NEW YORK - February 11 was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, an occasion for media commemorations and "never again" reminders.
Today the world knows what happened there although mostly after the fact when it was too late to do much about it. We also know that our own media was not as aggressive in alerting the world about the holocaust for fear of undermining the war effort. The BBC has admitted it had information that it sat on for fear of making it appear that the war was about the survival of the Jews. During that war censorship was widely practiced. Life magazine did not run a photograph of a dead American until 1943, and the director of the Office of Censorship was given a special Pulitzer Prize citation.
After the war, at the Nuremberg Tribunal American prosecutors wanted to put the German media on trial for promoting Hitler's policies. State propagandists were convicted. More recently, hate radio was indicted by the Rwanda tribunal investigating the genocide there while in the former Yugoslavia, Serbian and Croatian TV was criticized for inciting the war that divided that country.
The principle that media outlets can, for reasons of omission or commission, be held responsible for their role in inflaming conflicts and promoting jingoism, has been well established. Many remember William Randolf Hearst's famous yellow journalism dictum, "you give me the pictures, I will give you the war."
These issues do not belong to the past. In Italy this week, the citizens-initiated World Tribunal on Iraq is putting the media in the dock for its role in doing more selling of the Iraq war than telling. Critics there believe the media covered up war crimes, minimized civilian casualties, downplayed the destruction of cities like Fallujah and mis-reported the reasons for going to war and how it was conducted.
Already some of America's major media outlets, the New York Times and Washington Post have published limited mea-culpas acknowledging their pro-war coverage was flawed. In November the Presidents of the News Divisions of CBS, ABC and NBC admitted their coverage was not critical enough. "Simply stated, we let the American people down" admitted David Westin, President of ABC News.
The fact is the TV coverage across the board was totally unbalanced. Of 800 experts on all the channels before and during the invasion only six opposed the war. Only six!
Yet there were no consequences for jingoism posing as journalism. No one was held responsible. Or fired. Sadly, the media template has not changed much. The coverage is still mostly "all about us" with the focus on our soldiers and allies. Iraqis are rarely heard from. Neither are soldiers. Yes there have been stories about torture, but most have been sparked by Seymour Hersh in the New Yorker , not in a big media outlet. CBS admits holding up its story on prison torture for three weeks and did pursue many details we are just learning. Even when many Iraqis said they turned out in large numbers to vote to end the U.S. occupation, most media outlets spun it as a validation of Bush Administration policies. Ironically this great demonstration of staged and imposed "democracy" may yet result in a theocracy even less democratic than Saddam's secular Iraq, if that is possible.
As a former network producer (ABC and CNN) and the author of a book on the Iraq media coverage that spawned a critical documentary film, I was invited to testify before the international tribunal. I know it is problematic for a journalist to offer testimony at an international tribunal in another country. Most of us tend to stay away from the appearance of advocacy or even activism. Testifying overseas- even to a citizen's panel like this could be construed by some as presumptuous or even unpatriotic.
It could denounced as propagandistic (even as many overseas saw little distinction between most of our coverage and a state media system.)
Yet I decided to testify because I believe that our media like other institutions have a responsibility to be accountable, audit their own practices and acknowledge their errors and omissions. We need to admit that there was a "media failure" in Iraq as serious as the intelligence failures. If the spies were guilty of "group think," what about us?
We are living in an age of a profound global media crisis that goes beyond borders and boundaries.
Journalists who are closest to our media system are often in the best position to understand media practices and recount experiences. We know how the industry works and are most aware of the pressures journalists face from government interference and corporate control.
It is time for us to blow the whistle on how we intentionally or not misled the American people to "buy" this war. ("They fell for it hook, line and sinker," says Senator Byrd of our top media outlets.)
It's time for us to reflect on how we were used and what we can do to reform a news industry that is rapidly losing the respect and confidence of the American people.
News Dissector Danny Schechter is the "blogger in chief" at MediaChannel.org and directed WMD (Weapons of Mass Deception) a feature-length documentary exposé of the media coverage of the Iraq war. ( www.wmdthefilm.com )
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