It’s deja vu all over again.
Yogi Berra
Some thoughts on the corporate media’s coverage of the Middle East crisis in the two weeks since President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani:
The corporate media’s initial response was uncritical acceptance of the Trump administration’s justification for the attack.
There is near universal agreement that media coverage of the George W. Bush administration’s justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a total failure. The media reported without skepticism our government’s false claims that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and that he had participated indirectly in the 9/11 attacks. A 2003 study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) found that pro-war commentators greatly outnumbered anti-war voices on the major networks during the run-up to and early days of the invasion. If fact, only 3% of American sources could be classified as anti-war. People’s misperceptions continued long after the war and were systematically related to the coverage provided by their preferred news sources.
This month, the media are continuing in their traditional role as “stenographers to power,” dutifully reporting that Suleimani’s assassination was necessary to prevent “imminent” future attacks on Americans. Following unwritten rules, it was only after Congresspeople began to question the administration’s claims that the media began to focus on technicalities such as Trump’s failure to consult Congress. Unfortunately, this “he said/she said” journalism was not followed by any serious attempt to discover the truth.
Trump eventually contributed to the partial unraveling of the rationale for his attack by making embarrassingly inconsistent claims that his own subordinates were unwilling to confirm, i.e., “I believe it would have been four embassies.” In the end, Trump concluded that whether Suleimani posed an imminent threat “doesn’t really matter because of his horrible past.”
In fact, there was almost a consensus among politicians and media commentators that Suleimani deserved to die, since he was a “terrorist.” He was said to have helped Iraqi dissidents to kill American soldiers with roadside bombs. (Trump: “Great percentages of people don’t have legs right now, or arms, because of this son of a bitch.”) Presumably, the Iraqis are too dumb to have constructed such bombs on their own. But even if this charge is true, terrorism is defined as violence directed at civilians, not at soldiers and “contractors,” i.e., mercenaries, who have occupied Iraq since our illegal invasion in 2003.
The media’s pro-war bias is facilitated by their almost exclusive reliance on “expert” commentators who are current and former government employees, including retired generals.
Within a few weeks, someone will undoubtedly publish an analysis similar to the 2003 FAIR study showing that hawkish voices predominated during these past two weeks. As we wait, I want to make two points.
- Many of these pro-war voices turn out, on closer inspection, to be owners or directors of, or consultants to, weapons manufacturers; for example, Barry McCaffrey (Raytheon), Michael Chertoff (BAE Systems), and Jeh Johnson (Lockheed-Martin) . These financial conflicts of interest are almost never disclosed on the air.
- If one were looking for a true expert on the Middle Eastern conflict, a logical choice might be someone who had opposed the disastrous 2003 invasion. There are such people. Some of them are still in Congress. (One of them is even running for President.) However, the socialization of media personnel is so complete that looking for this source of information is unlikely to even occur to them. Instead, we hear the same old voices that have been so wrong so many times in the past.
Iran may well be another Iraq waiting to happen. That Trump and his advisors believe that we can get Iran to capitulate with “maximum pressure” shows how little they know about the Middle East. Trump, like Obama before him, is testing the limits of presidential war powers. But short of a mass movement taking to the streets, what’s to stop him? A recent survey shows that over two-thirds (69%) of voters want an end to the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and the Middle East. But does public opinion make any difference?
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