Tag: Jesse Ventura

Dissent Is Needed More than Ever

W.J. Astore

Dissent and critical thought are needed most of all in times of war. Yet it’s precisely the time when people are pressured the most to silence their doubts, to mindlessly conform, and to wave the flag and to cheer for the “good” guys against the “bad” ones.

Dissent is easy to tolerate when it’s about trivial matters that don’t challenge or involve prevailing power structures. Chomsky and Herman famously wrote “Manufacturing Consent,” which is another way of saying that dissent itself is manufactured and controlled, providing us with an illusion that democratic debate is allowed and encouraged in America. But of course dissent isn’t tolerated when it threatens power structures, profit margins, and prevailing narratives.

We see this clearly in the amount of dissent policing and information quashing about the Russia/Ukraine war. Look at what happened to the RT (Russia Today) network in the USA (RT America). It was dropped by DirecTV and forced to layoff its staff and cease operations. It’s easy to cheer something like this if you think or have been told everything Russian is evil, but the loss is considerable to democracy and to free speech.

I didn’t watch a lot of RT America, but I appreciated the network’s support of informed critics like Chris Hedges and Jesse Ventura. Hedges and Ventura, both freethinkers, were excluded by the mainstream media in the U.S. Ventura’s case is especially revealing. He had a three-year, multi-million dollar contract with MSNBC for a talk show in 2003 that was cancelled when the network realized he was against the Iraq War. The network honored the contract, paying him roughly $6-8 million while keeping him off the air for three years. Millions in hush money for no work sounds like a good deal, but it’s obviously not in the interest of free speech.

Jesse Ventura on RT: An informative, provocative, and often funny show

When I started writing for TomDispatch.com in 2007, posting articles that called into question the official narrative of “progress” in the Iraq and Afghan Wars, there were exactly two TV networks that asked to interview me: Al-Jazeera and RT America. (I turned them down, mainly because I was working in rural Pennsylvania and had no time to travel to New York City for in-studio interviews.) No mainstream media network showed any interest. I’m not complaining here — I’m just stating facts. Ask yourself how many times you’ve seen and heard antiwar voices and penetrating criticism on NBC, CBS, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, and similar networks. You won’t see and hear it there because it’s considered bad for business.

Why is it bad for business? Advertisers don’t like it. You know: companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and similar bastions of the military-industrial complex. Those same companies are often part of multi-national conglomerates that own the networks. They are not about to sanction shows or grant airtime to well-informed critics like Hedges and Ventura. Why would they? Profit and power trump free speech every time.

Dissenting voices are still out there, but they are kept on platforms where their reach is often limited by computer algorithms that send people to mainstream sites first. For what it’s worth, I look for alternative perspectives at the Jimmy Dore Show, at Useful Idiots, at Breaking Points, and from journalists like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, and Caitlin Johnstone, among others.

I also continue to check mainstream sources like the New York Times, NBC News, and PBS, as well as subscribing to old-fashioned paper magazines like The Nation, The New Republic, and The Baffler. And I’m not above watching Tucker Carlson when he features important voices like former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.

Americans, citizens of what is allegedly a democracy, deserve access to the widest possible range of sources and critics. Denying the same to us is censorship. It limits thought, it stifles debate, and it makes us much less than what we could be as a democracy and as a people.

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 …