Tag: Ashleigh Banfield

If you’re a U.S. reporter, anything but rabidly pro-Israel coverage is dangerous to your career

W.J. Astore

Learning from Ashleigh Banfield’s Landon Lecture of April 2003

Early in 2003, Ashleigh Banfield was a star in the making. A rising journalist at MSNBC, she covered the opening stages of the Iraq War. Before that, she’d made a name for herself covering the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. Smart, pretty, highly skilled, she was heading nowhere but up. Until she gave an honest lecture on her experiences in Iraq and the Middle East on April 24, 2003.

I’ve written before about Banfield’s honest and heartfelt critique of Iraq war coverage in the U.S. mainstream media, which won her no friends at NBC News. In fact, the NBC brass sidelined and essentially exiled her. I recently reread her Landon Lecture at Kansas State University and realized NBC wasn’t just angry about her critique of mainstream media war coverage: they were likely even more incensed at how she humanized and empathized with Palestinians and other Middle Eastern peoples and groups, including organizations like Hezbollah.

Here’s some of what she had to say back then in 2003:

But it’s interesting to be able to cover this [Israel and Palestine]. There’s nothing in the world like being able to cross a green line whenever you want and speak to both sides of a conflict. I can’t tell you how horrible and wonderful it is at the same time in the West Bank and Gaza and Israel. There are very few people in this world who can march right across guarded check points, closed military zones, and talk to Palestinians in the same day that they almost embedded with Israeli troops, and that’s something that we get to do on a regular basis.

And I just wish that the leadership of all these different entities, ours included, could do the same thing, because they would have an eye opening experience, horrible and wonderful, all at the same time, and it would give a lot of insight as to how messages are heard and how you can negotiate. Because you cannot negotiate when someone can’t hear you or refuses to hear you or can’t even understand your language, and that’s clearly what’s happening in a lot of places in the world right now, the West Bank, Gaza and Israel, not the least of which there’s very little listening and understanding going on. Our language is entirely different than theirs, and I don’t just mean the words. When you hear the word Hezbollah you probably think evil, danger, terror right away. If I could just see a show of hands. Who thinks that Hezbollah is a bad word? Show of hands. Usually connotes fear, terror, some kind of suicide bombing. If you live in the Arab world, Hezbollah means Shriner. Hezbollah means charity, Hezbollah means hospitals, Hezbollah means welfare and jobs.

These are not the same organizations we’re dealing with. How can you negotiate when you’ re talking about two entirely different meanings? And until we understand — we don’t have to like Hizbullah, we don’t have to like their militancy, we don’t have to like what they do on the side, but we have to understand that they like it, that they like the good things about Hizbullah, and that you can’t just paint it with a blanket statement that it’s a terrorist organization, because even when it comes to the militancy these people believe that militancy is simply freedom fighting and resistance. You can’t argue with that. You can try to negotiate, but you can’t say it’s wrong flat out.

And that’s some of the problems we have in dealing in this war in terror. As a journalist I’m often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, “Here’s what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here’s what the Lebanese are telling me and here’s what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here’s what they have to say about the Golan Heights.” Like it or lump it, don’t shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

Emphasis added. Original spelling retained. You can watch her speech here. 

Banfield tried to be a real journalist for MSNBC. She tried to understand and report the Israeli perspective but also the perspectives of groups like Hezbollah, and for that she was severely punished.

For Hezbollah, you could say something similar of Hamas today. As Banfield says, you don’t have to praise groups like Hamas (or, for that matter, Israel). But what you should try to do as a journalist is to understand them and to report on them as clearly and honestly as possible. As she says, her reward was to be defamed and dismissed as a slut by a fellow reporter, even called an accomplice to murder, after which her bosses at NBC punished and demoted her!

It’s no wonder that mainstream media coverage by most reporters today is so slavishly pro-Israel. Who wants to be slut-shamed and demoted? Who wants their career ruined just because they sought to understand more than one side (the Israeli/U.S. one) of complex situations in the Middle East?

My brother once quipped: “We learn, good.” MSM reporters in America “learned good” that being rabidly pro-Israel (and, of course, pro-U.S. government and pro-war) is always the safest bet to accolades and promotions from their corporate overlords.

With admirable honesty, Banfield spoke of the horrific face of war at Kansas State Univ. in 2003. Soon after her speech, she was demoted (Image courtesy of KSU)

And, as I wrote in my previous piece on Banfield: Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful. Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Phil Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Jesse Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.

Banfield tried to tell us there’s a difference between journalism and coverage; that far too many voices of dissent had been silenced in America before and during the opening stages of the Iraq War; that war coverage was (and is) far too often both one-sided and sanitized.

Again, it’s worth a few minutes of your time to listen to her lecture and reflect on her honesty and integrity—and how she was punished for it.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/SDrGNzIsZqY?start=3s&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

After watching this, you’ll understand why the reporters you see today on U.S. TV and cable networks are nothing like Ashleigh Banfield.

“War is ugly and it’s dangerous” and it fuels hatred. Yes it is and yes it does, Ms. Banfield. Thank you for your honesty, your integrity, and your courage.

Listening to Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange

W.J. Astore

I’ve caught a couple of videos featuring Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange and want to share insights I gleaned from them.

Let’s start with Julian Assange, currently being punished for being a journalist who actually challenges powerful people by telling uncomfortable truths. When asked what the number one enemy is, Assange replies that it’s ignorance. People are ignorant because the vast majority of the media are “awful,” relying on deliberate distortion and lies to advance narratives that reinforce the already powerful. As Assange notes, nearly every war is the result of lies facilitated by the mainstream media. This is unsurprising, since the media has been coopted by the military-industrial complex. Generally, people don’t like wars (surprise!), but it’s relatively easy to lie and manipulate most people into supporting them.

You can see why Assange had to be locked up in a maximum security prison and effectively gagged.

Awful media coverage is not just about lying; it’s also about eliding the truth. Consider blanket coverage of the Russia-Ukraine War and contrast that with the dearth of coverage of an ongoing genocide in Yemen, of slave markets in Libya, of starvation in Afghanistan, of U.S. occupation of oil fields in Syria. How can you speak out against the latter when there’s a relentless and all-consuming focus on Ukraine as the good guy and Russia and Putin as pure evil?

Chomsky’s insights into the media complement those of Assange. Media talking heads, Chomsky notes, are screened and selected for their obedience and conformity: their willingness to be subordinate, to go along to get along. They are boot-licking careerists, essentially, who learn quickly that there are certain things you just don’t say. And if you should stray and start to color outside the lines, you are slapped back into line, and if that doesn’t take, your crayons are confiscated and you’re demoted, fired, or otherwise silenced. Think again of the Iraq War in 2003 and how Phil Donahue was fired, Jesse Ventura was hired then put on ice because NBC belatedly discovered he was antiwar, Ashleigh Banfield was demoted for speaking out against the one-sided, pro-America coverage that almost entirely ignored Iraqi casualties and suffering, and so on.

Jesse Ventura, paid millions of dollars not to have a show because he was critical of the Iraq War

Along with these insights, I have an anecdote of my own. I know a skilled journalist who actually courts controversy by challenging prevailing narratives. He told me how he visited a journalism school and spoke to a class of would-be journalists. Did these student-journalists want to be the next Assange, or even Woodward or Bernstein of Watergate fame? Of course not! They aspire to be well-paid anchors or opinion-mongers on cable news, or so my friend told me. They’re in it for the money, for access to power, for fame. They’re not in it to call the powerful to account; they want to be among the powerful, and profiting from the same.

And that’s the way it is, as Walter Cronkite might have said.

Silencing War Criticism

dead
Grisly photos that show war as it is, in this case a dead Iraqi from Desert Storm, are not shown by the U.S. media

Silencing War Criticism: The Iraq Invasion of 2003

W.J. Astore

Update (7/19/17): I posted this article at HuffPost, and the site added a video that shows the mainstream media gushing over Trump’s strike against Syria.  The video is well worth watching.  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/596df7a3e4b07f87578e6bd7 or follow this link.

Jesse Ventura, former governor of Minnesota (1999-2003), was a hot media commodity as the Bush/Cheney administration was preparing for its invasion of Iraq in 2003.  Ventura, a U.S. Navy veteran who gained notoriety as a professional wrestler before he entered politics, was both popular and outspoken.  MSNBC won the bidding war for his services in 2003, signing him to a lucrative three-year contract to create his own show – until, that is, the network learned he was against the Iraq war.  Ventura’s show quickly went away, even as the network paid him for three years to do nothing.

I heard this revealing story from a new podcast, the TARFU Report, hosted by Matt Taibbi and Alex Pareene.  By his own account, Jesse Ventura was bought off by the network, which back then was owned by General Electric, a major defense contractor that was due to make billions of dollars off the war.

Of course, Ventura was hardly the only war critic to run afoul of GE/NBC.  Phil Donahue, the famous talk show host, saw his highly rated show cancelled when he gave dissenters and anti-war voices a fair hearing.  Ashleigh Banfield, a reporter who covered the Iraq war, gave a speech in late April 2003 that criticized the antiseptic coverage of the war (extracts to follow below).  For her perceptiveness and her honesty, she was reassigned and marginalized, demoted and silenced.

So much for freedom of speech, as well as the press.

As Phil Donahue said, his show “wasn’t good for business.”  NBC didn’t want to lose ratings by being associated with “unpatriotic” elements when the other networks were waving the flag in support of the Iraq war.  In sidelining Ventura and Donahue, NBC acted to squelch any serious dissent from the push for war, and punished Ashleigh Banfield in the immediate aftermath of the war for her honesty in criticizing the coverage shown (and constructed) by the mainstream media, coverage that was facilitated by the U.S. military and rubber-stamped by corporate ownership.

Speaking of Banfield’s critique, here are some excerpts from her speech on Iraq war coverage in April 2003.  Note that her critique remains telling for all U.S. media war coverage since then:

That said, what didn’t you see [in U.S. media coverage of the Iraq war]? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story, it just means you’re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that’s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid of a horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that.

I can’t tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you’ve got to be on both sides.

….

Some of the soldiers, according to our embeds had never seen a dead body throughout the entire three-week campaign. It was like Game Boy. I think that’s amazing in two different ways. It makes you a far more successful warrior because you can just barrel right along but it takes away a lot of what war is all about, which is what I mentioned earlier. The TV technology took that away too. We couldn’t see where the bullets landed. Nobody could see the horrors of this so that we seriously revisit the concept of warfare the next time we have to deal with it.

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized. [emphasis added]

….

This TV show [Iraq invasion coverage] that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do. [emphasis added]

War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It’s a dangerous thing to propagate.

….

I’m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Nothing has changed since Banfield’s powerful critique.  Indeed, the networks have only hired more retired generals and admirals to give “unbiased” coverage of America’s military actions.  And reporters and “journalists” like Brian Williams have learned too.  Recall how Williams cheered the “beautiful” U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles as they were launched against Syria earlier this year.

It’s not just that U.S. media coverage actively suppresses dissent of America’s wars: it passively does so as well, which is arguably more insidious.  Any young journalist with smarts recognizes the way to get ahead is to be a cheerleader for U.S. military action, a stenographer to the powerful.  Being a critic leads to getting fired (like Donahue); demoted and exiled (like Banfield); and, in Ventura’s case, if you can’t be fired or demoted or otherwise punished, you can simply be denied air time.

When you consider that billions and billions of dollars are at stake, whether in weapons sales or in advertising revenue tied to ratings, none of this is that surprising.  What’s surprising is that so few Americans know about how pro-authority and uncritical U.S. media coverage of war and its makers is.  If anything, the narrative is often that the U.S. media is too critical of the military to the detriment of the generals.  Talk about false narratives and alternative facts!

America’s greed-wars persist for many reasons, but certainly a big one is the lack of critical voices in the mainstream media.  Today’s journalists, thinking about their career prospects and their salaries (and who is ultimately their boss at corporate HQ), learn to censor themselves, assuming they have any radical thoughts to begin with. Some, like Brian Williams, even learn how to stop worrying and love the beautiful bombs.

And so it goes …