Africa-Press – South-Africa. Oscar van Heerden reflects on the arrest of Jack Teixeira, writing that it shows the embroidered relationship between our media, the US government and the powerful elites takes precedence over the truth.
When CCN International exploded onto the global scene in 1991 and brought everyone around the world first-hand images of the Persian Gulf war in Iraq, it was no small feat.
CNN gave us a front-row seat and told the news as it was.
We saw the destruction and devastation in real-time and how the Americans were liberating the Iraqi people. That scoop back then, set CNN international up for bigger things to come, and the immutable lesson learnt throughout that conflict was that war means profit.
When you are able to get millions of viewers from around the world glued to the TV screens watching CNN, that means ratings go up, which means advertising revenue increases too.
Six big media houses in control
The rest, as they say, is history. Today CNN competes with other news networks, and this is, of course, healthy competition. The US today has about six big media houses that control just about all information flowing in that country and given the soft power influence that the US have on the rest of the world. They also control, by in large, what you and I see as news globally.
The media houses and their owners are:
ViacomCBS – Robert Bakish
Disney – Bob Iger
Warner Bros. Discovery – David Zaslav
Comcast – Brian Roberts
NewsCorp – Rupert Murdoch
Sony – Kenichiro Yoshida
Their assets amount to a combined worth of $430 billion dollars.
These corporations bring you the news from around the world, or not. Some may argue that they exercise “cognitive warfare” on the world – a massive psych operation to tell us what they want us to know and think.
Cognitive warfare is the weaponisation of public opinion by an external entity to influence public and government policy and destabilise public institutions. It’s no longer about the news and the truth, it’s about the bottom line, it seems.
Recently I watched the brilliant movie, “The Post”, which centres around a family-run newspaper called The Washington Post and the everyday decisions that one has to make to keep the paper afloat but also relevant.
The central theme of the movie is what to do when a whistleblower leaks sensitive and classified information to the media that clearly demonstrates that the government has been lying to the general public concerning a certain matter. In this case, the Vietnam war. Do you print or do you not, in the interests of “national security”? Are you a patriot or a traitor, as some might even put it?
Should you inform the general citizenry of these lies and misinformation and how their tax dollars are being spent, or decide to partner with the government and hence become complicit in its lies?
The US defence secretary Robert McNamara, at the time, knew full well the true extent of the Vietnam war, the casualties being suffered by US soldiers and the true state of affairs on the ground on the battlefield, and yet still chose to lie to the American people: All is going well; we are winning this war.
But nothing could have been further from the truth, and these leaked documents, known as the ‘Pentagon Papers’ exposed the US government for who they were and the lies they peddled in order to continue with that war unabated.
Are we being told the truth?
Fast forward to today, and the question we must ask as critical thinkers and intellectuals is “are we being told the truth with regards the Ukrainian war with Russia”?
Recently leaked confidential documents from the Pentagon suggest exactly that we are being lied to, yet again. But the weird thing here is that the overwhelming response to this whistleblower has been nothing short of astonishing from western media. It seems telling the truth is the only real sin in Washington these days.
The young 21-year-old man, Jack Teixeira, who is also a US air national guardsman is believed to have leaked the documents online. But instead of hailing this young man as a hero who exposed this abomination on the part of the US government and the military establishment, news outlets have instead vilified him.
The New York Post stated that anyone on the left or right of the political divide should be ashamed to defend him. Others are also now questioning his love of guns and his association with potential right-wing elements in chat-groups.
Anything but a young man who felt what his government was doing was illegal and should not be lying to its citizens in order to justify more and more military and financial support to Ukraine. All under false pretences.
I won’t get into the details here today but suffice to say the western media needs to have some serious introspection as to what exactly their collective role in society must and has always been – to tell the truth without fear or favour.
In the movie, again the female owner of the newspaper laments: “My Daddy used to say ‘news is the first draft of history’.” And evidently, we are getting the wrong first draft, according to the leaked documents, thanks to Teixeira.
The government, of course, at the time of the “Pentagon Papers” challenged the matter in court and wanted to bar the newspapers from printing the truth. One of the justices, Hugo Black, in the Supreme Court stated the following, “The fourth estate is there to protect the governed and not the governors”. The court upheld the first amendment in the USA constitution. The freedom of the media is critical to a democracy in which the government is accountable to the people. A free media functions as a watchdog that can investigate and report on government wrongdoing.
Men and women risked their lives
How far the collective western media has fallen from the hey days of expose such as “The Pentagon Papers” and the “Watergate scandal”. Men and women risked their lives and faced imprisonment in order to expose the truth.
How we admired journalists and whistleblowers such as Seymour Hersh for telling the uncomfortable truth, for Edward Snowden for exposing how the government was spying on its own citizens, and Julian Assange for his expose in Wikileaks.
Snowden is now in exile in Russia because that’s the only place he is safe in, and Assange has been imprisoned for several years now, as extradition proceedings work their way through British courts.
Pulitzer Prize winner investigative journalist, Hersh gained recognition in 1969 for exposing the “My Lai massacre” in Vietnam and, subsequently, atrocities of abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison 2003/4 in Iraq. He now alleges the US government is involved in the bombing and subsequent destruction of the Nordstream Gas pipeline last year. And more recently he claimed President Volodymyr Zelensky fraudulently stole US aid money for his personal gain.
The collective western media now takes issue with such revelations from such an esteemed investigative journalist. I wonder why? It runs counter-narrative to their objectives.
There was a time when we heralded leaks such as these, but it seems no more.
The embroidered relationship between our media, the US government and the powerful elites takes precedence over the truth.
Our mainstream media is now owned by the elite, who are in cahoots with the political elite and Wall Street. It seems that when you are motivated by profits and getting your economy going on the back of a war, then that’s what must happen. You shape the public opinion landscape.
Ukraine are winning this war. That is the message, and it must sink in. The media, military analysts and business types all sing off the same hymn sheet: Russia is led by a mad and evil man dead set on re-establishing the former glory of the Soviet Union and that this was an unprovoked invasion and military aggression. Not NATO expansion and encroachment, not the 2014 coup d’etat in Ukraine, nor the continuous shelling and bombing of the Donetsk Oblast in eastern Ukraine for the last eight to nine years.
Well, besides the truth that we now see in these leaked documents, I’m not sure what the measure for winning is.
Ukraine lies in ruins. The Ukrainian people have suffered unimaginable suffering and death. The country has no money and had to be bailed out by the International Monetary Fund to the tune of $14 billion dollars. More than 10 million Ukrainians are refugees now in neighbouring countries, constituting one of the biggest humanitarian disasters since World War Two. The power grid and infrastructure destroyed. Whole cities are no more.
How exactly is Ukraine winning this war? The truth must out, and we ought to hail persons such as Jack Teixeira for their bravery in exposing it. The last I checked, the fourth estate still stood for the truth.
– Dr Oscar van Heerden is a scholar of international relations (IR), where he focuses on international political economy, with an emphasis on Africa, and SADC in particular.
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