MEDIA BEAT by Norman Solomon
CLINTON'S MEMOIRS: REFLECTING ON THE MEDIA WARS
News of Bill Clinton's lucrative book deal has created quite a buzz. There's no tell-ing how the former president's memoirs will turn out. But before revisions delete any excess candor, the first draft of a chapter about media coverage of his presidency might include a passage like this:
From the outset, I wanted to prove that I was a genuine New Democrat. Fortunately, I had the personality and the connections to pull it off. Bubba on Wall Street. Cracker with Chablis. A modern Huey Long, but well tailored and tamped down.
To be taken seriously by the Washington press corps, a presidential hopeful needs influential backers with access to millions. At the start of the 1990s, I gained momentum by excelling at events like the cozy bull sessions on Pamela Harriman's estate in Virginia fox country. I talked up a "third way"-- not liberal, not conservative. I was something else! I conveyed to a lot of journalists that I trusted their political sensibilities, revered their symbols, talked their language. I pursued a strategy to acquire a coveted media label --"moderate" --the favorable tag for a politician who supports abortion rights and won't rock the big corporate boats.
There was that unpleasantness about Gennifer Flowers, but it didn't do much damage after Hillary and I talked our way past it on "60 Minutes." I had the political two-step down cold -- talk like a mature populist and swing with the money boys. The media pros were often warm; those who didn't hate me were inclined to swoon.
At the '92 convention, the bio flick was pure media gold -- especially because of the Rose Garden scene with me and President Kennedy shaking hands. At year's end, Time magazine couldn't stop gushing about that footage: "Now the torch is being passed to the generation that was touched and inspired by Kennedy. Indeed, the most memorable moment in the convention video about the man from Hope was the scene of the eager student being inspired by Kennedy's anointing touch."
While I made a lot of media hay about my Cabinet "looking like America," few journalists focused on the blue-blood orientation. I sealed the deal by installing Wall Street bootlicker Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) as treasury secretary and Bob Rubin (D-Goldman Sachs) as economic policy czar. Both were fervently appreciated in the upper reaches of American journalism.
When I took early flak about gay rights in the military, I caved. But I knew what to fight for.
I went to the mat for NAFTA, and then for the GATT treaty forming the World Trade Organization. That boosted my stock among media elites. Even pundits who despised me, like Wall Street Journal editorial writers, had to give me grudging credit. Of course, with the hostility from media owners like Rev. Sun Myung Moon and Rupert Murdoch, I could never please the rabid right at outlets like the Washington Times and Fox News.
Overall, the big media wheels kept spinning in praise of my aversion to "big government" (the Pentagon excluded, naturally). When I showed myself eager to slash the social safety net, they knew I meant business.
There was a bit of grousing when I signed the welfare reform bill. If a Republican had done it, some media liberals might have gone nuts -- but they were content to give me, at most, the press equivalent of a slap on the wrist.
It sure didn't hurt that I pulled off the bipartisan Telecommunications Act of 1996. This multibillion-dollar gift to broadcasting's powers-that-be really helped to further ingratiate me with media moguls. They were thrilled to proceed with merger mania and ratchet up already-humongous profits.
To be frank, bombing also came in very handy. I don't want to hear about "Wag the Dog." No president needs a Hollywood movie to understand that when the commander-in-chief kills some foreigners, all kinds of media goodies follow.
I was five months into my presidency when I gave the order to launch two-dozen missiles at an Iraqi office complex. (If it bothered any important American journalists that a number of nearby civilians died in a residential Baghdad neighborhood, they never let on.) I loved Time's coverage of my televised Oval Office announcement: "one of his finest moments; he struck the right tone, reasoned but forceful." My subsequent use of missiles -- whether against Sudan, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, or Iraq again -- won me floods of media praise.
Even in the depths of the Monica mess, there was appreciable media allegiance to me, perhaps in gratitude for the political agenda that I championed so well as president. Many a journalistic lap dog couldn't stop drooling.
Sure, again and again, I betrayed my own high-sounding calls for social justice and economic fairness. But I learned early on that when such betrayals occur, forgiveness tends to rise with income bracket. And when was the last time a poor person owned a TV network?
DANCING -- OR YAWNING -- ON THE GRAVE OF CARLO GIULIANA
After a police officer shot Carlo Giuliani in the head, Time magazine published a requiem of sorts -- explaining that the 23-year-old Italian protester pretty much got what he deserved. "One man died in Genoa; a man, we must presume, who was swayed by the false promise that violence -- not peaceful protest, not participation in the democratic process -- is the best way to advance a political cause," Time's article concluded. "It is not too much to hope that the next time his friends stoop to pick up a cobblestone, they will remember a lesson learned when plows first broke the Mesopotamian earth: You reap what you sow."
The sanctimonious tone, etched with gratification, was not unique to the largest newsmagazine in the United States. Quite a few commentators seemed to accept -- or even applaud -- the killing of Giuliani as rough justice. "Excuse me if I don't mourn for the young man who was shot dead by police during the economic summit," wrote Houston Chronicle columnist Cragg Hines. "It was tragic, but he was asking for it, and he got it."
In Genoa, assaults by Italian police were systematic and widespread, causing hundreds of serious injuries. But American news accounts tended to be cryptic. "Italian police raided a school building housing activists and arrested all 92 people inside," the Wall Street Journal reported on July 23. "Afterward, the building was covered with pools of blood and littered with smashed computers. Several reporters at the school were hurt; one had his arm broken. Police said 61 of the detainees had been wounded in riots that preceded the raid, but neighbors described hours of beatings and screaming coming from the school during the raid."
On July 25, when I called the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Manhattan-based group had not yet issued a statement. But program director Richard M. Murphy told me: "CPJ is extremely concerned by reports that working journalists were attacked by both police and protesters while covering street demonstrations at the Genoa summit." The comment was evenhanded to a fault. The vast majority of the reported attacks on journalists were by police.
Unlike colleagues assaulted while displaying press credentials, reporter John Elliott was on an undercover assignment among protesters. Watching a water cannon move through tear gas, "I felt a massive blow to the back of my head," he wrote in the Sunday Times of London. "For a second my vision whited out. I had been hit by a police truncheon."
As more police ran toward him, Elliott quickly tried to regain his journalistic identity by yelling, "Giornalista inglese!" But the clubbing went on. "Two policemen dragged me along the ground, shouted at me in Italian and then hit me some more. My cycling helmet disintegrated under their blows. Truncheons whacked my back, arms and shins. They dragged me over railway lines towards a signal box where I was ordered to put my head on a steel rail. I tried to obey, unable to believe this was happening. Gripped by fresh impulses of violence, they started kicking my head, back and legs. Repeatedly they pushed me to the ground for a fresh pasting."
News accounts routinely declared that the fatality in Genoa was unprecedented. But an essay in the London-based Guardian debunked that media myth. "The members of the Landless Movement of Brazil (MST) could tell you that Carlo Giuliani ... is not the first casualty of the movement challenging neop;liberal globalization around the world," Katharine Ainger wrote. "The MST suffer ongoing persecution for their campaign for land reform in Brazil, their opposition to the World Bank's program of market-led land reform and to the corporate control of agriculture through patents on seed."
Ainger cited other deaths that have gone virtually unreported in mass media: "Recently, three students protesting against World Bank privatization were shot in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Young men fighting World Bank-imposed water privatization have been tortured and killed in Cochabamba, Bolivia."
Meanwhile, around the planet, those who perish from lack of food or drinkable water or health care have little media presence. The several thousand children who die from easily preventable diseases each morning, and afternoon, and evening, remain largely media abstractions. When will news outlets really scrutinize the profit-driven violence that takes their lives?
While such institutionalized violence is massive and continuous, supporters of corporate globalizing agendas benefit from the propaganda value of the street violence by "Black Bloc" participants in Genoa (who, according to eyewitness accounts, comprised no more than 2 percent of the protesters there). It would be surprising if those Black Bloc units were not heavily infiltrated by government-paid provocateurs and the like. Historically, covert police agents have often pushed for -- and helped to implement -- violent actions in isolation from a mass base. In sharp contrast, there is scant record of police agents trying to foment militant, nonviolent civil disobedience on a large scale.
A global movement with literally millions of participants is continuing to organize against the colossal daily violence of the world's biggest institutions. Progressive websites that are genuinely grassroots and international -- like <www.indymedia.org> and <www.zmag.org> -- reflect vibrant resistance to a corporatized future. Other futures are possible, to the extent that people are determined to create them.
--Norman Solomon's latest book is The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media., 1994. His syndicated column focuses on media and politics.