Echo Chamber

When I was a 20-year-old kid, a college student working afternoons at a movie theatre in San Francisco's Marina District, I realized we were going to war in Vietnam.

One sleepy September p.m. in 1964, as I stood idly in the cool darkness of the theatre auditorium, the weekly Hearst Newsreel began unspooling a story from a place along Vietnam's east coast called the Gulf of Tonkin. Yes, we still had the old black-and-white movie newsreels; Hearst's was the last survivor of that now extinct species, and it died the next year. However, the media role this particular newsreel played that day -- disseminator of government war propaganda -- is alive and well in today's corporate-owned and government-approved establishment media.

"Iraq is not Vietnam," says media critic Norman Solomon, "(but) War after war, decade after decade, the US news media have continued to serve those in Washington who strive to set the national agenda for war and lay down flagstones on the path to military intervention.

"From the US media's fraudulent reporting about Gulf of Tonkin events in early August 1964 to the fraudulent reporting about supposed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in the first years of the 21st century, the US news media have been fundamental to making war possible for the United States," Solomon charges, continuing the line of attack established in his several books on the U.S. news media, in which he frequently compares our corporate news establishment to the now-defunct Soviet dailies, Pravda and Izvestia.

That Hearst newsreel showed pictures of Soviet weapons -- automatic rifles and grenade launchers -- supposedly captured from North Vietnamese PT boats. "Evidence of aggression from the North," the narrator ominously intoned, as if he were Orson Welles performing an exorcism.

I remember thinking, "Something's not right," as I watched this weak attempt to portray North Vietnam as a threat to America's security. Those few pieces of tinny-looking Russian hardware seemed to me a very feeble menace compared with the vast might of the American war machine. But in the weeks that followed, network news and the print media pumped up the significance of the fictional "Gulf of Tonkin Incident" until the intimidated Congress passed the resolution of the same name, giving the president unilateral warmaking powers, with only two dissenting votes.

Fast forward to 2002 and 2003, and the Bush administration's need to manufacture a pretext for an invasion of Iraq, and once again the corporate media, so bitterly and frequently maligned by the right-wing noise machine, jumped into the breach to serve as the primary organ pipe for conveying the government's war fever propaganda.

"We need to confront the roles of the corporate media in helping to drag the United States into one war after another," says Norman Solomon. "In a country with significant elements of democracy, it matters what people think. The propaganda functions of media are crucial for the war makers."

"There are exceptional news reports," he concedes, adding "By definition, they're exceptions. What matters most is the routine coverage that bounces around the national echo chamber. Repetition is the essence of propaganda. And the messages of the warfare state are incessant."

"Echo chamber" is certainly the descriptor par excellence of the media's role in the run-up to Iraq. While there were some reporters like the New York Times's Judith Miller who went above and beyond what her government mentors expected of her, manufacturing tales of endless vistas of Iraqi warehouses, laboratories, and underground installations full of bacterial weapons, poison gases, and nuclear materials, most corporate media reporters simply and credulously repeated the administration's WMD claims, unedited, unexamined, and unchallenged. In doing so they acted not as journalists, but White House shils.

This opening segment that ran on CNN's "Moneyline," hosted by Lou Dobbs, on February 6, 2003 is typical of the corporate media's pre-Iraq-War reporting.

LOU DOBBS, HOST: Good evening. Tonight President Bush delivered a clear message saying, quote, "Saddam Hussein has to be stopped." The president also bluntly challenged the United Nations to take tougher action to disarm Iraq. The president's comments came as Secretary of State Colin Powell pressed the case against Iraq on Capitol Hill. Senior White House Correspondent John King joins us now from the White House -- John.

JOHN KING, CNN SENIOR WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: Lou, after that appearance on Capitol Hill Secretary Powell came here to the White House to brief the president on reaction to his presentation to the U.N. Security Council yesterday.

Mr. Bush then came into the Roosevelt Room here at the White House with Secretary Powell. He said there now should be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has made his choice and has actively defying the will of the United Nations Security Council. In a blunt message to the council, Mr. Bush said Saddam's made his choice. The council's turn now to make it's choice.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Now, the Security Council will show whether its words have any meaning. Having made its demands, the Security Council must not back down. When those demands are defied, and mocked, by a dictator.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: Mr. Bush said the Powell presentation should have removed any doubt that Iraq has active chemical and biological weapons programs, that it is actively conspiring to hide things from the inspectors. And Mr. Bush said that it is allowing an al Qaeda terrorist cell to operate out of Baghdad, a terrorist cell he said was responsible for the recent killing of a U.S. diplomat.

All of this begs the question, who produced this segment? CNN? Or the White House?

Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because both CNN and the White House serve the same corporate masters. Big corporations, many of them dependent on the business of warfare or preparation for war, own the networks and largest print media outright. They don't own the government, but have penetrated the decision-making process through bribery, which they are pleased to call "campaign contributions," and that curious process of largesse distribution known as "lobbying."

The government and the establishment media are joined at the hip, and united for the accomplishment of no honorable purpose.

"Last year, while doing research for my book 'War Made Easy,'" Norman Soloman observes, "I read the annual reports of many military contractors for the Pentagon - small, medium and large corporations. Those annual reports were clear: War is very profitable for our company. We expect more war, and that will mean a cornucopia of profits."

Now that we've come to grief in Iraq as we did in Vietnam, it's painfully obvious that the United States can no longer afford these kinds of corporate profits; the war machine's profits are killing the rest of us.