Eating is an agricultural act - Wendell Berry

Friday, July 27, 2007

the invisible government

a telling speech/essay on the role of media over this century. by john pilger, a noted anti-war journalist and film maker.
while we here in india are slowly becoming aware of the commercial bias and bent of the likes of TOI and most others (except perhaps the hindu), the more damaging role that could be underway is exemplified in his critique.

In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them
American. In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably
about 5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media
giants, and his company will be one of them.
Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the BBC's reporting. One
shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar
dissent—2 percent....A second study by the University of Wales shows that in the
buildup to the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass
destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them, and that by
clear implication Bush and Blair were right.
his experiences from vietnam and cambodia add to the argument

There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968—the day that the My-Lai massacre happened—and not one of them reported it.
I've made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia 1. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot
completed.

he has also quoted from the 2005 nobel prize for literature winner, harold pinter's, acceptance speech. brilliant.

and some facts on the rapaciousness of the US is startling.

Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found
that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion.
...what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States
adminstrations have overthrown 50 governments—many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of
countless lives.
this is a really long piece and requires time to just read, leave alone the time it would take to understand the depth. am also not finished.

1 the video is available here

1 comment:

sameersampat said...

piler article is good stuff.

he pegged me with this one:

So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings I have addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this conference, is itself interesting. It's my experience that people in the so-called third world rarely ask the question, because they know what to do. And some have paid with their freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It's a question that many on the democratic left—small "d"—have yet to answer.