Mainstream media continues to shamelessly parrot official explanations of everything, writes Ramzy Baroud* In the competitive world of media today, swift and conveniently selective reporting is of prime importance. GoogleNews, for example, claim to scan 4,500 news sources, of which only a few are highlighted as main stories. There are thousands of similar services, all competing to produce a story in the fastest time. Thorough -- and thus slower -- reporting is relegated and crucial information often appears too little too late. Iraq, which has occupied a huge proportion of headline news for years, provides many good examples of this. On 1 February, only a few minutes apart, two Iraqi women blew themselves up in two crowded markets in the Iraqi capital. Authorities said that 98 people were killed and 200 wounded. Eyewitnesses reported a grizzly scene where human and animal body parts littered the streets. Any thorough analysis of the story would have to examine several related factors. First, it would need to juxtapose the high death toll with US and Iraqi government reports of prevailing "calm" in Baghdad. This claim of a "return to normalcy" has been propagated for months, as a way of validating US President's Bush's military "surge" strategy. Even if we buy into the questionable statistics aimed at hyping the positive outcome of the surge -- questionable because only US and Iraqi military sources, with obvious vested interests, promote them -- the violence clearly seems to have shifted from the capital into northern areas. Instead of admitting failure in halting the violence that has plagued Iraq since the US occupation of 2003, US and Iraqi authorities resort to a language that continually distracts attention from the real issues. This is how Alissa J Rubin began her article for the New York Times on 31 January: "The unsettled situation in northern Iraq continued Wednesday as Iraqi troops massed in Mosul to fight Sunni Arab extremists." Rubin further quotes an Iraqi Defence Ministry spokesman as claiming that the goal of the military operation is to "oust Al-Qaeda in Iraq from the city and prevent its fighters from returning". These entry statements contain a dangerously inaccurate linkage between Arabs, Sunnis, "extremists" and Al-Qaeda. The New York Times, which often sets the standard for reporting in other major US publications, has thus laid the foundation for justifying ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs from the city as "driving out" Al-Qaeda militants. Returning to the Baghdad market bombings, the official response to this tragedy was, as usual, misleading. The Iraqi government issued a predictable statement and US officials, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, made fiery condemnations. These statements were rehashed to produce hundreds of "fresh" news stories within an hour. CNN online opened one of its articles as follows: "Two mentally disabled women were strapped with explosives Friday and sent into busy Baghdad markets, where they were blown up by remote control." The allegation was attributed to an Iraqi government official who said, "People referred to the bomber at central Baghdad's Al-Ghazl market as the 'crazy woman' and that the bomber at a second market had an unspecified birth disability." Who are these "people"? Did the CNN reporter examine the legitimacy of that claim by interviewing any of them? And what do the bombings tell us about the security situation in Baghdad, the success or failure of the "surge", or the war that is driving people to suicide in its most brutal manifestations? Apparently, they tell us nothing. But Lt Colonel Steve Stover, spokesman for the Multinational Force-IraqBaghdad division has an explanation that seems, at least from the point view of CNN, much more relevant than the seemingly unimportant questions above. "By targeting innocent Iraqis, they (those who dispatched the 'mentally disabled' women suicide bombers) show their true demonic character." Thus, CNN's headline: "'Demonic' militants sent women to bomb markets in Iraq." Focusing on such extraneous associations -- mindless madwomen acting on the behest of evil Al-Qaeda "Arab Sunni extremists" -- does much more than simply distract attention from the many US policy failures in Iraq. It helps create a substitute image that shapes and reshapes the perceptions of faraway news consumers. The corporate media's depiction of the Gaza story, which has been unfolding for months, might be summed up in one overriding headline: Hordes of Palestinians Breach Gaza Border with Egypt, Israel Concerned over Its Security. The imprisonment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza -- where the majority of the population is "food insecure" according to UN statistics -- should have been depicted first and foremost as a humanitarian disaster brought to being by an Israeli siege. The dates related to the successive stages of the siege follow the line of Israel's political -- not "security" -- logic. But this was irrelevant to the way the story was reported. As with Iraq, where the two dominant news sources are the occupation and the puppet Iraqi government, any story of relevance to Israel and Palestine is validated by the official Israeli source, and to a lesser but growing extent by their Palestinian allies. The rest are "extremists", hell-bent on destroying the "Jewish state" (the "Jewishness" of Israel is often emphasised whenever the word "destruction" is invoked). Through continual manipulation it becomes easier to forget that the real world -- in Iraq, Palestine, Burma, Kenya or any other place -- is a world that, although seemingly chaotic, is very much rational. It is predicated on the values of cause and effect. What may seem "demonic" and "mad" to a non-media person should not accepted as the same by a journalist. The latter's responsibility is to narrate, contextualise and deconstruct with an independent and critical eye. To mindlessly repeat the discourses of official sources may be easier and more profitable, but it has serious consequences for the field of journalism, and for any possibility of truth and justice. * The writer is editor of PalestineChronicle.com.
