WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception

Starring:Nicholas Johnson, George W. Bush, Tim Robbins, Maurice Hinchey, Dick Cheney, Dan Rather, Bill O'Reilly, Peter Arnett, Donald Rumsfeld, David Marr
Director: Danny Schechter
Studio: Cinema Libre
Product Type: DVD

Average customer rating:

Embedded Deception
The two-hour "20/20" or "60 Minutes" exposé that never was
The end of the journalistic age...
perhaps should have been longer or made into a series
If you didn't know it already, you're pretty naive

WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
Starring: Nicholas Johnson , Dan Rather , Bill O'Reilly , Peter Arnett , and Donald Rumsfeld
Director: Danny Schechter
Manufacturer: Cinema Libre
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00074DXFS
Release Date: 2005-03-08

Customer Reviews:

Embedded Deception.......2006-08-28

In the Weapons of Mass Deception, the producers show how this administration was determined to win media support and thus the country's support for their adventure into Iraq.

Mass media, now owned by large and conservative conglomerates avoided the anti-war stories, to the point of refusing to run commercials for people who were opposed to the war. Anti-war demonstrations received marginal coverage, at best. When Phil Donahue had opposed the war, and said so publicly on his show, the network cancelled his top-rated show. His replacement? Michael Savage who lasted less than four months with ratings in the cellar. Clearly, this "liberally-biased" media did not want to rock the conservative boat.

The admistration's genius turned out to be first orienting and outfitting reporters with kevlar helmets and vests, and showing them how to use gas masks for chemical attacks that would never come. This gave the media the feeling that Iraq was an enemy.

The embedding process was sheer administration genius. By placing reporters with our soldiers and marines, they identified with them to the point that their stories had lost all objectivity, and they had been reduced to a micro view of the war.

While some may complain that this production is biased, that is what the producer's slant is. It is also what he is already describing. The bias was in the media being duped by the administration and losing their objectivity in reporting the war.

Any criticism this DVD may receive, the facts are irrefutable. All these things happened. Schecter simply compiles these facts and presents them in a logical and presentable fashion.

This is recommended viewing.

The two-hour "20/20" or "60 Minutes" exposé that never was.......2006-07-19

This professionally written and produced documentary is essential viewing for any American concerned about their free press. In this exposé, of the sort which would have been on 20/20 or 60 Minutes when I was kid, media veteran and critic Danny Schechter amasses evidence which shows how complicit the American media were in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Statistics are damning---of the roughly 800 experts on American TV in the build-up to war, only 4 provided anti-war perspectives. Most of the time anti-war and other positions critical of the government line were simply ignored; when they were shown, it was simply a quick shot of "those people protesting" or a soundbite about soldiers protecting protestors rights to free speech, instead of any serious analysis of the arguments made against the war.

And so a large percentage of the American people's voices were lost from the so-called debate, because of a priori prejudices and agendas shared by the media producers, military leaders, and politicians.

This film provides evidence in support of Noam Chomsky's propaganda model of the American news media. The viewer sees how career advancement, product marketing, market share, etc. trump good old truth telling and challenging power in the modern American mass media.

The end of the journalistic age..........2005-12-21

I gave this DVD five stars because of the credentials of Danny Schechter and the way he delivered his argument. He is a well respected media critic well known throughout media circles for asking the toughest questions at media conferences and has appeared on just about every mainstream media outlet. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam and Cambodia, he was a producer for 20/20, worked for CNN and ABC, and has authored a couple of books. He successfully dissects the media with regards to the run-up to the war in Iraq, the embedded reporters, and the aftermath of the invasion.

You will see in this video clips and interviews with several well known media personalities along with Generals in the military, a retired Colonel who taught propaganda in the military War Colleges, authors, and some of the embeds themselves. You will see how the media was seduced by the government after 9-11 by means of access and cash. Journalism is most certainly dead with regards to mainstream media! You will even hear Kristiana Amanpour criticize her own network for crawling into the sack with the government.

The argument that was also well made was how the Neo-Con's believe that Vietnam was lost solely due to the media and not because of bad policy and how they are determined this time to `get it right'. You will also see how they `got it right' by the ingenious Pentagon embedded reporters program, they must have known of the effects of the Stockholm Syndrome, makes a lot of sense when you look at the big picture I think.

This documentary will show you how the death of responsible journalism has turned into `coverage' and the propaganda techniques that are used. Most interesting example I thought was the sports metaphor technique with the "dum-dum-dumm" football kick-off type music that the networks would use preceding a segment leading up to the war and all the `CNN Generals' that were used to draw lines on computerized maps of the battlefield, just like a football coach does on the field, and how they would promote, not report the war through all the flashy techniques describing new weaponry and the like and how they were told to "sex up the graphics". The fact that ALL of the networks hire psychologists to maximize the use of these graphics and music tells me that their intentions are not to inform us in the first place. You will see how the war was turned into a bloodless game through the use of video game like footage from `smart' bombs and the use of playing cards to show who was captured and was still out there. It's not supposed to be like Hollywood action oriented production but the government paid a million dollars to a Hollywood producer to set up the media center at CENTCOM!

You will be presented with the facts behind the Jessica Lynch propaganda scheme, the same with the toppling of the Saddam statue, the real reason why Peter Arnett was fired from CNN, how Ruppert Murdoch paid Saddam almost half a billion dollars just so that his reporters would be given access to enter Iraq during the time leading up to the war, and several other instances that will show you that what you are seeing is in fact NOT journalism, but "militainment".

Schechter definitely makes the argument that the more you watch TV, the less you know. If you want to be well informed you must not be a `consumer' of news but a critical thinker. I highly recommend this film as it is entertaining and very informative. WARNING: You should be ready for a big dose of reality as well as some people may be offended, especially Fox `news' viewers. Broaden your horizons and watch this film.

perhaps should have been longer or made into a series.......2005-12-14

This is an interesting and informative DVD to gain a broader view of how the media operates, especially during the runup to the Iraq war. However, it is so jam-packed with information that it occasionally seems to gloss over important points or scenarios. There are some segments that I would have liked Schechter to have elaborated on and a few which could have been presented more clearly. As a member of a younger generation this DVD is great because it provides an informed picture of just how much the media is in bed with government. For me, it tied a lot of loose ends together in my head and gave me a broader view of how mass media functions. I disagree with another reviewer that Schechter was in the movie too much. He was narrating his own point of view and he stayed out of the way when it was appropriate.

If you didn't know it already, you're pretty naive.......2005-09-12

Here's a documentary by former "20/20" producer Danny Schechter -- who calls himself a media crtiic -- that alleges that the Bush administration used the news media to build support for its war in Iraq (the second one, both for Bush and the war in Iraq.) Schechter puts together a lot of video evidence to support his thesis, suggesting war coverage became something less than journalism in the new century.

Well, duh! Maybe Schechter never realized this because he was involved in television "news" all his life, but there is no such thing as news delivered on television. It is enterainment and has been entertainment since the line was crossed way back in the era of Wilbur Mills and the Tidal Basin Bombshell.

For those of you too young to remember it, Mills was chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee aroudn about 1974 and had a fling with a stripper known as the Tidal Basin Bombshell. While news media outlets previously refused to merge the personal and public elements of an elected official -- all journalists knew John Kennedy was a womanizer but didn't report it -- this line was crossed first with Mills. The line disappeared when 1980 presidential candidate Gary Hart was exposed as a womanizer by a Florida newspaper, whose reporters hid out in the bushes waiting for him to depart his girlfriend's house.

Now, a generation removed from these beginnings and with television "news" program profligate on American television and being hardly any different than "Hard Copy" and "Entertainment Tonight", I don't need some "documentary" by a self-described media critic (who made his living as part of that hypocrisy) to tell me the media was sucked in by the Bush administation and the second Iraq war.

I've got news for Schechter and anyone that thinks his documentary is important: journalists are people, people with feelings, people working in an industry that has moved more and more toward entertainment since the advent of cable television 30 years ago or so. These people want their stories to reflect the reality of society, not just the reality of the story they report.

I have a first hand example since I was part of it. During the latter 1990s a new phenomenon captured the governmental landscape. It was called "welfare reform". In short, it was a sequence of activities and incentives that moved welfare recipients from support by government largess to support by the work place. Or so went the reporting on this, at any rate.

Story after story in medium after medium touted the "success" of welfare reform. People that hated welfare (which is almost everyone) loved it because it kicked those lazy folks off welfare checks and made them work for a living. Everyone else liked it (including jouralists) because they sympathized with those feelings. Briefly stated, welfare reform was a win for everyone. Everyone loved it. And that's how it was reported.

Today, there are fewer welfare recipients collecting checks than anytime since the Great Society of the 1960s. The downside, however, is most of those folks now work in low-paying jobs and are collecting Mediciad, or socialized medicine, paid for by state and federal government. Many employers are jumping on the bandwagon and finding ways for their employees to get their helath care paid by Medicaid instead of employer-covered health insurance. USA Today, which was once thought of as the exemplar of the crossover of news and entertainment, did a lengthy sequence of stories on this mess not long ago.

So why did everyone say welfare reform succeeded when it, in fact, merely moved millions of people from one support system to another? Because most people supported the tenets of welfare reform and jouranlists sympathized with it.

This, and not the phony superficiality shown in "WMD - Weapons of Mass Destruction" -- is the reason the news media (and the television news media in particular) so gratefully jumped on board for the second President Bush and his campaign in Iraq. They supported it and they wanted him to win. It was no different than in World War II except the war was based on a sequence of lies and distortions.

So, if you think this documentary is enlightening and proves something about the world you didn't already know, I am sorry to tell you that you are pretty naive and don't know much about how "news" works. This documentary is exactly what it purports to expose -- a superficial review of a problem that took 30 years to root, then mushroomed during the cable television news explosion of the 1990s.

Today, there is essentially no difference between the programming content of Fox News Channel and a "Friends" rerun. They both should be given the same amount of serious consideration when you make decisions about events in the world. This, I hope, will be the subject of Danny Schechter's next expose.

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