Speakers say media bear some blame for Iraq war
11:40 PM 11/07/03
Scott Milfred State government reporter

Misleading and incomplete reporting by major news outlets helped President Bush steer America into war with Iraq, speakers said Friday during the opening session of a three-day National Conference on Media Reform at UW-Madison. <

"This war could never have taken place without the complicity of the news media," said John Stauber, author and founder of the Center for Media and Democracy, a group that seeks to expose corporate and government propaganda campaigns. "The media that sold this war doesn't want to examine how they did it." <

Amy Goodman, host of Pacifica Radio's "Democracy Now!" program, said war would stop if media outlets showed images of injured and dead Iraqi civilians, including children, as often as they showed images such as the toppling of a large statue of Saddam Hussein draped with an American flag. <

Goodman also faulted the media and U.S. government for failing to tally Iraqi casualties. She quoted Secretary of State Colin Powell as once having justified this by explaining that the military doesn't count enemy deaths. <

"I don't consider a little dead Iraqi girl or boy on the ground my enemy," Goodman said in front of about 1,600 people in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union on campus. <

The conference continues today with more speeches, films, music and discussions, including an 8 p.m. speech at the Orpheum Theater by Bill Moyers of National Public Television fame. Tickets to the Orpheum event are sold out. <

Consumer advocate and former Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader has rescheduled his appearance for 8 a.m. today in Room 3650 Humanities on campus. His talk is free and open to the public. <

Media reform has quickly become one of the top issues on Capitol Hill, said former UW-Madison professor Robert McChesney, a featured speaker who's now at the University of Illinois. Attention has peaked since June when the Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 to relax media ownership rules. Media companies could get bigger by owning newspapers and broadcast outlets in the same cities. A single company also could own TV stations reaching 45 percent of the nation's viewers. <

Critics including many of the authors, politicians and independent journalists at this weekend's conference argue that the growth of media conglomerates limits and skews the diversity of news reports and opinions that Americans read and hear. <

A federal appeals court issued an emergency stay in September, preventing the rules from going into effect for now. <

Some Republicans including Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi want to undo the FCC changes. But this weekend's conference features mostly Democratic politicians and left-wing activists and commentators. <

Stauber and Goodman acknowledged not all big media companies are inherently bad. After all, Stauber used a major publisher for his best-selling book, "Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq," and Goodman's program is carried on 170 radio stations. <

Yet most people get their news from major network and cable television stations that are less likely to scrutinize events involving the Fortune 500 companies that pay for expensive TV ads, speakers said. <

"The eyeballs are still watching TV, and we have to build up a mass movement" for reform, said Nancy Snow, an author and assistant professor at California State University. <