Propaganda Blitz

How the Corporate Media Distort Reality

David Edwards, David Cromwell

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781786803313
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Do you trust the liberal media? While the tabloid and right-wing press - the Sun, The Times, the Mail and the Express - are constantly criticised for dangerous bias, outlets like the BBC and the Guardian are trusted by their readers to report in the interests of the public. However, the reality is that all corporate media is systematically filtered by the powerful interests that own, manage and fund it.

Propaganda Blitz shows that the corporate media does not just 'spin' the news - it fundamentally distorts everything it touches, hiding the real issues from public view, and often completely reversing the truth. This book uncovers a storm of top-down campaigns behind war reporting from Iraq, Syria and Palestine, as well as the destruction of the credibility of figures on the left, including Jeremy Corbyn and Hugo Chavez.

Exposing propagandists at the top levels of the BBC, as well as their reporting on the Scottish independence referendum, the dismantling of the NHS and looming climate chaos, Propaganda Blitz explains the real meaning of 'objective' journalism, exposes the fake news about 'fake news' and outlines a model for anti-business media activism.

1

Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz

A regular feature of corporate media manipulation involves the launching of what we call a propaganda blitz, attacking and discrediting ‘Official Enemies’, often preparing the way for ‘action’ or ‘intervention’ of some kind.

Propaganda blitzes are fast-moving attacks intended to inflict maximum damage in minimum time. They are:

1. based on allegations of dramatic new evidence

2. communicated with high emotional intensity and moral outrage

3. apparently supported by an informed corporate media/academic/expert consensus

4. reinforced by damning condemnation of anyone daring even to question the apparent consensus

5. often generated with fortuitous timing

6. characterised by tragicomic moral dissonance.

Dramatic New Evidence

A propaganda blitz is often launched on the back of allegedly dramatic new evidence indicating that an establishment enemy should be viewed as uniquely despicable and actively targeted. The basic theme: This changes everything!

Propagandists are well aware that media attention will rapidly move on from claims of dramatic new evidence, so the durability of the claims is not a key concern. Marginalised media websites and rare ‘mainstream’ articles may eventually expose the hype. But propagandists know that most corporate media will not notice and will not learn the lesson that similar claims should be received with extreme caution in future.

One of the most obvious recent examples of a propaganda blitz was the Blair government’s infamous September 2002 dossier on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which included four mentions of a dramatic new claim that Iraq was able to deploy WMD against British citizens within 45 minutes of an order being given.

Senior intelligence officials later revealed that the original 45-minute claim referred to the length of time it might have taken the Iraqis to fuel and fire a Scud missile or rocket launcher. But that original intelligence said exactly nothing about whether Iraq possessed the chemical or biological weapons to use in those weapons. The Blair government had transformed a purely hypothetical danger into an immediate and deadly threat.

The fakery surrounding the Iraq War was so extreme that even the ‘mainstream’ media could not ultimately ignore the collapse of the case for war. But by then the powers that be had got the invasion and occupation they were seeking.

In 1964, in what became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the US government and US corporate media launched a propaganda blitz based on the claim that US destroyers had come under attack from North Vietnamese patrol boats. The goal was to justify a massive escalation of the US assault on Vietnam. Media analyst Daniel Hallin wrote that the episode ‘was a classic of Cold War management ... On virtually every important point, the reporting of the two Gulf of Tonkin incidents ... was either misleading or simply false.’ Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky noted that the lies were simply ‘in accordance with the needs of the US executive at that crucial moment’.¹

In February 2008, the US Naval Institute reported on the release of nearly 200 declassified documents related to the incident:

These new documents and tapes reveal what historians could not prove: There was not a second attack on U.S. Navy ships in the Tonkin Gulf in early August 1964. Furthermore, the evidence suggests a disturbing and deliberate attempt by Secretary of Defense McNamara to distort the evidence and mislead Congress.²

As for the first ‘attack’, US naval aggression had provoked three North Vietnamese patrol boats to pursue the US aggressor in an engagement in which the patrol boats ‘were almost entirely destroyed’, while the US ship ‘may have sustained “one bullet hole”’.³

In October 1990, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, as the US worked hard to build a case for war, it was claimed that Iraqi stormtroopers had smashed their way into a Kuwait City hospital, torn hundreds of babies from their incubators and left them on the floor to die. In their book, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You, John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton described how the most powerful and heart-rending testimony came from a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, initially known only as Nayirah:

Sobbing, she described what she had seen with her own eyes in a hospital in Kuwait City ... ‘I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital,’ Nayirah said. ‘While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.’⁴

In fact, Nayirah was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family. Her father was Saud Nasir al-Sabah, Kuwait’s Ambassador to the US. Stauber and Rampton noted that Nayirah had been coached by US PR company Hill & Knowlton’s vice-president Lauri Fitz-Pegado ‘in what even the Kuwaitis’ own investigators later confirmed was false testimony’. The story of the 312 murdered babies was an outright lie. Journalist John MacArthur, author of The Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War, commented:

Of all the accusations made against the dictator [Saddam Hussein], none had more impact on American public opinion than the one about Iraqi soldiers removing 312 babies from their incubators and leaving them to die on the cold hospital floors of Kuwait City.⁵

As another war loomed in March 2003, in an article titled, ‘See men shredded, then say you don’t back war’, Labour MP Ann Clwyd claimed that Saddam Hussein’s goons were feeding opponents into a machine ‘designed for shredding plastic’ and dumping their minced remains into ‘plastic bags’ for use as ‘fish food’.⁶

Who, in good conscience, then, could deny the righteousness of a war against Saddam? Alas, as Brendan O’Neil commented in the Guardian, Clwyd had based her story on the uncorroborated claims of ‘one individual from northern Iraq. Neither Amnesty International nor Human Rights Watch, in their numerous investigations into human rights abuses in Iraq, had ever heard anyone talk of a human-shredding machine.’⁷

The story was baseless nonsense.

In 2011, dramatic claims were made that the Libyan government was planning a massacre in Benghazi, exactly the kind of action that Gaddafi knew could trigger Western ‘intervention’. Again, as we will see later in this book (Chapter 5, Libya – ‘It is All About Oil’), the claim was eventually exposed as baseless even by a UK parliamentary committee report. But once again, the warmongers had already achieved the regime change and control they desired.

In August 2013, corporate politicians and journalists instantly declared the Syrian government to blame for the use of chemical weapons in the Ghouta area of Damascus. Just one day after the attacks, a Guardian leader claimed there was not ‘much doubt’ who was to blame, and yet, as we will see in Chapter 6, the media’s certainty was again utterly bogus.⁸

In May 2016, an excellent example of a propaganda blitz saw Jeremy Corbyn targeted by dramatic new ‘evidence’: namely, the discovery of a graphic posted by Naz Shah two years earlier, before she had become a Labour MP. The graphic showed a map of the United States with Israel superimposed in the middle, suggesting that a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict would be to relocate Israel to the US.

Shah’s post was highlighted by right-wing blogger Paul Staines, who writes as ‘Guido Fawkes’:

Naz Shah ... shared a highly inflammatory graphic arguing in favour of the chilling ‘transportation’ policy two years ago, adding the words ‘problem solved’.⁹

Feeding the Naz Shah propaganda blitz in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland, formerly comment editor, argued that leftists view Israel as ‘a special case, uniquely deserving of hatred’, and that this hatred ‘lay behind’ Shah’s call ‘for the “transportation” [of Israel to America] – a word with a chilling resonance for Jews’.¹⁰

A few days later, in the Observer, columnist Andrew Rawnsley echoed the claim that Shah believed ‘that Israelis should be put on “transportation” to America, with all the chilling echoes that has for Jews’.¹¹

By contrast, Israel-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook, who was given a Martha Gellhorn special award for his work on the Middle East, argued that the map ‘was clearly intended to be humorous rather than anti-semitic. I would make a further point. It is also obvious that the true target of the post is the US, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by John Pilger
• Preface: The Devil’s Greatest Trick
• 1. Anatomy of a Propaganda Blitz
• 2. Killing Corbyn
• 3. Smearing Assange, Brand and Chávez
• 4. Israel and Palestine: ‘We Wait in Fear for the Phone Call from the Israelis’
• 5. Libya: ‘It is All About Oil’
• 6. Syria: Instant Certainty Promoting War
• 7. Yemen: Feeding the Famine
• 8. The BBC as a Propaganda Machine
• 9. Dismantling the National Health Service
• 10. Scottish Independence: An ‘Amazing Litany’ of Bias
• 11. Climate Chaos: An Inconvenient Emergency
• 12. ‘Fake News’, Objective Journalism and the No-Business Model
• Notes
• Index