 I'm program director at the media watch group fair and I'm a New Yorker in the days after the September 11th 2001 attacks New Yorkers were expressing themselves with homemade signs and stickers and the one that was most visible that had the most resonance read our grief is not a cry for war part of our addressing our horror and loss was an intense desire to avoid more horror and loss but corporate media didn't reflect our voices and in the coming months through the attack on Afghanistan up to March 2003 the US corporate press really did the opposite of what you would hope for from a free press in a democratic society we needed independent reporting what we got instead with few exceptions was uncritical coverage that took for granted the White House claims about Iraq having banned weapons in February 2003 when Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the UN and made his presentation media presented those allegations as fact reporting that Powell showed satellite photos of Iraqi weapons sites for example with TV networks attaching American flags to their logos and to broadcasters lapels we also got self-censorship NBC's Dan Rather famously said George W. Bush is the president and if he tells me to line up just tell me where you know a CNN executive admitted that they went to the Pentagon in advance for approval of the generals that they were going to use as on-air experts journalists were fired for writing critically about the war and Phil Donahue's show was canceled on MSNBC because the network was worried about giving any space at all to anti-war voices at a time they said when our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity so poorly did media perform at their most primary function that research by the University of Maryland showed that people who relied on television news held fundamental misconceptions about the Iraq war they believed that weapons of mass destruction had been found they believed that links have been proven between Iraq and al-Qaeda and they believed that the international community approved the U.S. invasion we needed debate and instead Time Magazine reflected the range of debate in an October 2002 issue that had two columns let's wait to attack versus no let's not waste any time a fair study of nightly news in the first three weeks of the war showed that 71% of U.S. sources were pro-war just 3% of U.S. sources were anti-war and it's not so surprising when you consider that two out of three of the guests were former or current government officials but this is at a time when 27% of the population more than one in four are telling people that they oppose the war so there were massive anti-war demonstrations in October of 2002 in DC when that happened both NPR and the New York Times undercounted the attendees and they said that not as many people had turned out as predicted they got it so wrong the fact that they both had to go back and do the story again another thing that i think is important is that from January through March of 2003 no nightly newscast aired a single story on the potential humanitarian impact of the war even as human rights groups were issuing urgent warnings indeed non-military experts anyone who could talk about international law human rights civil society history they were just 4% of sources on the nightly news and then finally we needed humanity and what we got instead was crude demonization and calls for war crimes and for racial profile in January of 2003 USA Today wrote that the US might be forced to bomb power plants and bridges and highways well these are war crimes NBC's Tom Brokaw on the first day of the war said to an admiral he was interviewing one of the things we don't want to do is to destroy the infrastructure of the rock because in a few days we're going to own that country when US forces bombed Iraqi TV which is forbidden by the Geneva Convention's US media cheered from before it began the Iraq war was sanitized by pundits who said it would be over in a week that US troops would be greeted as liberators that all of the weapons were surgical and would leave civilians unharmed and that it would lead to peace and stability even in images our research shown that US casualties were rarely seen and when Iraqi casualties were seen they were overwhelming when those killed by other Iraqis and not by US troops media made it their job to keep us from asking questions and to keep us from seeing what was done in our name now corporate media try to tell us that everyone was wrong about the Iraq war it's simply false but right now I resent most the way media misled us about ourselves about what we felt and believed and were capable of the way they told us that violence was the only possible response to violence and they shouted over anybody who wanted to talk about other ways forward that's why this tribunal is so important we must never believe the stories that corporate media tell us about ourselves we mustn't let them make us believe the worst of ourselves and of the world and because they don't speak for us we must speak for ourselves and that's why it's so important what we're doing here today