None Dare Call It Censorship

None Dare Call It Censorship
by Jack D. Douglas
29 November 2005

All serious and intelligent journalists today know that the
U.S. government has massive media management brigades
to carefully control what Americans see in the media and,
thus, what they are very likely to believe about things of
which they have no direct experience, such as high-level
politics, finance and foreign affairs. They also know that the
government is extremely effective in secretly censoring the
news by using devices such as "embedded reporting" in
nations like Afghanistan and Iraq which the U.S.
government invades, occupies, and governs.

Yesterday I saw Morley Safer, one of the real old timers of
CBS, once again bemoaning the almost total loss of freedom
in reporting on these invasions and occupations. As he said,
in Vietnam, U.S. and other national reporters could hop a
ride on U.S. or other vehicles to cover anything they wanted
to cover, which led directly to their exposing the Big Lies
of the U.S. military and politicians about what was going on
there. In Iraq and Afghanistan the reporters are "in-bedded"
(as I call it) with the military to prevent such free lancing
and the soaring dangers of guerilla attacks almost totally
prevents their even trying to circumvent the official
censorship. Of course, none dare call it censorship for fear
of being fired and ostracized to Alaska, so he did not use
that forbidden word.

What they do not normally realize or, at least, ever mention
is that the very concept of "The News" now totally blinds
the media people and, thence, the public about the Big
Realities everywhere. We all know that it is common for
"specialists" to focus all their attention on the trees and,
thereby, fail to see the forest. We all know about "Learned
Ignorance," the way in which even truthful, massive facts
can totally mislead about the important Big Realities. In a
society of immense division and specialization of function
and labor, we are continually bombarded by
narrow-minded, even stereotypic thinking about almost
everything. Everyone focuses on the factoids of his narrow
specialty and almost no one puts it together, "draws the
lines to connect the dots," as people routinely put it today.
We know those things, but the media are overwhelmingly
focused at all levels and in every way on narrow views of
realities today's food section, today's casualty number in
Iraq provided by the U.S. military, today's promises by
Bush, today's endless "human interest" kickers, and on and
on. The best and brightest journalists know all of this and
much more but they fall victim to all of these problems
every day in every way. The media are set up that way.
That's how they function. That's what they do, over and over
again, day after endless day in an eternal return of
Groundhog Day. The brilliant analysts of the news media
like David Altheide have shown us over many decades how
the media operate in these ways and the effects they have on
public thinking.

Brilliant media strategists and government propagandists
have worked together intimately for decades to exploit
these facts about the news media to control as best they can
the thinking of the American public about the issues vital to
the politicians who rule the U.S. By the 1980's they brought
all of this together under the direction of people like Lee
Atwater and Karl Rove in the Republican Party and created
a very powerful Media Propaganda Grand Strategy for
controlling public thinking. The Party has daily media-war
strategy consultations at the top, instant response teams,
overnight polling and instant response special ops teams,
daily talking points fed to massive brigades of media
operatives worldwide to make the messages come from a
vast number of seemingly independent inputs, and on and
on. This Propaganda War Against the American People
makes the Big Lie campaigns of Hitler and his media
specialists look totally amateurish.

An obvious example is the Character Assassination
Operation they launch against anyone who becomes or
might become an effective critic of their vital policies in the
media, thus undermining their Media War Strategy. A war
hero Congressman who comes out strongly against the Party
line on Iraq is instantly attacked from a great many
"independent" sources using variations on the day's talking
points. The instant polls and quick response focus groups
track the public response to the Assassination News.

When the polls for Bush and the Party plunged over their
Assassination attacks on the war hero, the Party talking
points immediately reversed their position on him, calling
him a "fine American," a strategic retreat to prepare for a
counterattack recoil to regroup, regain strength and attack
in a new way.

Less obvious are Party campaigns like "Emphasize the
Positive In Iraq." Anyone who knows anything about history
knows that the crucial facts about any war tend to be
negative facts on a narrow front. The U.S. and French
defeated the British at Yorktown over a relatively few days
when 99% of Americans were not paying any attention at
all, but were going on with their daily, happy lives. (They
couldn't get news for days.) But those few days in that tiny
part of America had profound consequences for Americans
and for world history in the past few centuries. What
happened in the U.S. prison at Abu Ghraib was tiny by
comparison with the millions of children going happily to
school in Iraq, but it has already had profound global
effects, increasing the already soaring loathing of the U.S.
for its hypocrisy, Big Lies, and mass killing. The children
going to school did not have any comparable effect. Any
newsman senses that. The U.S. media managers try to
deceive them and the public by trying to force them with
attacks for "Bias" to cover the irrelevant Happy News.

The powerful censorship effects of this Media War Against
the American Public are most obvious in all of the language
used by the American media to talk about Iraq, Afghanistan,
and almost everything else. The media use only the U.S.
government issued words for everything from the U.S. GHQ
in Baghdad "The Green Zone," a very Happy Talk Name
to "Liberation" instead of "Imperialist Invasion and
Occupation," which is what almost all intelligent people
around the world see it as.

The same is true about everything. "Inflation," "Terrorism,"
"Unemployment," "War Crimes," "blindness," and on and
on across the global spectrum is what the Party defines them
as, not what they really are or what we in the public want
them to mean. The Big Media especially speak only in
Government Speak, not in truth speak. That is a fact of
overwhelming and obvious importance in understanding the
Media, but it is a fact that none dare ever mention. The
Media in America are controlled more secretly and in some
ways more indirectly than Pravda and Izvestia in the Soviet
Disunion Empire (not the name they used for themselves),
but their mission, daily operations and effects on
government are basically the same. The U.S. media have
covered a wider spectrum of the public discourse before
invasions and annihilations and vast war crimes, but they
always have fallen in line and saluted once the firing starts.
On the vast majority of crucial issues in social life, from
inflation to taxation and government debt and medical care,
the media "News" stories are little more than parroting of
discussions among government officials and their "experts."
There is certainly more "opinion" in the op-ed pieces and a
somewhat wider spectrum of opinion, mainly from the
Republican wing to the Democratic wing of the Republicrat
Party, than in Soviet Media. But only a tiny percent of the
people, the more intelligent and educated, read even that
narrow spectrum of pre-approved Party opinion, all of it
done in the officially approved Government Speak words.

"Good Journalism" as now taught in the best schools of
journalism is now an enemy of the truth in America and, as
far as I know, around the world where similar Parties rule
and manage their Media in similar ways, always making
adjustments for the local situations. An "Elite" newspaper
like the New York Times is now almost entirely irrelevant
to understanding what is really going on in our world. The
journalists are not purposefully misleading or lying to
people, though some of the top publishers and editors know
exactly what is going on and they go along to get ahead in
the Party or just to make more money by fattening the
corporate "bottom line." The reporters are generally telling
truths about what is going on in Podunk and in Iraq, just as
Pravda (Russian for truth) did to maintain their credibility.
But those masses of little facts are irrelevant to
understanding the crucial facts and the Big Truths in our
world. They are the trees blinding the public to what is
being done to them by The Party. The Media can be mined
for "pearls" of facts, as serious analysts do, but they cannot
be relied on in any serious way to tell you the Truth.

The public needs desperately to tune-out on these Party
Media, just as the best and brightest young people are now
doing more and more. They need to think critically and
creatively, see how the massive dots go together in reality.
When George Bush or one of his armies of media hacks
makes his umteenth pronuncio by reading from a
telepromter Party Script that is not NEWS that is a Big
Lie. Anyone who covers it as News is deceiving you,
whether he intends to do so or not.

People need to swear off on Party Government Speak.
Make up your own names. The GHQ for the U.S. Imperial
Invasion Force in Iraq is The Forbidden City, a huge inner
city where Iraqis are not allowed to go without being totally
vetted by the U.S. Government of Iraq. The Forbidden City
was the term used by the Chinese for the Imperial Palace in
Peking. The U.S. Forbidden City is just like that.

Free men and women think freely. They do not submit to
Party Speak, a crucial fact of life George Orwell made all
intelligent people aware of fifty years ago. Only those who
think freely can be free. Those who think as the Party
dictates through its Media are Party slaves, not free people.