Ian Buruma en Zijn Dubieuze Bronnen

De BNR-uitzending, waarin Bernard Hammelburg de opiniemaker Ian Buruma interviewde, gaf onbedoeld een helder beeld van de grote verwarring onder de westerse mainstream-pers over de geleidelijke ineenstorting van het Amerikaans imperium. Met betreking tot de beschuldigingen van Trump en zijn aanhang inzake verkiezingsfraude zei Buruma, die zelf er niet voor terugdeinst om leugens te verspreiden -- zoals ik meermaals gedocumenteerd heb aangetoond:

De meeste mensen lezen niet The New York Times. De meeste mensen krijgen hun informatie via het internet, en daar kun je de meest grote onzin  verspreiden en miljoenen bereiken. Dat is dus een groot probleem. 

Maar ook dit is weer een halve waarheid, en daarom  een onwaarheid. Hoewel Buruma suggereert dat The New York Times altijd de waarheid vertelt, is deze bewering alles behalve waar, zoals uitgebreid is aangetoond. Het was juist deze krant die op 26 mei 2004 gedwongen was zich te verontschuldigen voor de propagandistische wijze waarop het dagblad de illegale Irak-inval had gerechtvaardigd. Volgens eigen zeggen had de krant  zich op sleeptouw laten nemen door de neoconservatieve Bush-junior regering en door uiterst corrupte Iraakse anti-Saddam informanten. De redactie en hoofdredactie meldden:

we have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been. In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge…

Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all. 

De NYT stelde dat het dagblad het regelmatig niet zo nauw had genomen met de 'waarheid,' dus zijn journalistieke taak had verzaakt, en concludeerde tenslotte dat:  

We consider the story of Iraq's weapons, and of the pattern of misinformation, to be unfinished business.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/26/world/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html 

Hoewel de Times een jaar na het begin van de inval moest erkennen dat het had meegewerkt aan het legitimeren van de meest desastreuze politieke oorlogsmisdaad van het naoorlogse Amerikaans buitenlands beleid, die vele honderdduizenden mensenlevens en tenminste 3 biljoen dollar aan belastinggeld heeft gekost, is dit niet het enige voorbeeld van Ian Buruma’s impliciete leugen dat deze krant in het bijzonder en de mainstream-pers in het algemeen betrouwbare bronnen zijn. De Amerikaanse auteur James Moore benadrukte op 27 mei 2004 nog eens dat:

[w]hen the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in particular those at The New York Times, so easily allowed themselves to be manipulated by both dubious sources and untrustworthy White House officials into running stories that misled the nation about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. The Times finally acknowledged its grave errors in an extraordinary and lengthy editors note published Wednesday, 26 mei 2004.

http://www.salon.com/2004/05/27/times_10/  

Een ander voorbeeld. In 2019 werd bekend dat:

The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from ‘national security officials’ before publication.

This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/06/24/new-york-times-media-us-government-approval/  

Nog een voorbeeld. De inmiddels bij The New York Times vertrokken onderzoeksjournalist James Risen schreef in zijn boek Pay Any Price. Greed, Power, And Endless War (2014) hoe de leiding van de krant zijn onthullingen tot twee maal toe weigerde te publiceren, na onder druk te zijn gezet door het Witte Huis. Ook Risen’s relevante informatie voorafgaand aan de agressieoorlog tegen Irak in 2003 werd door The New York Times gesaboteerd:

Before the invasion of Iraq, my stories that revealed that CIA analysts had doubts about the prewar intelligence on Iraq were held, cut, and buried deep inside the Times, even as stories by other reporters loudly proclaiming the purported existence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were garnering banner headlines on page one. I decided I wasn't going to let that happen again.

Omdat de censuur niet ophield, zag Risen zich uiteindelijk genoodzaakt een boek te schrijven met daarin de door zijn krant achtergehouden of weggemoffelde feiten:

After my manuscript was complete in the late summer of 2005, I told the editors at the Times that I was planning to include both the NSA story and the story about the CIA's botched Iran program in my book. 

They were furious. For several weeks, the editors refused to reconsider running the NSA story, which, of the two stories, was freshest in their minds and which became the focus of our tense internal negotiations.

Hoewel de polderpers The New York Times mateloos bewondert als de meest gezaghebbende en betrouwbare krant in de wereld, kwamen de Amerikaanse geleerden Edward S. Herman en Noam Chomsky in hun omvangrijke studie Manufacturing Consent. The Polical Economy of the Mass Media (1988) tot de conclusie dat:

In contrast to the standard conception of the media as cantankerous, obstinate, and ubiquitous in their search for truth and their independence of authority, we have spelled out and applied a propaganda model that indeed sees the media as serving a ‘societal purpose,’ but not that of enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process by providing them with the information needed for the intelligent discharge of political responsibilities. On the contrary, a propaganda model suggests that the ‘societal purpose’ of the media is to inculcate and defend the economic, social, and political agenda of privileged groups that dominate the domestic society and the state. The media serve this purpose in many ways: through selection of topics, distribution of concerns, framing of issues, filtering of information, emphasis and tone, and by keeping debate within the bounds of acceptable premises...

As we have stressed throughout this book, the U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit — indeed, encourage — spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness. No one instructed the media to focus on Cambodia and ignore East Timor. They gravitated naturally to the Khmer Rouge and discussed them freely — just as they naturally suppressed information on Indonesian atrocities in East Timor and U.S. responsibility for the aggression and massacres. In the process, the media provided neither facts nor analyses that would have enabled the public to understand the issues or the bases of government policies toward Cambodia and Timor, and they thereby assured that the public could not exert any meaningful influence on the decisions that were made. This is quite typical of the actual 'societal purpose' of the media on matters that are of significance for established power; not 'enabling the public to assert meaningful control over the political process,' but rather averting any such danger. In these cases, as in numerous others, the public was managed and mobilized from above, by means of the media's highly selective messages and evasions. As noted by media analyst W. Lance Bennett: 'the public is exposed to powerful persuasive messages from above and is unable to communicate meaningfully through the media in response to the messages... Leaders have usurped enormous amounts of political power and reduced popular control over the political system by using the media to generate support, compliance, and just plain confusion among the public.'

En: 

Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to succes. In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite (vereiste. svh) values and perspectives will be regarded as 'irresponsible,' 'ideological,' or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free — for those who adopt the principles required for 'societal purpose.'

Dit wat betreft de ideologische achtergrond, maar ook over de werkwijze van de zogeheten vrije pers valt het nodige op te merken. Nogmaals Herman en Chomsky:

The technical structure of the media virtually compels adherence to conventional thoughts; nothing else can be expressed between two commercials, or in seven hundred words, without the appearance of absurdity that is difficult to avoid when one is challenging familiar doctrine with no opportunity to develop facts or argument… The critic must also be prepared to face a defamation apparatus against which there is little recourse, an inhibiting factor that is not insubstantial... The result is a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power. In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration, right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management.

Onder de kop 'The New York Times Versus The Civil Society' schreef naderhand professor Edward Herman in een vernietigend artikel over 's werelds invloedrijkste krant:

The veteran Times reporter John Hess has said that in all 24 years of his service at the paper he 'never saw a foreign intervention that the Times did not support, never saw a fare increase or a rent increase or a utility rate increase that it did not endorse, never saw it take the side of labor in a strike or lockout, or advocate a raise for underpaid workers. And don’t let me get started on universal health care and Social Security. So why do people think the Times is liberal?' The paper is an establishment institution and serves establishment ends. As Times historian Harrison Salisbury said about former executive editor Max Frankel, 'The last thing that would have entered his mind would be to hassle the American Establishment, of which he was so proud to be a part.' 

Desondanks blijft Ian Buruma de mythe verspreiden dat The New York Times een uiterst betrouwbare, onafhankelijke bron is, en dat het ‘een groot probleem’ is dat de ‘meeste mensen hun informatie via het internet’ krijgen, ‘en daar kun je de meest grote onzin verspreiden en miljoenen bereiken.’ Maar als onafhankelijke — en daardoor gemarginaliseerde — journalist gebruik ik regelmatig informatie van internet, gepubliceerd door betrouwbare journalisten als John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, Seymour Hersh etcetera, die weigeren de leugens van de mainstream-pers te verspreiden en zijn uitgeweken naar internet, terwijl charlatans als Ian Buruma hun leugens voor de ‘corporate media’ blijven herhalen. Het ironische is dat Buruma mij in 2017 schreef dat mijn ‘ideeën eerder [komen] uit een wat ouderwetse Amerikaanse hoek, Chomsky, Zinn et al. die door een oudere generatie serieus werden genomen,’ maar die inmiddels door hem als obsoleet naar de prullenbak worden verwezen. Voor de opportunistische'corporate press' is 'waarheid' een tijdgebonden fenomeen.