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War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death

About 12,000 Italian demonstrators confronted President Bush in central Rome on Saturday as the US president visited with Pope Benedict and Italian leaders. They were protesting the US war in Iraq and the expansion of a military base in Italy. If you had been reading the American corporate press, it’s unlikely that you would even know of the Italian opposition to the Iraq war.

Today we spend the first part of the hour on how propaganda is used by governments and repeated unquestioningly by the mainstream media to sell war to the US public. Based on 2005 book by media analyst Norman Solomon, “War Made Easy,” a new documentary by the same name has just been released by the Media Education Foundation. The film, War Made Easy brings to the screen Norman Solomon’s insightful analysis of the strategies used by a number of administrations, both Democratic and Republican, to promote their agendas for war from Vietnam to Iraq. The film studies the techniques of war propaganda, particularly as it emanates from the White House and is echoed by CNN, NBC, Fox News, the New York Times and other corporate media.

Norman Solomon has also written “Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You,” and he is the founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.

Chomsky As the Rest of the World Knows Him

Since 2002, the New York Times Syndicate has been distributing op-eds written by the pre-eminent foreign policy critic and scholar of our time, Noam Chomsky. The New York Times Syndicate is part of the same company as the New York Times newspaper, and while readers around the world have had a chance to regularly read Chomsky’s articles, the New York Times newspaper has never published a single one. Only a few regional newspapers in the US have picked up the Op-eds, such as the Register Guard, the Dayton Daily News, and the Knoxville Voice. Internationally, the Op-eds have appeared in the mainstream British press including the International Herald Tribune, the Guardian, and the Independent. Now, City Lights Books has just published a complete collection of these 1000 word Op-eds in a single book called Interventions. In this second half of the hour, we’ll hear Noam Chomsky as the rest of the world knows him, with an interview we recently featured on Uprising, and a recent talk he gave about South America.

Thank you Gifts:

War Made Easy – DVD – $120
Interventions by Noam Chomsky – Book – $70
South America Rising by Noam Chomsky – CD – $50
Best of Uprising – MP3 CD – $35
Uprising T-shirts – $60