18 November 2016
Introduction:
WHEN the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Bashar
Assad, and now Donald Trump, are declared the latest 'New Hitler', we learn
little except that they are enemies of the establishment. It means the 'On'
button has been pressed on a propaganda machine designed for maximal
demonisation, leaving no room for public doubt. This inevitably drives
comparisons in the direction of Hitler and the Nazis.
The rationale is well-understood by the public relations
community. Phil Lesley, author of a handbook on PR and communications,
explained the spectacularly successful strategy for obstructing action on
environmental issues:
'People generally do not favour action on a non-alarming
situation when arguments seem to be balanced on both sides and there is a clear
doubt... Nurturing public doubts by demonstrating that this is not a clear-cut
situation in support of the opponents usually is all that is necessary.'
(Lesly, 'Coping with Opposition Groups,' Public Relations Review 18, 1992,
p.331)
Conversely, when action is required, the issue must be
presented as one-sided, clear-cut, black-and-white.
This doesn't mean that Saddam Hussein wasn't a tyrant, and
it doesn't mean that Trump isn't a grave threat to uncivilisation; it means
that establishment enemies are described as 'New Hitlers' for reasons that have
little or nothing to do with any threat they might pose.
In Trump's case, the public was not being softened up for
invasion, bombing and murder, although his liberal opponents have often
'joked', with complete unawareness of the irony, about assaulting and
assassinating him.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal Declares:
The idea that journalism should offer a neutral 'spectrum'
of views was unceremoniously dumped during the US presidential election.
Hillary Clinton was endorsed by the 500 largest US newspapers and magazines;
Trump by 20 of the smallest, with the most significant of these – something
called the Las Vegas Review-Journal - reaching some 100,000 readers.
As with Jeremy Corbyn, from the moment Trump became a
genuine contender, he was drenched in vitriol by virtually the entire US-UK
corporate press. The smear campaign was epitomised by the baseless, Ian
Fleming-like suggestion that Trump was in cahoots with the establishment's
other great bête noire, Putin – a propaganda-perfect marriage of Evil and Pure
Evil.
Ironically, Trump may well turn out to be the final nail in
the coffin of the manifestly stalled human attempt to become civilised. As
leading climate scientist Michael Mann has noted, Trump's stance on climate
stability may mean 'game over' for it and us.
But elite media did not oppose Trump because of his climate
views – no question was raised on the issue during the presidential debates
and, as Noam Chomsky observes (below), the issue was of no interest to
journalists. On the other hand, Edward Herman comments, a declared lack of
enthusiasm for foreign conflict, notably with Russia, 'may help explain the
intensity of media hostility to Trump'.
Inevitably, our drawing attention to the awesome level of
media bias drew accusations that Media Lens was an unlikely 'apologist' for
Trump's far-right declarations promoting racism, misogyny and climate denial.
When we asked Guardian commentator Hadley Freeman why, in comparing Trump and
Clinton, she mentioned Clinton's email server scandal but not her war crimes,
she interpreted this as an endorsement of Trump:
'You're right: the racist, war-endorsing misogynist multiply
accused of sexual assault was the better option. Thanks for clarity.'
Telegraph columnist Helena Horton dismissed discussion of
Clinton's devastating wars as 'whataboutery':
'your whataboutery is detracting from the fact there is a
far-right misogynist racist in the White House.'
She added:
'im shocked idiot men who pushed a fascist into power
because HRC not perfect enough haven't shut up... and gosh they're foul aren't
they'
Comedian Robert Webb of Peep Show fame agreed, describing us
as 'pricks'.
Again, there is much irony in ostensible anti-fascists
insisting that a tiny website should 'shut up' and leave Big Media to steamroll
their candidate into the White House.
To be fair to our abusers, it is of course true that
criticising Clinton risked, to a microscopically tiny degree in our case,
supplying ammunition for the Trump cause. But in reality Trump is only part of
the problem. Chomsky comments on the Republican Party's stance on climate
change:
'And notice it's not Trump; it's 100 percent of the
Republican candidates taking essentially the same position. What they're
saying... "It's all a joke. It's a liberal hoax."'
Chomsky is talking about the imminent breakdown of climate
stability:
'It is hard to find words to capture the fact that humans
are facing the most important question in their history – whether organized
human life will survive in anything like the form we know – and are answering
it by accelerating the race to disaster...
'It is no less difficult to find words to capture the
utterly astonishing fact that in all of the massive coverage of the electoral
extravaganza, none of this receives more than passing mention. At least I am at
a loss to find appropriate words.'
As this makes very clear, the problem does not begin and end
with Trump. The roots of the Clinton-Trump fiasco lie in decades of 'liberal'
media refusal to challenge the increasing venality, violence and suicidal
climate indifference at the supposedly rational end of the political spectrum.
Virtually the entire 'liberal' journalistic community saw great hope in Bill
Clinton, Tony Blair, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, while treating genuinely
honest and compassionate political commentators like Chomsky, Edward Herman,
John Pilger, Howard Zinn, Harold Pinter, Chris Hedges, Jonathan Cook and many
others as quixotic freaks who may be mentioned in passing, published once in a
supermoon, but otherwise ignored.
As Slavoj Zizek observed: 'The real catastrophe is the
status quo.' When liberal journalism slams the door on reasoned arguments and
authentic compassion, other doors swing wide for the likes of Trump.
The default corporate media excuse for ignoring 'our' crimes
is that elected politicians have been chosen to serve by the people, and it is
the task of journalism to support, not subvert, democracy. But of course
democracy is profoundly subverted by a lack of honest media scrutiny.
Structural media distortion is so extreme that, despite bombing seven
countries, Barack Obama continues to be depicted and perceived as an almost
saintly figure.
Which is why it was important to challenge the notion that
Hillary Clinton was a benevolent force for democracy, justice and the climate
before she attained power. And after all, as Secretary of State, she had held
one of the most important positions within the US regime.
The risk of boosting Trump was thus balanced by the need to
take advantage of a limited period when mass media are, or ought to be, obliged
to honestly compare the words and deeds of the leading candidates. In other
words, despite Trump's awfulness, there was a strong moral case for drawing
attention to Clinton's record of reducing Libya to a ruin – a war crime known
in Washington as 'Hillary's war' – of fuelling a hideous war in Syria,
supporting the overthrow of the Honduran government, and so on.
As author Frank Morgan noted, pretty much the entire media
system depicted Clinton as 'a peerless leader clad in saintly white, a super-lawyer,
a caring benefactor of women and children, a warrior for social justice'.
Morgan added:
'With the same arguments repeated over and over, two or
three times a day, with nuance and contrary views all deleted, the act of
opening the newspaper started to feel like tuning in to a Cold War propaganda
station.'
It was difficult to imagine these words appearing in a
national newspaper before the vote, and ironic indeed that they appeared in the
Guardian. Happily for Britain's 'leading liberal-left newspaper', the linked
examples of media bias embedded in Morgan's piece led to the New York Times
rather than to equivalent or better examples on the website hosting his
article.
In fact, Morgan's piece mocking media performance is part of
a trend indicating that filters suppressing media honesty have been partially
lifted now that a clear-cut, black-and-white version of reality is no longer so
crucial.
Two further examples should help clarify this intriguing
phenomenon.
Nick Bryant And The Lear Jet Liberals
On November 8, the BBC's New York correspondent, Nick Bryant,
published a last comment on the election before voting began. On November 9, in
the aftermath of the result, he published a second piece.
In his pre-vote piece, Bryant wrote blandly:
'The post-industrial wastelands of the rustbelt, with their
skeletal remains and carcass-like old steel mills, are hardly a new feature of
the topography in states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. But to view them again was
to look at the seedbeds of Trumpism - rubble-strewn but seedbeds nonetheless.'
After the vote, Bryant's tone had changed:
'So many people I spoke to during this campaign - especially
in the old steel towns of the Rust Belt - wanted a businessman in the White
House rather than a career politician. Their hatred of Washington was palpable.
'So, too, was their hatred of her. It was visceral. I
vividly remember talking to a middle-aged woman in Tennessee, who oozed
southern charm, who could not have been more polite. But when the subject of
Hillary Clinton came up her whole demeanour changed.'
Visceral hatred of Clinton, no less, with a woman's opinion
offered as an example. Remarkable.
Bryant's damning summation: 'few people personify the
political establishment more than Hillary Clinton. During this campaign, for
millions of angry voters, she became the face of America's broken politics'.
Before the vote, Bryant commented:
'the rule of thumb in this election, in non-urban settings
especially, was the more impoverished the landscape, the more likely its
inhabitants were to support the billionaire.'
After the vote:
'Hillary Clinton has long had a trust problem, which is why
the email scandal loomed so large. She had an authenticity problem. She was
seen as the high priestess of an east coast elite that looked down, sneeringly,
on working people.
'The vast riches that the Clintons accumulated since leaving
the White House did not help. The former first couple were seen not just as
limousine liberals but Lear Jet liberals.'
This was excoriating, unlike anything we'd seen from a BBC
journalist during the election.
Before the vote, like virtually every other corporate media
reporter, Bryant was casually damning of Trump:
'I have tried to learn more about narcissistic personality
disorder.
'Many commentators from both sides believe having a basic
grasp of the condition was important in making sense of the behaviour of Donald
Trump.'
He also focused on the idea that Clinton's 'personality is
endlessly intriguing. Why, for instance, does she struggle to convey the warmth
and spontaneity in public that many of us have witnessed in private?'
Bryant's post-vote piece dispensed with such pleasantries:
'Hillary Clinton is not a natural campaigner. Her speeches
are often flat and somewhat robotic. Her sound-bites sound like sound-bites -
prefabricated and, to some ears, insincere.'
And consider that, as discussed, before the election
numerous commentators compared Trump to Hitler, the United States to Germany in
the 1930s, and so on. Despite these terrifying claims, we saw little or no
discussion of just how much power a triumphant Trump would actually have. Some
analysis arrived after the vote on November 15 with Anthony Zurcher's piece,
'Can Donald Trump get what he wants?'
Zurcher immediately notes that popular support, in fact, is
not enough: Trump will require the backing of 'the Washington powers that
populate Congress and [that] are necessary to successfully implement his
agenda'.
What of Trump's infamous US-Mexico border wall? It would
cost $20bn, for which the Mexican government is clearly unwilling to pay, and
would in some parts be downgraded to a fence. But actually: 'Chances of a
monumental Great Wall of Trump ever becoming a reality... seem slim.'
What about Trump's shocking plan to deport 11 million
undocumented workers from the US?
'He's since walked back such sweeping pronouncements... In
the face of reluctance from Congress and financial obstacles... it will be
tough for him to make the numbers add up.'
What about dismantling Obamacare?
'Republicans likely lack the political will to fully pull
the plug... in the end "reform" looks considerably more attractive
than "repeal".'
And so on. Accurate or not, serious, high-profile attention
is finally being paid to the existence of checks and balances that will likely
prevent a Trump tyranny. This kind of rational discussion conflicted with the
establishment need to block Trump by presenting him as a Saddam- or
Gaddafi-like figure, a Hitlerian threat. The fact that Trump's stance on
climate means he really is a serious threat to humanity may turn out to be an
unhappy coincidence.
Conclusion:
Hillary Clinton was indisputably the preferred establishment
candidate, backed by virtually the entire US-UK corporate press.
'Mainstream' media did not merely support Clinton, they
declared propaganda war on Trump. As we have seen in this brief sample, even
BBC journalists thought nothing of ridiculing Trump's 'narcissistic personality
disorder' – unthinkable language from a BBC reporter describing an Obama, a
Cameron, or indeed a Clinton.
The intensity of establishment support for Clinton meant
that journalistic performance was filtered by host media and self-censorship.
As the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger told us in an interview:
'[T]he whole thing works by a kind of osmosis. If you ask
anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, "Rupert
Murdoch," or whoever, "never tells me what to write", which is
beside the point: they don't have to be told what to write. It's understood.'
The moment the vote was cast, pressures filtering out
criticisms of Clinton and less hysterical coverage of Trump were lifted. The
result is a semblance of balance that allows stunningly extreme 'mainstream'
media to enhance their ill-deserved reputation for 'fairness' and
'impartiality'.
DE
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