Why the news media’s job is to groom us
JVL Introduction
Not many of our readers believe that the mainstream media (MSM) are impartial, but are nonethe less – like your web editor – brought up short by how staggering the bias can be, especially in the more liberal, “balanced” MSM.
Jonathan Cook’s years of experience in MSM have left him deeply cynical about the purposes of the media whose job he describes as “manufacturing consent”, as Chomsky and Herman put it back in 1988.
Cook uses their framing to analyse contrasting reports in the BBC, the Guardian, and the New York Times of the large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians killed in missile strikes days apart earlier this month.
His post also includes a delightfully surreal video animating Noam Chomsky’s “5 Filters of the Mass Media Machine”.
RK
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's blog on Wed 10 Jul 2024. Read the original here.
Why the news media's job is to groom us
Large numbers of Palestinians and Ukrainians were killed in missile strikes days apart. The media’s differing treatment of these comparable events is the clue to what the media’s really there to do
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Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News and a former intern with Noam Chomsky, has been running a series of webinars on Manufacturing Consent and learning to outguess the mainstream media. These events take place on the 7th of every month at 7pm.
I would like to add a recent egregious example of lazy and timid journalism. The night that Trump was shot at, his first words were reported on BBCworld service as ‘Where are my shoes? I want my shoes’. (The bbc’s reporter was taking cover some distance from the event BTW) . Yet by morning only Trump’s later ‘Fight, fight’ was reported, and the photos omit the intermediate moments where he forcefully pushed down a female bodyguard, who incidentally appeared to be searching for her sunglasses… This was a farcical scene.
But by next morning not a single news outlet, as far as I know, was reporting it that way, instead even the liberal outlets were bewailing Trump’s titanic fighting spirit and making his victory seem inevitable.
The BBC reporter also retrieved his reputation by claiming to be the first to interview an onlooker who had seen the shooter on the roof and told security guards who failed to act in time…
it seems to me that there is a tapestry of motives here, so that even media outlets who deplore Trump and Farage end up enhancing their image rather than cutting them down to size.
This article rightly slams the western media’s biased reporting of the genocide in Gaza, but I am disturbed by the framing, as illustrated by the following sentence concerning Ukraine:
“The US and its western allies are ready to risk an entirely unnecessary nuclear war, it seems, to win that battle [for ‘full spectrum dominance’].”
Reducing the Ukrainian people’s struggle for self-determination to global power game is a denial of their agency, even form of dehumanisation. It is not their responsibility that the only powers prepared to send them (rationed) arms are the west.
Did not Russia risk “an entirely unnecessary nuclear war” by invading Ukraine, a country that gave up its nuclear arsenal in 1991, in return for “secure borders”, an agreement that Putin violated? And don’t forget that Biden offered asylum to Zelenskiy which he bravely refused, rather encouraging the mass of Ukrainian people to rise up and push the Russians out of the Kyiv region.
The western left has done a great job mobilising against thr Gaza genocide and for self-determination and liberation for Palestine. But they have largely abandoned the socialists fighting for the same things in Ukraine. That makes more difficult the struggle to keep Ukraine out of the grip of the west after the war is over.
I wholeheartedly agree with the post above. ‘From Ukraine to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime’. At the last Ceasefire march I walked with a group called Unite the Struggles which is in contact with progressives and resister in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Sudan, Kashmir, DRC. It was a small contingent for such a big endeavour. It is depressing that Philip ward’s post above had received only one response from JVL readers, and that a thumbs-down! Indicative of wider blindness on the left. Are we still mired in ‘campism’ under a new facade of geopolitics? What happened to politics from below?