September 25, 1995:
Several dozen reporters and photographers are packed into the room, bright with TV lights. The mayor steps to the microphones with a formal welcome for Colin Powell, who strides to the podium. He looks very executive in a black pinstriped suit, a crisp pastel blue shirt, a tasteful burgundy tie. From the start, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gives off authoritative confidence.

Powell, on tour for his new autobiography, is considering a run for president. Here in San Francisco, like everywhere else, he’s big news. Journalists are asking easy questions. He discusses race, then talks about next year’s presidential campaign, then launches into an explanation for why so many Americans are now extremely proud of the military—“the superb performance of the armed forces of the United States in recent conflicts, beginning with the, I think, Panama invasion, and then through Desert Shield and Storm”—but a voice breaks in from the back of the room.

By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for seventy-eight straight days.

“You didn’t tell the truth about the war in the Gulf, General.”

The loud voice is coming from a middle-aged man in a wheelchair.

Powell tries to ignore him, but the man persists, shouting about civilian dead in Panama and Iraq. Finally, Powell acknowledges the interruption. “Hi, Ron,” he says, “how are you? Excuse me, let me answer one question if I may.”

“But why don’t you tell them, why don’t you tell them why—”

“The fact of the matter is—I think the American people are reflecting on me the glory that really belongs to those troops,” Powell says. “What you’re seeing is a reflection on me of what those young men and women have done in Panama, in Desert Storm, in a number of other places ...”

Beneath Powell’s amplified voice, Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic can be heard only in snippets: “... 150,000 people ... the bombing ...”

“... So it’s very, it’s very rewarding to see this change in attitude toward the military. It’s not just Colin Powell, rock star. It’s all of those wonderful men and women who do such a great job.”

Later, after Powell leaves, I see a small knot of journalists around Ron, who’s on a tear: “I want the American people to know what the general hid from the American public during the Gulf War. They hid the casualties. They hid the horror. They hid the violence. We don’t need any more violence in our country. We need leaders who represent cooperation. We need leadership that represents peace. We need leaders that understand the tragedy of using violence in solving our problems.... Did Colin Powell really learn the lessons of the Vietnam War? Did he learn that the war was immoral? I think that he learned another lesson. He learned to be more violent, to be more ruthless. And I’ve come as a counterbalance to that today. I’ve come as an alternative voice.... I came down today because I just can’t allow this to continue—this honeymoon, this love affair with someone who was part of a policy which hurt so many human beings.”

--------

In the middle of the 1990s, when a Republican majority swept into Congress, the new House speaker Newt Gingrich said that the Heritage Foundation “is without question the most far-reaching conservative organization in the country in the war of ideas.” Heritage was proficient at hiring right-wing writers, commentators, and out-of-office politicians, giving them titles like “senior fellow” and “distinguished scholar,” and promoting them with a relentless public-relations juggernaut.

One day in 1996 I went to the spacious headquarters of the Heritage Foundation near the Capitol and interviewed the men running its PR operation. The organization’s annual budget was almost $30 million, and much of it went to prodigious media outreach and other publicity efforts. Heritage constantly flooded the media with messages favored by its wealthy conservative donors and corporate backers.

Leaving the interview, I thought about the need for progressive infrastructure to do such media work on a national scale. There was no way to raise $30 million, but I figured that even a fraction of that amount could fund a consortium drawing on the expertise of literally thousands of academics, researchers, and activists who were routinely shut out of news media. So, I applied for grants to launch a nonprofit organization called the Institute for Public Accuracy. Seed money materialized, and in late 1997 the Institute opened a small office in San Francisco. The next spring, an IPA media office got underway in the National Press Building in Washington—and soon we were sending out news releases to several thousand reporters, editors, and talk-show producers across the country.

When righteousness moved Friedman to call for “lights out in Belgrade,” he was urging a war crime.

I had no way of knowing that a decade later, the Institute for Public Accuracy would be going strong. But I did have a hunch that a staff of just a few people, committed to doing media outreach for progressive voices, could have a tangible effect on what Americans might see, hear, and read in news media. Of course the playing field remained badly tilted in favor of big-money interests. But we made inroads by offering journalists a range of experts available for timely interviews. While churning out a couple of hundred news releases per year via email and fax, we established a regular way of challenging the dominant media messages. And there was always a massive amount to challenge as the country’s media machinery kept spinning for economic privilege, corporate power, and war.

--------

“The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist,” Thomas Friedman wrote approvingly in one of his explaining-the-world bestsellers. “McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

Those words appeared in Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but the passage first surfaced (with a few tweaks of syntax) in the New York Times Magazine on March 28, 1999, near the end of a long piece adapted from the book. Filling almost the entire cover of the magazine was a red-white-and-blue fist, with the caption “What The World Needs Now” and a smaller-type explanation: “For globalism to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is.”

The clenched graphic could be seen as the “hidden fist” that “the hidden hand of the market will never work without.” While the cover story’s patriotic fist was intended as a symbol of the globe’s need for multifaceted American power, the military facet had been unleashed just as the magazine went to press. By the time the star-spangled cover reached Sunday breakfast tables, NATO air attacks on Yugoslavia were underway; the U.S.-led bombing campaign would last for seventy-eight straight days.

Writing columns and appearing on broadcast networks to assess the warfare, Tom Friedman could not contain his enthusiasm. (The man was widely viewed as a liberal, whatever that meant, and “the liberal media”—whatever that meant—provided Friedman with many platforms that often seemed to double as pedestals.) Interviewers at ABC, PBS, and NPR ranged from deferential to fawning as they solicited his wisdom on the latest from Yugoslavia. Even when he lamented the political constraints on the military options of the nineteen-member NATO alliance, Friedman was upbeat. “While there are many obvious downsides to war-from-15,000-feet,” he wrote after bombs had been falling for more than four weeks, “it does have one great strength—its sustainability. NATO can carry on this sort of air war for a long, long time. The Serbs need to remember that.” So, Friedman explained,

if NATO’s only strength is that it can bomb forever, then it has to get every ounce out of that. Let’s at least have a real air war. The idea that people are still holding rock concerts in Belgrade, or going out for Sunday merry-go-round rides, while their fellow Serbs are “cleansing” Kosovo, is outrageous. It should be lights out in Belgrade: every power grid, water pipe, bridge, road and war-related factory has to be targeted.

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

The convenience marbled through such punditry is so routine that eyebrows rarely go up. The chirpy line “Let’s at least have a real air war,” for instance, addressed American readers for whom, with rare exceptions, the “real air war” would be no more real than a media spectacle, with all the consequences falling on others very far away. As for rock concerts and merry-go-rounds, we could recall—if memory were to venture into unauthorized zones—that any number of such amusements went full throttle in the United States during the Vietnam War, and also for that matter during all subsequent U.S. wars including the one that Friedman was currently engaged in cheering on. If the idea of civilians trying to continue with normal daily life while their government committed lethal crimes was “outrageous” enough to justify inflicting “a merciless air war”—as Friedman urged later in the same column—would someone have been justified in bombing the United States during its slaughter of countless innocents in Southeast Asia? Or during its active support for dictators and death squads in Latin America? For that matter, Friedman could hardly be unaware that for several weeks already American firepower had been maiming and killing Serb civilians with weaponry that included cluster bombs. As I write these words, in 2006, news accounts today are matter-of-factly mentioning that a few more Iraqi children have been killed by some of the latest U.S. air strikes; meanwhile, of course, not a single concert or merry-go-round has stopped in the United States of America.

When righteousness moved Friedman to call for “lights out in Belgrade,” he was urging a war crime. The urban power grids and water pipes he yearned to see destroyed were essential to infants, the elderly, the frail and infirm inside places like hospitals and nursing homes. Targeting such grids and pipes would seem like barbarism to Americans if the missiles were incoming. Any ambiguity of the matter would probably be dispelled by a vow to keep bombing the country until it was set back fifty years or, if necessary, six centuries. But Friedman’s enthusiasm was similar to that of many other prominent American commentators who also greeted the bombing of Yugoslavia with something close to exhilaration.

The final paragraph of Thomas Friedman’s column in the New York Times on April 23, 1999, began with a punchy sentence: “Give war a chance.” It was a witticism that seemed to delight Friedman. He repeated it, in print and on national television, as the bombing of Yugoslavia continued. A tone of sadism could be discerned.

--------

Three weeks into the bombing of Yugoslavia, I got a call from a producer at CNN, inviting me to participate in a live show about media coverage of the war. I ironed a shirt, grabbed a tie, and dashed to the car in front of my house on the Northern California coast. Minutes after racing across the Golden Gate Bridge, I made it to the studio in time for the satellite feed.

Looking into the blank dark lens of a camera, I heard the host’s voice in my earpiece: “Norman Solomon, rate for us how the coverage has been so far in this adventure that we have in Yugoslavia.”

“I would rate the fourth estate as functioning more like a fourth branch of government,” I said. “We just saw this Pentagon briefing in the last half hour, where the Pentagon officials did their thing, which was video games trying to depict the dropping of 2,000-pound bombs as though it was just some kind of blip on screens. But we also saw the press corps in that room—in the Pentagon—beamed around the world, not posing even softball questions—I would call them beach-ball questions—in which the press corps uses, adopts, internalizes, and puts out into the world similar assumptions and terminologies used by the military.”

I took a quick breath and went on: “Now generals are going to talk in terms of ‘collateral damage,' ‘degrade,’ ‘bombing campaign,’ ‘air campaign,’ to try to use euphemisms, to turn this into something where Americans can distance from the destruction being wrought in our name with our tax dollars. But all those phrases I just mentioned were used by reporters without any reference to the underlying meanings underneath those euphemisms. So I would have to rate the journalists of this country very poor in covering this war, and frankly it dovetails with the strategy that has been implemented by the White House and the State Department and the Pentagon.”

To me, the discussion had veered into the familiar fog of American journalists praising their own supposedly intrepid persistence.

Moments later the host, Roger Cossack, turned to a New York Times reporter in another studio. “Judith Miller,” he began, “Norman Solomon says that the press has become an ally of NATO in what is being accomplished in Yugoslavia. Do you agree or disagree?”

“I couldn’t disagree more,” Miller replied. “I mean, I think that what we’ve just seen is one small part of the day’s coverage, which is a Pentagon briefing. I mean, if you look at, certainly, my newspaper, you see reports from all over the world, not just from the Pentagon briefing room. And I think that, if anything, this was a war that was kind of prompted by public outrage to the pictures that were shown on CNN, to the stories that were told in the New York Times and other papers.”

In a minute the third guest, NPR news analyst Daniel Schorr, joined the discussion: “May I agree with my friend, Judy? Hello, Judy.”

“Hi, Daniel.”

“Let me say this,” Schorr continued. “During the Vietnam War, we used to get briefings, which came to be known as ‘the five o’clock follies,’ about body counts—grossly exaggerated—about successes that weren’t there. What happened was we got a whole generation of journalists, starting, say, with people like David Halberstam, Peter Arnett, who say, ‘Let me go out there and see what’s happening.’ The result of that was the Pentagon’s ability to lull the public may have collapsed, maybe forever as a result of the fact that a reporter said, ‘They’re lying to you. They’re lying to you. Let’s show you what’s actually happening here.’ ... The fact that the reporters can’t get everywhere in Yugoslavia right now makes it more difficult, but even after the Gulf War, with all of the smart bombs you heard about, later we heard that most of the bombs were dumb and that most of the Patriots didn’t find their target. In the end, they can say what they want. We’ll catch up with them.”

To me, the discussion had veered into the familiar fog of American journalists praising their own supposedly intrepid persistence. I broke in: “Let me say that there’s always an excuse that journalists use when they attach themselves to the basic assumptions of the Pentagon and the war planners and in this case the war makers. You can have tactical debates until you’re blue in the face—and we have plenty of those—but the reality is that certain pictures get on television through the prompting and the urging and the showcasing of the Pentagon and the White House and certain pictures don’t get on.” Later, I added: “I think the problem is selectivity. All of the suffering that’s being depicted that the Albanian-Kosovars have gone through is very newsworthy. So is the suffering of the Kurds in Turkey. But we are not seeing those pictures, we’re not seeing those pictures, we’re not hearing journalists raise that to a high-profile issue, precisely because Turkey is a part of NATO.”

The host then asked: “Judith Miller, are we seeing enough of ... the damage that is being caused in Belgrade to the Serbs? Have we seen enough of that?”

“I think we have,” Miller replied. “I think we’ve seen a lot of it, and I thought we saw a lot of it from Baghdad, when American bombers were dropping payloads and bombs, and we didn’t call it ‘collateral damage.’ Those terms are used in quotation marks. We don’t use those euphemisms for war—which is ugly—and I think the media are showing as much of it as they possibly can. But the issue is, all forms of suffering are not equal, I’m sorry. It seems to me that Americans are being told that this bombing was brought about by Mr. Milosevic’s refusal to accept a political settlement that had been agreed upon by everyone except him, and that is what has caused the bombing, and therefore the ethnic cleansing and the pictures that you see are not comparable in terms of a political calculation to the bombs that are falling, because the leader of that country will not accept the Rambouillet accord that could have prevented this violence. It is a huge problem for the world.”

If a commercial break hadn’t intruded then, I would have talked about that “Rambouillet accord”—the Clinton administration’s purported formula for a prewar diplomatic solution to the Kosovo crisis. The White House had, with virtually no U.S. media coverage, slipped poison-pill demands into the Rambouillet ultimatum presented to Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in early 1999. Under the Appendix B provisions of the Rambouillet text, NATO troops would have basically had the run of Yugoslavia. (During a deep-background confidential briefing for journalists at the Rambouillet talks in France, shortly before the air war began, a senior State Department official said that the U.S. government saw a need to bomb Serbia and “deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.”)

After the commercials, I said: “We’ve heard, in this last few minutes, another example of how fine American journalists are very good at articulating the premises of U.S. foreign policy, but guess what? That’s not supposed to be their job as journalists. They’re supposed to function independently. They’re not just supposed to show us a window on the world that is tinted red-white-and-blue, but unfortunately that’s most of what we’re getting.”

“Judith, is the window on the world tinted red-white-and-blue?” the host asked.

“No,” Miller answered, “I think Norman’s is tinted anti-red-white-and-blue, but that’s irrelevant.”

--------

The champion of bombing Yugoslavia was the first president from the baby-boom generation. Vast quantities of hype had told how he idolized JFK and mindfully walked in his footsteps, a motif aided by the fleeting footage of a boyhood Rose Garden encounter with President Kennedy. But Bill Clinton, “the man from Hope,” could not outrun his psychological past, and neither—as he wielded power—could any of us. Dynamics of narcissism kept trumping less self-transfixed considerations. (For instance, President Clinton’s inability to keep his pants on resulted in a chain of events that helped to pull George W. Bush into the White House.) This was hardly peculiar to any generation or century, but the fruits of “New Democrat” neo-liberalism were supposed to be a better harvest.

For the vulnerable, as Clinton crowed, the era of big government was over—except for prisons, police, and the Pentagon. For the powerful, such as military contractors, the era was still going strong. And for investors, new glories awaited.

As usual for successful politicians, the recipe for Clinton’s favorite image was a concoction with plenty of heavy syrup. The symbolic touch of John F. Kennedy was just one more grand confection for PR machinery. The imagery was lofty, but results could be devastating for people on the ground. Clinton loved to talk about “opportunity” for all. But industrial workers who lost jobs or wages due to NAFTA would not have an opportunity to call him to account. Neither would the families kicked off welfare rolls due to Clinton’s signature domestic achievement.

A full decade after he signed “welfare reform,” the media’s references to the law commonly hailed a smashing success. But “ten years after the so-called welfare reform, mothers are being forced into full-time jobs that do not pay wages that allow them to make ends meet,” said a scholar on poverty, Gwendolyn Mink. “The wage gap for mothers is growing, and economic insecurity for mothers and children gets worse. Indeed, the persistent insecurity enforced by sub-poverty wages—combined with harsh welfare rules and the lack of child care and health provision—makes families fragile and puts mothers’ custody of children at risk.”

The next morning, the Fox TV broadcast network airs a live interview with the beautician in charge of Lynne Cheney’s hair. “That’s a pretty big responsibility,” the Fox correspondent says. The key issue is: “hair spray versus gel?”

For the vulnerable, as Clinton crowed, the era of big government was over—except for prisons, police, and the Pentagon. For the powerful, such as military contractors, the era was still going strong. And for investors, new glories awaited.

--------

Time’s lengthy cover story “GetRich.com” was effusive in the early autumn of 1999. The spread had its share of sardonic asides, but reverence for the magnitude of quick money in dot-com-land seemed to dwarf any misgivings. Although the magazine explained that “it’s not all about the money,” the punch line arrived a few dozen words later: “But mostly, it’s the money.” And there was plenty of it moving into new digital enterprises. At the time, Silicon Valley executives were holding stocks and options valued at $112 billion—more than the GDP of Portugal.

Computer-literate job seekers were riding high: “Never before have the unemployed been so cocky.... E-commerce niches are getting claimed so quickly that there might not be time for business school anymore.” Said one Stanford grad who was enjoying the rush of launching his own dot-com firm, “It’s all about the buzz. I can’t explain it. It’s like magic.”

“GetRich.com” was part of a long-running media binge. Fourteen months earlier, Time saw general prosperity on the cyber-horizon: “The real promise of all this change is that it will enrich all of us, not just a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley.” While media outlets reported on the dot-com phenom, they were also glorifying and egging it on.

But the bounties of a tech-driven economy were hardly being shared equitably. From 1977 to 1999 the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households averaged a boost of 119.7 percent in after-tax income—compared to a loss of 12 percent for the bottom fifth of households and a loss of 3.1 percent for the middle fifth during the same period. Meanwhile, corporations were carrying a smaller proportion of the tax burden; by the start of the twenty-first century, the nation’s corporate tax payments had dropped to 8 percent of all federal tax revenues, down from 13 percent in 1980 and 23 percent in 1960. Those kinds of trend lines rarely seemed to bother the journalists avidly recounting the fortunes of big investors.

“We can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis had commented several decades earlier, “but we can’t have both.”

--------

July 2000:
Every day at noon, a couple of blocks from the convention complex where delegates are holding their caucuses, destitute men line up for lunch on the sidewalk along Race Street in front of the Ministry to the Homeless. It’s not a photo-op.

About fifteen thousand journalists are here in Philadelphia to cover the Republican National Convention. But midway through the week, an aide at the Ministry tells me, not a single reporter has dropped by to inquire about the bedraggled spectacle.

“We feed homeless guys,” the staff member says. “Yesterday, we fed 223.” At least three-quarters of them, he estimates, are living on the streets in the City of Brotherly Love. Is this kind of situation unusual for an American city? He shakes his head. “There’s homelessness wherever you go.”

That night, I overhear delegates discussing news coverage of the convention. About the only negative theme emerging, they agree, is that the event has been carefully staged. “If the criticism is that it’s scripted,” says one, “well, God bless it.”

The next morning, the Fox TV broadcast network airs a live interview with the beautician in charge of Lynne Cheney’s hair. “That’s a pretty big responsibility,” the Fox correspondent says. The key issue is: “hair spray versus gel?”

Suitably sophisticated, media outlets make a habit of pausing to remark that the convention is an elaborately produced TV show—but that doesn’t stop networks from effectively serving as coproducers.

At midweek, under the punched-up hot lights and color-coordinated decor inside the amphitheater, I wonder whether the big news outlets will ever get around to reexamining the assumption that killing people in some other country is the best patriotic credential imaginable. This is military theme night for the convention, and Senator John McCain steps to the podium.

McCain built his political career while news accounts routinely called him a “war hero.” In the last year of the twentieth century, major U.S. newspapers published 160 articles using that phrase to describe him. The stories included frequent references to captivity and torture that he bravely withstood after a missile brought him down from a plane he was piloting over Hanoi. But media outlets rarely noted the fact that McCain was participating in an air war that killed large numbers of Vietnamese civilians.

McCain’s speech is part of an evening dedicated to celebrating America’s military exploits. All night, any mention of a war—past or prospective—touches off enthusiasm among the delegates so ecstatic that it often seems delirious.

--------

The Clinton-Gore administration turned out to be so disappointing—on matters ranging from poverty to trade to environmental protection to Pentagon budgets—that many progressive voters were ready to respond with an electoral kick in the pants. An added impetus for staying home or voting for Ralph Nader on Election Day 2000 was that too many prominent Gore enthusiasts who knew better (or should have) were touting him as a paragon of progressive virtue. That was a farfetched case to make after nearly eight years of Al Gore’s compliant behavior as vice president while Bill Clinton triangulated away, positioning himself between Republicans to his right and congressional Democrats to his left.

The best argument for Gore in the general election centered on the fact that he was the only way to keep the Republicans out of the White House. The Nader campaign was, as Nader 2000 supporter Barbara Ehrenreich wrote four years later, “tragedy... and I will admit now, with hindsight, that it was.” As another former Nader supporter, I agreed. But at the time, with the Clinton presidency akin to Republican Lite in so many ways, the consequences of a George W. Bush administration could seem abstract. We learned too late.


For background information on "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State," go to: www.MadeLoveGotWar.com