Pressed For News

Norman Solomon wrote in the Huffington Post that spying on the U.N. Security Council “had nothing to do with protecting the United States from a terrorist attack. The entire purpose of the NSA surveillance was to help the White House gain leverage, by whatever means possible, for a resolution in the U.N. Security Council to green light an invasion. When that surveillance was exposed nearly three years ago, the mainstream U.S. media winked at Bush’s illegal use of the NSA for his Iraq invasion agenda.”

The plan to conduct espionage against certain member countries of the U.N. was the brain-child of top members of the Bush administration and was approved by then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Solomon continues: “Back then, after news of the NSA’s targeted spying at the United Nations broke in the British press, major U.S. media outlets gave it only perfunctory coverage -- or, in the case of the New York Times, no coverage at all.”

This story is a precursor of the news that the New York Times had withheld for over a year the story of President Bush’s approval to use the NSA to spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant as required by the FISA law. Is this lack of reporting information that could be harmful to the administration merely a coincidence or is it revealing a trend? Consider some other stories that the Main Stream Media in the US have covered scantily or not at all.

The Downey Street Memo, written by a senior member of the British government who was in attendance at the meeting with top members of the US government, describes the Bush administration’s strategy to justify the invasion of Iraq by “fixing the facts around the strategy”. Although this item was the big story in the UK and headlined in other countries around the world, it was barely covered in the US.

WMD Lies by Judith Miller filled the pages of the NYT in the lead up to the Iraq war, published without question by her editors. Yet, they all turned out to be false as they were based on extremely questionable sources and shaded with the utmost in poor judgment.


Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government, The administration has drastically changed the rules on Freedom of Information Act requests and laws that restrict public access to federal records, mostly by expanding the national security classification, operates in secret under the Patriot Act and consistently refuses to provide information to Congress and the Government Accountability Office.

Distorted Election Coverage: Faulted study that caused most of the corporate media to dismiss the discrepancy between exit polls and the vote tally and missed the still-contentious question of whether the vote in Ohio needed closer examination.

U.S. illegally removes pages from Iraq U.N. report: Even as Bush urged military action against Iraq for the country's failure to divulge details of its alleged chemical, biological, and nuclear arsenal, the U.S. government covertly removed 8,000 of the 11,800 pages of the weapons declaration the Iraqi government had submitted to the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Closing access to information technology: The Internet has functioned as the single most important medium for accessing these kinds of information. But if big communications companies get their way, the Web could be compromised as a democratic source of alternative news and perspectives. Soon, what we get from the Web could be a carbon copy of what we already get from corporate TV, cable, radio, and newspapers.

Sale of electoral politics: As much hope as electronic voting offers (ease of use, access for the disabled etc), it offers just as many reasons for skepticism and fear. A look behind the curtain reveals that the programmers and manufacturers of the machines are a combination of defense contractors and corporations headed by staunch Republicans whose programming codes are dangerously faulty and whose results are impossible to verify.

Secrets of Cheney's energy task force come to light: In 2001 the Task Force formulated the National Energy Policy (NEP), or Cheney Report, bypassing possibilities for energy independence and reduced oil consumption with a declaration of ambitions to establish new sources of oil. Via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2003, documents revealed the Task's Force interest in Iraqi oilfields as early as March 2001, pre-9/11.

Bush administration hampered FBI investigation of bin Laden family pre Sept. 11: Less than two months after Sept. 11, a Guardian reporter got hold of 1996 Federal Bureau of Investigation memos indicating the bureau suspected Abdullah bin Laden, brother of the most infamous terrorist in the world, of funding terrorist activity. Unfortunately, angry agents who spoke to the reporter told him the counterterrorism probe was scuttled by bureau honchos before it could even get off the ground.

Taken alone any of the stories above would be considered not just significant but, a major story with profound political ramifications. Or rather, it would have been ten years ago. In today’s world of issue free news, this unbelievable collection of near mortal attacks on democracy remain unheralded in the media even when it is inescapably evident that they all occurred in the current administration’s term. There is only one logical reason for the medias lack of interest in events such as those above. Not reporting them is in the best interest of the media’s own ideological agenda.

Nearly all of the media is corporately owned and is operated for profit. When the networks first developed news departments to keep the public informed, they were divisions of the networks that operated as non-profit entities. They were also an obligation the network/corporation had accepted to obtain a broadcast license. These laws and policies have been quietly changed over the years to allow for profit news and the definition of what public service they should provide became so distorted that Fox News is licensed by the FCC.