`The basic premise is neoliberalism'

Interview with Alexander Cockburn, co-founder and co-editor of CounterPunch.

Alexander Cockburn is one of the sharpest and honest voices in the United States media today. He has established a reputation as a leading writer and political commentator. Born and raised in Ireland, he has lived in the U.S. since 1973.

The NationCounterPunch

In 1987, Cockburn wrote a highly successful collection of essays entitled Corruptions of Empire, for which he was called "the most gifted polemicist now writing in English" by The Times Literary Supplement. His diary of the late 1980s and early 1990s, The Golden Age is in us, drew rave reviews from newspapers such as The New York Times. More recently, he has co-authored with Jeffrey St. Clair, the bestselling Whiteout: the Press, Drugs and the CIA; The Politics of Anti-Semitism; Imperial Crusades: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq; Serpents in the Garden: Essays on Culture and Sex and Dimes Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils.

During a recent visit to Mumbai, Cockburn spoke to Dionne Bunsha about the media and politics in the U.S. Excerpts:

How free is the media in the U.S.?

Since the time that I have been in the U.S., from 1973 to now, the media have changed quite considerably for the worse. You won't find much beyond the safe Democratic Party stuff in the mainstream corporate media at all.

The area where I might, sort of, have a place in the mainstream is as a radical commentator. Through the 1980s, I had a column in The Wall Street Journal every three weeks as the sort of `mad radical'. So they could say they were open to every shade of opinion. They had a little patch of their real estate on their op-ed page open to outside commentary. But they don't have that anymore, it's gone.

Middle-distance critical stuff? I do a column for The Nation, which sells more now than it ever has. It's the oldest liberal weekly (founded in 1865), the left end of the Democratic Party, but they still regard it as the solution. I find the Democratic Party just the other face of the Republican Party, it's very difficult to distinguish the two.

I don't believe that the media itself would be a healthy media unless they reflect political movements.

There are too many people doing media commentary, so many web sites that spend so much time worrying what The New York Times says. It's important that you challenge them but that's not an expression of political power, it's a reflection of weakness. If we had a good Left economist (most of them are boring and dull) for every media commentator, we'd be a lot better off.

Is an alternative political movement possible in the U.S.?

In the U.S., the forces of corporate domination at the Federal and State levels are so strong that it's really hard to do much. You have to fight at the city level, where the bad guys are not so well organised. That's why you'll find that the Living Wage campaign has been pretty successful in many cities. At that level, there is a progressive politics.

You have to think really long-term. In the U.S., the food lobby kills far more people than the Pentagon. Far more people die of cancer than those being shot in the streets of Falluja, because they are eating rotten food filled with additives. Starting in the 1960s, the hippies said we want safe, organic food. Now, most cities have farmers markets where people sell good stuff. That's a slow but pretty important change for radical politics in the U.S. It's not because of the political parties. They are in the pay of the food companies and try to make it impossible to get a licence so you can sell your food.

Is there growing opposition to Bush, the establishment and to globalisation?

Let's take globalisation. Seattle 1999.... That was a huge shock to the establishment; you can take the ruling class by surprise every 20 years. There's certainly an anti-globalisation movement - a 1,000 universities have had a 1,000 conferences on globalisation and a 1,000 million pieces have been written against it. Has it had any effect? Almost zero.

Take the anti-war movement. In 2002 and 2003, there were huge demonstrations. Then, the mainstream anti-war movement decided to cut down on protests and just support John Kerry, who supported the war. So, there were no major peace demonstrations in the last six months of 2004. Now, they are trying to fire up the engine but can't get the numbers.

At a Military Families Against the War meeting in Seattle five months ago, there was a guy from Los Angeles, who must have been a first generation migrant from Mexico, whose son was killed in Iraq. He had gone on his own expense to the village where his son was killed in Iraq, he talked to the villagers, he talked to his son's unit and he came back and joined Military Families Against the War. And he was travelling around America raising awareness. It was the most moving speech I had ever heard in my entire life. At that level, there are networks of resistance.

How effective do you think the independent media is?

With the Internet, the information provided by the independent media such as ZNet or our web site CounterPunch is very good. There has never been in the history of the U.S., a greater access to information, which the mainstream media will not print. In the middle 1980s, if you wanted to know about, say, Palestine, there was no way you could find out. If you lived in the mid-West, you'd have to ask some cousin abroad to mail you a newspaper. Now, you can go online and you can access any newspaper.

Then, there's the Pacifica Radio network in five cities. Independent radio stations take a lot of their commentary, mainly Amy Goodman.

The independent media do not have a direct measurable impact on policy because policy is run by the two major parties, who are not responsive to anything progressive. There is no other third party option.

What was the reason for Bush's victory?

I think Bush won because enough people thought Kerry was the same. They didn't like him. They thought he was a snotty, middle-class, know-it-all who had a wife who was a billionaire and behaved as one. Bush had one big asset - Mrs. Bush. She's a fairly down-home woman, a former librarian. Mrs. Kerry said publicly late in the fall that Laura Bush had never done a day's work in her life, which is untrue. Soon after that remark, the polls showed that two million women deserted Kerry.

Since there was no major difference between them, Bush seemed more straightforward. It's true that Bush is stupid, ran a lousy business, was a drunk, a drug addict and a draft dodger, but Americans believe in redemption. They thought: `Well, he got over all that and now he's running for President. Maybe I could get over things too.' Every time the Democrats thought they were scoring a big hit, saying what an idiot Bush was, they didn't realise that people identified with him. Many were into drugs when they were young and dodged the draft. Here is a guy who screwed up and he became President.

Bush realised that. He went to Yale and said, `I came here to say that you can get a C and still be President of the United States.' People loved that.

How did the media drum up support for the attack on Iraq?

I suppose historians will look back at the selling of the war on Iraq as one of the most perfect examples of how to build up war sentiment by lies and manipulation of opinion. Very few newspapers and TV stations came out against the war in Iraq.

The Bush government polls said the two things that seemed to count were weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and that Saddam Hussein was in league with Osama bin Laden. The damaging stuff in the media wasn't done by the Right-wing, pro-Bush, pro-war Fox Network. The more manipulative stuff was done by The New York Times and The New Yorker - elite, liberal publications.

The major reporter ratifying the idea that Iraq had WMDs was Judith Miller of The New York Times. How did it work? The Central Intelligence Agency creates an exile group led by Chalabi who was a bank swindler on the run from Jordan. He realises that if you can say that Saddam was secretly piling up an enormous amount of nuclear and biological weapons, they will attack. So he creates these completely fraudulent exiles from Iraq who claim to be nuclear scientists and come and meet Judith. She listens to them, confirms it with an authority like the CIA (which created the organisation that created the defector) and publishes a series of stories. Later on, The New York Times had to publish a written apology for those articles.

As for the link between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, it was published in The New Yorker magazine by Jeffrey Goldberg, based on an interview with a prisoner in northern Iraq in Kurdish country, which was later proved to be a fraud by The Observer and Der Spiegel. Added to that was the great demonisation of Saddam Hussein, which wasn't difficult. He was a nasty customer, created in part by the CIA. He killed and tortured people. But he was inflated to Hitlerian dimensions.

Was the actual coverage of the war on Iraq any better?

Not very good. To be fair, it's very difficult to report on Iraq even if you wanted to. You have to be very knowledgeable (which most of the reporters aren't), you have to be prepared to work on your own (which is extremely dangerous). If you are not embedded, what are your options? If you want to go from Baghdad to Mosul without being murdered, you're going to try and go in a U.S. Army carrier or helicopter. This is true of Vietnam too. If you want to commit suicide, you get in your own car and drive along as an independent journalist.

The CNN reporter said publicly that he thought the U.S. Army had targeted journalists. In my view, there's absolutely no doubt that they killed the correspondent from Al Jazeera when he was standing on the roof of his hotel.

The U.S. media have, at times, been incredibly complicit. The famous scene that was used to justify the invasion - the pulling down of the statue of Saddam Hussein in the main square - have you looked at the wide angle shots? If you looked at the shots on U.S. TV, you'd have thought there were thousands of people in that square. If you pull it back, you will see there was a very small, organised crowd. Any journalist would have known that. Even if the journalist had told his producer that it was a small number, the producer in New York will obviously go for the close shot which is more dramatic. It's not exactly being told by the U.S. government what to do, they do what they feel is appropriate. Because the reporter has an idea of what his bosses will like, how far he can go, and so on.

American journalism is opposed to experts. The expert has a view. The idea is the best person to confront a subject is someone with a clear mind. That could also mean an empty mind. A journalist who goes to Rio or Buenos Aires has one thing in his/her head. The basic premise is neoliberalism, and they will write pieces about market reforms and it doesn't matter what happens.

The great success story for the U.S. press in the 1990s was Argentina. It was the marvel. Argentina was where it's at - enlightened, moving ahead, kicking out the old state industries of the past - selling its phone company, hospitals, transportation company... everything. The currency was linked to the dollar. In 1998, the whole thing collapsed, the President and the Chief Economic Adviser fled for their lives across the border. At this point, you might expect a piece in the NYT saying `wonder what happened?' No. There wasn't a single article. Within one year, the biggest collapse of the neoliberal model was forgotten. No one pointed a gun to the NYT reporter saying `write that'. They just knew what they should write and what they couldn't do. They operate within staggering restraints.

What is the story about Russia? It's not the collapse of all social safety nets, about the taking over of the Russian economy by corruption on an unimaginable scale. No, it's that reforms have had its ups and downs, its setbacks but its heroic stories. Just as every American paper is writing that Vladimir Putin represents the possibility of a return to the bad old days of communism, what is he doing? He is destroying the last vestiges of the pension system. But the story in every media is: can reforms survive - even though anyone with a brain can see that reform in Russia has meant exactly what has happened in every country in the world, which is the theft of public resources and assets into private hands for private gain.