inside the glass house

Faking news – the US style
NEW YORK -- Daya Perera, a former Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations, has remained a strong advocate of muck-raking journalism.

At a social function in New York, he once criticised Sri Lanka's state-run newspapers for carrying "bogus news stories" planted by successive governments known to manipulate the flow of news.

Playing the role of a devil's advocate against one of Sri Lanka's distinguished criminal lawyers, a former journalist tried to jokingly defend the government-run institution by pointing out that Sri Lankans still read these newspapers-- at least for their obituaries.

"I say, even those obituaries are bogus,'' Daya shot back, with his usual rapid-fire repartee. Perhaps it is not Sri Lankans alone who have been taken for a ride on a steady diet of bogus news-- even the Americans seem vulnerable.

And last week, the Bush administration was under fire -- this time for feeding counterfeit news to the US media, in the guise of real news. According to a story in the New York Times, over 20 federal agencies, including the State Department and the Pentagon, have created fake news clips or promoted staged interviews with supposedly "independent columnists", some of whom were really in the payroll of the government.

All of the stories were slanted in favour of the Bush administration and its economic and military policies, including the war on Iraq. But no where did it say these stories were originating from government-sponsored or government funded news projects.

As one critic told the Times: "The failure of news editors to make this distinction, intentionally or not, has critically underminded the credibility of news organisations and has put us in the same company as all those (totalitarian) countries whose propaganda machines have long been targets of our derision."

These pre-packaged news stories were mostly distributed through small town televisiom stations which were quick to use them because they were short of correspondents to cover the White House, the Pentagon, State Department and Capitol Hill.

Over the last four years, the Bush administration has spent more than $250 million purely on contracts with US public relations firms which are handsomely remunerated to put a positive spin even on the most depressing news that comes out of the White House or the Pentagon.

Clearly, the story of fake news is an embarrassment to an administration that has accused several Arab media outlets, and specifically the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television network, of being anti-American and pro-insurgent in covering the war in Iraq.

Al Jazeera has been denounced as being "inflammatory"-- specifically for its aggressive reporting on civilian casualties in Iraq and for being "a mouthpiece" for Iraqi insurgents and for Al-Qaeda leader Osama in Laden.

"We have very deep concerns about Al-Jazeera's broadcasts because, again and again, we find inaccurate, false, wrong reports that are, we think, designed to be inflammatory," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, told reporters last year.

Colin Powell, then US Secretary of State, made a formal protest against Al Jazeera when he met with the Qatari Foreign Minister Sheik Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabir al-Thani in Washington last April.

Judging by last week's controversy, the Bush administration is no better than Al-Jazeera which is accused of false or inaccurate reporting. The rationale for the war on Iraq was based entirely on a line of propaganda skilfully packaged and sold to the US media: that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that there was a link between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda. On both counts, the Bush administration has been proved wrong.

The events that led to the war in Iraq have clearly eroded the credibility of the US in the eyes of the world. But the credibility factor has taken an even more severe beating on the question of how the Bush administration swayed American public opinion by carefully crafted propaganda.

Even former Secretary of State Colin Powell had to apologise for a presentation he made before the UN Security Council when he produced photographs that purported to show Iraqi military facilities making weapons of mass destruction.

Not surprisingly, in a bygone era, the world was more trustworthy of the US than it is now. During the 1962 Cuban missile crisis -- when US spy planes uncovered Soviet plans to place nuclear weapons on Cuban soil -- then US President John F. Kennedy sent his Secretary of State to Paris with a message to President Charles de Gaulle.

When the Secretary of State offered to produce photos of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, de Gaulle apparently waved him off. According to the story recounted by the New York Times, de Gaulle said "the word of the president of the United States is good enough for me."

How many world leaders would today express similar sentiments about the present incumbent in the White House?

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