In a post yesterday I wrote about the dumbing down of news in America by replacing news coverage with lifestyle feature stories.
But what is even worse is when the news actively misleads about important events. Glenn Greenwald points to three recent examples of counterfactual warmongering against Iran by Erin Burnett of CNN, Diane Sawyer and Brian Ross of ABC News, and Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News.
Matt Taibbi notes the repetition of history in the way they report:
As a journalist, there’s a buzz you can detect once the normal restraints in your business have been loosened, a smell of fresh chum in the waters, urging us down the road to war. Many years removed from the Iraq disaster, that smell is back, this time with Iran.
You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. CNBC’s house blockhead, the Goldman-trained ex-finance professional Erin Burnett, came out with a doozie of a broadcast yesterday, a Rumsfeldian jeremiad against the Iranian threat would have fit beautifully in the Saddam’s-sending-drones-at-New-York halcyon days of late 2002.
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We have a similar gentleman’s code, a “Westernized industrial power” code if you will, that operates the same way. In other words, our newspapers and TV stations may blather on a thousand times a day about attacking Iran and bombing its people, but if even one Iranian talks about fighting back, he is being “aggressive” and “threatening”; we can impose sanctions on anyone, but if the sanctioned country embargoes oil shipments to Europe in response, it’s being “belligerent,” and so on.
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But now the public openly embraces circular thinking like, “Any country that squawks when we threaten to bomb it is a threat that needs to be wiped out.”
It is a tried and true formula. First you dumb down the audience. Then you scare them to death with irrationally magnified threats. Then you go to war.
And remember, CNN, ABC and NBC are supposed to be the ‘sensible’, ‘responsible’, ‘impartial’, even ‘liberal’ news channels that we are supposed to take seriously, unlike the supposedly wild-eyed zealots over at Fox News.
I’m in the middle of reading _Flat Earth News_ by Nick Davies. It’s a rather discouraging account of how many lies get into the news for several reasons including the lack of time for reporters to fact check. One chapter is on the way propaganda is inserted into the news by organizations like the CIA.
I hope at the end Mr Davies has some suggestions about how to reduce the problem.
There is a marked difference between Iranian threats of sending warships to close the straight of Hormuz by force and the choice of simply not buying oil from Iran.
“[O]ur newspapers and TV stations may blather on a thousand times a day about attacking Iran and bombing its people, but if even one Iranian talks about fighting back, he is being ‘aggressive’ and ‘threatening’….”
I would equate this to how the Nazis banged the war drums before invading Poland, but the Poles weren’t threatening anybody.
It’s not just the pre-war propaganda that’s infuriating. Equally annoying is what happened in the aftermath of the first two illegal wars. Many media stooges (e.g. NY Times, Washington Compost, and of course, they looneytune right like FAUX) tried to excuse the “mistake” of starting illegal wars.
There was a full court press to pretend that “nobody knew there were no WMDs”. And they all made the claim that “nobody was against the war”, as if the anti-war voices didn’t exist. It’s not enough that they avoid admitting being wrong, they have to pretend that nobody was right, either.
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