Journalisten Chris Hedges klev av falsk rapportering – USA:s krigsmaskineri styr media

MEDIA. Empire Files producent Abby Martin intervjuar journalisten Chris Hedges om ”hanteringen” av allmänheten med känslomässiga metoder, hotade och köpta journalister samt medias roll i krig. Att skapa fred handlar om att bryta vapenindustrins makt, anser Hedges.

Text: NewsVoice, uppd. kl 19:25, 13 okt 2015

NewsVoice publicerar hela intervjun (28 min) och några valda citat.

Den brutala styrningen av ärliga journalister

”And when you are up close, as I was for twenty years, and you see the workings of the Empire, you understand how vicious, and ruthless and brutal it is but, you know, it’s very hard to penetrate within the heart of that reality, so that reporters, such as myself, who would report on these things were under constant attack, not only from the state department and from the government”…”but from our own Washington bureaus, that, you know, we were being spun a ficticious narrative, and we were kind of demonized…”.

”The pressure that the Empire would put on those few reporters, who would attempt to go out and actually report, is fierce and can even involve the loss of life”.

Journalister i karriären som vill bli köpta

”The notion that the press was used in the war was incorrect. The press wanted to be used”…”Journalists are careerist as anyone else, and they know how to advance within the system. So let’s take, for instance, the first Gulf war which I covered within very draconian press restrictions, you could only be within a pool, I mean I couldn’t do it [inaudible], Cheney draw up a list of ten journalists he wanted to expel and I was on the top of that list”.

Lösningen är att stoppa vapenindustrin

”But if we don’t break the back of the war machine, if we don’t break the imperialist project, if we don’t terminate the for-profit arms industry, then, you know, any rethoric about significant change is a smoke in the wind.”

”We have the break the back of Empire, not only for what empires are doing to, what Frantz Fanon called – The wretched of the Earth – but because what it is doing at home, because as it disembowels the country, the harsh forms of control the empire uses on the outer reaches of empire, will migrate back to the homelands… ”

Chris Hedges (1956-) är en amerikansk journalist och författare som var utrikeskorrespondent för bla The New York Times (1990–2005). Tillsammans med andra reportrar på The New York Times fick han 2002 Pulitzerpriset för tidningens bevakning av global terrorism.

Bibliografi
2002: War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning
2003: What Every Person Should Know About War
2005: Losing Moses on the Freeway: The 10 Commandments in America
2007: American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America
2008: I Don’t Believe in Atheists
2008: Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians
2009: Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
2010: Death of the Liberal Class
2011: The World as It Is