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Wednesday, October 1, 1997

Innocent message hides madness

MEDIA: Educational ad points to newspapers' promotion of violence

On Saturday, September 20, 1997 the L.A. Times ran an ad which was designed to cause parents to encourage their children to read every day. There was a picture of George Bush smiling over a newspaper and a caption that read, "Encourage your children to read every day. One day they may take the world by storm."

Now, perhaps this ad is so offensive to me because I do love to read. Therefore, I don't like to think that reading will cause children to grow up to be responsible for the deaths of something like 150,000 people. That many were killed just in the one war referred to in the ad (not to mention all the people killed in Panama, and the countries invaded while Bush was vice-president, or all the deaths the CIA was responsible for while he was that agency's head).

I know that I would probably encourage any child that I may have to read, but I would not want them to be involved in any wars, much less the commander-in-chief of a war, especially if it was being fought for such horrible reasons.

But perhaps there is some truth to the implications of this ad. I'd like to think that reading alone does not lead to such violent behavior. However, perhaps reading publications such as the Los Angeles Times does encourage this kind of thing. After all, most mainstream news media were highly uncritical of such things as the Gulf War or Bush's invasion of Panama in flagrant violation of international law.

The mainstream media in this country seems to not really be interested in questioning the actions of our leaders, except in the instances of meaningless scandals which catch the public's attention. Take for instance our current president, Mr. Bill Clinton. There was so much focus on the details that he probably smoked marijuana and that he supposedly slept with some women.

Who cares? What does this have to do with how someone runs a country?

What I care more about is that he hasn't done anything meaningful in the past five years, at least nothing that I can discern. He has consistently moved to the right on the political spectrum and has allowed things such as NAFTA, so-called welfare reform and other things to pass into law. If there is any criticism of him in the mainstream press, it is from conservatives calling him a liberal, which is simply laughable.

Rather than attempting to inform the public about meaningful issues, the media seems more intent on bringing us mindless entertainment. A recent example of this was with the death of Princess Diana. On the Sunday after she died, every story on the front page of the L.A. Times was about her. Who cares? She was royalty in another country, and the U.S is a country which supposedly doesn't think royalty is too cool. Yet when some English princess dies we get all teary-eyed. I don't get it. And I shouldn't even have to mention the whole O.J. Simpson fiasco.

When the mainstream media isn't buffeting us with meaningless soap operas, it is busy blindly towing the propaganda line of the government and trans-national corporations. The Gulf War is a perfect example.

Kuwait is a monarchy. That means it has a king (or dictator to be less romantic). In the elections they do have, women cannot vote. As I understand, the reason why Iraq invaded Kuwait was that Kuwait was slant drilling into Iraqi territory. Did the media report on any of this? Not at all. Bush and Congress said that we were fighting for democracy. We were fighting against unwarranted aggression. (Never mind the fact that we did the exact same thing that Iraq did to Kuwait to Panama only a year before).

And we certainly did not hear about how the U.S. had been giving millions of dollars to Hussein (knowing full well who he was) only a few years before.

The line fed to us by the powers that be is almost never questioned by the mainstream media. Recently, however, there was an aberration. Last year, Gary Webb published an article in the San Jose Mercury News in which he exposed how the CIA (George Bush's old friends again) backed Contras in Nicaragua and received a lot of money from funneling crack cocaine into the inner cities of the U.S., especially L.A.

For a long time the major news media were silent. Then two months later, on nearly the same day, the L.A. Times, New York Times and Washington Post all came out with stories announcing that Webb's article was baseless. Yet, in the Los Angeles Times, it was interesting that the people cited in the article were mostly CIA agents or former CIA agents. It seems to me that they may have had an interest in lying about what actually happened.

So, if I might give a little bit of advice, I would say this - don't just encourage your children to read, but also teach them to question what they read. While you're at it, encourage them to read diverse sources of information; they simply aren't going to get the whole truth if they only read the L.A. Times.