Media blows the trumpet

American journalists and most of the media in the US are products of their education system, which moulds their thinking. Unlike in other countries, the American education system is such that it largely determines the way people think. This has resulted in the phenomenon of most Americans having predictable views on almost every issue. Mainstream American thinking can also be considered subliminally racist in nature, that is, they are racist without realising that they are racist. Even the media is not free of this attitude. Captions on photographs covering the disaster in New Orleans illustrate this point. While desperate white victims who helped themselves to food from grocery stores were described using positive words and were supposed to have "found" food, blacks in a similar predicament were supposed to have "looted" the grocery stores.

In a similar display of double standards, Amy Waldman of The New York Times (NYT) asserts the identity of the London bombers and repeats the claims of the London police without providing evidence. In her report on the terror bombings in Mumbai in 2003, she sought to rationalise the blasts as retaliation for the events in Gujarat the previous year, and wrote, "The Bombay police commissioner, R. S. Sharma, said on Monday night that law enforcement authorities suspected that so-called jihadi groups were also responsible for the blasts, although he offered no specific evidence for that assertion." In the same article, she justified the serial bomb blasts in Mumbai in 1993 that killed hundreds of innocent people as retaliation for riots that occurred in 1992. No one can be blamed for viewing this attitude of Amy Waldman as racism and concluding that NYT considers terrorism to be terrorism only when there are white Christian casualties.

Amy Waldman may or may not be overtly racist, but there is no denying that many American journalists are subliminal racists. This is due to the values they imbibe from their environment, and much of what they say is actually sincere conditioned response fitting in with the framework of mainstream thinking. Thus, when Amy Waldman tries to obfuscate the issue of Pakistanis and Bangladeshis being violent by lumping them together in the non-existent group called "South Asians", she is most likely not being deliberately racist. It is due to subliminal racism that almost every description of Native Americans involves mention of their mystical beliefs and projects them as far removed from modernity, while Christians are treated with reverence even if they indulge in laughable behaviour. For instance, people in New Jersey recently claimed that a Sacred Heart of Jesus statue in a church blinked, and the American media gave the impression that it might be a miracle.

The prejudice of the media folks in considering American thinking as the only acceptable form of mainstream thinking results in a curious phenomenon; they end up behaving like cheerleaders of their mainstream establishment. Despite its stated claims of being the watchdog of democracy, the American media acts as the propaganda arm of its government. This point was on display during the bombing of Iraq when the media faithfully parroted the false claims made by the US government. Instead of being watchdogs and indulging in critical analysis, the media behaved like lapdogs seeking to be petted by Uncle Sam.

The US government exploits this weakness of the media to its full advantage. During the bombing of Iraq, it figured that if secretary of state Colin Powell stood in the United Nations and claimed to have evidence of chemical weapons and other weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the media would believe it. All he had to do was to have a couple of CIA agents next to him and this would lend him credibility.

The next day, The Washington Post's editorial stated, "After Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction." It went on to claim that he "offered a powerful new case that Saddam Hussein's regime is cooperating with a branch of the al Qaeda organization that is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe."

While the rest of the world dismissed Powell's claims, the media in the US fell for this cheap trick. Leading Indian journalist Ashok Row Kavi terms this as "desperate disinformation" - apart from those spreading the disinformation (in this case Americans), no one else believes it.

The Washington Post was not alone in falling for the government propaganda about Iraq. Bill O'Reilly of Fox TV fell for it completely, and ended up having to make a humiliating apology admitting that his "analysis" was wrong. He blamed George Tenet of the CIA for his flawed claims, and in doing so, made the tacit admission that it was not his analysis to begin with; he was just parroting CIA's bogus claims.

For their part, a majority of Americans believed their government, and in a stunning response to directions from their government to stock up on plastic sheets and duct tapes to seal their homes and shield themselves from germ warfare, many of them created a mad rush at department stores. Robert Bartley, an editor emeritus of The Wall Street Journal, even took credit for having "elaborated this threat" before the government had done it. For its part, the government used a colour-coded terror alert system to control the level of fear in the masses. Merely by changing the status from yellow to orange, the government could induce more fear in the minds of Americans. While this whole setup may seem amusing to those outside the US, it must be kept in mind that the government used fear as a mechanism to gain support from people.

Propaganda on behalf of the US government was also carried out by the so-called "embedded" journalists who were attached to the US army and had to get their reports about the war approved by the US army. That is, they were acting as typists for the press releases of the US army.

The American media has acted as the mouthpiece of its government for a long time. A prominent example is the coverage of the 1988 mid-air bombing of the Pan Am flight as it was flying over Lockerbie in Scotland. The American government claimed it was the handiwork of a Palestinian group in Syria, which was bankrolled by the Iranian intelligence agency, and the media faithfully carried these allegations. They even presented "evidence" of a wire transfer of several million dollars to buttress their claim. In 1989, after Libya's refusal to support the American response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, incensed Americans claimed to have found "new evidence" suggesting that the bombing was actually carried out by Libya. The American media obediently changed its tune and claimed that it was Libya after all that carried out the bombing.

The reason for the media's behavior is their lack of knowledge of things in general, and as a result, they look up to their government for authentication of facts. Complaints by American journalists that they are looked down upon by their peers from other countries for no reason are invalid. If other journalists feel superior and behave in an arrogant manner, Americans have only themselves to blame.

The media not only supports the government, but also the Christian evangelists. While the rest of the non-Islamic world has advanced, many Americans are still in a dilemma and have not decided whether women should be treated as human or sub-human. A Tennessee based newspaper, Knoxville News Sentinel, actually carried an exchange between those who wanted to keep women subservient and those who were against women being submissive. It is truly remarkable that they are still discussing this point.

Christianity also finds expression in the form of hateful articles about other religions. Some time back, Jon Carroll of San Francisco Chronicle made a factually incorrect and outrageous claim that Hinduism condones rape as a just form of punishment. Such ignorance is by no means an exception; it is rampant among Americans. Studies repeatedly find that many Americans are ignorant of geography and are unaware of the cultures of other countries. Thus, Carroll's hateful statements may have been sincere statements made out of ignorance about Hindus and India. However, what cannot be condoned is that even after Carroll's article was brought to the attention of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a self-proclaimed media watchdog group, it did not criticise the publication of this hateful article. There is definitely an unwritten rule among both conservatives and liberals in the US, to act as the foot soldiers of Christianity.

Denver Post, a newspaper in the state of Colorado where many staunch Christians live, published another shocking article. According to this article, the central tenets of Christianity and Islam were charity and love of one's neighbour, but Hindu gods were unconvincing and Hindus were despicable people. The article criticised Hindus for not surrendering their hard-earned wealth to the Christians and even termed their wealth as "commercial spoils."

Hatred against non-Christians, possibly subliminal like their racist attitudes, is rampant in the American media. A proposed Buddhist retreat at Berne in upstate New York resulted in a weekly magazine publishing a letter from a pastor, Jay T. Francis, inciting hatred against Buddhists and claiming that the "spiritual environment of our area and more importantly the destiny of our souls is at stake". Two weeks later, an editorial by Reverend C.W. Davis of Altamont was published in which he blamed Eastern religions for leading him into drug abuse in the 1960s, and mocked Buddha for not claiming to have the powers to cure cancers, broken bones, illnesses, and mental disabilities, powers that his god supposedly possessed. It is a well known fact that many Christian priests are recruited from drug rehabilitation centres and prisons and this is the reason for their continued errant behavior.

When a Hindu temple in St Louis was firebombed twice within days of each other in 2003, the media pretended that it was not motivated by hate and swept the news about it under the carpet. More recently, in a chilling reminiscence of Taliban's destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, statues at a Hindu temple at Orlando, Florida, were broken and paint poured into shoes left outside, but most of the media has not even bothered to mention the attack.

The same racist attitude made the journalists react with horror when India conducted its nuclear tests. Not long before the Indian tests, the French carried out tests in the Pacific Ocean, and the media found those acceptable. As noted earlier in the context of American academics, this attitude is a result of the bias in the choice of journalists who write about Hindus. They usually do not have a Hindu background, or if they do, they are usually Marxists.

American journalists also believe that it is the right of Christians, Muslims or Jews to be politically active, but brand Hindus fighting for their political rights as "Hindu fundamentalists". So deep is the antipathy that they do not realise they are prejudiced and consider a Hindu to be a criminal merely for being politically active. A reward of $100 was offered to the members of a journalism related mailing list if they could name just one organisation that asks for the rights of Hindus and yet has not been branded "Hindu fundamentalist" or an equivalent term. The offer resulted in a stunned silence and put an end to a noisy discussion on the topic. The reward lies unclaimed to this day and is now open to everyone. The first person to name just one such group can send in their entry and collect the reward of $100.

Despite the fact that the media indulges in propaganda on behalf of the government and Christian fundamentalists, there is always hope. The New York Times has started charging a fee for letting readers access some of its content on the web. This means that at least some of its propaganda will no longer be distributed for free. Small mercies, these.



Continued Part IV

Arvind Kumar is an expert on the United States.