It's with John Stauber, the author of "The Best War Ever" .
“Lies got us into this war. Only the truth will get us out.”
The Best War Ever, by the best-selling authors of Weapons of Mass Deception, is a vital account of why America is losing in Iraq and the Middle East. We have met the enemy—and it's our own PR machine. One of the most tragic consequences of the Bush administration's reliance on spin, the authors argue, is its disdain for realistic planning. Repeatedly, when faced with predictions of problems, policymakers dismissed the warnings of Iraq experts, choosing instead to promulgate their own version of the war through conservative media outlets and PR campaigns. And as the book reveals, they're still doing it—as the people who sold us the war in Iraq are now trying to sell an expansion into Syria and Iran.
Why You Should Read The Best War Ever
* Offers the most compelling and complete study to date of the propaganda campaign that led us to war, and which continues to trap the Bush administration within a “mirrored echo chamber” of its own “message consistency”—with catastrophic consequences for the United States and the world.
* Provides meticulous accounting of the polling and spin-doctoring of GOP and administration officials in laying out language to obscure the reality of this unilaterally-declared war of choice, and occupation.
* Details how the Bush administration has aimed its propaganda not at a tactical deception of enemy combatants, but at the American people themselves. This violates long-standing and important American political traditions dating back to the Smith-Mundt Act, which was first passed by Congress in 1948 after lawmakers saw the harm that propaganda had done during Hitler's reign in Germany.
* Gives necessary context and background on the administration's use of leaked information and ad hominem attacks to discredit their critics. It examines the case of CIA analyst Valerie Plame and her husband Joseph Wilson, showing how the administration's eagerness to discredit a critic came at the cost of sacrificing important policy goals, including preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
* Is the first book to compile and compare various accountings of Iraqi and U.S. casualties as a result of this conflict. Why is there no official U.S. count of Iraqi dead? And why have pro-war pundits engaged in smear campaigns against respected research journals such as the Lancet for conducting their own research into the number of casualties?
* As support for the war dwindles, Rampton and Stauber predict a next round of propaganda that will likely be aimed at rationalizing the failures to bring stability and democracy to Iraq. They also warn that the same officials who misled us into war with Iraq are now gearing up to argue for war with Iran. The authors urge all Americans to understand the lies that were told, and to hold accountable those responsible for creating and disseminating them.
“More than a book—it's a call to action.”
Here's an excerpt from the book.
http://www.prwatch.org/tbwe/docs/tbwe_intro.pdf
In their new book titled "The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies, and the Mess in Iraq [1]" (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006), which goes on sale Thursday, co-authors John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton assert that television reporters "actually underplayed rather than overplayed the negative" in their reporting from Iraq, while "newspaper coverage during the subsequent occupation has also been sanitised."
Stauber and Rampton cite a study by researchers at George Washington University that analysed 1,820 stories on five U.S. television networks: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox News, as well as the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera, and found that "all of the American media largely shied away from showing visuals of coalition, Iraqi military, or civilian casualties. Despite advanced technologies offering reporters the chance to transmit the reality of war in real time, reporters chose instead to present a largely bloodless conflict to viewers even when they did broadcast during firefights."
Print journalists didn't perform much better. A May 2005 review by Los Angeles Times writer James Rainey of the coverage of a six-month period -- when 559 U.S. and Western allies died in Iraq -- by six major U.S. newspapers and two popular newsmagazines found that "readers of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Washington Post did not see a single picture of a dead serviceman."
"Rumsfeld's complaints are an interesting twist of the truth since the reality is that the United States has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on media campaigns that have been spectacularly ineffective," Rampton told IPS in a telephone interview. "That the enemy has been more effective in communicating its message to the world is not so much a reflection of their media savvy as it is on the ineffective message of the United States."
"You can't expect a better messaging strategy to compensate for the fact that the underlining policy is based on falsehoods and deliberate deception," Rampton said.
As the occupation of Iraq proved unmanageable and the total number of dead and wounded U.S. military personnel mounted, stories about the revamping of schoolhouses and the building of soccer fields were given a backseat by the media.
With things continuing to spiral out of control in Iraq, the Bush administration has once again decided that it's a public relations problem; a question of propaganda not policy. Around the same time that Rumsfeld was on the road railing about anti-war appeasers and confused critics that were enabling terrorism, and how much better the terrorists were in handling the media, the Washington Post reported that "U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, 20-million-dollar public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq."
According to the Post's Walter Pincus, the "contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a programme to provide 'public relations products' that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal."
Pincus pointed out that the proposal "calls in part for extensive monitoring and analysis of Iraqi, Middle Eastern and American media, [and] is designed to help the coalition forces understand 'the communications environment.' Its goal is to 'develop communication strategies and tactics, identify opportunities, and execute events... to effectively communicate Iraqi government and coalition's goals, and build support among our strategic audiences in achieving these goals,'" according to a statement publicly available through the FBO Daily's Web site.
"From what I've seen, the thing about this proposal that most concerns me is the component calling for the monitoring of the media, especially when journalists will be rated as to how favourable they are toward U.S. policy objectives," Rampton pointed out.
"Monitoring journalists and maintaining a database of their stories raises a number of serious questions: Who knows where that database will wind up in two years or five years from now? What kind of retribution might be exacted against those reporters whose work is seen as unfavourable to U.S. policy?"
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/node/634/print
All book sales benefit the Center for Media and Democracy, a 501(C)3 non-profit whose programs include PRWatch.org, Sourcewatch.org, Congresspedia.org, the No Fake News campaign, the Weekly Spin, and PR Watch quarterly.
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