My piece on becoming a trusted communications advisor is online this week at Bulldog Reporter’s Daily’ Dog Barks & Bites.

No time to write a snarky comment. This ad from the latest print edition of OMMA Magazine speeks for itself.

If like me, you find it ironic that war is so often touted as a means to achieve peace, then you should buy (and watch) War Made Easy, a video that is far more important than Al Gore’s Academy Award winning Inconvenient Truth. This 73-minute video from the Media Education Foundation, describes “How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” and examines wartime rhetoric, how politicians deceive the American people with cleverly crafted messages, and how the media have abrogated the role of public watchdog to become agents of the administration.

You’ll be able to hear phrases like “cut and run” and “stay the course,” dozens of times from as many politicians and pundits. Based on research by, and hosted by, Norman Solomon, and narrated by Sean Penn, War Made Easy would be an almost comical indictment were it not for the fact that this rhetoric has been used to justify so much death and destruction, and, in Solomon’s words, “doesn’t bring back any of the people who died.” Since Vietnam, the media, both right-wing and left, have been complicit in selling the war. War Made Easy documents with alarming ease the clichés that our “leaders” use to sell and advance the cause of war, including popular classics like:

• We do not enter into this conflict lightly.
• War is inevitable.
• We are entering into this war to bring democracy to the people of [country name here], so that they will be free to govern themselves.
• We do not want war. We want peace.
• Withdrawal is an unacceptable option.
• We need to support our troops. (Conversely, those who don’t support our troops are traitors.)

In times of war, peer pressure has worked well to silence and ostracize those who “dissent,” that is, those who have not been suckered in by the rhetoric, poorly constructed arguments, logical fallacies and, yes, lies. The video examines the run-up to the Iraq war, and Colin Powell’s February 5, 2003 presentation* to the United Nations Security Council of “evidence” of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which was accepted almost universally as “overwhelmingly conclusive,” and “devastating,” but was in fact, poorly researched, inconclusive and misleading. Among top journalists, only Phil Donahue questioned the research, and he was fired shortly thereafter. An internal memo from an MSNBC exec expressed concern that Donahue was not an appropriate spokesperson at a time when the administration needed support for the war. “We don’t want this to be a face of MSNBC as the United States goes into war.” Powell later said the speech was a “blot” on his political record and that he was a “reluctant warrior” who abetted the president in his quest to use deadly force in Iraq. The trend is not confined to the current situation. Solomon cites columnist Sydney Schanberg’s reminder of the media handling of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, and the media’s “unquestioning chorus of agreeability when Lyndon Johnson bamboozled us with his fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incident.” Schanberg added: “We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”

*Ironically, the presentation is titled “Denial and Deception,” and is available on the White House web site.

Note: this post also appeared on my Eastwick blog.

Colin Powell, Gulf of Tonkin, Inconvenient Truth, Media Education Foundation, MSNBC, Phil Donahue, rhetoric, Sydney Schanberg, War Made Easy No comments