Until recently Murdoch's satellite carried BBC television news. When the Chinese regime complained that unwelcome news was reaching into China, Murdoch obliged and kicked the BBC off the satellite. The American company CNN, which is owned by the billionaire Ted Turner, is the model of the 'information age'. CNN made its reputation with its round the clock coverage of the Gulf War. It was CNN that we saw relayed on the BBC and ITV during the war. Who can forget the lit up skies over Baghdad coming to us live, and the excited commentators describing the accuracy of the new 'smart' weapons and the preciseness of the 'surgical' strikes: so precise that missiles could go round corners and so smart they could distinguish between good people and bad people? And we actually saw it happening on television. Or rather we thought we did. The message was clear: war at last had become a science. And this was a war, according to the Independent newspaper, 'with miraculously few casualties'. Long after the Gulf War I remember vividly one surreal moment from television. It was on the BBC's arts programme, The Late Show, which devoted an edition to foreign correspondents talking about their adventures in the Gulf War. As each one spoke, the background filled with images from the war itself: mostly tanks and artillery and missiles flashing brilliantly in the night. Then suddenly the scene changed to bulldozers at work, and the reporters' monologue was overwhelmed by shocking pictures they couldn't see behind them. Driven by American soldiers, the bulldozers were pushing thousands of bodies into mass graves. Many of the bodies were crushed, as if they'd been run over. To my knowledge, the BBC's subversive blink was the only time the British public was allowed to see the true extent of the slaughter in the Gulf.
The nature of the crime committed in the Gulf was never stated in the media � in the same way that 20 years after the war in Vietnam, it is extremely unusual to see or read in the media the truth that the United States attacked Vietnam, not tried to save it. As in Vietnam, so it was in the Gulf, where the mass murder of people was passed off as 'tragic', at times even 'a mistake'. Both were described as 'noble crusades'. Recently, the Guardian carried a small item that only 8 percent of the weapons used in the Gulf War were so called 'smart' weapons, and that the majority were old fashioned, highly inaccurate 'dump bombs'. And we now know that most of them missed their military targets, killing tens of thousands of men, women and children, including the very Shia and Kurd minorities that the West claimed to be defending. A basic function of the modern hi-tech media is to 'normalise the unthinkable', a term that comes from a fine essay by Edward Herman called The Banality of Evil. Herman wrote, 'Doing terrible things in an organised and systematic way rests on normalisation. There is usually a division of labour in doing and rationalising the unthinkable, with the direct brutalising and killing done by one set of individuals and others working on improving technology [such as new weapons]. But it is the function of the mainstream media to normalise the unthinkable for the general public.' Of course this is not a new concept. At the height of the pointless slaughter known as the First World War, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, told the editor of the Guardian, C P Scott, 'If the public knew the truth, the war would end tomorrow. But they don't know and can't know.' When President Johnson unleashed American bombers on North Vietnam in 1964, he did so only after the media had helped him sell to Congress a cock-and-bull story that Communist gunboats had attacked American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam. On the basis of this lie, the greatest bombing in history followed, legitimising the American invasion and the carnage of the next ten years, in which at least 3 million people were killed.
