David Edwards
In January 2005, we described how the British media were united in celebrating Iraq’s ‘first free election in decades’. (Leader, ‘Vote against violence,’ The Guardian, January 7, 2005)
The BBC’s main evening news reported ‘the first democratic election in fifty years’ (BBC1, News at Ten, January 10, 2005). The Daily Telegraph wrote of ‘the first democratic elections’ (Leader, ‘Mission accomplished,’ Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2004). The Independent argued that ‘democratic and free elections can bring a hope of peace’ (Borzou Daragahi, ‘Bin Laden backs deputy Zarqawi,’ The Independent, December 28, 2004).
In their excellent book, Demonstration Elections (South End Press, 1984), Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead listed six criteria of election integrity:
‘Freedom of speech.’
‘Freedom of the media.’
‘Freedom of organization of intermediate groups.’
‘The absence of highly developed and pervasive instruments of state-sponsored terror.’
‘Freedom of party organization and ability to field candidates.’
‘Absence of coercion and fear on the part of the general population.’
As Herman and Brodhead noted, a good way of ‘looking at the validity of elections is to examine the conditions making for a free election and see how the actual electoral case conforms to these criteria.’
But this the US-UK mass media never seriously attempt to do in covering elections in states newly ‘liberated’ by the West. Instead:
‘Following the government’s lead, the media accept the election at face value, focusing on the personalities of candidates, the surface mechanics of election day procedure, and other secondary matters and propaganda gambits, the most important being the alleged efforts to disrupt the election by the bad guys. They carefully avoid or downgrade issues such as the prior decimation of a political opposition, death squads as an institutionalized phenomenon, and the exclusion of major political opposition groups from participation.’
In regard to Iraq, for example, serious analysis was replaced by the simplistic message that, no matter how much killing the ‘coalition of the willing’ had done (with journalists consistently undercounting the death toll by an order of magnitude) at least ‘we’ had brought political freedom to Iraq.
But tragicomedy was always close at hand. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Jon Leyne reported that the victorious Shia United Iraqi Alliance would choose a new prime minister from two candidates: ‘both religious Shiites, but also both acceptable to the Americans’. (Leyne, Newsnight, February 14, 2005)
Leyne continued: ‘We call them a religious Shiite alliance… but they’re very sensitive to what the Americans would feel if guys with turbans took over this country.’
And indeed everyone, of course, knew that ‘democracy’ in Iraq had to be ‘sensitive’ to American concerns, not least in regard to ‘guys with turbans’ (which sounded like a euphemism for ‘towelheads’). It was obvious what ‘acceptable to the Americans’ meant for the claim that the elections were in any real sense ‘free’. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush I, made the point in April 2003:
‘What’s going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We’re surely not going to let them take over.’ (Quoted, Walter Gibbs, ‘Scowcroft Urges Wide Role For the UN in Postwar Iraq,’ The New York Times, April 9, 2003)
That was clear, as was the lesson implicit in the punishment meted out to Iraq’s third city, Fallujah, just weeks before the election. Smeared by the media as an insurgent ‘stronghold’, the city was subjected to all-out assault by US forces leaving 70 per cent of the houses and shops destroyed, and at least 800 civilians dead. (‘Fallujah still needs more supplies despite aid arrival,’ www.irinnews.org, November 30, 2004)
Also, in October 2004, the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet, published a report estimating that almost 100,000 more Iraqi civilians had died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred.
The media turned a blind eye to this and much other evidence clearly challenging the claim that elections were conducted in the ‘absence of coercion and fear on the part of the general population’ and without ‘the prior decimation of a political opposition’. Instead, with smoke still rising from the ruins of Fallujah, the likes of Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian reported that Iraq was preparing ‘for the country’s first democratic election’. (MacAskill, ‘Blair ‘feels the danger’ on visit to Baghdad,’ December 22, 2004).....read more
http://libya360.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/libya-elections-burying-the-amnesty-report/#
In January 2005, we described how the British media were united in celebrating Iraq’s ‘first free election in decades’. (Leader, ‘Vote against violence,’ The Guardian, January 7, 2005)
The BBC’s main evening news reported ‘the first democratic election in fifty years’ (BBC1, News at Ten, January 10, 2005). The Daily Telegraph wrote of ‘the first democratic elections’ (Leader, ‘Mission accomplished,’ Daily Telegraph, December 6, 2004). The Independent argued that ‘democratic and free elections can bring a hope of peace’ (Borzou Daragahi, ‘Bin Laden backs deputy Zarqawi,’ The Independent, December 28, 2004).
In their excellent book, Demonstration Elections (South End Press, 1984), Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead listed six criteria of election integrity:
‘Freedom of speech.’
‘Freedom of the media.’
‘Freedom of organization of intermediate groups.’
‘The absence of highly developed and pervasive instruments of state-sponsored terror.’
‘Freedom of party organization and ability to field candidates.’
‘Absence of coercion and fear on the part of the general population.’
As Herman and Brodhead noted, a good way of ‘looking at the validity of elections is to examine the conditions making for a free election and see how the actual electoral case conforms to these criteria.’
But this the US-UK mass media never seriously attempt to do in covering elections in states newly ‘liberated’ by the West. Instead:
‘Following the government’s lead, the media accept the election at face value, focusing on the personalities of candidates, the surface mechanics of election day procedure, and other secondary matters and propaganda gambits, the most important being the alleged efforts to disrupt the election by the bad guys. They carefully avoid or downgrade issues such as the prior decimation of a political opposition, death squads as an institutionalized phenomenon, and the exclusion of major political opposition groups from participation.’
In regard to Iraq, for example, serious analysis was replaced by the simplistic message that, no matter how much killing the ‘coalition of the willing’ had done (with journalists consistently undercounting the death toll by an order of magnitude) at least ‘we’ had brought political freedom to Iraq.
But tragicomedy was always close at hand. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, Jon Leyne reported that the victorious Shia United Iraqi Alliance would choose a new prime minister from two candidates: ‘both religious Shiites, but also both acceptable to the Americans’. (Leyne, Newsnight, February 14, 2005)
Leyne continued: ‘We call them a religious Shiite alliance… but they’re very sensitive to what the Americans would feel if guys with turbans took over this country.’
And indeed everyone, of course, knew that ‘democracy’ in Iraq had to be ‘sensitive’ to American concerns, not least in regard to ‘guys with turbans’ (which sounded like a euphemism for ‘towelheads’). It was obvious what ‘acceptable to the Americans’ meant for the claim that the elections were in any real sense ‘free’. Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush I, made the point in April 2003:
‘What’s going to happen the first time we hold an election in Iraq and it turns out the radicals win? What do you do? We’re surely not going to let them take over.’ (Quoted, Walter Gibbs, ‘Scowcroft Urges Wide Role For the UN in Postwar Iraq,’ The New York Times, April 9, 2003)
That was clear, as was the lesson implicit in the punishment meted out to Iraq’s third city, Fallujah, just weeks before the election. Smeared by the media as an insurgent ‘stronghold’, the city was subjected to all-out assault by US forces leaving 70 per cent of the houses and shops destroyed, and at least 800 civilians dead. (‘Fallujah still needs more supplies despite aid arrival,’ www.irinnews.org, November 30, 2004)
Also, in October 2004, the prestigious scientific journal, The Lancet, published a report estimating that almost 100,000 more Iraqi civilians had died than would have been expected had the invasion not occurred.
The media turned a blind eye to this and much other evidence clearly challenging the claim that elections were conducted in the ‘absence of coercion and fear on the part of the general population’ and without ‘the prior decimation of a political opposition’. Instead, with smoke still rising from the ruins of Fallujah, the likes of Ewen MacAskill in the Guardian reported that Iraq was preparing ‘for the country’s first democratic election’. (MacAskill, ‘Blair ‘feels the danger’ on visit to Baghdad,’ December 22, 2004).....read more
http://libya360.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/libya-elections-burying-the-amnesty-report/#
