[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 167 (Tuesday, November 18, 2003)]
[House]
[Page H11509]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              A FREE PRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, the Bush administration has openly 
demonstrated its dissatisfaction with the stories that the major media 
has chosen to broadcast about Iraq, saying that the news media too 
often covers the negative events that occur in Iraq but rarely reports 
the positive happenings there. In fact, in their peak in order to 
achieve its desired results, the administration has regularly pressured 
reporters to find the so-called good news in Iraq or lose access.
  Perhaps the reason reporters have been focusing on the so-called 
negative stories about Iraq has something to do with the fact that 
since the start of the war in March, over 412 soldiers have been killed 
in action, in fact, two more today. Over 2,000 have been wounded and at 
least 7,000 have been evacuated to hospitals for noncombat medical 
conditions, not to mention that approximately 4,000 unarmed Iraqis have 
perished since the war began.

                              {time}  2330

  You have to agree, it is a bit easier to understand the media's 
decision about which stories to report when those tragic numbers are 
considered.
  Still, the White House wants reporters to focus on the supposedly 
good news, but intimidating reporters into writing stories that make 
President Bush look good is not enough for the White House. Instead of 
just spinning the news, Bush's people want nothing short of controlling 
the information that comes back to the United States from Iraq. They 
want to have final say as to what gets reported and what does not, what 
the American public actually knows and what is spoken only in faded 
whispers halfway around the world.
  So they decided to do what any autocratic, propaganda-loving dictator 
like Saddam Hussein himself would have done, bypass the media entirely.
  The Coalition Provisional Authority, which runs Iraq and was created 
by the Bush administration, plans to create its own broadcast operation 
which will broadcast live to the United States 24 hours a day from 
Iraq, and one of the worst parts about this project is that the money 
to pay for it comes from the $87 billion in emergency supplemental 
funds that Congress recently approved to continue military operations 
in Iraq. That means that the U.S. taxpayers are paying for Bush's 
propaganda campaign that attempts to falsify and falsely mold their 
perceptions about the increasingly unsustainable situation in Iraq.
  Mr. Speaker, this is not the first time the Bush administration has 
dared to control the media. Fearing that support for his Iraq policy 
would fade if Americans caught sight of U.S. soldiers returning home in 
flag-draped caskets, the Bush administration banned all news coverage 
and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases. 
This new, government-run propaganda operation, which is informally 
referred to within the administration as C-SPAN Baghdad, represents a 
new low even for the Bush administration. Influencing the media is one 
thing; controlling it is something entirely different.
  Mr. Speaker, we must stay on top of this.

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