In the Water

State-corporate propaganda sinks to new depths in attempt to demonize anti-WTO actions

My goodness, I'd mentioned something about hysteria in the media building up to the anti-WTO protests in December... but the great folks at InMedia HK and Roland Soong of EastSouthWestNorth have just brought up something even more scandalous. It seems that the Sing Tao newspaper has printed this picture...

...alongside sob-stories about the poor police getting beaten by demonstrators. Anyway, the specific caption to this picture suggests that sling-shots with iron-balls were used at the HK anti-WTO protests, thus proving that the demonstrators were brutal and calculating in their attacks on police.

The problem is that I don't remember seeing anyone dressed like that during that week in December! Neither did anyone else I spoke to... perhaps this is because, as Roland points out, the picture was not taken in Hong Kong in December 2005, but in Caracas, Venezuela in 2004! You can even find a copy of this picture on Roland's page from that time, when he reported on demonstrations in Venezuela... also, to confirm things, here is an article from 2004 from the great website Venezuelanalysis.com, featuring the same picture.

So, the Hong Kong media is fabricating evidence in an attempt to deceive the public, create false sympathy for the police and the people they were protecting in the Convention Center, and demonize anti-WTO actions: all right at the time when the cases of 14 people arrested at the anti-WTO actions are being heard in court?

Aside from proving that the police and their media organs are lying, manipulative, not to mention violent sacks of shit, what does this episode prove? As a friend from InMedia told me, it highlights that we need to be more proactive in monitoring and calling out the mainstream media on this kind and other forms of propaganda, or "our society will be eroded and ruined completely." Definitely. And this episode aptly prove that it's not just outright state control or power that affects media freedom, which is where many liberals draw the line, but corporate globalization and its institutions too.

For a decent working model of a group that tries to hold corporate media accountable, I'd refer everyone to Media Lens in the UK and also to En Camino in North America.

My other thought immediately was that people have been jailed, sacked, even taken before various legislatures for much, much less... remember the so-called saga of the "sexed-up" intelligence report from Britain? Maybe we should take this picture, a much more damning and obvious manipulation, very personally and never let Sing Tao forget its actions. Especially when the next few years in the lives of 14 people are hanging in the balance at the moment...

Incidentally, the English-language corporate toilet roll, sorry, newspaper The Standard is owned by the same group as Sing Tao. You might remember I'd blogged earlier about their own scare-tactics and active campaign against anti-WTO protests here and here and here... please visit the websites of these organs and let them know what you think!!

National Geographic

I was looking through the shelves of the local animal-welfare centre's thrift store the other day, and found stacks of old National Geographic magazines from the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. I don't know if anyone's ever sat down and read an issue of this rag, I never really had before either, but it's a strange publication. In between articles on babboons, cheetahs, national parks, and nature walks, they'll tend to stick in a feature on a non-Western country at a politically strategic time. These features seem to have very strong editorial lines regarding which political players and elements in society the magazine 'backs' or feels more favorably towards, and perhaps not surprisingly this editorial line reads much like the Party line from Washington.

So from this angle, it was the dates got me interested. For example, what would such a magazine have to say about Iraq in 1984? The Philippines in 1986? Vietnamese refugees in Hong Kong in 1979? Haiti in 1987?

Turns out I was able to find the issues with articles on all of these areas, and it's pretty interesting reading.

The issue on Iraq, for example, has a feature on a Baghdad under Saddam Hussein... a bustling, "New York on the Tigris" that is going places in the 'Arab world'. The most glowing and overt reference to the political efforts of Saddam is when the author refers to "the equalizing effect of Baathist Socialism on the social and economic life of Iraq." Imagine reading that sentence today... it certainly wouldn't be found in National Geographic. Overall, the article is cautiously supportive of the Ba'ath government, seeing it as a modernizing, secular alternative to the fundamentalist regime in Iran. This was more or less the line when Washington leaned towards Iraq for the same reasons during the Iran-Iraq war, but didn't want either side to achieve outright victory or for even the "secular", "modern" Baghdad to become too independent.

The article on the Philippines is also telling, written shortly after the overthrow of the former US-backed dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Much as Reagan abandoned Marcos politically as his regime teetered, the National Geographic article writes him off and puts its full backing on opposition leader Corazon Aquino. In doing this, it not only erases the history of US support for Marcos, it also beats the reader over the head with the idea that the People Power uprising was completely led by Aquino and her good judgement, that it was a middle-class movement with pro-US inclinations, and had nothing to do with the continuing insurgency involving the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP). This is also more or less false, since Marcos was a staunch ally of the US government, and the CPP as an organization was central to politicizing a generation of activists and creating the social movement that resisted Marcos' rule (particularly under martial law). The article ends by setting up a dichotomy between People Power and the New People's Army (NPA, the CPP's armed wing), thus echoing the US government stance of seeing in the opposition-- at least in Aquino herself and in the more elite sections of her movement-- a potential ally for its interests in the region, and against elements such as the CPP.

Haven't read the other pieces yet, but I'll let you know more when I do. Though judging from the pieces so far there won't be any surprises...

The Great Reporters Without Borders Swindle

A quick link to a very important story. Salim Lamrani has a new article up on ZNet with some new information confirming what he calls the "dubious and partisan" work of Reporters Without Borders (RSF). There have for a while been criticisms from many people on RSF's work on Colombia, Haiti, Venezuela and other areas that are sensitive and strategic to US imperial interests...

Aside from the fact that RSF has been receiving money from the Reaganite funding agency National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and reflects such a bias in the selection of its work, Lamrani ends with another, more fundamental point:

Reporters without Borders is at the service of governments and the powerful economic and financial interests. It is the reason why the main threat to freedom of the press, the concentration of the means of information, has never been denounced by Mr. Ménard’s organization.

This is a point that I brought up earlier on this blog, after reading a report by the Hong Kong Journalists' Association that focused on state interference and neglected to mention this basic point that corporate power was a threat to press freedom...

For me Lamrani's article also brings up a lot of general issues about funding agencies and funded 'civil society' organizations, and is sort of lnked to another point I brought up earlier on the large groups involved in the HK democracy movement. There are many, many funded NGOs in Hong Kong,  and many of these  'civil society' groups are awash with money from the NED, NDI, USAID and other arms of government and corporate interests from around the world... China, of course, is a particularly strategic area of the world, and this context of the 'world system' is something we should have no illusions about.

So while RSF has been pretty well exposed here, perhaps similar scrutiny on the NGO-industrial-government complex here in HK and wherever we are would be in order... so that we can assess their work, the level of consistency or partisanship regarding the generally desirable principles that they profess to uphold, and to figure out how to deal with the presence & work of these groups in the context of the wider social justice movement...

Some Tools for Media Analysis

Brian Dominick is co-editor of The NewStandard (TNS), a unique media outlet in the US because it is non-corporate and advertiser free, yet manages to produce hard-hitting, original news items on a daily basis.

TNS' editors are also very insightful in their analysis of corporate media reporting, its biases, and the range of debate that this represents. Most recently, I've read three short case studies by Brian where he methodically takes apart a couple of typical corporate media reports. These cases are pretty instructive in terms of some of the techniques used.

The most recent is this decimation of a report on the pharmaceutical industry that was aired on National Public Radio (NPR) in the US. It is a particularly blatant example of corporate propaganda, on a so-called "listener-supported", "public" radio station that receives corporate donations and co-produces programs with the likes of Microsoft.

The other, earlier case study has to do with the reporting of the Associated Press, the large 'news wire service' whose reports are picked up by media outlets around the world. This case study looks specifically at the structure of a report and the language used, and how certain points of view are evident in a report's construction even if they aren't stated outright. Particularly fascinating for me was Brian's look at the use of active and passive voices in this particular AP report:

The AP likes to portray the news as stuff that happens to people. So soldiers “were killed” and an Iraqi “was handcuffed and humiliated.” If you pay close attention, you’ll notice that people rarely do anything in AP stories. Mostly, stuff happens to them.

Perhaps some of the topics and the outlets involved are US-specific, but the methods of analysis used are important tools for looking at media reporting anywhere. Examples of groups which focus on such analysis in other countries include Media Lens in the UK and En Camino which is based in Canada...

We could certainly use a group like this over here! I remember reading a report on media freedom by the Hong Kong Journalists Association last year which was very thorough on the subject of state pressure and government interference in the media, but was virtually blind to that other elephant in the room, the institutions of corporate power.

Such an investigation is virtually begging to be done, and one wonders what a more honest and comprehensive analysis of reporting in HK might reveal...

Bloggers scare the crap out of Rupert Murdoch

And THAT'S why I keep this site! Well, one of the reasons, I suppose. Despite the fairly meagre hits for this blog, it's reports like this that put a smile on my face... forget the strange analysis offered by Murdoch and revel in the quaking boots of the corporate media...

In a speech to American editors in Washington, Mr Murdoch issued a stark warning to the industry, arguing that the web was "a fast-developing reality we should grasp".

He said consumers wanted "control over the media, instead of being controlled by it", pointing to the proliferation of website diaries known as "blogs" and message boards.

And newspaper editors simply cannot afford to ignore this, he said, or to look down on readers or ignore what they actually wanted.

Heh heh.

Of course, this whole issue of "not ignoring what readers actually want" is the usual, empty argument made in mainstream economics that markets are simply efficient mechanisms for 'responding to peoples' needs and wants'. Thus Murdoch can play the saint and chide his colleagues for "looking down on readers"...

As it so happens, I once transcribed a phenomenal talk called War, Propaganda, Empire by the model journalist P. Sainath (who is often-quoted by me) in which he mentioned old Murdoch and took up this very point with reference to the media industry...

As Sainath says in this talk, the problem isn't individual editors or papers who are "looking down on readers" and not giving them what they want due to to some improper adherence to market logic or the supply-and-demand argument, it's in fact the fundamental assumption that corporate godzillas in the media and other industries operate by "responding to peoples' needs" that is an insult to the public...

Right through the 70s and the 80s, two of the fastest growing sectors of the global economy were information and armaments. And the growing integration between these two sectors, the rapid integration between the sectors of information and armaments, had and has very obvious implications for the content of information that we get, for the kind of media environment that we live in.

These huge conglomerates, these little oligarchies, about 6 of them, whether you are taking Time-Warner or Disney… just take Time Warner. Its market value is equal to the combined GDP of say Mali, Mauritania, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and half a dozen other countries. The kind of clout it gives these guys is something enormous and astonishing. And this whole business about “giving the public what it wants” is essentially an attitude of enormous disrespect for the public. It’s not what the public wants, the idea that the public wants something and they are being given it is very misleading. It’s what I want to give the public, which my advertisers want to give the public, which my sponsors want to give the public, and the public, if it has very few choices, will take...

Here here!

Guardian: The Nazis forced Israeli settlers in Gaza to wear stars

The Guardian really dropped the ball on this one.

"Jewish settlers wear emblem similar to one forced on them by the Nazis in protest at Israel's plan to evacuate them." (World headlines, December 22 2004)

Let's forget the completely opportunistic, disrespectful lack of proportion that is inherent in such a comparison and look at how the newspaper chose to report it. In fact, let's just look at this one, above line.

I'm pretty sure that settlers in Gaza did not have any emblems "forced on them by the Nazis."

How could the reporters get away with this ridiculous historical error? Because they have begun by conflating the terms "Jewish" and "Israeli"... ie. "Jewish settlers" rather than "Israeli settlers".

While the government of Israel would certainly appreciate the acknowledgement that it speaks and acts for all Jewish people and therefore has some kind of higher moral authority for its occupation, this is patently false and utterly illogical. I've met many Jewish people who would heatedly disagree with any such claim.

But once the religious and political monikers are confused, as in the quoted line, it's easy to come up with lines like "settlers wear emblem similar to those forced on them by the Nazis." You know, they're Jewish settlers, the Jews had to wear emblems under the Nazis, therefore the settlers had emblems "forced on them."

On a wider level, it's easy for a media outlet to misrepresent history in grossly distorted ways.  A simple line such as the one above can already take many incorrect assumptions as its foundation, and end up serving the interests of power and essentially justifying the incalculable suffering of the powerless- in this case, the Palestinians.

Gary Webb 1955-2004

Gary Webb, the US investigative journalist who reported on the links between the CIA, the Contras, and the rise of crack cocaine in US cities, is dead.

Webb was one of those rare journalists who did his job, and was rewarded for it by being vilified in the mainstream press, driven out of journalism, and having his articles dismissed as "discredited" in his obituary... Webb's series  'Dark Alliance' was originally printed in the San Jose Mercury News, but is no longer available on the newspaper's website. Luckily some people have put the series up on their websites, and it can be read here.

The excellent US website Counterpunch has featured a piece by Webb from 2001, where he maintains correctly that not one fact that he brought up through his articles was successfully challenged. Counterpunch editor Alexander Cockburn cites the vilification campaign against Webb as "a very dark day in the history of American journalism."

This 1996 cartoon from Tom Tomorrow on Webb's story is also worth taking a look at.

RIP