Corporate media obsessed over the whodunit of an anonymous op-ed published by the New York Times (9/5/18).
The anonymous New York Times op-ed (9/5/18), purportedly written by a senior Trump administration official, coupled with the release of Bob Woodward’s new book, Fear—itself full of White House back-stabbing and anonymous quotes—unleashed a veritable tsunami of breathless press speculation last week. But lost amidst the deluge was a Trump administration story that will have deadly, far-reaching consequences long after the Times op-ed is forgotten and Woodward’s book hits the discount pile. That’s because Trump effectively endorsed endless US war in Syria last week, and almost no one in the press noticed.
There were a few lonely exceptions. The Washington Post (9/6/18) spelled out the new Trump administration policy quite clearly, though the banality with which US foreign policy is described belies the Groundhog Day nature of the goals being established (emphasis added):
President Trump, who just five months ago said he wanted “to get out” of Syria and bring US troops home soon, has agreed to a new strategy that indefinitely extends the military effort there and launches a major diplomatic push to achieve American objectives, according to senior State Department officials…. US forces are to remain in the country to ensure an Iranian departure and the “enduring defeat” of the Islamic State.
This kind of open-ended commitment and nebulous criteria for withdrawal all but consign the US to Syria forever. And the stipulation of an Iranian departure from Syria as a necessary end-state for redeployment would seem to strip away any last veneer that the 2001 AUMF can be used to justify the US presence there. But these thorny questions were conspicuously absent from a press corps that barely noticed the sea change underway in our Syria policy this week.
The Associated Press (9/6/18) also covered the story, but its effort left much to be desired. Its ponderous headline, “US Plays Down Talk of Imminent Pullout of Forces From Syria,” entirely missed the point of what this president had just committed to. Likewise, the article’s lead was a jumble of disingenuous and contradictory official statements that the reporter never bothered to deconstruct or challenge.
Instead, the AP allowed Trump’s special representative for Syria, James Jeffrey, to spin away, demanding an “enduring defeat” of ISIS while also casually claiming that “means we’re not in a hurry to get out,” and then adding that this didn’t necessarily require a long-term military presence in the country. All this in the first two paragraphs. Readers who weren’t already dizzy from hearing the press dutifully pass along the same shopworn clichés used to justify our multi-decade wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be forgiven for having a case of journalistic whiplash as well.
Fox News (9/6/18) was one of several outlets that relied on AP to cover the announcement that the US military would be occupying Syria for the foreseeable future.
The AP’s muddled, one-day story was important, however, because it represented the bulk of print and online press coverage of the White House creating one more permanent front in the “global war on terror.” The New York Times, ABC News and Fox News didn’t bother to report their own stories, instead relying on the AP for their only coverage. USA Today failed to cover the news at all. Only the Wall Street Journal (9/9/18) bothered to conduct a thorough news analysis of the far-reaching repercussions of this new embrace of a military occupation of eastern Syria, highlighting the perilous journey it would set US foreign policy on once again.
Despite the dearth of coverage in its news pages, the Times editorial board did, however, take the time to write an editorial (9/8/18) on the Trump administration’s new Syria policy—in order to tacitly support it. (As FAIR has previously noted—3/27/17—this move is in keeping with the Times’ long track record of supporting every overseas US military campaign for the past 30 years.) In its Sunday Review column, the paper matter-of-factly endorses the Trump plan of keeping more than 2,000 US troops in Syria as “leverage,” while also not-so-subtly echoing Trump’s “take the oil” campaign rhetoric (“Mr. Assad will have to change his behavior to get control of that area’s oil and gas resources”), the better to blackmail President Bashar Assad into complying with US diplomatic demands.
As bad as the print coverage was, TV news was worse. On the all-important Sunday morning TV news shows, the new policy of open-ended commitment to military intervention in Syria barely even registered. ABC, NBC and CNN ignored the news on their respective programs. Fox News Sunday (9/9/18) spent two minutes on Syria during its interview with Vice President Mike Pence, but only to press him to promise a US military response to any Syrian government attack on the rebel stronghold in Idlib. The administration’s new “enduring defeat of ISIS” posture went unmentioned. Only on CBS News’ Face the Nation (9/9/18), which discussed Syria for all of 20 seconds, did Washington Post reporter David Nakamura briefly note, as an aside, that “there’s now reports that said [Trump has] committed now to a longer-term strategy, and it’s not going to be simple.” That was it.
Meet the Press (9/9/18) devoted the most time of all the Sunday shows to the parlor game of who-wrote-the-op-ed?
By contrast, the Sunday news shows gorged themselves on the anonymous New York Times op-ed story. And while its claims of an “active resistance” certainly broke new ground, there have also been plenty of previous accounts of internal staff pushback and rank Oval Office dysfunction throughout Trump’s time in office. Nevertheless, the mainstream media couldn’t get enough of this story. NBC’s Meet the Press (9/9/18) devoted a solid 20 minutes to the op-ed. (Note: the coverage on the Sunday shows often merged with coverage of Woodward’s Fear, making precise measurements difficult). Fox News Sunday (9/9/18) spent around 18 minutes on the op-ed, repeatedly returning to it across multiple interviews. ABC’s This Week (9/9/18) had roughly 15 minutes on the op-ed. CNN’s State of the Union (9/9/18): 13 minutes. CBS’s Face the Nation devoted the least amount to time—five minutes—to the Times op-ed.
The time differences between the coverage of these two stories couldn’t be more stark. Out of roughly 220 minutes of high-profile TV news airtime this past Sunday, the former got all of five seconds of direct coverage, on one show. The latter, on the other hand, enjoyed around 70 minutes across all five networks. Put another way, the mainstream media devoted 840 times more airtime to the palace intrigue of the Times op-ed than to Trump’s commitment to indefinitely occupy and conduct combat operations in yet another Middle Eastern country. This level of asymmetric focus demonstrates a collective news judgment that is seriously out of whack.
It isn’t just Sunday mornings, either. Syria coverage has been completely missing from the NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight evening broadcasts during the past week. CBS Evening News did cover the potential humanitarian disaster in Idlib on Monday (9/10/18), but it too left out any mention of Trump’s major decision to maintain an indefinite military presence inside Syria. Whereas coverage of the Times op-ed swept across all three networks’ broadcasts last Wednesday, Thursday and Friday (Both NBC and ABC evening broadcasts revisited the op-ed story again on this past Monday), sometimes spanning multiple blocks of airtime (ABC World News Tonight, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News).
Cable news was, unsurprisingly, awash in programs and panels speculating over the Times op-ed ad nauseam; Syria war policy coverage was almost blacked out. CNN (9/7/18) ran an online story on the Syria news with an admirably accurate headline—“US Envoy to Syria Says US Will Stay Until There Is an ‘Enduring Defeat’ of ISIS”—but the network notably didn’t devote any panel show debates or other on-air coverage of significance to this new Syria policy by the Trump administration. Similarly, MSNBC offered minimal coverage of Syria, and even those anchors that took the time to dig into the civil war, like Ali Velshi (9/8/18), didn’t note Trump’s 180-degree policy shift on military occupation.
And by “We’re no longer pulling out by the end of the year,” envoy James Jeffrey means, “We’re going to be occupying Syria indefinitely” (CBS, 9/8/18)
CBS did produce a segment (9/8/18) on the new Syria policy for its digital streaming channel, but it buried the real news under a bland, misleading headline: “US to Keep Military Presence in Syria.” Moreover, the report produced a few moments of stark cognitive dissonance. For example, halfway through the segment on the many factions fighting in Syria, the CBSN Live host asked the expert she was interviewing:
Do you get the sense that there will be some sort of military action taken at this point by the United States. Are we closer to intervening?
She was specifically referring to military action against a Syrian government assault on Idlib in northwest Syria, but the language was still striking, as it served to disappear the reality that the US has already been heavily intervening in Syria for years now—via a CIA-funded pro-rebel campaign, two missile attacks against Assad, as well as the deployment of thousands of US combat troops and more than 100,000 munitions dropped to fight ISIS. The fact that the US has maintained a broad—and now growing—combat footprint in Syria continues to be so overlooked by the establishment press that even prominent New York Times columnists have forgotten it (FAIR.org, 9/6/18).
Seventeen years after 9/11, the corporate media still finds itself overwhelmingly making the same mistakes when it comes to its war coverage: obsessing over shiny, ephemeral Beltway distractions while the most important, consequential stories get either ignored or buried. But as our nation’s military campaigns spread across even more of the globe under Trump, journalism must break free of an institutional groupthink that makes it increasingly complicit with a policy of endless war.
If US soldiers are still fighting and dying and killing in Syria 17 years from now, solving the whodunit of how this tragedy came to pass won’t be that difficult; the press could start by looking at what it chose to cover this week.
Well, let’s see, what insanity can I add? O.K. who are the usual suspects? Oh let’s go for one no will will ever suspect.
COMEY wrote it, because he’s been inside the White House, so semantically he’s an “insider” Or say, what about Hillary—she’s certainly been inside for years at that address——-and if she could cause them all to dump Trump well why not as a dump is a kind of a win.
Oh, who else….BOLTON, because since Trump’s original idea was leave Syria—but Bolton wants eternal wars with someone else’s kids in the body bags….Oh wait, I forgot, maybe it’s Netanyahu—–he’s been around enough and has interest in nothing except extracting dollars——- and plus maybe Israel can own Syria too, along with—-oh wait, that Saudi problem. oh well never mind. Well that was fun, but just as unnecessary to read as the NY Times.
Do I think it was anyone in the White House? It could be anyone anywhere as the way it was written it tried to leave such obvious clues—–but this is probably just an example of more fake news. Oh wait, maybe its Melania, or Ivanka who are just so tired of the whole place. I give it an F for facts and if someone in the White House wrote this—they have way too much time on their hands.
Dear Reed :
I have been following the v=events in Syria since it started in 2011,unfortunately, the US policy in Syria was a disaster at the Obama administration,They gave lip service to the opposition, and allowed the Assad to kill with all types of arms, including the internationally forbidden arms such as cluster bombs, phosphorus bombs and even the chemical weapons on civilian neighborhoods. Even when the Obama administration put a red line on chemical weapons , they backed of it with the help of Russia. and allowed hundreds of chemical attacks with Chlorine gas and some with Sarin gas to take place without any response .Air strikes on civilian neighborhoods became common law, the Assad air forces attacked schools , farmers markets, water, electricity plants, and even hospitals and ambulances without any real response from the Obama administration.
The results were devastating , the worst catastrophe in our lives since WWII: about 1,000,000 lives lost, 14,000,000 were displaced ( out of a country’s 23-24 million citizens) of which 6-7,000,000 are refugees in other countries, and the rest internally displaced , which could be even worse for many who do not have any income or lost their parents . not to mention 150,000-250,000 forcefully disappeared, many of them being tortured to death and/or executed. In addition to an amount of destruction unprecedented since the WWII, all this was not and is mostly still not news to the media in US!!, not even to you or to FAIR itself which I respect , but I think they did not provide enough attention to this important problem .
Unfortunately , these failed policies of theObama administration are in large part responsible for this situation, they have put a tight lid on the opposition, and a red line on the anti aircraft MAN PADs that could have stopped this carnage long time ago, and opened the doors to Hezbollah, Iran, Jihadi factions, and eventually to Russia to become a major player on the ground in Syria, and subsequently changed the local problem into a regional conflict and a focus for an international game of power .
Russia found in Syria a theatre to show her arms, try her most recent arsenal of new arms, and increase the sales to other countries seeing the show of power they performed at the cost of real human lives, while US policy has been so vague and undetermined to do anything too top the carnage and the massacres taking place every day, until it was thought natural mohave people dying with barrel bombs every day but get concerned only when chemical weapons are used ? is this now the new international normal for civilians out of the US or first world countries ?
I would love to blame the president for an endless war, however stopping a genocide, which this has come to be is a better option than letting it linger for her as Obama did , President Clinton acted in Bosnia in the 1990’s and stopped the massacres in 3-4 weeks .
Should President Obama acted in a responsible way after the chemical attack red line was crossed , we would not have been there now, neither Russia , who intervened about two years later , and hundreds of thousands of live could have been saved ,
what is the right answer to this catastrophe now is anyones’s guess, what I knows that the people in Syria have no trust in the the US Obama policies and think he was an accomplice of Assad, to get the iran Nuclear deal . they also welcome any effort, or intervention ( preferably political, but military if needed ) to stop the carnage in Syria and allow the people to live in dignity and enjoy the freedom and democracy . whether President Trump will have the right r policy to help that or not remains to be seen, what I know is that : it is now 1000 folds harder than at the time of President Obama duet the interference of all the regional and international powers int eh conflict ,, but the longer we wait the harder it will be to solve .
Seriously? The problems in Syria are 100% the USA and its “allies” fault. This includes, of course, the spoiled brat in the region, Israel, which takes the time to attack anything and anyone for various “self protection” reasons. You cannot blame Syria or Assad for his nation being ruthlessly attacked because Israel wants all the land around it to be theirs! It really doesn’t matter who has the reigns of ‘power” in the Oval Office as long as EVERY American President bows to the whims of Israel and the military/industrial mafia. You want justice? Justice would be a world that roundly condemns AND punishes nations like the USA and Israel for ganging up on the weak and taking advantage of them!
Fanciful but devoid of facts and evidence. Perhaps you have been talking to UK PM May.
What is really missing, both from mainstream corporate media and this fine piece by Reed Richardson, is the Israeli role in directing the foreign policy of the United States and the use of American resources and military presence as a Janissary force for Netanyahu and Company. Mr. Trump’s “America First” 2016 campaign rhetoric is belied by his Zionist First foreign policy warriors Bolton, Haley, and Pompeo.
The deafening silence is joined by a Bought and Paid for American Congress wearing either Elephant or Donkey Uniforms.
The fix is in.
Trump commits to endless war —— FOR ISRAEL.
Trump is putting Israel FIRST.
I did not think it possible for there to be a worse government than Obama or W-rong Bush, but I do believe Trump is going to surpass them ……………… God Save America.
Donald Trump and his christian.zionist CULT members are actually making Kim Jun Ill look honest, rational and reasonable.
Bolton, Pence, Haley, Pompeo, the Huckabees, Ivanka & Donald Trump, Betrayers of CHRIST, Traitors of America. Get them out of Our government. Not only are they mental cases, they are STUPID.
These C-Z cowards are all about preaching for war — but ALL of them REFUSED TO SERVE. “Chrystyans” that want war but none of them or their children will fight or sacrifice.
They think precipitating a war that kills Billions of humans will bring about the return of the PRINCE of PEACE ! “christian.zionism” is really just islamic.jihadism in different clothes. To claim they are going to “Build the THIRD Temple” is proof they know nothing of Christianity. To claim the Third Temple is yet to be built is to Deny Jesus Christ. Jesus “The LAMB of GOD” —IS— the Third Temple. The THIRD Temple (Jesus) was “raised up in three days” on Easter Morning.
FAKE BILLIONAIRE STOOGE PUPPET FULFILLS PENTAGON TRAITOR AGENDA OF SERVING THE BRITISH EMPIRE.
American foreign policy is created in Israel and enforced by AIPAC with the corporate media and Hollywood acting as cheerleader and propaganda agents. The president acts only like the Israeli Viceroy with the American Congress being just a group of Quislings dependent on Zionist approval to stay in office. Obama was the only president who tried to balance support for Israel with what is good for America. Trump has become Netanyahu’s and Adelson’s boy.