Fahrenheit 9/11 For Grown-ups

[Guest guest]

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/fahrenheit_911_for_grownups.php

 

 

Fahrenheit 9/11 For Grown-ups

Robert Jensen

September 17, 2004

 

 

 

Fahrenheit 9/11 stirred up emotions about the war in Iraq, but

Hijacking Catastrophe arms us with an understanding of how we got

there. Moore avoided discussing the real reasons the Bush

administration invaded Iraq; i nstead he made inferences about George

W. Bush's allegiance to the Saudi royalty and desire to avenge his

father. But Bush alone wasn't leading the charge to invade. Jensen

writes that a new documentary lays clear the path to war and the

media's role in selling it.

 

Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of Texas at

Austin and the author of Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim

Our Humanity from City Lights Books. He can be reached at

rjensen.

 

I'm a former full-time journalist turned journalism professor. I

continue to commit occasional acts of journalism, and I retain a deep

affection for, and commitment to, the craft and its ideals. That's why

it pains me to say this: The performance of the U.S. corporate

commercial news media after 9/11 has been the most profound and

dangerous failure of journalism in my lifetime.

 

That's the bad news. The good news is that the void is being filled by

other institutions, including the Media Education Foundation with its

new documentary, Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear & the Selling of

American Empire.

 

That performance of journalists in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of

Iraq was so abysmal that the country's top two daily newspapers, the

Washington Post and New York Times , eventually were forced to engage

in a bit of self-criticism, albeit shallow and inadequate. The U.S.

news media's willingness to serve as a largely uncritical conduit for

the lies, half-truths and distortions the Bush administration used to

create the pretext for war showed how easily journalists can become de

facto agents of a state propaganda campaign, which in this case

mobilized public support for an illegal war.

 

But the lies that led to the Iraq war are only part of a bigger story,

the most important story of the past three years: The Bush

administration's manipulation of the tragedy of 9/11 to extend and

intensify the longstanding U.S. project of empire building (and the

complicity of most Democrats in that endeavor).

 

No publication or network in the mainstream of U.S. journalism has

offered an independent, critical analysis of that project. Only a few

journalists, mostly on the margins, have even dared to take a crack at

it. The best consistent work has been in the foreign press or the

alternative media in the United States.

 

This also has been the year of the political documentary, and

Hijacking Catastrophe is the best film in this genre to date.

 

(Full disclosure: I was one of the people interviewed for Hijacking

Catastrophe, and I also have appeared in two other MEF films. I agreed

to participate in these projects because, after years of using MEF

videos in the classroom, I have come to respect the quality of the

work and the integrity of its staff.)

 

Until this year, MEF had focused primarily on media criticism; its

videos examined the effect of mass media on U.S. politics and culture.

MEF primarily took as its task the job of explaining the failures of

journalists, not doing the work of journalists. With Hijacking

Catastrophe, directors Sut Jhally and Jeremy Earp also take up that

task, covering the tremendously important story of the current phase

of the U.S. empire that journalists have let slip through their fingers.

 

The film concentrates on two major topics: The neoconservative agenda

for U.S. domination of the world, which was created long before 9/11,

and the selling of that agenda to the U.S. public after 9/11.

 

The first story goes back to the early 1990s and the end of the Cold

War, when policy planners such as Paul Wolfowitz (current deputy

secretary of defense) were devising a more aggressive foreign policy

and military posture to allow the United States to capitalize on the

collapse of the Soviet Union and to dominate the globe in ways that

had not previously been possible. At the time, the plans were

considered so extreme that the first Bush administration reined in

these ideological fanatics; the U.S. empire could go forward, but not

in such radical form.

 

During the remainder of the 1990s, these neoconservative planners

chafed at what they saw as an insufficiently aggressive approach to

expansion of the empire in the Clinton administration. The Project for

the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank, was created as

a vehicle for promoting this ideology, which was able to take center

stage with the George W. Bush administration.

 

Resistance to such an aggressive and dangerous project remained,

however, and the project still had to be sold to the U.S. public. The

attacks of 9/11 created the political climate which made that possible.

 

The second story told by Hijacking Catastrophe is how the Bush

administration—again, with the Democrats either helping or standing

aside, and the news media playing a compliant lapdog role—devised and

executed a propaganda campaign to ratchet up and manipulate the

public's fear of terrorism to justify first an illegal, immoral and

counterproductive invasion of Afghanistan (designed to solidify U.S.

control in Central Asia) and then an even more blatantly illegal and

disastrous invasion of Iraq (designed to solidify U.S. control of the

Middle East).

 

Reviews in the Washington Post and New York Times both acknowledged

that the film offers a " cogent, concise and engaging " argument and

makes a " convincing case " (the case, perhaps, that journalists from

those papers should have been reporting all along). Both reviews also

note that Jhally's and Earp's presentation of " the facts without any

funny business " marks Hijacking Catastrophe as a film different from

Fahrenheit 9/11 , one that is " more sober, yet no less sobering " than

Michael Moore's movie.

 

These repeated failures of journalists to hold the powerful

accountable should be a subject of serious discussion not just within

the profession but for all of us. If journalists don't provide a truly

independent source of news and instead routinely subordinate

themselves to power—especially in times of war and national

crisis—it's difficult to imagine how citizens can adequately inform

themselves so that they can participate in the political arena in a

meaningful way.

 

But when journalism fails, it's possible for other institutions to

take on some of the news media's obligations. That doesn't mean MEF or

groups like it can replace existing journalistic institutions on their

own. Nor does it mean that Jhally and Earp are holding themselves out

to the public as journalists, in the same way that so-called

" objective " journalists do.

 

Instead, films such as Hijacking Catastrophe provide information and

analysis, coming from a political orientation (critical, dissident,

progressive—historically, the hallmarks of great journalism) that is

up front. The question isn't whether the people who made the film and

appear in it have a politics—of course they do, just as mainstream

journalists and mainstream journalism's institutions do. The question

is whether the information presented is accurate, the judgments made

are honest, and the conclusions reached are compelling.

 

On those criteria, Hijacking Catastrophe is one of the best pieces of

journalism of recent years.