Posted on
Mar 24, 2013
By Chris
Hedges
I am not sure
exactly when the death of television news took place. The descent was gradual—a
slide into the tawdry, the trivial and the inane, into the charade on cable
news channels such as Fox and MSNBC in which hosts hold up corporate political
puppets to laud or ridicule, and treat celebrity foibles as legitimate news.
But if I had to pick a date when commercial television decided amassing
corporate money and providing entertainment were its central mission, when it
consciously chose to become a carnival act, it would probably be Feb. 25, 2003,
when MSNBC took Phil Donahue off the air because of his opposition to the calls
for war in Iraq.
Donahue and
Bill Moyers, the last honest men on national television, were the only two
major TV news personalities who presented the viewpoints of those of us who
challenged the rush to war in Iraq. General Electric and Microsoft—MSNBC’s
founders and defense contractors that went on to make tremendous profits from
the war—were not about to tolerate a dissenting voice. Donahue was fired, and
at PBS Moyers was subjected to tremendous pressure. An internal MSNBC memo
leaked to the press stated that Donahue was hurting the image of the network.
He would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war,” the memo read.
Donahue never returned to the airwaves.
The celebrity
trolls who currently reign on commercial television, who bill themselves as
liberal or conservative, read from the same corporate script. They spin the
same court gossip. They ignore what the corporate state wants ignored. They
champion what the corporate state wants championed. They do not challenge or
acknowledge the structures of corporate power. Their role is to funnel viewer
energy back into our dead political system—to make us believe that Democrats or
Republicans are not corporate pawns. The cable shows, whose hyperbolic hosts
work to make us afraid self-identified liberals or self-identified
conservatives, are part of a rigged political system, one in which it is
impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America,
General Electric or ExxonMobil. These corporations, in return for the
fear-based propaganda, pay the lavish salaries of celebrity news people,
usually in the millions of dollars. They make their shows profitable. And when
there is war these news personalities assume their “patriotic” roles as
cheerleaders, as Chris Matthews—who makes an estimated $5 million a year—did,
along with the other MSNBC and Fox hosts.
It does not
matter that these celebrities and their guests, usually retired generals or
government officials, got the war terribly wrong. Just as it does not matter
that Francis
Fukuyama and Thomas
Friedman were wrong on the wonders of unfettered corporate capitalism and
globalization. What mattered then and what matters now is likability—known in
television and advertising as the Q score—not honesty and truth. Television
news celebrities are in the business of sales, not journalism. They peddle the
ideology of the corporate state. And too many of us are buying.
The lie of
omission is still a lie. It is what these news celebrities do not mention that
exposes their complicity with corporate power. They do not speak about Section
1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act, a provision that allows the
government to use the military to hold U.S. citizens and strip them of due
process. They do not decry the trashing of our most basic civil liberties,
allowing acts such as warrantless wiretapping and executive orders for the
assassination of U.S. citizens. They do not devote significant time to climate
scientists to explain the crisis that is enveloping our planet. They do not
confront the reckless assault of the fossil fuel industry on the ecosystem.
They very rarely produce long-form documentaries or news reports on our urban
and rural poor, who have been rendered invisible, or on the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan or on corporate corruption on Wall Street. That is not why they are
paid. They are paid to stymie meaningful debate. They are paid to discredit or
ignore the nation’s most astute critics of corporatism, among them Cornel West, Medea Benjamin, Ralph
Nader and Noam Chomsky. They are paid to chatter mindlessly, hour after hour,
filling our heads with the theater of the absurd. They play clips of their
television rivals ridiculing them and ridicule their rivals in return.
Television news looks as if it was lifted from Rudyard Kipling’s portrait of
the Bandar-log monkeys in “The Jungle Book.” The Bandar-log, considered insane
by the other animals in the jungle because of their complete self-absorption,
lack of discipline and outsized vanity, chant in unison: “We are great. We are
free. We are wonderful. We are the most wonderful people in all the jungle! We
all say so, and so it must be true.”
When I
reached him by phone recently in New York, Donahue said of the pressure the
network put on him near the end, “It evolved into an absurdity.” He continued:
“We were told we had to have two conservatives for every liberal on the show. I
was considered a liberal. I could have Richard Perle
on alone but not Dennis Kucinich. You felt the tremendous fear corporate media
had for being on an unpopular side during the ramp-up for a war. And let’s not
forget that General Electric’s biggest customer at the time was Donald Rumsfeld
[then the secretary of defense]. Elite media features elite power. No other
voices are heard.”
Donahue spent
four years after leaving MSNBC making the movie documentary “Body of War” with
fellow director/producer Ellen Spiro, about the paralyzed Iraq War veteran
Tomas Young. The film, which Donahue funded himself, began when he accompanied
Nader to visit Young in the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in
Washington, D.C.
“Here is this
kid lying there whacked on morphine,” Donahue said. “His mother, as we are
standing by the bed looking down, explained his injuries. ‘He is a T-4. The
bullet came through the collarbone and exited between the shoulder blades. He
is paralyzed from the nipples down.’ He was emaciated. His cheekbones were
sticking out. He was as white as the sheets he was lying on. He was 24 years
old. … I thought, ‘People should see this. This is awful.’ ”
Donahue noted
that only a very small percentage of Americans have a close relative who fought
in Iraq or Afghanistan and an even smaller number make the personal sacrifice
of a Tomas Young. “Nobody sees the pain,” he said. “The war is sanitized.”
“I said,
‘Tomas, I want to make a movie that shows the pain, I want to make a movie that
shows up close what war really means, but I can’t do it without your
permission,’ ” Donahue remembered. “Tomas said, ‘I do too.’ ”
But once
again Donahue ran into the corporate monolith: Commercial distributors proved
reluctant to pick up the film. Donahue was told that the film, although it had
received great critical acclaim, was too depressing and not uplifting.
Distributors asked him who would go to see a film about someone in a
wheelchair. Donahue managed to get openings in Chicago, Seattle, Palm Springs,
New York, Washington and Boston, but the runs were painfully brief.
“I didn’t
have the money to run full-page ads,” he said. “Hollywood often spends more on
promotion than it does on the movie. And so we died. What happens now is that
peace groups are showing it. We opened the Veterans for Peace convention in
Miami. Failure is not unfamiliar to me. And yet, I am stunned at how many
Americans stand mute.”
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