Ukraine war: The need for a Fifth Estate to bust the propaganda

File photo: CNN reporting on the Ukrainian crisis. Reuters

1 April 2022 

Scores of Western nations, including European Union members, the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada, along with politically pro-West Japan and Australia, have proscribed the Palestinian resistant movement Hamas. 

Hamas is not known to have resorted to violence except in the noble cause of freeing Palestinians’ motherland from Israel’s illegal occupation. Yet, Western nations in their Islamophobic racism and in their overdeference to Israel, have proscribed Hamas, interpreting its resistance as “terrorism”.
Now let’s turn our focus on Ukraine. Civilians who have taken up arms and even pro-Nazi groups which have joined the Ukrainian Army have been hailed by Western leaders and their servile media as freedom fighters, for they are resisting, rightly so, the invading Russian Army.  Reports say all able-bodied Ukrainian men between the ages of 18 and 60 have been prevented from leaving the country. They were told to take up arms to defeat the invasion.

Now this is what the Palestinians have been doing since the 1940s and the Iraqis did when their country was occupied by troops from Western nations from 2003 till 2011. International law recognises the right of a people to carry out armed resistance against foreign occupation. Ukrainians have all the right to defend their country’s territorial integrity. But when the West fails to accord such recognition to the Palestinians and other such people, who are under the occupation of a foreign power, it is nothing but hypocrisy and outlandish racism. 

On Wednesday, the CNN news bulletin included an extensive coverage on the growing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine. The highlighting of the suffering of the Ukrainian people caught up in the war zone is certainly praiseworthy journalism. But when not even a fraction of the TV time the Ukrainian humanitarian crisis is getting in the Westen media has been set aside to highlight the suffering of the people in Yemen, it is nothing but opportunistic journalism. Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, described by the United Nations as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, is outrageously underreported, as had been the suffering of the people in Iraq during the US invasion and that of the Palestinians when Gaza was reduced to rubble by the Israelis. 
The Russian bombing of a Mariupol theatre where civilians had sought shelter still dominates the news bulletins in the western media. Compare their coverage with how they reported Israel’s bombing of a United Nations-run school which had been sheltering some 3,300 civilians, including children, during the 2014 Gaza war. The then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said, “Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children.” Investigations revealed that in more than 17 communications, the UN officials had informed the Israelis about the precise location of the UN school which was being used as a civilian shelter. Despite the information, the school was bombed. Some 15 people, including an 18-month-old baby, died in the attack. Yet, Israel escaped the Western media’s demonisation. Perhaps, such media attacks are reserved for Palestinian resistance groups, those standing up to the West’s hegemonic designs and anti-West nations like Russia, Iran, North Korea and China.

This analysis is not an effort to belittle the suffering of the Ukrainian people caught up in a war that was the making of their President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s puerile foreign policy decision of seeking Nato membership, knowing well it would only provoke Russia, its powerful nuclear neighbour, on the other side of the border. Our effort is to highlight the double standards of the war-mongering Western media. 

For those who have learned to question the credibility of the Western media’s reporting, watching their Ukraine war coverage is a nauseating experience, especially, after the Western nations, in their aggressive mind-control push, blacked out Russia’s state-funded news organizations Russia Today and Sputnik. The so-called champions of the free speech are denying us the opportunity to learn the Russian side of the story while they still have the gall to preach Third World countries about the importance of free speech.

As the war entered its second month, the Western media scurried to highlight that 1,119 civilians had been killed in the first month of the war, while the US president Joe Biden called Russia’s President Vladimir Putin a “war criminal.” But there was no such coverage on the body count in Iraq when the American invasion entered into its second month. In Iraq about 11,000-15,000 people died in the first month of the United States’ Shock-and-Awe military operation. Iraq’s first month death toll is seven times more than what Ukraine has seen. Will Biden call the then US President George Bush Jr a bigger war criminal than Putin?
The corporate media made no effort to investigate Bush’s casus belli -- that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The Iraq war could have been avoided if the Western media had investigated Bush’s claim and exposed his lie. But big-time US media chose to toe the war party’s line.

Journalism, as practised by the corporate media, is mainly propaganda wrapped in the mythology of objective journalism to further the national interest of the West and the business interests of media group proprietors and sponsors. The general perception is that it is the authoritarian regimes which use their media for propaganda. However, as rightly pointed out by global justice activist Arundhati Roy, “public opinion in ‘free market’ democracies is manufactured just like any other mass market product—soap, switches and sliced bread.”
Since the 9/11 attacks, the Western media have become blatantly pro-War, and the mouthpiece of their governments. 

Often, we have marvelled at the Western media’s courageous journalism and BBC’s impartiality. But this is a myth sustained by their own propaganda. BBC was founded by Lord John Reith in 1920. Soon it won public accolade for its independent journalism and the courage to take on the government while being a state-funded institution.  Shattering the myth, historian Patrick Renshaw said the price of that independence was in fact doing what the government wanted done. [The then British Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin... saw that if they preserved the BBC’s independence, it would be much easier for them to get their way on important questions and use it to broadcast Government propaganda.

The modus operandi is first they build up a reputation of being an independent media organisation and then resort to deception with a view to promoting the hegemonic capitalist state’s global agenda.
Award-winning war journalist and docu-film maker John Pilger says what we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power.