oops! The real stories you missed
By Tom Engelhardt
The San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Denial is a basic human trait. But media denial denies us the knowledge and analysis we need to make reasonable sense of the world. Most American journalists are not decoding or assembling the world for us - they're more or less smashing it into thousands of fragmentary tales and leaving matters at that.
My top nominees for under- or misreported stories last year:
The anthrax killer(s)
We've been swept away by a government-induced wave of hysteria about an imagined smallpox attack on our country. Yet the only weapon of mass destruction used in the United States has been weaponized anthrax, evidently from our own secret weapons labs. Stories on the anthrax assaults have simply disappeared. The Hartford (Conn.) Courant followed the case valiantly for awhile. But what's happened to the FBI investigation or the former Rhodesian and now American bioweapons expert who was a possible suspect?
Our own weapons of mass destruction
The media have focused on three issues: asking whether the Iraqis still have them (or how close are/were they to the bomb), whether the North Koreans will make them (or have them already), and whether the al Qaedas of the world can get their hands on them. All reasonable questions, but also the only mass destruction questions this administration wants anybody to focus on.
There has been some modest coverage of specific U.S. issues, such as the development of nuclear-tipped bunker-buster missiles and the Bush administration's urge for renewed nuclear testing. But I've not seen a single major, mainstream piece on the fate of and state of America's nuclear forces, rescued by this administration from the post-Cold War doldrums.
There's been next to nothing on the U.S. use of depleted uranium munitions in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan - and soon assumably in Iraq again - which threaten to create radioactive battlefields harmful to troops and civilians for eons.
The U.S. global-basing policy
The American military is like the proverbial guest who comes to dinner and refuses to leave. Everywhere we've made war recently, we've remained on ever- more-permanent bases. The post-Sept. 11 period has been a banner time for new bases in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the various 'stans of Central Asia, as well as for the expansion of bases in the gulf. We also now have a base in Djibouti with more of suddenly oil-strategic Africa soon to be garrisoned. Despite articles on individual bases, I've seen next to nothing on the way we are garrisoning vast strategic areas of the planet, particularly the planet's oil lands.
Oil
Elsewhere in the world, oil looks like at least a partial explanation for much that the Bush administration is doing (including preparing for war in Iraq). Here, most of the time, the media are too polite even to remind us that the president, vice president and various members of the administration came straight out of a world where oil was king. After all, how many American national security advisers have had oil tankers named after them?
The Bush agenda
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recently wrote of our economic nonrecovery: "The administration clearly still believes that problems -aren't challenges to be met, they're opportunities to push a pre-existing agenda." I have yet to see a single series anywhere in the press on the way this administration leaped upon the assaults of Sept. 11 and, in areas ranging from energy policy to national security, used the terrorist attacks to promote an endless series of issues that had little or nothing to do with them.
The administration and the environment
Global warming gets a little attention, and certainly each individual Bush assault on environmental laws is covered to some degree but always as a discrete event. No paper has compiled anything like a record, let alone an analysis, of this assault. If we lose our rights, perhaps at some point we can get them back. If we lose species, the world is simply a more empty, less valuable place.
Cold War history
The dangers in our world - Osama bin Laden, smallpox, North Korea's bomb, Iraq's chemical weapons and so on - are always portrayed as imperiling but unrelated to us. But so much that now seems to endanger us (like al Qaeda) arose originally in the context of the Cold War superpower confrontation. For instance, just as the anthrax evidently came out of secret U.S. weapons labs, weaponized strains of smallpox, if used, would probably have fallen out of secret Russian weapons labs. -Wouldn't it make sense to trace the various dangers in our world back to their origins and think about what this means?
The new lingo
We've been overrun by strange new phrases. How, for example, did "homeland, " so redolent of the German heimat, sweep over us without a peep from anyone? Or "regime change," which seemed in a space of about 30 minutes to take up daily residence in every paper, on every prime-time news show and in all our brains. It was as if a coup d'etat had just been performed on the language and a new phrase installed in power. "Regimes," we know, are statist and nasty, and "change," well that's inevitable and undoubtedly good. The clever euphemism sweeps those good old terms - "coup d'etat," "assassination" and "overthrow" - into a basket and wraps them all decorously in the ribbon of change. Is no one curious about its origins?
Connecting the dots
Finally, it's not the specific subjects, but the general urge to connect the dots that seems so thoroughly absent from our media. The assassination by Hellfire missile in Yemen carried out by the CIA under presidential fiat was certainly news. So were, in a fine Washington Post piece, the CIA and the military's use of methods of interrogation and imprisonment-torture, essentially on captured terrorists. As discrete acts, each of these has been described and editorialized about (however weakly).
But assassination and torture -aren't just discrete policy acts in the world. They are two points on a policy continuum, part of a pattern that is transforming our country from the inside. The pattern extends from various legalized "disappearances" in the United States to the fast-blurring lines between domestic and foreign surveillance, the FBI and the CIA, the military and the civilian. These are not simply discrete acts but part of a developing way of life, of being and ruling in the world.
I undoubtedly missed many pieces over the past year, but I think my description fits a certain general picture. I'm afraid it's that of a cowed press in denial about, and so denying us, the larger picture of this administration's assault on us, our rights, our land and the planet. Read the papers, turn on the TV, and you'll see some of the trees (those not being felled by this administration), but catch hardly a glimpse of the forest.
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Tom Engelhardt, author of "The End of Victory Culture," is the creator of www.tomdispatch.com, a Web log of the Nation Institute, where a longer version of this article first appeared.
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