This Week:

Quote of the Week

Anti-War Resource of the Week

Iraq Context and Analysis Sources

Know Your Propaganda ABC’s
How To Spot A Good News Source: Idea and Example
The Story of Hillah

Greetings,

As promised (threatened?) in this space last week, this week is a “double issue” of Nygaard Notes. For you readers of the paper version, that means that you have an extra couple of pages. For the rest of you, it means that your e-mail is bigger, and runs to about 3,500 words instead of the usual 2,000 or so. There are a lot of new readers this week, and I hope you don’t get the idea that the Notes is always this long. But it happens every now and then. It might happen next week, too, if I know me.

I talk a lot about news sources this week, and you’ll notice that I put the word “good” in quotation marks every time I use it. That is because I want Nygaard Notes readers to be constantly aware that the process of defining a “good” source is subjective, and will be different for everybody. That’s why I give a list of criteria to use. I think using these criteria could help anyone who wants to find better sources for their information about the world, but I don’t want to constantly tell people about specific sources. Not that I object to doing that, but my “good” sources won’t necessarily work for you; if you have different values than me, for example, you’ll probably find different sources to suit your needs. (But, hey, if you have different values than me, then what the heck are you doing reading Nygaard Notes? You’d better read that piece about “good” sources pretty carefully, and then get out of here!)

I mentioned the new readers, so let me take this opportunity to say: WELCOME to Nygaard Notes! As I always say, give it a few weeks before you pass judgement on this newsletter. I won’t even try to explain what I am trying to do, since I think it can only be understood over time. Let me know what you think!

Peace, solidarity, and so on and so forth,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:

Dr. Hyder Abbas spoke this week to reporters Anton Antonowicz and Mike Moore of the British newspaper The Daily Mirror. Dr. Abbas is a surgeon at Babylon General Hospital in Hillah, Iraq, and he was speaking in the wake of treating some of the estimated 250 injured survivors of U.S. and/or British attacks in surrounding villages (perhaps 60 or more were killed). “Not one” of the wounded, according to Antonowicz and Moore, were being treated for bullet wounds. All “bore the wounds of bomb shrapnel,” most likely deadly cluster bombs. Dr. Abbas asked a few questions of the reporters, and more:

“What kind of war is it that you and America are fighting? Do you really think that you will be supported by the Iraqi people if you win? Do you think we will all forget this and say it was for our own good? This war is building a hatred which will grow and grow against you. I have no anger for the British people. But one day, I fear they will suffer for this just as we do now.”

Anti-War Resource(s) of the Week

The week of April 10-15 will be an important week for taking to the streets to voice support for peace and social solidarity.

One of the legacies of the Reagan administration’s various attacks on democracy in Central and South America during the 1980s is that it spawned a broad-based network of resistance, both here in the U.S. and south of our border. Much of that resistance has organized itself into an association called the Latin America Solidarity Coalition. LASC is organizing a mass mobilization in Washington DC from April 10-15 to say NO to US military and economic intervention. As they say in their call to action, “We are making connections between the war in Iraq and US military involvement in Latin America because we know that Bush’s war didn’t start with Afghanistan, nor will it end with Iraq.” For more information on how you can support this part of the movement, go to LASC’s website at http://www.lasolidarity.org/index.html or call them up at 202-234-3440.

During the same week, the national anti-war group International A.N.S.W.E.R. is organizing national protests to occur at noon on April 12 in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and in the nation’s capital of DC. See their website for details: http://www.InternationalANSWER.org/ or call them at 212-633-6646.

Also on April 12th, here in the Twin Cities, further links between the attack on Iraq and the attack on our social infrastructure. The Poor People's March on the State Capitol is being organized to “Say NO to War at Home and Abroad.” As I write this, final details are still being pulled together, but the current plan is to gather at St. Paul’s MLK Center (270 North Kent Street, near Selby and Dale ) at 11:00 am, and march to State Capitol Building. Community leaders from Northside Minneapolis are planning this event. Check the websites of the local Anti-War Committee at http://www.antiwarcommittee.org/ (612.379.3899) or Students Against War at http://www.geocities.com/studentsagainstwar/ (612-339-3092).

Iraq Context and Analysis Sources

Mainstream commentary on the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq comes largely from a seemingly-endless stream of generals and admirals, and retired generals and admirals, who populate the TV talk shows. Despite the fact that they have been arguing with each other a lot, causing great excitement in the pundit class, all of these military people and their civilian bosses share a belief in the basic justice of the cause—whatever it officially is on the day they are talking. They only differ on the tactics. How can we escape their ideological clutches?

Last week I recommended sources to use in following the Breaking News phase of war coverage. The second phase of war coverage is the Context and Analysis phase, and this week I want to recommend a few commentators who can serve as a counterweight to the official and semi-official (and tedious, and infuriating, and ignorant, and...) opinion-shapers offered us by the corporate media.

In general terms, I recommend looking at the writings of people whose work and perspective you have reason to trust. To decide who those sources might be, check out “How To Spot A Good News Source” elsewhere in this issue of the Notes. After you do that, you can more easily find your own trusted sources. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite commentators who have been writing about Iraq recently, in laundry-list format:

George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Tim Wise, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, John Pilger, Phyllis Bennis, and so many others. You may want to go to the Fisk site at: http://www.robert-fisk.com/. If you scroll down a couple of pages, you’ll see a box with the words “LINKS TO ARTICLES BY AUTHORS ON ZNet.” You’ll find a whole bunch of names (including most of the above), and they’re all worth checking out. Just click on any name and see what you find.

Know Your Propaganda ABC’s

When I teach classes on media I sometimes give students homework asking them to bring in some news reports from sources that they consider “good.” When they bring them in, I ask the students to explain why they are “good.” Usually someone will say a source is good because they “agree” with what the source says. This starts a discussion, my part of which I’ll briefly relate here.

I suggest the possibility that all of us share a susceptibility to what I call “deep propaganda.” These are the ideas that get lodged in our heads through our contact with the various doctrinal institutions that surround us every day, such as our education systems, the mass media, and advertising. Many of the ideas planted here then are reinforced in popular jokes, conversations with friends and family, and so forth. Over the years these ideas harden into attitudes, beliefs, and conceptions about the world. I like to call these Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions the ABC’s of internalized—or “deep”—propaganda.

These ABC’s are amazingly powerful. Why? Our ABC’s are a large part of our “mental landscape” that shapes how we see the world. These ideas make believable—or not believable—the specific facts and news items we see and hear every day. It’s like the backdrop in a movie scene. If you have a backdrop that looks like a desert, and in the foreground you see a polar bear running around, it’s either a comedy or else the movie-maker has some big explaining to do.

So it is with our mental landscape, which doesn’t come from nowhere. Many people think our ABC’s are the result of some natural, organic process, shaped in the same way that Nature shapes the landscapes we see around us. But then, think again about the landscapes most of us see around us: more than likely they are made up of houses, streets, billboards, stores, and bridges. Likewise, in today’s mediated world, our mental landscapes are increasingly constructed by other human beings and their institutions, not shaped by Nature. Just like a movie set.

In the same way, a different set of ABC’s can make the same “fact” seem obvious to one person and silly to another. To use a current example, a report that the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is aimed at “liberation” will seem very believable to those whose conception is that the United States has always been in the business of liberating other countries. To those with a different belief about U.S. history, the “liberation” idea seems highly implausible, if not ridiculous. How could two people with these different ideas ever have a discussion about the current crisis, unless they talked about the differences in their Attitudes, Beliefs, and Conceptions? Unless they each know their ABC’s?

Our ABC’s—the rocks, boulders, and trees that make up our mental landscape—are powerful, and that’s neither good nor bad. All of us need to have some way to organize the information we receive. However, it’s quite possible to believe things that are not true, don’t you agree? Especially if—as is the case with many of our ideas about the world—our ABC’s came to us a result of deep propaganda implanted in our minds from very early ages by the various doctrinal institutions that surround us. Much of our “early learning” is received unconsciously in this way. When we let it reside in our minds, undisturbed by new information, for a long, long time, as many of us do, it can end up sounding like “common sense” to us. Even to the point of making us doubt some pretty compelling evidence to the contrary.

Do you see the point I try to make with my students who think that “agreeing” with a source makes that source a “good” one? That’s a terrible way to judge the worthiness of a news source! The best sources should surprise you, maybe even outrage you, and certainly make you want to double-check what they say. But a lot of terrible sources will do all those things, too. So, how can you tell the difference between a “good” source and one that just makes you feel good? See the following story...

How To Spot A Good News Source: Idea and Example

For me, a “good” news source—in time of war or any time—will exhibit the following characteristics:

• HONESTY. Reporters must be willing to report what they see and hear, and not just what they are told.
• COURAGE. A courageous reporter will report based on principles, and not simply expediency (as in being willing to risk alienating important inside sources by telling the truth).
• COMMITMENT. A good reporter (and media organization) will stick with an important story, even when the costs are high and the project is time-consuming and difficult.
• VALUES that resemble my own. My guiding values are Compassion, Democracy, Justice, and Solidarity, so I look for news sources and reporters who demonstrate these values.
• QUESTIONS. Journalists are surrogates for the rest of us, since they go all kinds of places most of us can’t go, and ask questions on our behalf. So, for me, it’s important to find sources that tend to ask the sorts of questions that I would ask if I were in their spot.
• RESPONSIBILITY. A journalist I trust will have an awareness of the social role of the journalist, always being aware of why they are reporting what they are reporting, and the likely significance of their work to the larger society and world. In other words, they understand the context in which they work, and don’t have silly ideas about “just the facts.”
• EXPERIENCE and KNOWLEDGE. Good journalists know a lot about the subject upon which they are reporting, because they have been on it for a long time.

It may surprise readers to know that these last two points are quite controversial in the journalism world these days.

One Story by Robert Fisk to Illustrate

As a brief case study of how a “good” source operates, I’ll look at a 1,400-word report filed from Baghdad by reporter Robert Fisk on April 3rd for the London Observer. The headline read: “Wailing Children, the Wounded, the Dead: Victims of the Day Cluster Bombs Rained on Babylon.” In it, he writes of “the wards of the Hillah teaching hospital,” where medical personnel are treating 10 civilians for wounds caused by cluster bombs. Fisk reports that these wards “are proof that something illegal—something quite outside the Geneva Conventions—occurred in the villages around the city once known as Babylon.”

Fisk acknowledges that no one knows exactly who dropped the cluster bombs. (“The 61 dead who have passed through the Hillah hospital since Saturday night cannot tell us. Nor can the survivors...”) But then Fisk points out the relevant fact:

“Only the Americans and British, of course, have air superiority—indeed there is no evidence a single Iraqi aircraft has taken off since the start of the invasion—so even the US and British officers back at Qatar headquarters can hardly claim the cluster bombs were dropped by Iraq.”

Fisk then mentions a history of cluster bombs being used against civilians, specifically by the Israeli Air Force in 1982 in Beirut, when they dropped U.S.-made clusters on two neighborhoods. Fisk knows about this, as he was there and saw that those weapons “caus[ed] civilians ferocious and deep wounds identical to those I saw in Hillah yesterday.”

Is Fisk so biased that he can only see the crimes of one side in this military conflict? Is he a dupe of the evil Saddam? Here is his final paragraph, which I think answers those questions:

“It is not easy to listen to Iraqi officials condemning the use of illegal weapons when the Iraqi air force has itself dropped poison gas on the Iranian army and on pro-Iranian Kurdish villages during the 1980-88 war against Iran. Outraged claims from Iraqi officials at the abuse of human rights sound like a bell with a very hollow ring. But something terrible happened around Hillah this week, something unforgivable and something contrary to international law. One hesitates, as I say, to talk of human rights in this land of torture but if the Americans and British don't watch out, they are likely to find themselves condemned for what they have always—and rightly—accused Iraq of: war crimes.”

This is good journalism. Why?

• HONESTY: Fisk reports what he sees, not just what he is told.
• COURAGE: Fisk must know that such a report risks angering the occupying power and diminishing his access to these sources in the future.
• COMMITMENT: Fisk has spent the last twenty-three years in the Middle East, and has covered the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Persian Gulf war, and the conflict in Algeria.
• VALUES. Mr. Fisk allows his compassion and respect for justice to shine through in this article.
• QUESTIONS: Fisk asks the important questions about international law and the costs of war. He does NOT try to help U.S. warmakers answer questions about how they will manage the public relations problems caused by what they call “collateral damage.”
• RESPONSIBILITY: In the above article, Fisk puts the comments of both U.S. and Iraqi officials in context, refusing to believe either one at face value. This is a large part of what distinguishes a journalist from a (conscious or unconscious) propagandist.
• EXPERIENCE and KNOWLEDGE: In Fisk’s case, these flow from his long-standing commitment to the region. (Fisk lives in Beirut.) His witnessing of Israel’s use of cluster bombs in 1982, for example, allows him to be far less “confused” than most of the U.S. reporters who have been recently rushed to Iraq for the first time from their homes in New York or Minneapolis.

Fisk works for the British daily paper The Independent, which maintains a website devoted to his work, and which is excellent: http://www.robert-fisk.com/. Click on “Articles.”

The Story of Hillah

In addition to the report by Robert Fisk, many U.S. newspapers also mentioned the situation in Hillah on April 3rd. What a contrast! Here is a look at the coverage in the largest Minnesota newspaper, the Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!), and in the nation’s newspaper of record, the New York Times.

In the April 3rd Star Trib, one finds a single article mentioning Hillah, written by the Associated Press. The article isn’t really about Hillah, but is mainly about the public relations problem that dead non-combatants pose for the U.S. military as they approach Baghdad, a “city of civilians.”

The article focused on the propaganda risks that face U.S. war leaders in Iraq (they don’t use the word “propaganda”) “at a time when civilian deaths already have angered many around the world.” The first word goes to U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, who is quoted asserting the U.S. military’s intention to “avert large numbers of civilian casualties.” Brooks states that “We'd like to see that become zero, but that's not the way it's ever been on the battlefield.”

The Star Trib article calls the current conflict in Iraq an “instant war of satellite TV, satellite phones and the Internet” that “has already put images of civilian casualties on worldwide display.” The article includes a list of examples in which the public relations problem for the U.S. is apparent, including “In this week's photographs of mothers and children crammed into coffins in the central town of Hillah,” which is the Star Trib’s first mention of Hillah.

The second, and final, mention of Hillah in the article was this sentence: “On Thursday [April 3], for example, U.N. officials in Amman said they had learned that 300 civilian wounded had flooded the hospital in Hillah in one day.” The article adds that “Although verification is difficult, it seems likely that hundreds of Iraqi civilians have died” overall in the war so far.

“Not a Statistic That Interests Them”

Verification is indeed “difficult” for embedded reporters who rely on official U.S. sources for that “verification,” as the previous day’s New York Times (“All The News That’s Fit To Print”) made clear. In an article headlined “U.S. Military Has No Count of Iraqi Dead in Fighting” we are reminded that “American officials say numbering the enemy dead in the midst of battle is dangerous and ultimately fruitless. They say it is not a statistic that interests them. . . They count destroyed tanks and artillery pieces and missile launchers. They count captured weapons. They do not count people, civilian or military.” Therefore, “As in the Persian Gulf war in 1991 and in Afghanistan, the American military is not counting” dead Iraqis of any sort.

Since the American military is not counting, we can expect that the “embedded” American press will likewise have little to say on the subject.

Going back to the April 3rd reports, the Times’ account of Hillah on that day evinced a concern for the U.S. public relations problem caused by massive civilian casualties similar to that shown by the Star Tribune. The lead on the Hillah story for Times reporters Tyler Hicks and John F. Burns is that the hospital wards in Hillah are “a showcase of what Mr. Hussein's government wants the world to believe about the American way of war.”

Reporting both from the Hillah hospital and the village that had been attacked, these reporters stated that “It was difficult to mesh accounts from the hospital with the scenes where the attacks were said to have occurred.” Still, Burns and Hicks also reported from the attacked village that “Small, grayish-black pieces of unexploded ordnance, possibly a form of cluster bomb, lay scattered in profusion.” No mention of international law, nor the Geneva Conventions.

To their credit, the Times article, headlined “Iraq Shows Casualties in Hospital,” eventually did point out that the Hillah hospital “received 33 victims dead on arrival and 180 others who were wounded by American fire.” And they did quote the hospital’s chief surgeon as saying that “Most of them—no, all of them—were civilians. All of them were from Nadir village, women and children and men of all ages, mostly they had very serious injuries to their abdomens, to their intestines, to their chests and their heads. Many of the bodies were completely torn apart.”

After quoting the doctor, Dr. Saad al-Fallouji, on these details, the Times asked him “how he felt about the carnage,” to which he replied “I feel very angry about this. Don't you feel angry too?” There is no record of the response from the New York Times, although the reporters reminded us again that “accounts were confused” about what had happened that day in Hillah.