War story continues to be told
Jensen says media, Bush isn’t telling whole truth
By Bill Morrison
Staff Reporter

Speaking to a crowd of more than 60 people Wednesday night, Robert Jensen explained how the American media is misrepresenting the war.

Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said Americans have misconceptions about their own history that are blurring the true meaning of the war in Iraq.
Jensen said Americans have a natural distrust for the government but, once a war starts, the public trusts everything the government tells them. He argued the American people have been lied to about the actual reason we have gone to war.
“What I was trying to do was to explain why some of the claims made about this war by the Bush administration are distortions,” Jensen said. “The real name shouldn’t be operation Iraqi Freedom ... the name should be an operation for trying to get long-term de facto control of the oil flow out of the Middle East.”
Jensen said he was trying to teach people how to get through the rhetoric and see what is really happening. He said the media’s coverage was like watching the local station cover sports when the reporters are not neutral and obviously rooting for the home team.

“TV, which is the main source of information for the people, is simply not doing the job of a journalist, which is to be independent of the government and provide both a reliable source of information and critique,” Jensen said.

He said people must unmask the terms the Bush administration uses to obscure the truth.

“You have to radicalize the message,” Jensen said. “It is the radicalist of the past that has taken the rhetoric of freedom to the reality of freedom.”

Jeff Brubaker, president of the TCU Student Peace Action Network that helped sponsor the event, said the notion that people need to be more radical was in itself a radical idea.

“At TCU, we’ve been trying to be more moderate to get people on the other side to come around to our cause,” Brubaker, a junior history major, said. “I was surprised and filled with hope that he encouraged us to be more radical.”

Jensen said he is not for peace nor is he anti-war. However, he said, he is anti-empire.

He said right now, the United States is the most powerful and affluent nation, but that does not give the United States the right to impose imperialistic needs onto other nations.

“No empire has ever existed forever and if we don’t take down our empire from the inside, we could be dismantled from the outside,” Jensen said.

w.c.morrison@tcu.edu