Innocent message hides madness

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.