Media spin

This book, by the veteran international correspondent Uli Schmetzer, who spent much of his professional life working for the once venerable Chicago Tribune, makes riveting reading for media practitioners and students of international affairs. Schmetzer had the good luck or knack of being at various global hot spots just as a crisis broke out. As a rookie reporter for Reuters, he witnessed first hand the Tlatelolco Square massacre in Mexico City of student protesters by the Mexican Army as the country was preparing to host the Olympics in 1968. He reported for the wire service from Chile when the government of Salvadore Allende was overthrown in a United States-backed coup. As Chicago Tribune's foreign correspondent, he covered Western Europe, West Asia, China and India. Schmetzer was Chicago Tribune's correspondent in New Delhi in the late 1990s.

Immigrant bashing

Of German parentage, Schmetzer grew up in Australia. He started his career in the highly competitive world of tabloid journalism in the late 1950s. He starts his book by recounting his experiences about growing up and working in Australia. Schmetzer writes that even in the late 1940s and early 1950s, immigrant bashing was an Australian pastime, despite the fact that most of the newcomers at the time were Europeans from the war-ravaged parts of the continent. In those days, the 1950s and the 1960s, migrants were second-rate citizens, he writes.

According to Schmetzer, who has Australian citizenship and spends a lot of time in that country, Asians today occupy the bottom rung of Australian society as Germans, Italians, Serbs and other European immigrant communities have moved up the ladder. He gives many personal anecdotes to buttress his point. Ironically, after he retired from Tribune, Schmetzer was subjected to a witch-hunt for a story he had written about racism in Australia. His alleged journalistic impropriety was to change a name to protect his source.

Of particular interest to the readers are the illustrations of double standards adopted by his employers in particular and the Western media in general on issues relating to the freedom of the press.

Schmetzer's eyewitness accounts of the government-ordered mayhem in Mexico City did not find their way into print. Reports of the killing of a large number of students were suppressed after the Mexican and the United States governments brought pressure to bear on the media. The top news agency, which had employed Schmetzer at the time, instead chose to give prominence to the version put out by the government that those killed were dangerous communist agitators financed by the Cuban and Russian governments.

Right-wing agendas

In the case of Chile, too, Schmetzer notes that his well-documented stories about Allende's supporters being tortured and the story about Socialist Party and Communist Party activists massed in a football field some of them executed later were suppressed by the news agency. The main reason the Western media did this, he notes, was that Washington supported the coup and was, therefore, anxious to keep the death roll low. The other important reason was that most of the wire subscribers were big newspaper groups with pronounced right-wing agendas. His bosses recalled him from Chile and supplanted him with a reporter known for his anti-Left bias.

Schmetzer's exit was hastened by a question he asked General Pinochet about bodies with their hands tied being fished out of the river that flows through the capital city. Pinochet's glib reply was that many communists are committing suicide by throwing themselves into the river. Schmetzer quit Reuters, and his next full-time job was with Chicago Tribune in Rome. He had the opportunity to cover the Vatican, including the events surrounding the sudden death of John Paul I and the murky politics that preceded the anointment of his successor.

Covering West Asia

Schmetzer had the privilege of being the first Western journalist allowed to enter Albania, then under the iron rule of Enver Hoxha. Italy, during his posting, was reeling from the terror attacks of the Red Brigades. The kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, a former Prime Minister, was headline news throughout the world.

From Rome, Schmetzer covered West Asia, the Balkans and North Africa. He recounts in detail the attack President Ronald Reagan ordered on Libya. Schmetzer was in Tripoli when American warplanes attacked many targets, including Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's home.

The editors at Tribune, happy with Schmetzer's exclusive stories, acceded to his request for a posting in Beijing. The timing was fortuitous. According to Schmetzer, China was a country where a billion people moved on bicycles when I arrived and were stuck in automobile jams when I left.

A major part of his book is devoted to the events surrounding the Tiananmen incident. He recounts the naivety of the student leadership, which tried to challenge the authority of the Communist Party. He also gives illustrations of the Western media's manipulation of the news from China during those turbulent years. Our reports fell miserably short of evaluating the consequences to the rest of the world if China was plunged into chaos, notes Schmetzer.

Western media reports that between 10,000 and 20,000 people were killed in Beijing were a gross and irresponsible exaggeration based on Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) briefings. According to him, the failure of the student revolt was a factor that paved the way for China's rise as the next superpower. Schmetzer's disillusionment with his bosses at the Tribune becomes evident when he talks about his coverage of Israel and the occupied territories. His reports about the suffering of the Palestinian people, the construction of the separation wall and related stories elicited a barrage of criticism from the influential Jewish lobby in the U.S. Schmetzer was given verbal instructions by his bosses to stop highlighting issues such as Israel's settlement-building and other forms of land-grabbing. He was politely told not to write any more on the separation wall because it was overdone.

An earlier story in which he quoted the mayor of a West Bank town describing the wall as a blatant land grab was killed. The author notes that Chicago Tribune, like other leading American papers, later chose a correspondent holding American-Israeli citizenship to report from Tel Aviv. It is unfair to expect from these people a balanced report on the Israel-Palestine conflict. For a start they are reporting from the Israeli side and their hearts and souls are steeped in Jewish culture, Schmetzer writes.

In the early 1990s, Schmetzer along with another colleague, Bob Rowley, was assigned to do a story on global smuggling of nuclear material and weapons.

After travelling around the world and spending more than $80,000 of Tribune's money, an interesting story, which uncovered the smuggling of plutonium in tree trunks from Eastern Europe, CIA officers trying to buy back Stringer missiles from the Afghan Mujahideen, and an accident involving a Polish plutonium smuggler who died while carrying his consignment in a briefcase, was sent to the Chicago desk of the newspaper. The story never saw the light of day.

According to Schmetzer, it was rumoured that the State Department did not want the story to be published as it would panic the public. Seven years later, on September 11, 2001, Americans were jolted out of their fake sense of security and really panicked.

Schmetzer recounts another incident to bolster his argument. During his stint in India, he wrote a story on the fight between Indian farmers and scientists and the Monsanto Company over the introduction of genetically modified seeds (GMS). His story had focussed on the fears of Indian farmers that GMS could spell the end of native seeds, might transmigrate and would grant Monsanto a monopoly over seeds in the second-most populous nation of the world.

The desk in Chicago asked him for clarifications to which Schmetzer immediately replied. A few hours later, a representative of Monsanto told Schmetzer that there was an inaccuracy in the third paragraph of his copy. The Monsanto Company was obviously shown the copy sent by the correspondent in India. The story was never published.

The author acknowledges that after having covered the world's hot spots for decades, he started becoming increasingly outraged by the brutality and the disproportionate retribution for the so-called acts of terrorism, which he feels in reality were mainly resistance to occupation and the cavalier ways Washington and Tel Aviv brushed away their blatant war crimes against civilian populations, defining them as unfortunate collateral damage.

Hogwash

Journalists, he writes, have very little option but to dish out the hogwash. If they do not include the official briefings, the home desk will incorporate the official version anyway. Soon you realise news is diluted and distilled by political and corporate interests well before it reaches the consumer, he observes. Schmetzer complains that his stories were extensively rewritten for partisan purposes. But he stoically accepted his fate, noting that in the battle between editors and correspondents, the correspondent is pre-destined for defeat even though most of them will boast when asked they have never' been rewritten.

Schmetzer describes Western media outlets as nothing better than propaganda machines, a little subtler perhaps than the one in the former Soviet Union. Human rights issues, he notes, are pretexts to justify military interventions and organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund are no more than a cartel of handout-merchants to make the world's poor accept their miserable lot instead of rioting for a better deal.

He blames the often naive, though sometimes complacent, mass media for justifying the bellicose acts of Western governments. The ridiculous claim of objectivity in reporting news in the U.S. has been repeatedly exposed by the double standards adopted by the American media. It is a country in which objectivity' is our way and for whom elections in other countries are a good thing as long as they produce winners who are on our side, he writes.

Peddling fairy tales

In the Epilogue to his book, Schmetzer concludes that our mass media still peddles fairy tales narrated by government officials, establishment experts and senior politicians, who dominate the talk shows and newsprint. Critics of the system are ignored or given limited space. He points out that the Pentagon alone trained 75 military officers to be on television shows to give a positive spin on the war in Iraq. These military experts were quoted 4,500 times by major news outlets.

The book is recommended reading for all those interested in world affairs and in the functioning of the corporate media.