2003 Media Follies!

Geov Parrish


12.31.03

2003 Media Follies!
Annual survey of the year’s most overhyped and underreported stories

This is the eighth year that I’ve looked at the most overhyped and under- reported stories of the year. I began compiling the list in 1996 with the perception that the U.S. public, instead of getting the information it needed to make informed decisions in a democracy, was being distracted with an endless barrage of feel-good trivia and official spin.
Every year since, it’s gotten worse, and the gulf between what people in this country and those elsewhere in the world are told about the same events has continued to widen. But the year 2004 will be a particularly critical one in our nation’s, and world’s, modern history. The chain of events set in motion by the U.S. invasion of Iraq is likely to take a definitive turn; beyond that, the American public will be asked to pass judgment on four years’ performance of one of the most radical regimes in our country’s history. Understanding what’s actually happening has never been more important – and spinmeisters’ efforts to obscure what’s actually happening will be stronger and more technologically savvy than ever. It’s time to get smart.

To that end, enter 2004 with our annual list of the past year’s most overhyped and underreported – and misreported – stories. Remember, they told us they’d lie to us. They were telling the truth.

Most Overrated Stories of the Year

Saving Jessica Lynch On the basis of its subsequent media saturation – books and TV instamovie included – the bogus story of Jessica Lynch’s “rescue” narrowly outpolls the toppling of Saddam’s statue as the most sickening episode of government lying for political gain in recent memory. (The “official” story of Saddam’s capture may yet prove to join this elite company.)

Both the statue and Lynch stories were easily and quickly discredited in foreign media – and, eventually, in U.S. media as well – but remain iconic markers of the “heroic” Iraq invasion in the minds of many Americans. In the case of the statue, what was presented as the joyous, spontaneous post-victory celebration of a huge Baghdad crowd was quickly revealed by non-network witnesses and wide-angle lenses to be a group of at most 150 Iraqis – probably paid by the Americans – who with the help of U.S. troops on site pulled down a statue of Saddam for waiting TV cameras in an otherwise nearly empty plaza.

The Lynch episode was even more cynical, particularly for its crass exploitation of a young soldier who had gone through the undeniably harrowing ordeal of being a POW. But she was captured after being injured in a vehicular accident – not, as the first Pentagon claimed, after a heroic firefight. And the videotape of her “rescue” from an unguarded hospital that she could freely walk away from involved the filming of an elaborate Hollywood-style commando raid against an off-camera foe that turned out to be completely fictitious. Both episodes were important reminders that sometimes the camera does lie – depending on who’s holding it.

Other lowlights of the year:

Arnold Schwarzenegger runs for governor. Never before has a political neophyte gained high political office by waging a campaign through appearances on E! and Jay Leno. Let’s hope it never happens again. (But it probably will.)

Michael Jackson and Kobe Bryant. Which is worse – a sports superstar, on trial for felony rape, who gets huge ovations in arenas across the country because of the charges against him, or the dare-you-not-to-look spectacle of a trial examining the alleged perversions of an over-the-hill music superstar who is now longer barely recognizably human, let alone black or male?

The economic recovery. Also on the 2002 list. This year, it moved from the realm of projecting a fictitious recovery from a highly selective (and dubious) reading of economic tea leaves, to projecting a fictitious permanent recovery from a highly selective (and dubious) reading of the tea leaves of what is at best a temporary respite from misery. And what the hell is the point of a “jobless recovery,” anyway?

And, of course, there are the perennials: bleeding that leads, overhyped weather, and our secular religions: sports and shopping. Bread and circuses, sans bread.

The Year’s Most Important Underreported Stories

The Bush tax cuts have flopped. The flip side of the “recovery” stories. This has also been on the list the last two years. But it’s worth a return engagement because most of the administration’s economic claims – and assumptions for future planning – are grossly fictional. Never has an administration been so greedy for its own economic interests, or lied so much about it. We’ll be stuck with the bill for decades.

Corporate corruption continues to run amok. Bush’s 2002 “reforms” were a farce. The problem isn’t just the lack of regulatory enforcement – it’s the entire system.

Health care in America is in crisis. Bush’s Medicare bill largely served to make wealthy drug companies richer still; the so-called “Patient’s Bill of Rights” was a meaningless farce. Meanwhile, even a relatively minor health problem can destroy the life savings of the nearly 50 million uninsured, and the far larger numbers whose insurance works great so long as we don’t get sick. The real story here is the countless parasites unnecessarily making money in our health care system, and how politicians would rather cater to them than help solve a crisis that, sooner or later, affects each of us.

Dennis Kucinich and Al Sharpton. Neither man has a chance for the Democratic nomination. Yet both Kucinich and Sharpton have generated fiercely loyal followings as the only two candidates in a crowded field with the clarity and guts to challenge fundamental assumptions of the Bush domestic and foreign policy agendas. Howard Dean’s successful candidacy wouldn’t be possible without this pair on his flank, making him look “more reasonable” even as corporate media ignores or ridicules their campaigns.

The Taliban is making a comeback. Bush’s pledges to not abandon Afghanistan turned out to be a cruel joke. Sure, our troops are still there – they’re the only thing keeping CIA man Hamid Karzai in “power,” albeit only in the capital city of Kabul and only during daylight hours. Elsewhere, the same old brutal warlords are running the show, stealing, murdering, and getting rich from record poppy harvests. The Americans have so little influence they’ve resorted to quietly working with “moderate” elements of the Taliban – who, with the patience of any society that has a history of several thousand years, are quietly getting stronger again in the mountains.

The peace movement was right – and still is – about Iraq. The fact that the Bush Administration was lying about virtually every justification for invading Iraq was something any inquiring reporter could have exposed months before, not after, the invasion began. No ties to Al-Qaeda. No weapons of mass destruction. No danger to U.S. security. Dated, wildly exaggerated, or simply forged “intelligence.” An invasion that was illegal under any and every conceivable legal authority. And peaceniks have continued to be right: the anonymous (and, in the U.S., almost entirely unreported) death of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Many thousands more, including U.S. soldiers, will die from the radioactive munitions. And now the country’s being looted by the same bullies who overran it. Saddam isn’t the only government leader who deserves to stand trial.

The catastrophe that has been the U.S. administration of Iraq. Iraq’s guerrilla resistance is not the work of Saddam Hussein, or foreign fighters recruited by Al-Qaeda and the like. It’s the work of the Americans – specifically, it wouldn’t exist except for the widespread and steadily rising popular anger over the Americans’ ongoing, utter failure to provide any of the services normally associated with government. Eight months into U.S. rule, looting is still so bad most Iraqis won’t leave home after dark. Usually there’s no electricity to see by, anyway, especially outside Baghdad. The U.S. occupiers have been censoring Arab media, repressing the political parties they don’t like – especially Shi’a fundamentalists – making widespread mass arrests with no semblance of a judicial system or due process (and widespread torture allegations), and murdering civilians seemingly at will and with no fear of consequence. Far from instilling democratic values, Washington has done everything possible to avoid them – from canceling promised free elections to blocking the use of U.N. and other technocrats with experience in building and nurturing civil society to not doing that work itself. Hiding in their heavily fortified compounds and armored convoys, the Americans remind many Iraqis of nothing so much as the thugs they replaced.

Privatization and corporate looting of Iraq. Meanwhile, the serious looting isn’t on the street – not that Americans tried to stop that, either, even at the invasion’s height. It’s in a privatization scheme more sweeping than has ever been adopted in any poor country anywhere else in the world. Iraq is literally being auctioned off, mostly to well-connected American companies like Halliburton and Bechtel. Few Iraqis have any of the new currency, let alone jobs – those are all going to Americans or to Kuwaitis, Saudis, or Southeast Asian nationals. By the time Iraq is given the chance (albeit heavily rigged in D.C.’s favor) to “rule itself,” the country will look a lot like those houses the Grinch visited before Christmas – except that these Grinches will never, ever get bigger hearts and give the stuff back.

http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?ItemID=16212
for the rest could only submit 10,000 characters

huh this seems interesting, didn’t read it all, was most interested that no one responded. i don’t member seeing it, thought I’d bump it and see if anyone cares to discuss this stuff, although, I don’t haha.

I think it got moved over because there was a lot to read. Some interesting points in there though.