Articles with the Tag Manufacturing Consent

Silencing academic criticism of Zionism

Manufacturing Consent
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Joel Kovel is a well known American politician and academic, who made the mistake in 2007 to write a book (mildly) critical of zionism. For this he has had to suffer through accusations of anti-semitism and now his employer, Bard College, has fired him:

This document argues that this termination of service is prejudicial and motivated neither by intellectual nor pedagogic considerations, but by political values, principally stemming from differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism. There is of course much more to my years at Bard than this, including another controversial subject, my work on ecosocialism (/The Enemy of Nature/). However, the evidence shows a pattern of conflict over Zionism only too reminiscent of innumerable instances in this country in which critics of Israel have been made to pay, often with their careers, for speaking out. In this instance the process culminated in a deeply flawed
evaluation process which was used to justify my termination from the faculty.

Meanwhile John Yoo is still at Berkeley…

Louis Proyect has more information.

Plucky little Georgia not so innocent after all

Manufacturing Consent, War on south Ossetia
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If there ever was a texbook example of Chomsky’s and Herman’s propaganda model in action, it was the way in which the conventional narrative about the War for South Ossetia was created this August. It was …interesting… to see how quickly western media, (with a little prompting from Washington and London) settled on a cod-Cold War story of plucky little Georgia standing up to the mad and dangerous Russian bear, while still reporting the war as it happened. On the one hand you had journalists correctly reporting how escalating tensions finally led to a Georgian invasion of South Ossetia followed by a Russian response, on the other hand you had the op-ed pages and other commentary roundly condemning this latest example of Russian aggression. As the news cycle moved on the facts of the war disappeared, eclipsed by new news events while the story remained, now firmly established as background assumptions to further reports about the war and its aftermath.

Which is why it’s good to see the BBC reporting that the Georgians were not so innocent after all, even if it comes months too late:

Marina Kochieva, a doctor in the regional capital Tskhinvali’s main hospital, told our reporters that she and three relatives were targeted by a Georgian tank as they were trying to escape by car from the town on the night of 9 August.

She said the tank fired on her car and two other vehicles, leading them to crash into a ditch. The firing continued as she and her companions lay on the ground, she added.

Georgy Tadtayev, a 21-year-old dental student, was one of the Ossetian civilians killed during the fighting.

His mother, Taya Sitnik, 45, told the BBC he bled to death in her arms on the morning of 9 August after a fragment from a Georgian tank shell hit him in the throat as they were both sheltering from artillery fire in the basement of her block of flats.

It confirms what I thought from the start: Saakashvili tried to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians and it backfired, not so much on him as on the Georgian inhabitants of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, who in turn were cleansed from those regions. Saakashvili gambled that Russia was too weak to intervene or that his western backers would help him and he lost.

Ragemongering

Manufacturing Consent, Nu Labour
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Justice secretary Jack Straw says prisons exist to punish criminals and attacks the “criminal justice lobby [sic] for putting the needs of offenders before those of victims”. Immigration minister Phil Woolas says a tough new points-based system to limit non-EU immigration is needed to make sure the UK won’t reach a population of seventy million. Work and Pensions Secretary James Purnell, a while back said the unemployed should be made to work for their benefits.

Three examples of ragemongering, pandering to the worst instincts of the tabloids. Unlike America where fear and hatred of the stranger seems the paramount emotion driving the rightwing press, in the UK it seems to be anger and rage at everybody getting one over on ordinary, decent hardworking folk. Scroungers getting money for nothing from my hard earned wages, criminals mollycoddled by those leftie lawyers, bloody foreigners coming over here and getting everything handed on a silver platter, those are all tabloid stock villains. Amongst a certain part of the electorate there’s a deep rooted conviction that other people are getting away with murder and a strong desire to see them punished for it. It’s a well conditioned reflex that New Labour has been nurturing ever since they first got in power, by a torrent of ill considered and needless legislation designed to trigger these sentiments. Because if there’s one thing New Labour has internalised is that they need the tabloids behind them to remain in power.

For Gordon Brown it must be slightly worrying that such a big hitter like Jack Straw is engaging in this tactic now, just when Gordon himself is widely praised for his handling of the credit crisis, after such a long period of tabloid dissatisfaction with the Designated Successor. It may just be a sign that Gordon’s political position is not as secure as it seems to be, that Straw is positioning himself for a possible leadership battle in the near future. Ragemongering after all can also be used to raise your own profile, rather than that of the party…

The bad news movement: more Israeli propaganda

Israel/Palestine, Manufacturing Consent, Zionism
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In comments to the previous post, Branko suggested I should google for the phrase “bad news from the Netherlands”, as that would produce some interesting results. It turns out there’s a blog with that name, and that this blog is part of a whole range of similar blogs for other countries, all of which only post about negative news from the country they’re dedicated to.

So why are they doing this? Well, it turns out this is an experiment/demonstration to show what happens if you subject people to a constant flow of nothing but bad news about a country: they start thinking badly about the country itself. And why is this done? Because the person behind this experiment, Manfred Gerstenfeld from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, believes this is what has happened to Israel:

In his words, he simply uses the same methodology as the mainstream media, publishing only the bad news in order to create a negative view of, in his case, the Netherlands, and, as a result, showing the power of the media to present almost anything in whatever light they choose: “People form their judgements on countries on the basis of nothing, just a few elements.”

And the Netherlands was just an easy target since the country has a generally positive image and he happens to be reading the newspapers already for his book.

There’s just one or two problems with this methology. Israel has problems with its image not because there’s an international media conspiracy against it, but because it’s an Apartheid state. All negative news out of Israel, with the rare exception, stems from this simple fact. Whether it’s about Israel attacking civilian targets in order to assasinate an alleged Hamas terrorist, a suicide bomber blowing up a pizza parlour, or the latest condemnation by Amnesty for how Israel treats its non-Jewish population, all stem from the same source, what is usually called the “Middle East Conflict”. Gerstenfeld’s blog with bad news from the Netherlands on the other hand is filled with a hodgepodge of news items you can find about most countries: reports about a failing school system, errors in hospital tests, a rise in xenophobia, etc. There’s no connection between the items, other than that they’re about Holland. And for those who might think that Gerstenfeld might have a point with regards as to how the “Middle East Conflict” is reported about: try reading the Israeli press itself sometimes.

This experiment is therefore nothing but propaganda designed to perpetuated the myth that Israel is treated hostile by the Dutch (and other western) press. The sad thing is that it has been partially succesful in this, as several newspapers and newsshows have reported on this experiment without challenging the basic assumptions behind it. Imagine Gerstenfeld doing the same experiment with Iraq and you see how absurd it is. Israel has a bad image because it does bad things, and Gerstenfeld is like the guy who murdered his parents and asked the judge at his trial for clemency, as he was sadly an orphan.

Manufacturing consent and the NIE

Manufacturing Consent, War on Iran
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I came across two great remarks today on how that National Intelligence Estimate helps shape the received wisdom on Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions. First quote is from Left I on the News, second quote from Aaronovitch Watch:

One of the successes of the new NIE is that virtually everyone in the “mainstream” (pundits, candidates, corporate media) now accepts as simple fact that Iran had a nuclear weapons program which it abandoned in 2003.

[…]

“News” in the same sense that it was “news” that Iraq didn’t have WMD – ie, it’s not news, it has been available for years, the international inspectors who know what they’re doing and publish their results have been giving exactly this message, but now some sekrit American intelligences have said the same thing, it is no longer possible to pretend otherwise[.]

The news cycle on this issue was from start to finish driven by the American government. The US says Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and the debate is on whether the US should impose sanctions or use military force to stop this, not on whether or not its claims are actually true. When the issue of truth did arise, it was presented as “he said, she said”, with the truth of the matter, that international inspectors had not found any evidence of Iranian wrongdoing, largely not being reported or only glossed over. Only when the NIE confirmed this was it converted to the official truth, though as Left Eye remarks, with the caveat that Iran had a nuclear programme before 2003, again something I haven’t seen any evidence for.

In other words, there have White House originated limits in the reporting on this issue, beyond which the newsmedia, whether approving or disapproving of the US stance on Iran, whether British, American or Dutch, have largely not strayed. And this is not done through some sort of Stalinist censorship, but purely through the news media’s internalised ideas about what is and isn’t acceptable reporting. As Chomsky and Herman discussed so many years ago, the media operate under a set of self imposed filters, filters that hinder its ability to determine the real truth and instead lead it to present a severely skewed image of the world.