Doctoring the Election News

http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56033.shtml

This is how they brainwash the sheeple

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The response of the US media to the Iranian election says more about
the state of democracy and the so-called “free press” in America than
it does about the state of democratic rights in Iran.

The coverage by the New York Times typifies a presentation of the
victory of the incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, over his main
challenger, former Prime Minister Mirhossein Mousavi, that abandons
any pretense of journalistic objectivity. It is sheer propaganda aimed
at discrediting the election result.

No sooner had Iranian authorities announced late Friday, US time, that
Ahmadinejad had defeated Mousavi by a 30 percent margin than the Times
and virtually the entire media proclaimed the election a fraud. The
Times did not simply report the allegations by Mousavi that the
election had been stolen, it embraced them wholeheartedly and
uncritically.

It did so without undertaking any independent investigation. It
brought forward no serious facts to substantiate the claim. Rather, it
relied on allegations made by Mousavi and his supporters.

Already on Saturday, the Times made a video, which it posted on its
web site Sunday, in which its leading foreign correspondent, Roger
Cohen, breathlessly denounced the “hastily declared” victory of
Ahmadinejad and gave the impression that Tehran had been placed under
martial law, with droves of black-clad police roaming the city and
beating oppositionists.

The only “evidence” Cohen was able to produce for his claim of a
stolen election was the fact that the authorities had declared
Ahmadinejad the victor “within hours” of the polls closing and that
the official vote numbers had “scarcely varied” from the initial
tallies.

Cohen’s video was supplemented by a front-page article on Sunday by
the Times’ executive editor, Bill Keller, in which Keller cited
uncritically the claims of opposition voters that Ahmadinejad’s
reelection was “the imposed verdict” of the regime and a “coup
d’état.” He adduced not a single fact to back these charges. In lieu
of evidence, he reported the claim by “somebody’s brother who
supposedly knew someone inside” that “vote counters simply were
ordered to doctor numbers.”

The core of Keller’s argument that the election had been manipulated
was what he called the “preposterous margin of victory” for
Ahmadinejad. But he himself acknowledged in his piece that Ahmadinejad
successfully appealed to the Iranian poor, a huge percentage of the
electorate. And he acknowledged the severe disappointment of “Western
leaders who had seen a better relationship with Iran as potentially
helpful in resolving the problems of Afghanistan, Iraq and nuclear
proliferation.”

The Times and the rest of the US media, directly reflecting the
outlook of the government, had promoted the candidacy of Mousavi and
depicted a rising tide of popular support that was certain to either
sweep the “reformer” into office or obtain a close enough result to
force a run-off contest with Ahmadinejad. In their function as
conduits for the state and US imperialist policy, they were seeking to
promote the notion that a victory for Mousavi would represent a
triumph of democracy and open up a new chapter in US-Iranian
relations. The only possible explanation for Ahmadinejad’s landslide
victory, they immediately concluded, was fraud.

For anyone with a serious knowledge of Iranian society and politics,
the decisive victory of Ahmadinejad could not have come as a surprise.
Even Western newspapers that denounced the election admitted that the
incumbent had strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—
the vast majority of the population. Ahmadinejad has retained this
constituency, despite the repressive and corrupt character of the
regime, because of the absence of a socialist alternative.

On what mass base could Mousavi depend for a successful bid to unseat
Ahmadinejad? The candidate of the Iranian liberal establishment, he
campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamist clerical rule
than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more
openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the
urban poor and the peasantry.

The media has not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people
should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market
policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world.
Mousavi’s most prominent backer, moreover, was Ali Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a leading figure in the state apparatus and one of the
country’s wealthiest men. Rafsanjani, notorious for his corruption, is
despised by Iranian workers and the poor.

Mousavi’s actual electoral base did not extend beyond better-off-
sections of the urban middle class, university students and
businessmen.

There is another issue. What standing do the New York Times and the US
media as a whole have to lecture Iran about democratic elections?

The Times accepted the theft of the 2000 US presidential election
without a whimper. That was a presidential coup, and it was carried
out in broad daylight, with Bush and the Republicans suppressing votes
and the Supreme Court halting a recount in Florida that would have
given the election to Al Gore, who had won the popular vote
nationally. One need only recall the extraordinary events of election
night 2000, when the networks suddenly reversed their call for Gore in
Florida and declared the pivotal state for Bush.

The American elections are among the least genuinely democratic
elections in what passes for the world’s democracies. Working and poor
people are routinely denied the right to vote. The elections are
dominated by corporate money and media manipulation. Third parties
find it virtually impossible to obtain ballot status because of laws
that are designed to maintain the monopoly of two big business
parties.

The state of American democracy is summed up in the current mayoral
election in the country’s largest city, New York. There, a multi-
billionaire media tycoon, Michael Bloomberg, overturned a term limit
law and is running unopposed for reelection.

The Times is silent about the historical record concerning US
“support” for democracy in Iran. This includes the 1953 coup,
organized by the CIA, which overthrew the democratically elected
government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh and installed the
Shah. From then until the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the US backed the
Shah’s torture regime and hailed it as the bulwark of the “free world”
in the Persian Gulf.

The filthy role of the Times in seeking to discredit the Iranian
election epitomizes the corruption of the American media and its
integration into the state. The mass media serve ever more openly as
instruments for the manipulation of public opinion in the interest of
state concerns.

That the role of the Times as a conduit for US foreign policy aims is
not limited to one country or one part of the world is underscored by
another example of propaganda in the guise of news. Just two weeks
ago, on May 30, the Times published a diatribe against another regime
deemed by Washington to be an obstacle to US imperialist interests—
that of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. Headlined “Chávez Seeks Tighter Grip
on Military,” the article retailed without substantiation claims of a
massive crackdown by Chávez against dissidents within the military.

In this article, as in the articles published on the Iranian election,
there is a large element of provocation. Such “news” items are written
on assignment from US intelligence agencies. This corruption of the
media is itself a critical expression of, and factor in, the advanced
decay of American democracy.

The election in Iran underscores the necessity for an orientation to
the Iranian working class on the basis of a clearly defined socialist
and internationalist program as the only foundation for opposition to
the reactionary bourgeois regime of the clerics.

The response of the US media to the election underscores the fact that
the American working class can defend its democratic rights only by
developing its own mass, independent socialist movement.
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