by William F. Jasper
Reprinted with permission from THE NEW AMERICAN magazine, May 10, 1999
The Ruling Class Journalists have struck again with a terrible, bloody vengeance — a vengeance cloaked in the guise of humanitarianism. Their hearts bleed for the poor refugees of Kosovo, they say. But the heartrending images of the Kosovar refugees are a cynical camouflage in the aggressive propaganda campaign for war — war for the vaunted “new world order” of the one-world elite. It is an all-out assault on national sovereignty, the Constitution, and the rule of law. It masquerades as compassion for the victims and retribution against the perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing,” “brutal atrocities,” and “genocide.”
In the span of just a few days, the media demigods have managed once again to confect a “national consensus” for massive U.S. military intervention in a distant land: the Balkan powder keg, where international intervention earlier in this century led to a world war that cost millions of lives. And, at the same time, they have managed not only to saddle us with false alternatives — an air campaign only versus an air campaign with ground troops — but also to inundate us with manipulative half-truths and outright disinformation.Compassion Con
The Ruling Class Journalists (RCJ), an appellation coined by the Washington Post’s own ombudsman, Richard Harwood, do indeed have an agenda. As Harwood pointed out in his Post column for October 30, 1993, entitled “Ruling Class Journalists,” the RCJ are but a subset of “the Council on Foreign Relations, whose members are the nearest we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
The “watchdogs of liberty,” the press, have long enjoyed a cozy, incestuous relationship with the political elite of this CFR establishment, which, according to former CFR member Admiral Chester Ward, is a gaggle of “one-world-global-government ideologists” consumed with a “lust to surrender the sovereignty and independence of the United States.” Harwood admitted that the RCJ at his own newspaper constitute a virtual CFR fraternity. “The editorial page editor, deputy editor, managing editor, foreign editor, national affairs editor, business and financial editor, and various writers,” he observed, “as well as Katherine Graham, the paper’s principal owner, represent The Washington Post in the council’s membership.”
A similar representation, he noted, can be claimed by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, “the weekly newsmagazines, network television executives and celebrities — Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Jim Lehrer, for example — and various columnists, among them, Charles Krauthammer, William Buckley, George Will and Jim Hoagland.” In fact, the CFR claims 363 top “journalists, correspondents, and communications executives” among its august membership.
The RCJ, wrote Harwood, “do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it.” Harwood quoted media analyst Jon Vanden Heuvel, who stated: “By focusing on particular crises around the world, the media are in a better position to pressure government to act.” It just so happens that the RCJ are ever handy to push the crisis button and apply the pressure in coordination with their CFR confederates who have crafted the policies that have brought on the very “crises” they claim to deplore.
“Humanitarianism has taken on new dimensions as a component of American foreign policy,” explained Vanden Heuvel, “and the media are largely responsible.” “Somalia is Exhibit A” of that humanitarian component, wrote Harwood. Both he and Vanden Heuvel were writing, of course, as American soldiers were dying in Mogadishu on an earlier UN humanitarian misadventure, one that had been launched, Harwood noted, by repeated showing of the horrific “BBC film of starving Somalian children.” A similar RCJ/CFR tag team pattern was employed for Exhibits B and C — Haiti and Bosnia. Now comes Exhibit D, Kosovo, and the RCJ compassion con game has been perfected to a science.
Make no mistake: Compassion is a good thing, an integral component of Christian charity. However, when it is manipulated by lies and blatant propaganda, exploited for political objectives, and harnessed as an emotional engine to push a subversive agenda, it is a very dangerous thing. For observers who are familiar with the identities and program of the RCJ/CFR opinion cartel, the real objective in the media saturation coverage of the Kosovo victims is blindingly obvious.“Inevitable” Ground War
“U.S. Consensus Grows to Send Ground Troops,” trumpeted the Washington Post front-page headline on April 6th. “With remarkable speed, a consensus supporting the deployment of U.S. ground forces in Kosovo has formed in Washington and it appears to be pulling public opinion in the same direction,” reported the Post, with pretended objectivity and detachment. “Even as the Clinton administration continues to rule out ground forces until ‘a permissive environment’ exists in Kosovo,” said the Post, “a chorus of foreign policy experts and key members of Congress have been making the case that deployment may be inevitable.”
The Post, of course, is a key player in the orchestration of that chorus chanting the inevitability of our deployment to the Balkan quagmire. The story continued:
They argue that, with the air war failing to achieve its immediate objectives of stopping Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, it may take such a risky commitment to deal with the mushrooming humanitarian disaster unfolding on the ground there and to salvage the credibility of the NATO alliance. “Very early on, there was among the foreign policy establishment a realization that this was real, that this was not just a bit of bombing, but that it basically was a declaration of war,” said Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a former National Security Council adviser to President Clinton. “People realized what we were engaged in was war and that the stakes were far grander and far larger than the administration painted them.”
The trick for the Ruling Class Journalists is to completely saturate all commentary slots with CFR members or CFR-approved “experts” from such internationalist-oriented think tanks as Brookings, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Harvard University, and the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Combined with the relentless onslaught of television images and front-page photos of the hapless refugees and endlessly repeated stories of atrocities (mostly unconfirmed, and sometimes proven to be completely false), the RCJ has struck on a slam-dunk formula guaranteed to overwhelm all “isolationist” opposition.Taking It to the People
An event reported on the same day that the Post article appeared illustrates again the RCJ/CFR nexus in operation. The Overseas Press Club announced that the main speaker for its 60th Annual Awards Dinner would be Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke (CFR), architect of the Dayton Accords and the Clinton/CFR policies that helped invite the current Balkan turmoil. Presiding over the prestigious Press Club event would be NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw (CFR).
By April 6th, the RCJ saturation formula had indeed created a de facto consensus among the chattering classes and talking heads who populate medialand. It is remarkable to see how quickly and completely the denizens of print and broadcast journalism fall in behind the CFR clerisy in just a matter of several days.
The main assault in the RCJ formula began, arguably, with President Clinton’s 70-minute interview on Wednesday, March 31st, with Dan Rather (CFR). It was the first time Mr. Clinton had sat down for a television interview since November, and it was no accident that he chose CBS, which has not only earned the title of the “Clinton Broadcasting System,” but has always been bullish on the President’s internationalist crusades. CBS set aside portions of the CBS Evening News and 60 Minutes II in prime-time to air the very friendly interview, about two-thirds of which concerned the war in Kosovo.
On the same day, C-SPAN gave full coverage to the Washington press briefing by the “Balkan Action Council,” a CFR front group constructed to provide establishment Republican cover for deploying U.S. ground troops to a supposedly reluctant President Clinton. Jeane Kirkpatrick (CFR), Frank Carlucci (CFR), Morton Abramowitz (CFR), and Helmut Sonnenfeldt (CFR) all resolutely asserted the inevitability of committing troops to stop the carnage. Portions of this conference, naturally, were regurgitated on the network and cable news channels and quoted in the print media.
Then began a six-day orgy of non-stop, escalating appeals by the _RCJ/CFR cognoscenti. Take this exchange, for example, on CNN’s Larry King Live. Larry King asked Ivo Daalder, “Were you quoted correctly in saying this has to go to a ground war?” “Yeah,” said the Brookings wonk, “I think that’s where we’re ending up…. We’ll probably have to go in on the ground.”
“Will the President be able to sell that to the American people?” inquired King. “Well,” said Daalder, “I think in the previous segment both Senator Feinstein and Senator McCain indicated that we need to make the argument, the President needs to make the argument on a daily basis. But if he does and shows how serious this is … I think, reluctantly, the American people will come along.”
At which point Larry King asked U.S. News & World Report’s David Gergen (CFR) if he agreed. “Absolutely,” responded Gergen. “I don’t think the Administration has been as fully informative to the American country about what exactly is happening on the ground — how many refugees there are, how many atrocities can we sense are taking place there…. He cannot allow these atrocities to continue because the United States’ honor is at stake and Milosevic is spitting in our eye.”Deafening Drumbeat
Council on Foreign Relations spokesperson Paula Dobriansky appeared on CNN and other programs to argue in favor of escalation, but the real CFR war push was being advanced by other more weighty names not identified on the programs as having any affiliation with the CFR. “The clearest sign of a rapidly developing consensus within the foreign policy establishment,” said the Washington Post in the previously mentioned April 6th story, “came last Friday, when former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and two former national security advisers, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, appeared on PBS’s ‘NewsHour With Jim Lehrer’ and argued that Clinton should not rule out the use of ground troops.” Kissinger, Scowcroft, Brzezinski, and Lehrer are all veteran CFR members, but this important fact was not mentioned by the Post or any of the other RCJ watchdogs who insist on “full disclosure” when it comes to ties to, say, the “tobacco lobby,” “gun lobby,” or the “religious right.”
“There are some signs that the drumbeat in favor of ground forces — coupled with images of the flood of refugees — has begun to affect public opinion,” crowed the Post, citing polls showing a marked and steady increase in support of deploying ground troops in Kosovo. “Drumbeat” is an apt description of the deafening, orchestrated propaganda campaign of the RCJ warmongers, and the Post is one of the leading drum beaters.