MEDIA BEAT
"Media Beat is the insightful weekly syndicated column on media and politics written by FAIR associate Norman Solomon.
It runs in newspapers across the country. Until early 1996, the column was co-written by FAIR Executive Director Jeff
Cohen."
Friday, October 12, 2001
KILLING THEM SOFTLY: Starvation and Dollar Bills For Afghan Kids
NORMAN SOLOMON
The Pentagon's air drops of food parcels and President Bush's plea for American children to aid Afghan kids with dollar
bills will go down in history as two of the most cynical maneuvers of media manipulation in the early 21st century.
Many U.S. news outlets have been eager to play along. A New York Times editorial proclaimed that "Mr. Bush has wisely
made providing humanitarian assistance to the Afghan people an integral part of American strategy." Four days later, on
Oct. 12, the same newspaper still had nothing but praise for the U.S. government's food aid charades: "His reaffirmation
of the need for humanitarian aid to the people of Afghanistan -- including donations from American children -- seemed
heartfelt."
While thousands of kids across the United States stuff dollar bills into envelopes and mail them to the White House, the
U.S. government continues a bombing campaign that is accelerating the momentum of mass starvation in Afghanistan.
Relief workers have voiced escalating alarm. Jonathan Patrick, an official with the humanitarian aid group Concern,
minced no words. He called the food drops "absolute nonsense."
"What we need is 20-ton trucks in huge convoys going across the border all the time," said Patrick, based in Islamabad.
But when the bombing began, the truck traffic into Afghanistan stopped.
In tandem with the bombing campaign, the U.S. government launched a PR blitz about its food-from-the-sky effort. But the
Nobel-winning French organization Doctors Without Borders has charged that the gambit is "virtually useless and may even
be dangerous." One aid group after another echoes the assessment. The U.S. has been dropping 37,000 meals a day on a
country where several million Afghans face the imminent threat of starvation. Some of the food, inevitably, is landing
on minefields.
The food drops began on Sunday, Oct. 7, simultaneous with the start of the bombing. "As of Thursday, a Pentagon
spokeswoman said more than 137,000 of the yellow-packaged rations had been dropped," the Knight-Ridder News Service
reported on Oct. 12. "International aid organization officials say, however, that around 5 million Afghans are in danger
of starvation because the nation's borders are sealed and food supplies are diminishing by the day -- meaning that only
a tiny percentage of the hungry are receiving the U.S. food." The borders are sealed because of the continuous bombing.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld wasn't worried about provoking appropriate derision and outrage when he told reporters on
Oct. 8: "It is quite true that 37,000 rations in a day do not feed millions of human beings. On the other hand, if you
were one of the starving people who got one of the rations, you'd be appreciative."
Avowedly, the main targets of the bombing are the people in the bin Laden network and their Taliban supporters. But the
rhetorical salvoes will be understood, all too appropriately, in wider contexts. "We will root them out and starve them
out," Rumsfeld said, just before closing a news conference with a ringing declaration: "We are determined not to be
terrorized."
Supposedly, bombing Afghanistan is going to make us safer back here in the USA. But as soon as the attacks began on Oct.
7, the FBI called for heightened alerts across the United States -- because the risk of another deadly attack in this
country had just increased. What's wrong with this picture?
Unlike the media herd, longtime foreign correspondent Robert Fisk is exploring key questions. "President Bush says this
is a war between good and evil," he writes in the London-based Independent newspaper. "You are either with us or against
us. But that's exactly what bin Laden says. Isn't it worth pointing this out and asking where it leads?"
Fisk asks other questions that aren't ready for prime time: "Why are we journalists falling back on the same sheep-like
conformity that we adopted in the 1991 Gulf War and the 1999 Kosovo war? ... Is there some kind of rhetorical fog that
envelopes us every time we bomb someone?"
In wartime, media accounts seem to zigzag between selected facts and easy sentimentality. Michael Herr, a journalist who
covered the Vietnam War, later wrote that the U.S. media "never found a way to report meaningfully about death, which of
course was really what it was all about." Obscured by countless news stories, "the suffering was somehow unimpressive."
Accustomed to seeing its military might as self-justifying, the USA powered ahead. "We took space back quickly,
expensively, with total panic and close to maximum brutality," Herr observed. "Our machine was devastating. And
versatile. It could do everything but stop."
In its Oct. 12 editorial, headlined "Mr. Bush's New Gravitas," the New York Times concluded that the current president
is providing exactly the kind of leadership we need: "As he reflected on the sorrow, compassion and determination that
have swept the country since those horrifying hours on the morning of Sept. 11, he seemed to be a leader whom the nation
could follow in these difficult times."
Among the leadership qualities most appreciated by editorial writers is the Bush administration's aptitude for shameless
propaganda. While the Pentagon keeps dropping tons of bombs, it scatters some meals to the winds. While the U.S.
government persists with a bombing campaign that shows every sign of resulting in mass starvation, the president urges
the young people of the United States to send in dollar bills -- "to join in a special effort to help the children of
Afghanistan."
[Note to online readers of "Media Beat": You can access free audio and video of Norman Solomon's recent appearance on
C-SPAN's "Washington Journal" at http://www.c-span.org/journal -- listed under Monday, October 15, 2001. The one-hour
program focuses on media coverage of terrorism and the bombing of Afghanistan. (The audio and video will remain posted
on the C-SPAN site until about October 24, 2001.)
Norman Solomon's latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media." Note to readers of "Media Beat": If you'd like
to see Norman Solomon's syndicated column appear in a local daily newspaper, you can help by contacting the opinion-page
editors of papers in your area and urging that they give the column a try. Editors can make arrangements by phoning
Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles or by sending an e-mail note to mediabeat@igc.org .
Utne Reader called Solomon one of "the fiercest and most articulate media critics around." A Los Angeles Times reviewer
wrote: "The bold, muckraking tone of these columns offers a welcome respite from the decerebrated discourse that too
often passes for contemporary journalism."
The book Wizards of Media Oz -- the third collection of columns by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon -- can be ordered from
FAIR -- http://www.fair.org .]
Copyright © 2001 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)