Newsspeak

Do you ever get tired of terms that find their way into news stories over and over again. Here are a few that I would like to see retired.

Heavily-fortified green zone: this of course is that large swath of land in Baghdad that houses the 104-acre American embassy and the Iraqi government. Green zone is now forever paired with heavily-fortified as if to try to drum into our heads that the area is safe for the employees and politicians therein; this pairing is even used to describe attacks on the enclave, like the one that occurred the other day. So, is the use of this term an ironic wink to the reader that the heavy fortifications are not fulfilling their purposes, or, is it an attempt to brainwash us by word association into believing that our attempts at safety in the midst of carnage are succeeding?

Anti-American cleric: this is the term used to describe Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shi’ite cleric who holds sway in Sadr City and who has the support of many of the poorer residents of Iraq. News organizations from Fox, to USA Today, to the New York Times all use this expression as a lead-in to al-Sadr. Apparently, the only way we can understand this individual and his relationship to his people, his country and the world is to give him the epithet “anti-American”. This does echo the Manichean presidential pronouncement after the September 11, 2001 attacks that individuals and countries can either be “with us” or “with the terrorists”, and continues the fallacious notion that we as a people are too stupid to understand nuances.

(Pick your country) tanks and troops: an expression that was used ad nauseum when Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006 [as in Israeli tanks and troops] and is also used to describe our own actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Perhaps by substituting the term troop (a word which implies an amorphous group) for soldier (a term that describes a human being) the media are trying to deflect our attention from the individual toll our country’s policies and actions are taking.

Lest you think I am in some way fixated on the Iraq war (since apparently we Americans have severe attention span problem, unable to hold Iraq and the economy in our brains at the same time), I also offer the following item:

Going forward: this is an entirely overused expression which means from now on. It appears to have some business connotations and I suppose the notion of movement is important in the corporate world. But it has morphed from a business buzzword to a constant annoyance on NPR and in other news reports. Yes, it is even used in reports on the Iraq war.

If you have any other examples of tired, silly, overused expressions, you’re welcome to add them in a comment.

Media manipulation

One thing the mainstream media excels at is pummeling the public with the images they deem important. It will be difficult to forget the constant barrage of images of Bush, Cheney, Rice and Powell as they were given free reign of the airwaves to hawk their lies. The constant drumbeat of WMD, aluminum tubes, mushroom clouds, and of course Iraq’s share of responsibility for the 9/11 attacks was so effective that even today there are still many people who believe that our invasion of Iraq was a form retribution and self-defense. Dissenting voices were given little if any access to the public airwaves.

Now we are in an election season and the focus has changed somewhat. Chastened by accusations of favoritism, the media have zeroed in on Barack Obama’s questionable associations. For a while we were treated to all Louis Farrakhan all the time. But Obama’s rejection and repudiation of Farrakhan necessitated another image. Enter Jeremiah Wright, candidate Obama’s now former pastor. On a bright note, this may finally put to rest the ridiculous public obsession that Obama might possibly be of the Muslim faith. Still, like the WMD hawkers of yesteryear, Mr Wright’s image and his damnation of American foreign policy and the devastation it has caused people of color appears in a continuous loop on the nightly news, the morning news, the overnight news, with nary a suggestion that what he is saying about our foreign entanglements might contain a kernel of truth. Of course, the same press that inundates us with the images of Jeremiah Wright has totally ignored the equally tactless John Hagee, founder of the Citizens United for Israel (CUFI), and endorser of John McCain. Perhaps pastor Hagee’s offensive language is not directed at the right people.

In its search for ratings and profits, the mainstream press has abrogated its responsibility to educate and inform the public and prefers to use its first amendment privilege to incite outrage – the very same behavior it has criticized in other news organizations, like Al-Jazeerah for example.

Winter Soldier

Did you catch any of last weekend’s Winter Soldier testimony? Patterned on the Winter Soldier hearings of 1971 where Vietnam veterans testified about their actions during the Vietnam War, Winter Soldier: Iraq/Afghanistan has exposed the the hellishness of life in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan for both civilians and occupiers. If you didn’t know of this event you’re not alone since the major media outlets chose to ignore it – CNN needed extra space to devote (over and over again) to the damage done to its studio in Atlanta from a freak tornado, and the New York Times for the second Sunday in a row wondered what was happening to Iraqi oil profits, in an article that did in fact mention something very important, though you had to read practically the entire expose to find it: amazingly, most of the Iraqis who are taking money in exchange for planting IEDs and otherwise attacking US soldiers do so because they are going hungry, not going Jihadi.

Well, you can wait a few years, until the mainstream media catch up with the testimony of retired and active-duty Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans on the atrocities they committed and the physical and psychic toll it has taken on Iraqis and on the soldiers themselves or you can go to the Democracy Now! website which will feature Winter Soldier testimony for the rest of this week. Then, thirty years from now, when an Iraqi war veteran who participated in Winter Soldier runs for President, the mainstream media will finally catch up.