Manufacturing Consent for World War III by Michael Barker

[Joanne98]

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/manufacturing-consent-for-world-war-iii-by-michael-barker/

When President Bush used an October 17 <2007> White House press conference to threaten that the escalating US confrontation with Iran posed a danger of ‘World War III’ his remark was passed over in silence by most of the media. Those that did report it seemed, for the most part, to accept the White House claim that the president was engaging in hyperbole and merely making a ‘rhetorical point.’” Bill Van Auken (2007).

The key role the mainstream media plays in manufacturing public consent for elite decision makers has a long and inglorious history that has wreaked havoc on progressive aspirations for the development a truly democratic globa l p olity. While the antidemocratic implications of Manufacturing Consent were first popularized in the late 1980s by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s (1988) classic book of the same title, the methods of manufacturing public consent were honed much earlier by communications researchers participating in the seminal (Rockefeller Foundation funded) Communications Group, and many of the founding fathers of mass communication research.<1> Given the high level of involvement of mass communications researchers in refining the means by which to manufacture consent, it is little wonder that recent studies provide ample evidence illustrating the US government’s ability to exploit the system-supportive tendencies of the mainstream media to justify overt wars and cover-up covert wars,<2> distract attention from their support (throughout the Cold War) of right-wing terrorist armies in every European country,<3> legitimize controversial ‘humanitarian’ interventions,<4> play down genocides in which their government is implicated, and manufacture public consent for economic sanctions that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.<5> More recent events (post 9/11) also demonstrate how a relentless propaganda campaign waged through the American media was able to persuade a significant proportion of the domestic population that the destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq was both necessary and justified.<6>

Thus considering the historical willingness of the US media to propound antidemocratic elite propaganda, it is entirely predicable that the media would play an integral role in manufacturing the next perceived threat to international stability, that is, the Iranian ‘threat’. As Marjorie Cohn (2007) notes: “It’s déja vu. This time the Bush gang wants war with Iran. Following a carefully orchestrated strategy, they have ratcheted up the ‘threat’ from Iran, designed to mislead us into a new war four years after they misled us into Iraq.” John Pilger (2007) adds that this ‘threat’ is “entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s ‘nuclear ambitions’, just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage.”

It is then unfortunate to note that international attention is now firmly fixated on the Iranian ‘threat.’ Furthermore, given the success of the Bush administration’s most recent propaganda offensives, which have led to the destruction and ongoing occupation of both Afghanistan and Iraq, there is little reason to doubt that the American government does not have similar plans for Iran. In an earlier study I documented how the ostensibly democratic US-based National Endowment of Democracy has funnelled money to Iranian groups and media projects in an attempt to overthrow the Iranian government from within. However, in an attempt to counter the US government’s ongoing propaganda initiatives, this article will review how the mass media is manufacturing public consent for yet another illegal war by examining the work of radical mass media critics.

Mediating the Path to World War III

“…we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I’ve told people that if you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” President Bush, October 17, 2007.

(For a useful commentary on this statement, see Cuban Missile Crisis Redux)

Judging by the ongoing discussions in both the mainstream and alternative (progressive) media, it is apparent that, one way or the other, the US (and its coalition of willing cronies) has its sights firmly set on bringing regime change to Iran. So far, for the most part, the alternative media has focused on the nuclear threat posed by the Middle East’s most dangerous lawbreaker, Israel. The mainstream media, however, has persistently and erroneously portrayed Iran as the ‘real’ nuclear threat. Even Britain’s so-called liberal media is demonstrating its ability to manufacture consent for elite interests, with the BBC recently devoting an entire (Israeli-made) documentary to the issue of the Iranian problem, ironically titled Will Israel bomb Iran? This is not really surprising, as the governments guilty of involvement are heavily reliant on the mainstream media’s willingness to legitimize their ‘war on terror’, which in turn, could turn out to be the catalyst for an illegal and catastrophic foreign intervention in Iran (and thereby a catalyst for a global war).

In a manner which is eerily reminiscent of the mainstream media’s focus on Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, Dmitriy Sedov (2007) notes that in Iran’s case the media similarly “never stop debating the issue of the ‘Iranian atomic bomb’”. Indeed John Pilger (2007) points out that “e are being led towards perhaps the most serious crisis in modern history as the Bush-Cheney-Blair ‘long war’ edges closer to Iran for no reason other than that nation’s independence from rapacious America.” However, as Pilger notes, despite the proximity of this crisis:

“…there is a surreal silence, save for the noise of ‘news’ in which our powerful broadcasters gesture cryptically at the obvious but dare not make sense of it, lest the one-way moral screen erected between us and the consequences of an imperial foreign policy collapse and the truth be revealed.”

This phenomenon was well documented by Edward S. Herman (2006), who as early as March last year wrote:

“Today’s big news is the possibility that Iran, the Little Satan, might some day acquire a nuclear weapon: the administration says so, the media say so, and now three times as many people regard Iran as the U.S.’s greatest menace than four months ago and 47 percent of the public agrees that Iran should be bombed if needed to prevent its acquiring any nuclear weapon capability.”

In August 2007, Noam Chomsky pointed out that “ithout irony, the Bush administration and the media charge that Iran is ‘meddling’ in Iraq”. Unfortunately:

“…Washington’s propaganda framework is reflexively accepted, apparently without notice, in US and other Western commentary and reporting, apart from the marginal fringe of what is called ‘the loony left.’ What is considered ‘criticism’ is skepticism as to whether all of Washington’s charges about Iranian aggression in Iraq are true. It might be an interesting research project to see how closely the propaganda of Russia, Nazi Germany, and other aggressors and occupiers matched the standards of today’s liberal press and commentators.

…

“The rhetoric about Iran has escalated to the point where both political parties and practically the whole US press accept it as legitimate and, in fact, honorable, that ‘all options are on the table,’ to quote Hillary Clinton and everybody else, possibly even nuclear weapons. ‘All options on the table’ means that Washington threatens war.”

War, Propaganda, the Corporate Media, and the BBC?

Herman (2006) outlines Twelve Principles of Propaganda Used in Setting the Stage for War in Iran,
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/manufacturing-consent-for-world-war-iii-by-michael-barker/

[seemslikeadream]

1. Hi Joanne98

There's a "little thingy" in there that's causing the strike out, it's right after the word stop I think :hi:

[Orwellian_Ghost]

2. "The use of democracy itself as a tool of foreign policy"

Concluding Thoughts

In the case of the mainstream media’s recent coverage of Iranian issues it is perhaps uncontroversial to suggest that the media are conforming to Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s (1988) Propaganda Model by demonstrating their willingness to manufacture of mass consent for elite interests. Of course, this democratic deficit of the mainstream media is particularly noticeable to any regular readers/viewers of the alternative press, as the latter’s stories are almost unrecognizable when contrasted with their mainstream counterparts. That said, like the mainstream media’s coverage of Iranian issues, the alternative media has concentrated almost all of its energy into analysing the ongoing (and potential nuclear) military operations in the Middle East.<12> This is problematic because military threats and interventions (both overt and covert) are only one among many instruments available to the imperial architects of US foreign policy to promote regime change in Iran. As discussed earlier, a relative newcomer to the armoury of foreign policy elites is the use of democracy itself as a tool of foreign policy, a tool which is arguably one of the most potent weapons in the war of ideas waged by policy elites against progressive activists. Nevertheless despite the minimal coverage of such ‘democratic’ tactics, World War III still lurks on the horizon, and as Jean Bricmont (2007) summarised this September:

“All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American ‘left’. The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not – according to our views – but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specifically in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.”

To work to defeat the propaganda war (not to mention the military war) on Iran, it is essential that citizens around the world develop the know-how to see through the propaganda veil that has been cast over Iranian affairs. For example. to counter the influence of best-selling authors like neoconservative-linked Azar Nafisi – (in)famous for writing Reading Lolita in Tehran – concerned citizens would do well to help publicise more honest books dealing with Iranian affairs like Fatemeh Keshavarz’s (2007) recent book Jasmine and Stars: Reading More than Lolita in Tehran. (See interview with the author here, and also read Hamid Dabashi’s (2006) important critique of Nafisi’s work). However, at the end of the day it is vital that al l p eople, with even a passing interest in the foreign affairs of their elected governments, work to create a media that can support democratic principles, not undermine them. This can be done in a number of ways but of course providing financial support for independent media outlets is a must. This is because as Robert McChesney (1997) points out: “regardless of what a progressive group’s first issue of importance is, its second issue should be media and communication, because so long as the media are in corporate hands, the task of social change will be vastly more difficult, if not impossible, across the board.”<13>

http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/manufacturing-consent-for-world-war-iii-by-michael-barker/