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Winning "Hearts & Minds" in New Zealand

by Larry Ross, November 12, 2004

Some NZ newspapers, owned by overseas media moguls, are subtly pushing the Bush/Neocon political and war agenda. They write editorials and select articles which favour the US Iraq war and justifications for war. They severely limit, or do not publish letters and articles with facts which expose a biased editorial, or the truth about biased coverage of a situation involving the US. At the same time they like to present themselves as a "free press printing the truth and all the news that's fit to print". That's good business as people don't like to think that they are buying, reading and believing a load of lies.

Some editors allow a thin veneer of criticism in order to substantiate their claim to "objectivity", and keep reader loyalty. However by featuring half truths, suppressing and not commenting on important facts, they accomplish their hidden objectives. If it's done well, people don't even realise that their minds and attitudes are being shaped and captured by overseas moguls acting through local editors to push Bush's Neocon war agenda. 35 years ago they did the same thing with the Vietnam war, justifying and pushing the American view of the war and suppressing dissent
and the facts. They never acknowledged or apologised for their very serious journalistic crimes. There was no shame or guilt about conditioning the NZ population with rubbish.

Today, UK and US examples of this are the London Sunday Times and the Fox TV, owned by Rupert Murdoch. They have lost a lot of credibility by featuring heavily biased articles, editorials and news coverage. Columns of this distorted material is often reprinted in New Zealand to shape and condition the local population. Letters or articles of criticism are
often not printed. It is not a matter of "right vs left" politics or "achieving journalistic balance" as they like to claim.

The real issue is a matter of knowingly and deliberately publishing lies, bias, and calculated news selection and opinion to condition the public, and severely limiting any rebuttal.
The following quotes show how propaganda works:

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly...it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.": Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Propaganda Minister

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"The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies - all this is indispensably necessary.": George Orwell in the book 1984

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Like the effect of advertising upon the customer, the methods of political propaganda tend to increase the feeling of insignificance of the individual voter: Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst and social philosopher, 1900-1980

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Half a truth is often a great lie: Benjamin Franklin

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Larry Ross
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George Monbiot, in speech to environmental journalists, gave a superlatively good analysis of media suppression of the truth and distortion of the material they do present. It explains why Bush did so well. Monbiot also illuminated the environmental crises and how they increasingly threaten life on earth, and why the media give it such limited or distorted coverage.

......... So let us picture a journalist who is interested in the environment, and who works for a newspaper run by a rich man with rich friends. Let's say she wants to write about climate change, and that she knows that much of it results from the carbon dioxide emissions produced by coal-fired power stations. Straight away she runs into a problem: the power stations are owned and run by members of the rich men's trade union. She has several options.......