What George Carlin Taught Us About Media Propaganda by Omission

By Jeff Cohen, Reader Supported News

16 September 19

n the old George Carlin joke, the TV sportscaster announces: “Here’s a partial score from the West Coast – Los Angeles 6.”

For a brilliant comedian like Carlin – who skewered corporate power, class structure, and political/media propaganda – that’s one of his more innocuous jokes. But it’s sharply relevant today as corporate TV news outlets serve up a series of partial scores. Call it “propaganda by omission.”

Take the coverage that followed Thursday’s Democratic debate. Bernie Sanders didn’t object in the debate when Joe Biden hung a price tag on Sanders’s “Medicare for All” plan of $30 trillion (over 10 years). Sanders responded by offering the other score: “That’s right, Joe. Status quo over 10 years will be $50 trillion. Every study done shows that Medicare for All is the most cost-effective approach to providing health care to every man, woman, and child in this country.”

The $50 trillion figure for continuing the status quo (actually $47 trillion) comes from the ”National Health Expenditure Fact Sheet” of the federal government’s Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.  

I checked the post-debate news coverage. As in the Carlin joke, I found many references to the partial score: the $30-32 trillion estimated cost of Sanders’ legislation. But not the other score: the more costly estimate of sticking with a system in which health insurance is provided by for-profit corporations.  

I watched, for example, the next day’s in-depth report on CBS Evening News lasting a full two minutes. (That’s “in-depth” nowadays on nightly newscasts.) The $32 trillion estimate was prominent, but the other score was omitted – no estimate for staying with the status quo. When the report ended, anchor Nora O’Donnell accentuated the bias by saying: “That’s an expensive plan, Ed. Thank you.”  

CBS opened its report speaking of “government-run healthcare plans being touted by liberal Democrats.” It’s well-known that “government-run healthcare“ is a GOP/Fox News/insurance industry talking point. As is “government takeover” of healthcare. Just ask GOP propagandist Frank Luntz.

Of course, when Medicare simply provides the coverage – whether to older people today or everyone tomorrow – that’s NOT “government-run healthcare.”

As I recently wrote to the L.A. Times in response to a biased poll question: “Doctors and hospitals are private today within Medicare in the U.S. (I know because I’m old enough to be on Medicare) – and they would remain so under a Medicare for All system, just as doctors and hospitals are private today under Canada’s Medicare for All system. Insurance is government-provided; not the healthcare itself.”

It’s easy to explain why Medicare for All is more cost-effective than the corporate-insurance system. Less bureaucracy and wasteful paperwork. No sales commissions. No exorbitant CEO compensation – averaging $18 million per healthcare CEO last year. No insurance company profits; the “big 8 health insurers” raked in $7 billion in one quarter last year.  

But confusion, not clarity, is the job of TV news – which is so heavily sponsored by drug and healthcare companies. (Night after night, big pharma is the main sponsor of network newscasts.) And confusion is the job of industry ads and corporate politicians like Biden, who receives more healthcare industry donations than any other Democratic candidate.

That’s why we keep getting partial scores.

Besides the reduction in financial cost, imagine the reduction in human cost – hardship and anxiety – if our country joined every other wealthy country in achieving truly universal health coverage.

Which bring us to a partial score on another crisis causing hardship and anxiety today: climate change. The Green New Deal proposal in Congress to address the problem, while creating millions of high-paying jobs, has been savaged as “too expensive” – with Mitch McConnell and Republicans incessantly invoking a concocted and ridiculous figure of $93 trillion.

As with Medicare for All, moneyed elites want to omit the other score – the price tag of sticking with the status quo into a future that Bill McKibben describes as “a modern Dark Ages.” From science-denying Republicans to solution-denying corporate Democrats who seek a go-slow “middle-ground,” there’s an attempt to downplay the more expensive cost of deny and delay, including: rising seas and rivers, more damaging hurricanes and floods, worsening droughts and wildfires, buckling bridges and roads, increased air pollution and hospitalizations, premature deaths, crop failures, extinct species, spread of new diseases, intensified migration, and more brutal civil wars.

McKibben argues that the Green New Deal “costs pennies on the dollar” compared to the bleak and costly future predicted by scientists. McKibben, of course, doesn’t sponsor TV news. The fossil fuel industry does.

In a country as wealthy as ours – when progressive proposals to address the crises of climate, healthcare, and social inequality are routinely shot down by corporate politicians and media as “too expensive” – George Carlin’s quip reminds us to demand the other score: the horrific cost of our unequal and unsustainable status quo.

Jeff Cohen was an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College and founder of the media watch group FAIR. In 2011, he co-founded the online activism group RootsAction.org. He is the author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

As Saudi Arabia Burns, Trump and Pompeo Are Tested by the World They Have Created

By Christopher Dickey, The Daily Beast

16 September 19

n Saturday morning, even as Saudi oil facilities blazed from an unprecedented drone attack, world markets braced for a huge surge in prices and the prospects of war with Iran loomed large on the smoke-filled horizon, the White House, weirdly, confirmed information leaked in July to the effect that Hamza bin Laden, son of the infamous killed-by-Obama Osama bin Laden, had been snuffed in a U.S. counterterror operation.

The statement did not come out as a Trumpian tweet, but as an official press release from the office of the White House press secretary. It didn’t say how the younger Bin Laden was killed. It didn’t say when. It didn’t say where, apart from “the Afghanistan/Pakistan region.”

Although it’s conceivable that it took until now for forensic scientists working on whatever was left of Hamza to confirm his DNA (they presumably have his father’s on file), the timing raises questions about the administration’s larger foreign policy, mainly whether the president’s tough guy credentials can actually coexist with an approach that’s been incoherent and, fundamentally, weak.

The headline of the week was Trump’s dismissal of John Bolton, his third ill-chosen national security adviser. Donald J. Trump said he made all the decisions anyway, so it should be an easy job to fill. But in an increasingly chaotic world where much of the chaos is of Trump’s own making, without a strong and knowledgeable adult at the national security council, he is going to find himself, as my daddy used to say, “up shit creek without a paddle.”

Can Secretary of State Mike Pompeo navigate through the Augean gloom? Probably not in a way that resolves the looming crises to the satisfaction of his narcissistic boss. A few examples:

CRIPPLED SAUDI OIL PRODUCTION

In the dark before dawn on Saturday, a group of Iran-backed Yemeni rebels claimed responsibility for a drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s enormous Abqaiq oil facility, as well as a large oil field, hundreds of miles from what is considered rebel held territory. The Houthis, as the rebels are called, claim to have sent 10 drones on the attack, a veritable swarm. 

Years ago, former CIA operative Robert Baer called Abqaiq “the Godzilla of oil-processing facilities” and warned that a moderate-to-severe attack would slow average production by about 5 million barrels a day, equal to about a quarter of the daily consumption in the ever-thirsty United States. As a result of the drone attack Saturday morning, Saudis have indeed cut their oil production by almost half—that is, by 5 million barrels a day. The threat will continue, and we can expect prices to soar. 

Given the level of logistical and technological sophistication shown by the drone attack, will Iran be blamed? Of course. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo did just that by calling it “an unprecedented attack on the world’s energy supply” and asserting, “There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen.”

Okay. What will be the response? Will the Saudis dare to retaliate? Will the United States? Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, best known for the butchering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, is nothing if not impetuous. Will Trump back him up? ... And then what? 

ROCKET MAN

Trump may still “love” Kim Jong Un, and dismiss the North Korean tyrant’s several test launches of short range ballistic missiles, including those this week, as relatively unimportant. His reasoning: they couldn’t come close to hitting the continental United States like the ones tested in 2017. But a detailed report to the United Nations Security Council at the end of August made it perfectly clear that North Korea’s development of short range ballistic missiles is directly integrated with its development of intercontinental ballistic missiles perfectly able to hit any city in the U.S. The goal is to use solid rather than liquid fuel, making the missiles much easier to transport and to hide from American satellite surveillance (the capabilities of which America’s enemies know more about now, since Trump tweeted a classified satellite photograph earlier this month). All this as North Korea continues to build its arsenal of nuclear warheads.

(At the same time, the report to the Security Council said, North Korea continues on a cyber-criminal rampage, stealing huge amounts of money by hacking into accounts or through extortion. Example: the WannaCry ransomware that shut down computer systems all over the world in 2017 and only reopened them for a price paid in bitcoins which then were laundered thoroughly on their way to fill Kim’s coffers.) 

THE TALIBAN AND PUTIN

Just a week ago, Trump suddenly scuttled a hard-won agreement with the Taliban that he had hoped would set up a reality show allowing him to declare on his electoral resume his own Trump-branded Camp David accords. The key elements of that deal were a ceasefire and a Taliban promise never to harbor terrorists intent on attacking the United States. But as Trump became aware of the agreement’s tone, which smacked of an American surrender, he instrumentalized the tragic death of an American soldier in a Taliban attack as a reason to back out. 

With the agreement “dead,” as Trump put it, the Taliban are heading back to the battlefield. They can expect to target Americans whenever they get the chance. And they have told The Daily Beast that they may actually strengthen their ties with what has been of late a relatively low-profile Al Qaeda organization directed not by Hamza bin Laden, but by the venerable Ayman al-Zawahiri for whom the United States remains enemy number one. 

Adding a further level of complication to the Afghan mess, aTaliban delegation went to Moscow this week to consult with the Russians. Perhaps they think Vladimir Putin can “mediate” in some fashion with the Americans. Trump, for his part, has long believed that his buddy in the Kremlin could help him solve difficult international problems.

Hey, thinking outside the box, maybe the Great Disruptor should name Putin as his new national security advisor. Or, you guessed it, maybe he already has.