor
ourselves.
Q: So, do you think that these mainstream, corporate media are playing
a role in paving the way for the US military adventures?
A: They legitimize US intervention. They legitimize the capitalist
economic system. They legitimize US hegemony and the fact that the
United States has 735 military bases around the world. Many of them
are in your part of the world, i.e. West Asia. That is the societal
function of the media to provide the state with legitimacy and
propagandistic base so that the citizenry and the American people will
go along with the policies.
Q: What’s your viewpoint about the role the media in the United States
played in explicating the tragedy that played out on September 11,
2001 to the American people and giving rise to the Global War on
Terror? There were massive demonstrations across the United States in
the run-up to the occupation of Iraq and after that. There were also
protests against the invasion of Afghanistan, but the Bush
administration didn’t pay attention to them and went ahead with its
plans for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Do you think that the media
in the United States could play a role in preventing the two wars from
happening?
A: Of course the case of Iraq is very instructive because it’s almost
like a textbook example of the uses of propaganda. The population here
in the United States was subjected to months and months of propaganda
and the great danger that it posed to the United States; that Saddam
Hussein was somehow connected to events of September 11, and that he
was somehow connected to the Al-Qaeda; all of these things were
completely ludicrous and anyone that knew anything about West Asia and
the history of Iraq and Saddam regime would have laughed at these
assertions. But they have a huge effect on the population and even
though there were demonstrations against the launching of the war on
February 15, 2003 – there were demonstrations all over the world,
including in the United States, but Tony Blair – let’s not forget him,
he is a major war criminal – he, along with Aznar of Spain and Bush in
Washington led the charge against Iraq and the consequences of that
criminal action are being borne today by the Iraqi, Iranian and Syrian
people and the people of the Persian Gulf. It was not a mistake or
blunder, but a war crime, and the people responsible for it should be
held accountable.
Let’s talk about Iran, about your country. The United States media has
been for many years conducting a virulent and incessant campaign of
the demonization of Iran largely goaded by Israeli interests who see
Iran as some kind of existential threat to Israel. So there has been
lots of negative reporting on Iran in the corporate media here, and
whenever Iran is discussed, it’s always in negative terms: Iran
refuses; Iran denies; Iran is not forthcoming; Iran is not living up
to the IAEA treaty stipulation. One should say the United States is
not living up to the IAEA stipulations. One of those stipulations is
that it should be actively reducing its nuclear weapons stockpile. Our
great President Barack Obama recently announced a $1 trillion, 30-year
plan to modernize US nuclear weapons. It’s in direct violation of the
NPT. We know that Israel has nuclear weapons. We know that India has
nuclear weapons. We know that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. They are
not signatories to the NPT and are not being held accountable, but
Iran which is a signatory and which has been engaging in negotiation
is being held out for special criticism. Again, the hypocrisy here is
absolutely mind-boggling.
Q: I was about to touch upon Iran before you talked about it. The
portrayal of Iran in the Western mainstream media is really lopsided
and biased. Whenever there’s talk of Iran in an American TV station,
they show footages of a vast desert with camels running in them. They
simply equate Iran with the Arab nations of the region and never
screen anything about Iran’s glorious past, its ancient culture and
the contribution of the great Iranian poets, scientists and scholars
to the global civilization. Why is it so?
A: Well, people who are exposed to alternative media, like my program,
and others such as Z Magazine, The Progressive and The Nation, have a
different view of Iran from that which is laid out in the corporate
media. This view, as you say, largely rests upon clichés and
stereotypes about Iran and all the orientalist types of thinking which
Edward Said brilliantly deconstructed in his classic work Orientalism,
as well as in his Culture and Imperialism. So, the little information
the general public gets about Iran is all negative, but there are a
lot of other people who are tuned to the alternative media and
understand that Iran is in fact a very old, ancient and rich
civilization; you mentioned the great poetry. For example, Ahmad
Shamlu, when he died a couple of years ago, thousands of people
marched in his honor in Tehran. I visited his grave in Karaj. There
were people honoring him, leaving flowers at his grave. The Iranian
cinema is one of the world’s best, and many Europeans, American,
Canadian and Latin American people enjoy the great movies produced by
the Iranian filmmakers.
Q: How do you think it is possible to counter the hegemony of the
corporate media in the United States and elsewhere? How is it possible
to forge new channels for getting people exposed to the realities that
are withheld and concealed from them?
A: Well, that’s happening right now. The growth of the internet and
social media and all the new websites – Glenn Greenwald has a great
website called The Intercept, that was actually funded by an
Iranian-American Pierre Omidyar, the founder of the eBay, and very
good journalists such as Jeremy Scahill are writing excellent articles
there about the different aspects of the economic situation of the
world, the environmental crisis, the US foreign policy and military
interventions. Al-Jazeera has made an impact here in the United States
with its reporting. Al-Monitor is very good. There are all kinds of
good websites, radio programs and TV programs that are countering of
the hegemony of the dominant, corporate media. The good news is that
more and more young people are not paying attention to the corporate
media here in the United States. They understand that it’s garbage and
propaganda and there’s nothing of value there. So they are looking for
their independent sources.
Interview by Kourosh Ziabari
From: A. Papazian