"Plane Shootdowns in the Propaganda System" (An Interesting History of U.S. MediaLies)
Plane Shootdowns in the Propaganda System
The U.S. media treatment of the destruction of the civilian airliner Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, effectively blamed on the East Ukraine “separatists” and especially Putin and Russia, follows a long-established pattern of rapid and indignant acceptance of politically serviceable official claims, despite a long record of official deception on such matters. When we contrast this with the media’s handling of cases where the U.S. or Israel have shot down civilian planes, the contrast and double standard are dramatic and even grotesque.
When THEY Do It
KAL-007. My old favorite is the Soviet shooting down of Korean airliner KAL-007 on August 31, 1983. This was a period in which the Reagan administration was in the midst of a major arms buildup and associated assailing of the “evil empire.” As with the assassination attempt on the Pope in 1981, this event was welcomed as an outstanding propaganda opportunity, and administration denunciations of the Soviet Union were fast and furious. The plane was far off course and flying over Soviet space and near Soviet naval facilities, and it failed to respond to radio challenges from a Soviet fighter plane. A good case has been made that it was on a military mission as well as transporting civilian passengers (P.Q. Mann, “Reassessing the Sakhalin Incident,” Defense Attache, June 1994; David Pearson, “K.A.L. 007,” the Nation, August 25, 1984). The Reagan administration claimed that the Soviets had deliberately shot down a civilian airliner, although it was known from the radio message intercepts—edited for the media to sustain the propaganda lie—that the Soviets had not identified it as a civilian aircraft.
The media got on this propaganda bandwagon with enthusiasm, denouncing the Soviets as “barbarians” and engaging in “cold-blooded murder.” The New York Times had 147 news items on the shootdown in September 1983 alone, covering 2,789 column inches, and for 10 consecutive days it ran a special section of the newspaper devoted to the case. This “savage act” of the Soviet Union as James Reston pointed out, “garnered it the hatred of the civilized world” (NYT, September 4, 1983). The Times editorialized on September 2, “That there is no conceivable excuse for any nation shooting down a harmless airliner.”
This propaganda campaign was a great success for the United States, as the Soviet Union was widely vilified and suffered some temporary harassment at airports around the globe. As reporter Bernard Gwertzman noted in a year-later retrospective, U.S. officials “assert that worldwide criticism of the Soviet handling of the crisis has strengthened the United States in its dealings with Moscow” (NYT, August 31, 1984). As the evidence grew that KAL-007 had been on a spy mission, and as the Reagan administration itself quietly acknowleged that the Soviet pilot had not known that this was a civilian airliner, this fresh evidence was either ignored, kept at a very low-key, or dismissed as unproven or Soviet propaganda. It didn’t interfere at all with this propaganda triumph. Gwertzman needed to make no qualifications as he noted so complacently the success of the official and media campaign against barbarism.
On January 18, 1988, the New York Times published an editorial titled “The Lie That Wasn’t Shot Down.” In it the editors acknowledged that the Reagan administration knew within hours of the shootdown that the Soviets had not recognized 007 as a civilian plane and that the Administration had “misled the American people and the world.” But the paper itself was an integral part of that lie-program, as it rushed into furious denunciations and massive coverage without the slightest scepticism or investigative effort. It took the paper five years to admit that it had been a gullible agent of propaganda and it also admitted that it hadn’t done the research leading to this conclusion. Over the five year period, the paper had downplayed or ignored a stream of investigative efforts to seek out the truth on this subject, the editors preferring to leave the lie that they had so aggressively and intensively disseminated to be corrected by others.
Continued with more on other Plane Downings where the "Rush To Judgement" served Propaganda Purposes at:
http://zcomm.org/zmagazine/plane-shootdowns-in-the-propaganda-system/
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