The author is an Iraq war veteran and the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s congressional candidate in Florida’s 22nd District. Click here to read more about his campaign. Click here to read more about PSL candidates running in local and national elections.
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When Dwyer was acting in a way that would boost public opinion of the criminal war, the media happily made his picture one of the most internationally well-known images of the invasion. This lone image was a far cry from the many hidden images of destruction being visited on Iraqis by the U.S. war on their country.
The media paid no attention to this side of the invasion. Likewise, it paid no attention to Dwyer when he returned home with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; when his marriage fell apart and when severe depression led him to drug addiction. In 2005, the media ignored him when he was in a 3-hour standoff with police, barricaded in his apartment in El Paso, Texas, with a handgun because he had delusions that people were trying to get into his home.
The media paid no attention when, on June 28, Dwyer overdosed on prescription pills and inhalants, and later died in the hospital. The media never really cared about Dwyer; they cared only about his potential as a tool to sell the war to the U.S. public.
“He just couldn’t get over the war,” his mother said. “He wasn’t Joseph anymore. Joseph never came home.”
Marketing the war effort
From the early planning stages of the war, the corporate media has been the Pentagon’s most valuable tool in mustering public support. Across the board, mainstream media outlets offered no critical analysis of the purpose of the invasion or the gruesome toll it would take on the Iraqi people.
We now know that the Bush administration and the Pentagon purposefully implanted loyal military “analysts” in all the mainstream media outlets with the task of boosting public support and optimism for the illegal invasion. CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, National Public Radio and others filled their airwaves with all-out lies peddled by the war-machine’s henchmen.
Journalists who attempted to question the war were silenced. In 2003, Phil Donahue, who had one of MSNBC’s highest rated news shows, was fired for allowing anti-war voices on his program. He was replaced by a slew of pro-war hosts. An internal NBC report soon surfaced that described Donahue as “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” The report worried that Donahue’s show could become “a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
The media role as a mouthpiece for the Pentagon enabled the U.S. military to wage an unprovoked war of aggression, carpet bomb Iraqi civilians, invade their cities, and carry out the daily violence and brutality now characteristic of the occupation.
I spent a week at a forward operating base that was attacked by mortars and rockets day and night, every few hours. I remember the frustration of returning to the main base to see the television news show report a single rocket fired at a building there.
The media thus became the primary vehicle for mischaracterization and distortion of the situation on the ground in Iraq. The task of the media was no longer providing a justification for the war, but showing the war through rose-colored lenses to maintain public support and continue to enable the U.S. government to carry out its heinous crimes. Hidden from the public at home are the dead and wounded U.S. soldiers, and the innocent Iraqis killed or maimed by U.S. attacks.
Embedded journalists are forbidden to publish stories and images that show the toll the war has taken on soldiers sent to die in Iraq. Embedded photographer Zoriah Miller recently accused the U.S. military of censorship after he was kicked out of his assignment for publishing a photo of a dead Marine in Fallujah.
When wounded or dead Iraqis are shown, the media claim them to be victims of attacks carried out by “Iraqi extremists” or al-Qaida, even though U.S. forces perpetrate the vast majority of death and destruction. And most of the attacks by Iraqi resistance forces target U.S. military personnel and their Iraqi puppet forces. You would never know this by reading the capitalist press. Media manipulation is calculated to mislead the public into supporting the war.
‘Just forget about it’
After five years of brutal occupation, the reality of the war has become too clear to be whitewashed by the media. The majority of people in the United States know the justifications for the war were fabricated. Over 70 percent of the population is against the war.
While the people have broken through the U.S. government’s lies, which have been fed to them by the corporate media, the media is still working hard to suit imperialism’s needs. Making us forget about the war is their new task.
Television consultant Andrew Tyndall compiled data that shows that coverage of the Iraq war has been “massively scaled back this year.” The three major nightly newscasts—the CBS Evening News, ABC’s World News, and the NBC Nightly News—have shown only 181 minutes of Iraq coverage so far this year combined. That translates to a paltry two minutes per network per week. (New York Times, June 23)
The war in Afghanistan, which has increased in intensity and violence, has received a mere 46 minutes of total coverage so far this year.
CBS has already “drastically downsized” its news bureau in Baghdad and no longer has a full-time correspondent there. Journalists from all three broadcast television networks have expressed concern that their news organizations will withdraw from Iraq after the presidential election.
Because the gruesome truth about the illegal war on Iraq has become too obvious to cover-up, the media has again come to the aid of the imperialists by attempting to erase it from the public’s consciousness.
The corporate media’s manipulation of public opinion is critical because those who profit from war—including the big media owners—know full well that the people have the power to stop it.
