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The Need for Independent Media: Voices For Peace in a World at War

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Mickey recently spoke with Jeff Cohen, founder of FAIR, and author of Cable News Confidential, about his time as senior producer to the late Phil Donahue’s MSNBC program. It was among the highest rated shows on the network at the time but was cancelled on the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq because network execs didn’t want him to interview anti-war guests. Cohen talked about corporate media censorship, the state of our so-called free press today, and why we need vibrant, independent media outlets to report in the public interest. Later in the show, Mickey welcomes back author, historian, and media critic Norman Solomon. They discussed the paperback release of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine, with a new afterword that analyzes the US media propaganda campaign and censorship around Israel’s ongoing assault on the Palestinian people. US and Israeli officials claim these are acts of self-defense after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on a music festival. Many others around the world, including the International Court of Justice, have called the ongoing belligerent acts harming mostly innocent civilians a plausible genocide.

Video of the Interview with Jeff Cohen

Video of the Interview with Norman Solomon

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Jeff Cohen

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today in this segment we are beyond honored and delighted to welcome long time listener, first time guest, Jeff Cohen, to the Project Censored Show. If you don’t know who Jeff Cohen is, you probably don’t listen to the Project Censored Show because we talk about the great work of the organizations he’s been part of and he’s founded or co founded repeatedly.

Some of you may remember Jeff Cohen as being one of the founders of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and the great publication Extra magazine. Of course, they have a radio show Counter Spin as well. That’s here on Pacifica Radio. Jeff is also author of Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media.

And a foreward by Jim Hightower. Jeff is also a co founder of Roots Action. Let me go back a minute. The book he wrote, Cable News Confidential, actually is going to be part of our discussion today because Jeff was the senior producer for Phil Donahue’s primetime show on MSNBC. On the run up to the second invasion of Iraq in 2003 when Phil Donahue’s show was cancelled because he didn’t have enough pro war folks on, and Jeff wrote all about that in Cable News Confidential.

And we’re gonna talk about that because Phil just passed not long ago, and Jeff’s gonna share some of his experiences with the great Phil Donahue. I mentioned Jeff’s also co founder of Roots Action, and also Jeff is the founder of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, along with the Park Foundation.

Some of you may see a sign in the background. I’m actually now sitting in Jeff’s old office. Jeff Cohen, welcome to the Project Censored Show.

Jeff Cohen: It’s great to be with you, Mickey, and I’m thrilled that you’re now the director of the Park Center for Independent Media.

Mickey Huff: I am as well, as along with Project Censored, a lot of synergy, and we’ve got a lot of work to do promoting independent media.

And calling out the many challenges and the propaganda we see in corporate media. And again, you’ve been doing this for so long, Jeff Cohen. Tell us, tell us about your, the great work of your friend, Phil Donahue.

Jeff Cohen: Well, Phil was a pioneer in television. He brought issues of controversy to mainstream audiences.

Millions of people watched his daytime show that started out of Dayton, Ohio, 1967, then it moved to Chicago, then it moved to New York City. He mainstreamed issues that were once considered extreme or radical or fringe, like gay rights, women’s rights. consumer rights and corporate irresponsibility, civil rights.

His three most frequent guests on the daytime Phil Donahue show were Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate, Reverend Jesse Jackson, the civil rights advocate, and Gloria Steinem, the feminist advocate. He did an amazing thing with that show, working within corporate media and bringing ideas to the masses, that many corporations weren’t that big on so he was a real pioneer. To the day he died he was a critic of corporate media. He saw it from the inside the first time I ever met Phil he had me as a guest on his huge daytime show in the early 90s in New York City, and he wanted to do a show about what’s wrong with corporate news media. Now, I didn’t usually get invited on big shows to talk about that and so I suggested other guests it ended up being me, Michael Moore, the filmmaker, Jim Hightower and Donna Edwards who was then working with Ralph Nader, and we did a whole show on what’s wrong with corporate news media what stories get censored, what stories get slighted, that’s how I first met him And then we, bonded, we worked on political issues, especially anti war issues.

And then, I feel a little guilty about it, I’m the one who kept persuading him after 9/11 when news media had gone berserk. Talk radio was like, on day one, let’s bomb somebody already, God damn it, and you know no one knew who was behind 9/11 yet, but they wanted to bomb a bunch of countries so during that period Phil was one of the few people who could get on mainstream TV saying we need to be smart about combating terrorism and not tough on terrorism, which just produces more terrorists.

So, it was during that period that I said Phil, I know you’re happy in your retirement, but maybe you should come out of retirement and try to get on cable news or public TV, and we end up getting on MSNBC. And they lied to us, which is something that I know corporate media management does a lot.

They said to Phil and they said to me, that we would be able to counter program against Bill O’Reilly. We could have all the guests we wanted. It wouldn’t have to be balanced. That’s the reason we went there. And we were hired in about April of 2002. We didn’t go on the air till July. And in that interim, management really got scared.

The country was moving toward a broadened war that would include an illegal invasion of Iraq. And, and they had this guy on there who was known as a liberal progressive anti war voice. And so even before we went on the air in July of 2002, now they had switched, all those promises were gone.

They said, look, you have to have a, pro war voices. We don’t want you just to have a, left wing show. They totally had gone back on every single promise. And so, in our very first show, we had the U. N. weapons inspector, Scott Ritter, who said Iraq is not a threat. But we had two right wingers that outshouted him.

And you couldn’t really hear his critique. He turned out to be, of course, 100 percent right that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. So, it got worse. The suits took over the show. Phil Donahue at MSNBC was always referring to them as the suits, the management, the execs. I also said, what’s happening in Suitville?

Listen to the crap I’m hearing from Suitville. And, as we got nearer the Iraq invasion, people know this, they’ve heard me say this, we were given like a quota system by management, if we had someone on the air who was against the impending invasion, we had to have two that were pro war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed to book three on the right.

At one meeting, when a producer said she could book Michael Moore, who was a critic of the impending invasion, she was told for political balance, she would need three right wingers. So, it was really a nightmare. We accomplished some good things in the first weeks like on labor day, we had Barbara Ehrenreich for a full hour talking about how hard it is to make it on the minimum wage in our country, yeah her book Nickel and Dimed and we beat CNN in the ratings that was unheard of, MSNBC was always in third place if they had let us do the show that they promised us we could do, we would have had huge ratings. At that time, Democracy Now was just soaring.

All of these new blogs were just taking off. The, as the march toward the invasion of Iraq was getting stronger and louder, all of these independent outlets that were debunking the lies that Bush-Cheney were telling, week by week that you could hear you could see on the front pages of the New York Times or endorsed on the editorial pages of the Washington Post.

They were being debunked in real time by independent journalists in independent media. If they had allowed Phil Donahue to be Phil Donahue, our ratings would have taken off. The biggest anti war mobilization in history was in February of 2003, in advance of the Iraq invasion. That’s when we were terminated.

The executives, the suits, immediately lied and said it was just about ratings. But we have the internal documents that show, as you said, Mickey, it was because we were trying to get anti war voices on the air. That’s with the internal memos, internal emails. It was all about Phil’s politics, anti war, Phil’s un American, Phil’s questioning Bush, and, remember, MSNBC was owned by General Electric, so I’ve seen corporate censorship intimately from my years working in all three cable news channels.

Mickey Huff: That’s pretty incredible, Jeff, and, I know that it’s been, 20, 21 years since that invasion, I’ve taught courses on that particular topic for a long time, almost as long. I was teaching about it nearly in real time, using sources like FAIR, Project Censored, Common Dreams, certainly from the historical perspective, looking at Zinn’s history, looking at a history of how we’re led to war through propaganda, I have to say, and in fact, one of my good friends and colleagues, Nolan Higdon, who was a student of mine at the time, his whole awakening to corporate media propaganda came through that campaign for the Iraq war and you were the only major voice in the cable world that had the temerity, the integrity, literally, to really report on that.

And what’s fascinating, too, is what you just said. It wasn’t enough to just have the anti war voice and have pro war voices, which, by the way, you could hear everywhere else. You had to have two or three people that were pro-war to counter what was happening. And it was, blatant. Let’s not forget that there was a great wave of censorship at that time.

Whether it was the Dixie Chicks should shut up and sing. Bill Maher lost his show, Politically Incorrect, at ABC. There was a wrath of censorship. People going after Michael Moore. Bill O’Reilly saying, oppose the war. Once it starts, shut your mouth. It just went on and on. And I think historically, that’s very, very important to remember, which is why your book, Cable News Confidential, I think is still, it’s just as relevant now, if not more so, for the same nonsense we’re seeing and saw around Russia, Ukraine, and now around Gaza.

Jeff Cohen.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, at this late date, if anyone’s trusting the mainstream media on, the corporate media on war and peace issues, they need to get their head examined. When my book came out in 2006, I heard from local journalists, regional journalists, and national media figures that they’d all been suppressed.

How come I didn’t mention them in my book? And I got an email from, The former governor of Minnesota, Jesse Ventura, who was a talk show host. And it was announced when we were terminated by MSNBC that Jesse Ventura was going to replace us. But he never did, because as he sent me the email I received after my book, Cable News Confidential, came out, Jesse said, when they learned I was as opposed to the invasion of Iraq as Phil Donahue was, they paid me millions of dollars never to go on the air.

So his show never started. But they made it, had a contract with them and they had to pay him. We need to remember that General Electric, a major military contractor owned MSNBC at the time. Now it’s owned by the huge entertainment conglomerate, Comcast. Everywhere I was in mainstream media I encountered corporate media censorship. When I was at CNN they tested me to be the co host from the left on the biggest show, Crossfire, at that time in that era in the 90s, the two biggest shows on CNN were Larry King Live or Crossfire.

Mickey Huff: You weren’t Michael Kinsley enough.

Jeff Cohen: Right. I wasn’t a backpedaling, half hearted, yeah, who always agreed that the right wing was sorta right, but going too far.

I was an actual, you can’t you what we realized when I did not get hired was that, you can’t, if you want to represent the left on US television, you can’t really be on the left.

Mickey Huff: Yeah,

Jeff Cohen: And so, there they brought me into an office the top executive and he was questioning whether I would be critical of the nightly sponsor of CNN’s Crossfire and the nightly sponsor was a company I was known to be a critic of even back in 95 96 and that was General Electric. I’d done a long interview with Ralph Nader’s, what was it called? multi

Mickey Huff: multinational reporter. What is it?

Jeff Cohen: That’s a multinational monitor. Yes. So at any rate, he brings me into his office and I said, look, I’m not going to go out of my way to attack General Electric every night.

But if the issue is relevant, of course, I’m not going to censor myself. Well, that wasn’t a good enough answer. At MSNBC when we got terminated by, MSNBC and the decision was made way at the top by General Electric and people like that, we realized that the orders we were given by management made no sense at the time.

There, we could have built ratings and usually television wants ratings, but they didn’t give a damn about ratings. What they were worried about was we might say something that would offend Bush. And so you couldn’t practice journalism at that time if you were in television. And the reason was the top lobbyists and executives for all the big entertainment and media conglomerates were going to the Federal Communications Commission to get rules changes that would allow these fat corporations to get even fatter.

Mickey Huff: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: And,

Mickey Huff: 96 Telecom Act, Clinton (unintelligible).

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, well, Clinton was very responsible for this, but they were going to enlarge it even more in 2003 when the FCC, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, was Michael Powell, the son of Colin Powell, then the Secretary of State, and Michael Powell had the nerve, when any sentient human being knew that the mainstream media had utterly bungled the coverage of the run up to the Iraq war, Michael Powell at the FCC had raved about how great the coverage was.

Mickey Huff: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: So, so the big entertainment conglomerates, and this is the problem with a news media so dominated at the ownership and sponsorship and advertising level by big corporations that all they care about is their growth, their next quarter’s profits, being able to conglomerate, get bigger.

And, and they, and if you practice journalism that could interfere. So we, everyone’s heard about the infraction of DWI, driving while intoxicated. We were all terminated at MSNBC for, JWI, practicing journalism while war is on

Mickey Huff: And Jeff, one of the things I wanted to talk about, I was just talking to a class about what you were just saying about corporate media.

And how the mainstream media really became corporate media over time, such that it really doesn’t represent the ideas of everyday folks, of labor, of people in local communities. We’re living in a time of extraordinary news deserts. One of the things that you really pioneered yourself, was the Izzy Awards, named after the great I.F. Stone and the Stone Weekly Reports, and tell our, can you remind our listeners a little bit, just who Izzy Stone was. There’s a great documentary that Oliver Stone produced, you’re in, All Governments Lie: Truth, Deception, and the Spirit of I. F. Stone. Talk about that in, vis a vis the extraordinary relevance of that kind of work today.

And why, are the Izzy Awards something that are really significant in terms of teaching the public about what independent journalism can really do? Jeff Cohen.

Jeff Cohen: Yes. I. F. Stone, especially for your younger listeners, I.F. Stone was this maverick independent journalist who had a, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, started in 1953, went to the early 70s.

It’s considered one of the greatest achievements in journalism. He wrote it himself, he edited it himself. His wife was in charge of business and, and, subscriptions. He completely was reliant on the donations and the subscriptions of his readers. There were no advertisers. There was no corporate interference.

There was no corporate censorship. He stood up against the Joe McCarthy witch hunts. He fought racism from day one. He fought political repression. And then as the war in Vietnam is expanding under Lyndon Johnson and then under Nixon, Izzy was one of the only journalists who was exposing, debunking the lies in real time, month after month. So when my generation started questioning the war in Vietnam and the racism in our society and looking to independent outlets because no one trusted, what was called the pig media. We hear about this guy, I.F. Stone and his weekly. And then one of the importance is, importance, aspects of I.F. Stone’s weekly is it’s reliance on the readers.

That there was no interference. There were no sensorial editors. And so, at the Park Center for Independent Media, 15, 16 years ago, we started this, Izzy Award. I. F. Stone’s name was Izzy. And, we have continued this tradition. We have wanted to honor those who are walking in the footsteps of Izzy Stone.

And what we noticed over the years of giving out the Izzy Award is while corporate media has gotten in many, worse and worse, more sensational, more irrelevant, you have now this independent media sector that has grown largely thanks to the internet. and you have all of these non profit news outlets that rely on donations or their listeners or readers.

So, we’ve given the award to a lot of local non profits that are filling the gap because mainstream journalism has collapsed because the advertising has left local dailies and gone to the internet, gone to Facebook and Google. We gave an award to Mississippi Free Press, an amazing multiracial outfit, non profit, two different outlets, non profits in Chicago, Block Club Chicago, and Better Government Association.

We’ve given it out to two non profits in New York City that do incredible work. One is called City Limits, one is called The City, and then these national outlets that are non profit. The Lever recently won an Izzy, the Marshall Project, which focuses on the criminal injustice system, Earth Island Journal, Inside Climate News, so there is this expansion of indie media where they really believe in journalism.

The thing about independent news outlets is if you work for one of them, you will not get paid the way I was paid when I was at MSNBC. You will not get rich, but every day you go to work, you will be saying to yourself, wow, I can cover any important story. I could cover the biggest stories. I can do it without worrying about stepping on powerful toes.

So you may not get a huge wealth from being a real journalist in independent media, but every day you go to work, you’ll be a happy camper.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, there’s a lot to be said for that, and it comes with the integrity that’s involved. And it also, when you look at a history, I. F. Stone is literally part of this muckraking tradition.

We, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, one of the books I’ve taught with for years by Carl Jensen, the founder of Project Censored, is Stories That Changed America: Muckrakers of the 20th Century. I. F. Stone was an early supporter of Project Censored because of the mission overlap about reporting in the public interest.

And, it’s important, I think the history of this in the present, because if people understand that there’s long been a problem with information control and the way capitalist and for profit media benefit owners and advertisers versus the public, once people realize that there’s a long tradition of this, they may start looking around for it in the present, right?

And I think the Izzy’s is a great way to honor independent journalists the way we do at Project Censored with our Top 25 stories saying, here’s 25 stories that the corporate media missed or didn’t cover or didn’t want to cover and it gives people an opportunity to expand their media diet to become more news media literate and again, I think this is about media literacy education.

And some of the best education we get isn’t out of the textbooks. It’s literally out of these kind of publications. It’s literally out of, whether it’s the blogosphere, now in the podcast world. And again, Jeff, I know people often say like, well, whom do you trust? There’s a lot of garbage out there. The independent media is biased, it’s not objective.

Look at the title of the magazine, The Progressive. That’s not objective journalism. Say something about that.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, it fascinates me. Like, everyone’s going to remember the role that Phil Donahue played in trying to get the truth out in advance of a war before our young people were sent overseas to kill or be killed in a needless, horrific war that destabilized the Middle East.

He’ll be remembered. All these people that engaged in censorship. No one knows who they are. And I can prove this point by citing a mainstream source. At the end of the 20th century, NYU’s journalism department, with a bunch of celebrity journalists, including conservatives, George Will was on. They put together a panel to look back on the 20th century and come up with the greatest hundred achievements in journalism in the 20th century.

I.F. Stone’s weekly was like number 16. And if you looked at the first most of the winners who were considered those who were the big achievers in journalism in the 20- almost all of them were passionate non neutral journalists. They believed in getting the facts right and being completely accurate, but they all, John Hersey, Hiroshima, I think was number one.

The Silent Spring, the great environmental manifesto, which grew out of a New Yorker article. I think that was number two or three, Upton Sinclair and the jungle, which was, you had all of these journalists. Some of them were socialists. All of them were at least muckraking progressives.

Yeah, and they believed the job of journalism was to hold the powerful accountable.

And so when you look back, even when the mainstream looks back at 20th century journalism, you realize that those who really achieve, those who change society for the better, they were not dispassionate. They were not neutral.

They had a cause, they got the facts straight, they were accurate, but they really were motivated by, this is important for society to know, and I’m going to dig it up no matter what. And most of those people did not work for mainstream media.

Mickey Huff: No, and including Upton Sinclair, who, who also wrote the Brass Check.

Which was a scathing critique of the for profit press, the capitalist press. That was like 1919. That was 10 years after fighting Bob La Follette, I think, founded the Progressive, right? That was like 1909. We had Norm Stockwell on the show not long ago, talking about that history. But you’re right, Jeff.

These weren’t traditional journalists working in the so called mainstream. These were people that you know, George Seldes tell the truth and run, you know, these were people that, these were people that wanted, believed in the power of the press to make a difference. Even Ralph Nader, right, Nader when people think they’re like I don’t think of Ralph Nader as a journalist. As a messenger I mean look at how many things you know that Ralph changed going back to ’66 and beyond, whether it was the auto safety seat belt laws or any of the other things you know that you see things happening after it really gives us the opportunity to think about journalism outside a corporate for profit sort of frame and allows us to reconsider that journalists are people that want to tell the public what’s going on and make a positive difference in the world.

Jeff Cohen: And when I was in your job when I was at your job years ago I would show the class the Society for Professional Journalists’ code of ethics does not mention the word neutral does not mention the word objective or objectivity does not say both sides-ism but what it says is be fair and accurate to the facts and otherwise and if you have a conflict you know admit it acknowledge it

Mickey Huff: also says do no harm

Jeff Cohen: Right but remember progressive journalists will often say, will often expose their bias.

By the way I did used to work for the ACLU by the way, when I was in mainstream media, they never revealed their biases. Never. And in, in, in the code of ethics, it says, the antidote to having a conflict is just to reveal it. When I was at NBC, MSNBC, I used to watch the 22 minutes, 21 minutes of news on NBC Nightly and, eight, nine minutes of commercials. And then I realized that almost every segment that NBC Nightly News reported on was something that affected the bottom line of the owner General Electric whether it was trade whether it was war and peace whether it was labor whether it was environment, there was no serious issue you could report on and if they did reveal all their conflicts of interest there’d be no time for the news

Mickey Huff: Jeff they also, you might remember this, NBC, General Electric, NBC, they censored Saturday Night Live.

And Saturday Night Live did an animated skit that only showed once. It was called Conspiracy Theory Rock, riffing off of the Schoolhouse Rock stuff. And they had a show, they did a whole skit on media ownership that seriously lampooned General Electric, never shown again.

Jeff Cohen: Yeah, Robert Smigel. At FAIR, we used to talk about not only the censorship of news, but the censorship of entertainment.

Yeah.

An amazing story that we had, was a guy who had a newsletter called National Boycott News. And it was a one person operation just keeping track of all the boycotts. Some were over environmental issues, women’s issues, labor issues, and he was invited to go on NBC’s Today show. And when the producers were interviewing him before the show, he said, well, I have to admit, I have to acknowledge, I want you to know that the biggest boycott going on in the country today is the boycott against your employer, General Electric, over its profiteering from nuclear weapons.

And there’s all sorts of church groups. There’ve been Catholic hospitals refused to buy multi million dollar equipment from GE because of this boycott. And one producer after another said, whatever you do, if you mentioned that on the air, I’m going to lose my job. So he ultimately does go on the show.

They fly him from Seattle and on the table next to him are all these products that are being boycotted. Nike sneakers, they somehow couldn’t find room for a general electric light bulb. And so he walks out of the studio, dejected, like shit, I can’t, I, got play, I was not able to talk about the biggest boycott and he’s walking out to go to the elevator and a janitor yells to him, “Hey! How’s that General Electric boycott going?” And the only person who wanted to discuss the biggest boycott in the country was not the journalist It was the janitor who knew about it, I guess from alternative or independent sources

Mickey Huff: Well because working people are engaged in the community and they pay attention to things that affect them and the anti nuke movement was big for a while as Peter Kuznick and I have talked about the Dan Ellsberg late great Dan Ellsberg, talked about why we need a reinvigorated nuclear awareness.

It’s, we’re closer to that kind of a apocalyptic ending than even we were at the height of the so called Cold War.

Jeff Cohen: Right. We’ve never been closer to midnight. No, on any of these issues, the reason you can’t trust corporate media, like on war and peace is they’re making money from war.

You can’t trust them on healthcare. Because the biggest sponsors of the nightly news, the pharmaceutical companies and then secondarily insurance companies, you can’t trust them on all sorts of issues because of who owns them and who sponsors them. But I want to say, let me leave your listeners with one last piece of advice when they’re listening to NPR or watching PBS or any of the other channels.

And they hear someone introduced as a former government official.

Mickey Huff: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: Like a retired general, retired colonel, former CIA director and they do not tell and sometimes these people were in the government 5, 10, 20 years earlier. But they still get identified only by former. When you hear the news media, whether it’s NPR, PBS or anyone else introduce someone only as a former official.

They’re lying to you because these people that go on the air over and over are people who are now consultants for big corporations. They sit on the think tanks that are funded by big corporations. There are these retired generals are on the boards of directors of military industrial companies.

And if they are unwilling, and it’s a gentleman’s agreement that these news outlets make with these so called experts that we will just introduce you as former Secretary of State. So all of the way that they’re cashing in on their former titles, you will never hear that from me. And that’s more relevant to the listener or viewer.

I remember when they kept trotting out this guy, Jim Messina.

Mickey Huff: Yeah.

Jeff Cohen: He’s, I’m not talking about the singer, the guy who was a campaign manager for Obama. He worked for Obama in 2008 and 2012. They kept trotting him out to attack Bernie Sanders. And they would just introduce him as a former Obama official. But they would never tell you that he’s currently a corporate communications executive, whose clients include Amazon’s pharmacy division, Uber, some of the most important and biggest corporations.

If they had introduced him properly on CNN, where they had Messina all the time bashing Bernie Sanders, it would have made sense to the viewer. Oh, okay. I get it. This guy is a corporatist, that’s why he hates Bernie Sanders

Mickey Huff: Anti labor, all the, yeah,

Jeff Cohen: But again, they didn’t, when you’re only hearing former or retired colonel retired general.

They are lying to you and they know what they’re doing

Mickey Huff: Framing, it’s framing. They’re not lying outright. They’re lying by omission. Yes, yeah. Jeff Cohen. It’s been fantastic to spend some time with you. And I, and just in the last minute, I wanted to, if you could please just remind people fair.org and, maybe say a word about that and Roots Action, just so people know that you’re still very active and you’re still doing a lot of things.

Jeff Cohen: Yes. In one of the groups, that’s so close to Project Censored is FAIR. FAIR.org does media criticism and the radio show every week, Counterspin. RootsAction.org, I co-founded with Norman Solomon, that’s an online progressive activism group. We fight for whistleblowers and we fought for journalists who were harassed by the government.

We defended James Risen when he was at the New York Times and the Obama administration was harassing him because of a confidential source. He later went to the Intercept, and, and then, of course, Park Center for Independent Media, where Mickey Huff is now the director.

Mickey Huff: Well, Jeff Cohen, it’s great to have you on the program and you’ve done a lot in the world of independent media.

Continue to be a real proponent for a truly free press in the public interest. Can’t thank you enough for everything you’ve done and keep up the great work. We should try to have you back on the program because you’re always up to something good and it is an election year, which means more folks are crawling out of the woodwork and corporate media propaganda is in overdrive.

Jeff Cohen: That’s for sure.

Thanks Mickey.

Mickey Huff: Thanks Jeff Cohen

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Norman Solomon

Mickey Huff: Welcome back to the Project Censored Show on Pacific Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Well, in the last segment I spoke with Jeff Cohen from Fairness, Accuracy, and Reporting. We talked about the legacy of the late great Phil Donahue and of course the state of our Free Press and can’t really think of a better accompaniment to Jeff Cohen than his longtime colleague, friend, and co-author Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon was on the program with me last year when his book came out, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. Norman Solomon should be no stranger to the Project Censored audience, co founder of RootsAction. org. He’s the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

His previous books include War Made Easy, among many, others, including some with Jeff Cohen. Today, we’re going to talk about War Made Invisible, but there is a new paperback edition that’s either coming out or will be out by the time this program airs and it has a new afterword that specifically looks at the media, the military industrial complex in the frame of US, Israel, and the onslaught in Gaza. Norman Solomon lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Norman, welcome back to the Project Censored Show.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Mickey.

Mickey Huff: It’s it’s really great to have you on. There are a few folks that have the depth, the historical depth and the acumen with your analysis regarding meet the intersections of media, propaganda, media, censorship and framing.

And your book, War Made Invisible, really breaks down how our media routinely glorify the military, obscure the real costs of war, and dehumanize people that the US government has deemed dangerous or, expendable. And, unfortunately, we have this example that keeps raging on. and the onslaught and attacks in Gaza, but Norman Solomon, we’re gonna have time to get to that in this segment.

Maybe remind our listeners a little bit about the book War Made Invisible, and then I wanna segue to your very important and timely afterward. Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon: Really the invisibility or the de-counting, you might say, of the people on the other end of Pentagon firepower has really been chronic, in our lifetimes.

Whatever our lifetimes might be, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Now we have another facet of what the subtitle of the book refers to as the military machine of the United States. And this is one of the themes that I get into in the afterward that the so called Israeli Defense Forces, and I’m struck that defense is the name of the US Defense Department and the Israel Defense Forces, that they are in tandem with each other, which is very rarely talked about explicitly or even implicitly in US media, that the Israeli military is an adjunct to the most powerful, by far, military forces in the world of the United States. And so that gets obscured because when we have this tremendous suffering, the killing, the maiming, mostly of children and women in Gaza, which continues as we speak, there is this paradigm of victims without victimizers.

And when this book and others make a critique of US media coverage, some folks may think, oh, I saw an article in the New York Times and it was quite empathetic towards a Palestinian family who lost their lives. I listened to All Things Considered and they chronicled that. It’s very moving. Those are victims without any causality really being presented in the media coverage.

Now, because Netanyahu is so extreme as the Prime Minister of Israel, there’s a tendency to say, oh, well, he’s a bad guy, and he’s out of control. But in fact, he is part and parcel of Israeli policy, and more to my point here, he is functioning although there are disagreements at times, he is functioning in tandem with the US foreign policy and US military, and so When we go back to that question of the empathetic coverage that we have seen, the compassionate, heart rending stories, yes, they’re out there, but how often have you seen a direct connection made in the journalistic narrative between that suffering, that horrendous, really, by most definitions, genocide going on, and the direct policies of the US government? That is the disconnect that is chronic in US media coverage.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely. Norman Solomon, there is no lack of coverage around the subject of this ongoing, we can use lots of different words and that shows the frame, of course, that we’re coming through. The international court has called it a plausible genocide.

I think people that are really watching it happen and looking at the rhetoric around it, while that term may seem harsh to some, it unfortunately also seems accurate, factually. And that’s something that the corporate media in the US have a hard time, they have a hard, they have a strange relationship with language and terminology.

And they employ many euphemisms. And as you stated, they frame certain stories and they do talk maybe on occasion, rare as it may be, about some of these hardships and horrible things that are happening. But it’s all within the frame of it’s necessary. And if only Hamas hadn’t done this horrible thing and Israel has the right to self defense, but apparently no one else does. These are all the propaganda frames, that we see in the corporate media and you, deconstruct these in the new afterward to your book.

And again, I urge people that, to really look at this analysis, and you talk about several things about how mainstream discourse avoids voices condemning the US government for its role in the slaughter. And look, let’s be clear, what’s happening, and this is even from the mouths of Israeli military personnel, they could not be doing what they’re doing without US material support. Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon: Well, absolutely. Even before this war began, upwards of 80 percent of the Israeli military weaponry imports were from the United States. That number has even skyrocketed since then. Mickey, you just used the word slaughter, and you were referring before to how language is selectively utilized.

That is really key, and it goes to the, again, the theme of War Made Invisible that the invisibility is at many different layers, and a lot of those layers are, you might say, enforced by the language that is used quite selectively. Here’s an example that I cite in the afterward. It was research done by the Intercept.

Six weeks into the Gaza war, the word slaughter was used by the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times. A ratio 60 to one attributed to what Hamas had done for every reference to Israel slaughter of Palestinians, 60 references to what had been done to Israelis. Then you go to the word massacre, the ratio 125 to 2.

The word horrific, 36 to 4. This is an Orwellian way to tell people that, in effect, certain people’s lives really really matter, and certain people’s lives really, really don’t. And I make the argument in the book that this is so morally, spiritually, politically, ethically corrosive, so that we have, in effect, and it’s so subtle and so pervasive, two layers of grief, what I call two tiers of grief, where some people’s lives are held up, are magnified, as put important, through the news media and some just discounted them.

Of course, we’re seeing this in the war on Gaza, but we’ve seen it time and again, where the invasion of Iraq, had very little empathetic coverage because of who was being killed and who was doing the killing, namely the killing being done by the US government, whereas with the invasion of Ukraine, it’s flipped.

And tremendous empathetic coverage of the victims of that invasion. So, do as we say, not as we do is part of US foreign policy. You have Anthony Blinken, Secretary of State, going around the world saying we need a, quote, rules based order. What he really is saying is, do as we say, not as we do. We make the rules, and we can break the rules.

Mickey Huff: It’s really riveting, Norman Solomon. And, at the New York Times, we also, we saw them repeating over and over the propaganda from people that weren’t even actual journalists work, that we’re working with them about the so called Hamas rape scenarios that had been debunked over and over.

We also saw coming from the higher levels of the New York Times a leaked memo, telling the reporters things that they shouldn’t cover, words they should or shouldn’t use, the frames through which they should cover what was happening there. I mean, this is blatant pulling back the curtain, Edward Bernays, kind of effects of, who’s pulling the wires of the public mind.

I mean, this is a literal example of how the establishment press are really flogging the public with this kind of propaganda all the while they point fingers at anybody that’s an independent journalist that simply wants to report as George Seldes would say in the 20th century, what’s really going on?

And there are now record numbers of journalists that have been killed quote around the world, but a vast majority of them have been in Gaza. And it’s as if you can’t point that out or nobody wants to seem to really discuss with, all seriousness, as you say, tiers, right, of things that are happening. There are so many to deconstruct and comprehend.

So it seems as though that they’re, there should be ample time for the corporate news media to cover these things. It’s not that they lack documentation. It seems, however, to be that these issues escape the frame of the corporate media outlets, or they’re literally pushed out by their owners and paymasters in the military industrial complex.

So, I know in your afterward, you talk about the role of the military and war made invisible is like the nod or the handshake between the press establishment press and the military industrial complex that they only cover certain things, as you pointed out years ago in the hijacking catastrophe film for media education foundation, our media is infatuated with war.

They’re infatuated with the machinery of war. They glorify the weapons and, as the great editorial cartoonist Khalil Bendib once say, our corporate media love to show all the bombs and missiles and the extravagant technology and when they take off. But other organizations like Al Jazeera that are now banned in Israel like to show what happens when the bombs land.

Different frame, Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon: Yeah, there are people listening who may feel, well, come on, Project Censored. The book, War Made Invisible, you are sounding like a conspiracy. And I think a response is, no, it’s much worse than a conspiracy. It’s not a few people, diabolical, snide, whiplash, going in a back room with his co conspirators and giving out one memo or, the hammer coming down.

No, it is structural. It’s the way that the, if you will, political economy functions. It’s the way that these huge institutions interlock and the enormous profits that are being made, the shipping of weapons to Israel and to Ukraine and to Eastern Europe since the expansion of NATO. this is a humongous cash cow.

And are we supposed to pretend to be so naive that billions of dollars of weapons shipments every year don’t affect policy? I mean, there are more lobbyists on Capitol Hill than there are members of Congress for the weapons manufacturers. And speaking of language, and this is a losing battle for me, for years, when we say defense spending, when we say defense budget, lowercase d, we are already giving away part of the argument, where it’s very little of what the Pentagon spends.

And really filches from US taxpayers. Very little that has to do with defense. So if we can call it military spending, which is what it is, rather than defense, which it isn’t, then I think we’re ahead of the game. I think of what Martin Luther King Jr said. We have appropriately, many reprises of his wonderful speech in 1963, I Have a Dream.

Virtually no mass media coverage of what he said in 67 at Riverside Church in New York City when he denounced what he called the madness of militarism and in the economic standpoint, which again is rarely really talked about in US mass media. Dr. King talked about what he referred to as the destructive demonic suction tube.

Those are his words. demonic suction tube of massive military spending. And, here we are, Mickey, in 2024, and as in 1967, but with perhaps even more pernicious effects, you could say that suction tube is ripping people off, and not only abroad, but really, siphoning life away from people in communities around the United States.

Healthcare, education, housing, neonatal care, elderly care. you name it. So this is a multi level battle, and when we get back to the question of military aid to Israel, the war on Gaza, the genocide, would be impossible without the US military shipments. Just in the last few weeks here, by the time the summer was over, the White House had approved 20 billion, with a B, dollars more of military shipments, and it’s a sort of, Now you see it, now you don’t.

Now we make a difference, now we don’t. There’s a pretense that, oh, there’s this rogue Israeli government. What can we do? The United States could end this war on Gaza very quickly, except, that would require some political courage, stepping away from these massive pipeline shipments of weapons.

And one more thing I would add is, There’s an anomaly that’s rarely talked about in US mass media. The polling is against shipments of weapons to Israel. At least 60 percent, polls are showing. Most of the public wants a cutoff as long as the war on Gaza continues. And yet you wouldn’t know that from the punditocracy, the mass media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, because they’re in a different plane.

They’re in, oh, we’re in the elite circles. We know best, the public opinion in this case doesn’t matter because there are other considerations that are viewed as way more important.

Mickey Huff: No, absolutely. And, Norman Solomon, this, this lack of coverage in corporate media, six and 10 people in this country do want this to stop.

We have and you write about this in the afterward of the new paperback version of your book, War Made Invisible, you talk about how there’s a such a selective coverage of this, but there are people there are many, establishment journalists. And there are even people in the Senate and Congress that have well, sometimes sounded a little bit like we have here in the last 5 minutes.

I mean, maybe not so stridently in that way, but. There, there have been people that have spoken out against what’s happening and they have called attention to this. The Democrats have been experiencing the uncommitted voters in whatever passed for the primary, right, and just recently at the convention, these people were denied even having one representative talk about what a majority of Americans want.

Norman Solomon: that’s a great point. And the contradiction is glaring if we look for it, if it isn’t, like hidden under the bushel of the corporate mass media. I think, for instance, and I talk about this in the afterword of War Made Invisible, that Chris Van Hollen, the senator from Maryland, who really has been great in going to the borders of, Gaza and firsthand seeing, and this is a part of the genocide, the use of starvation as a weapon of war is incontrovertible.

Israel has been doing this. And so there’s US media coverage of Blinken, Secretary of State or President Biden saying, Oh, you really shouldn’t do that. But it continues and the US could stop it from happening. And so on the floor of the US senate earlier this year, fresh back, from Gaza, Senator Chris Van Hollen gave an eloquent, moving speech about the use of starvation as a weapon of war by the Israeli government against Palestinian people, and he said that the people running the Israeli government are committing war crimes.

He used that phrase. They are war criminals. And as I point out in the book, hours later, he votes to send more weapons, billions of dollars worth of weapons, more to Israel. So how does one explain that political schizophrenia, tremendous fear that the mass media will come down on them, the pundits at the major media outlets, of course, AIPAC, the pro Israel lobby, Israel can do no wrong, and this is a, terrible blight, one might say a criminal blight on the governing class of the United States.

Mickey Huff: Indeed, I’m speaking with Norman Solomon, author most recently of War Made Invisible, how America hides the human toll of its military machine. Now, the book came out last year. Norman Solomon has a new paperback edition that’s coming out, and may be out by the time this program airs. and we’re speaking a lot about the new afterword that focuses on this complicity between the U.

S. media, the military industrial complex, and enabling, the ongoing, the ongoing massacres that are happening in Gaza. I’m Mickey Huff, host of the Project Censored Show. Again, we are speaking with author and media critic Norman Solomon. We’ll continue our conversation after this brief musical break.

Stay with us. Three, two, one. Welcome back to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today on the program, we’re honored to have back Norman Solomon, journalist, media critic, historian. Norman Solomon’s work spans decades, looking at the commple-, the propaganda of the corporate media, the censorship of corporate media. And we’re speaking now about his recent book, War Made Invisible. It’s out in paperback here with a new afterwards specifically looking at what’s been happening with Israel and Gaza in the Middle East. And Norman Solomon earlier in the program, earlier in our conversation, I really liked that you, when you’ve, you talked about what’s happening in media.

And the way they cover things with their cozy relationships with the military industrial complex. This isn’t about a conspiracy. It’s, this is a bit, this is business strategy. This is policy. I mean, I’d like to say public policy, but that’s a total misnomer because it’s not in the public interest at all.

but one, one of the other sides to that is that there are. there’s, cracks in the facade. There are journalists that work for many of these, establishment outlets that actually signed on to a Committee to Protect Journalists letter decrying the carnage of journalists going on in Gaza and there were numerous people that signed it.

You wrote, and you, were quoting a, piece in your afterward. More than 30 journalists have since asked to have their signatures removed from the statement condemning the death of journalists in Gaza. Fearing reprisal from their employers. And then, you go on to quote this and saying, well, that includes Associated Press, Washington Post, Bloomberg, McClatchy, Chicago Tribune, et cetera, KQED, in San Francisco Bay Area.

Talk, can you talk a little bit about that kind of pressure inside the industry? That a lot of people would say is again well, that’s a conspiratorial mindset. It’s not this is self censorship These people seem to be very reasonably worried about their employment because they seem to know something about the business within their work

Norman Solomon: Yeah, the incident that you referred to makes its own case really because it was actually an independent letter that was presented by drafted by american journalists and got a really large amount of signers very quickly saying You know, we want independent journalism.

We don’t want this shilling for one side of this war. And it was eloquent. It was clear. And as you say, a few dozen people who signed a letter within days. contacted the, distributors of the letter and said take my name off because my employers, will come down on me or already have come down on me.

So that fear factor is really hard to quantify, and it’s in the air. You mentioned the great press critic George Seldes, and I think it was Seldes who said that when you went into the newsroom, and this is perennial, it’s going back to the 30s, you could smell in the air what is allowed and what isn’t, what’s expected and what isn’t.

And when you think about it, somebody breaking into the profession, how do they evaluate what is helpful for your career? and that is what those who have already advanced farther are doing. And contrary wise, if there are object lessons for people who have the hammer coming down on them because they signed the wrong letter or they do something that gets them fired or demoted or hitting, a ceiling, of their career.

That is very, instructive in a bad way. I note in the afterward that, Mehdi Hassan had a weekly prominent show on MSNBC for years. And then within a couple of months after October 7th, his show was canceled. Why? Well, it was very clear. He actually condemned what Israel and the United States were doing in the carnage, in the slaughter of civilians.

And we need to remember most of those deaths, this is an undercount, more than 40, 000 of people who have been killed by the US armed Israeli forces in Gaza, most of them are children and women. And so, Hasan actually talked about that and had guests who were explicit about it and causality on MSNBC.

And the trap door opened and he was gone. Well, these are object lessons. It’s not only to get this guy off the air to say, this is what can happen if you step out of line.

Mickey Huff: Well, Norman Solomon, it sounds like Mehdi Hassan should have read Jeff Cohen’s Cable News Confidential about the escapades of Phil Donahue and how MSNBC sacked his program on the run up to the Iraq war.

Norman Solomon: Well, it really goes to the aphorism that history might not exactly repeat itself, but it rhymes a hell of a lot. And these are patterns, not that we should be fatalistic, we should be independent and realistic about what the hell is going on. And might I say, it’s a program like, the Project Censored Show and others around the country that are using the airwaves and the internet to say, there is another way.

There are capacities that we have to convey information, not vertically, but horizontally, and not only because information is power, knowledge is power, but it helps people to organize, which is how social change has always happened.

Mickey Huff: Meaningful civic engagement informed by transparently reported facts, right?

That’s what the fourth estate is supposed to be doing. That’s why that this is protected in the constitution under the free press to not allow this kind of government interference. However, what we see increasingly more and more over the years is what we refer to as a censorship by proxy, right, where these corporations are so integrally enmeshed through the national security state and so on, they don’t need to get memos.

The White House doesn’t need to tell big tech, etc, It’s what you were referring to as sell these. You can almost walk into these rooms and smell it in the air, and that’s what creates this kind of very, I would say you use the word pernicious before to use it again, the self censorship that goes on that many times people don’t know that.

But you are here giving people the opportunity to understand that many of these people, these journalists that were self censoring that it made its own case. They were coming out saying, take my name off the letter. In other words, they were saying, I have to go back and self censor. I’m violating some golden rule in, in, in journalism, right, among the corporate journalists, directly in violation of the Society Professional Journalist Code of Ethics, right, which is to seek truth and report it and to, not get into conflicts of interest and to cause no harm.

Rather, we see the media doing great harm. Another thing you mentioned earlier that I wanted to come back to was the great Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky’s manufacturing consent and their analysis of worthy and unworthy victims. And it seems like Mehdi Hassan committed the great crime of noticing the unworthy victims.

Right? And this is what leads to his exit. These unworthy victims, right, are the evidence of a genocide that’s been unfolding under people’s eyes. And it’s the way in which that we can dehumanize and refer to people. In fact, you write that some of the people inside the Obama administration, I’m sorry, the Biden administration, sorry about that, Freudian slip.

They were calling him the Comforter in Chief Biden, these kind of things. I mean, it’s just extraordinary the kind of things that the administration can say, like, at the convention, yet it’s as if they have to completely saw off this part of reality that directly contradicts it. And the media is helping to bolster that firewall.

Norman Solomon: In journalism, and more broadly, we would want, we ought to strive for a single standard of human rights. And what really bounces around, and unfortunately becomes very upsetting if we look at it closely, is the Orwellian concept that is spelled out in the book, 1984, where DoubleThink has as its key characteristics, certainly one of the main dynamics, is that certain facts or precepts or espoused principles can be taken off the shelf and evoked and invoked and talked, be talked about and cited.

But then when inconvenient, you put them back on the shelf as though they don’t exist. And this is so chronic in the punditocracy. I mean, if you, listen to the discussion on All Things Considered or the PBS NewsHour with the regular pundits who will come on, or you read, the major op ed columnists in the most influential outlets, or the less influential that are still corporate owned media outlets, you see this constant, you might say, bifurcation of what is a principled existence, and it’s so flagrant when it’s really bad when Russia invades Ukraine, which it is, I would say.

But it’s just fine when, the United States has time after time invaded, and this is not only ancient history. We’re not only talking Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and so forth. We’re talking about continued, as I point out in the book, warfare in dozens of countries, often from the air. And again, it’s a different standard.

Whereas if you pack explosives into the trunk of a car and drive it into a military or civilian outfit or location that is condemned as terrorism. Yes, it’s terrorism. But if you kill people from 20 or 30,000 feet in the air, high tech on quote our side, that’s considered to be okay. And that is wrong.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, it is. It’s fundamentally wrong. And the perversion of the languages is what also continues to facilitate the overall acceptance of this but even still 60 percent of people in this country are saying they want to stop this arming. They want to stop what’s happening and they’re literally being shut out and ignored.

Just again, just riffing on that, you reminded me that the late great George Carlin did this, long ago, a rant on euphemisms, particularly looking at government and militarism. And he ended that part of his, the segment of his show by saying, let’s not have a double standard here. One standard will do just fine.

And just fine.

Norman Solomon: And, Carlin, of course, he talked about contradictions, like, Jumbo Shrimp and military intelligence. He had that sort of riff. I think that we have an opportunity and certainly independent media have really been utilizing that to pop the bubble of delusion and propaganda and say, hey, we can decode this.

We can create a different ethos in media that can also create a different ethos in politics and governance. But obviously this is a very uphill climb.

Mickey Huff: Indeed, it is and Norman Solomon where we have only a couple minutes left in our segment today, and I know maybe we want to try to come up into the more of the present as far as electoral politics go, but I wanted to end at least or at least launch into your conclusive remarks.

You wrote in the afterward, quote, this is from an Israeli major general who said all of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs. It’s all from the US retired Israeli major general Itzhak Brik said in late November, 2023. Early, that’s early on, right? He added, quote, everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States.

Period. How does that kind of a statement then, do you think, reflect on what’s happening in the campaign with the Harris Walz, Democrats, really just, I mean, just plugging their ears and their eyes and so on. I mean, they’re like the three monkeys, it’s really riveting what’s happening and how they seem to want to compartmentalize this.

Norman Solomon.

Norman Solomon: Well, both parties and their presidential candidates are glorifying the military of the US as it’s the quintessential great expression of the US values, whatever that might be. I think it’s clear that, hard to imagine, that Trump would be worse because he has told Netanyahu to, quote, finish the job.

But both parties have really soldered themselves to this very false and lethal notion of what it means to be patriotic and what the military means. I would just close by saying that as I worked on this afterward, I kept thinking about, well, the subtitle of War Made Invisible is how America hides the human toll of its military machine.

What does that machine have to do with what Israel is doing? And I kept seeing again and again that the Israeli military machine is, as I say, an adjunct of the US military machine. Therefore, our US media must be confronted for its failure to point out that the killing in Gaza comes from the United States, as well as from Israel.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely. Norman Solomon, your latest book now coming out in paperback with this new afterword that we’ve been discussing is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of its Military Machine. It has accolades from, Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman, the late great Daniel Ellsberg, a friend of yours said, “No one is better at exposing the dynamics of media and politics that keeps starting and continuing wars.” Norman Solomon, thank you so much for the important work that you do, often pulling back the curtain in the world of journalism to see how the decisions are made, what the conflicts of interest are. And again, few people deconstruct that propaganda better than you. Norman Solomon, as always, thank you so much for taking time and coming on the Project Censored Show with us today.

Do you have a place where people can follow more of your work or find out more about what’s around this book?

Norman Solomon: Sure, people can go to, warmadeinvisible. org and, there’s a lot of info there.

Mickey Huff: Thanks so much, Norman. It’s always a pleasure.

Norman Solomon: Thanks a lot, Mickey.