Of the top 100 US newspapers, 47 ran editorials on President Donald Trump’s Syria airstrikes last week: 39 in favor, seven ambiguous and only one opposed to the military attack.
In other words, 83 percent of editorials on the Syria attack supported Trump’s bombing, 15 percent took an ambivalent position and 2 percent said the attack shouldn’t have happened. Polls showed the US public being much more split: Gallup (4/7–8/17) and ABC/Washington Post (4/7–9/17) each had 51 percent supporting the airstrikes and 40 percent opposed, while CBS (4/7–9/17) found 57 percent in favor and 36 percent opposed.
A list of the editorials with quotes showing support or opposition can be seen here. The list of the top 100 editorial boards in the country was taken from a 2016 Hill piece (10/5/16) on presidential election endorsements.
Eight out of the top ten newspapers by circulation backed the airstrikes; the Wall Street Journal (4/7/17), New York Times (4/7/17), USA Today (4/7/17), New York Daily News (4/8/17), Washington Post (4/7/17), New York Post (4/10/17), Chicago Sun-Times (4/7/17) and Denver Post (4/7/17) all supported the strikes with varying degrees of qualification and concern.
The San Jose Mercury News (4/7/17) and LA Times (4/8/17) were ambiguous, highlighting Trump’s past opposition to bombing Syria and insisting, in the Mercury News’ words, that he get “serious about setting policies and pursuing diplomacy.”
The one editorial that expressly opposed the attack, in the 15th-ranked Houston Chronicle (4/7/17), did so mainly on constitutional—not moral or geopolitical—grounds, writing, “As we said a year-and-a-half ago, the president cannot and should not use military force against Syria without a legislative framework.”
The Chronicle—like all of the editorials on the list—accepted the government of Bashar al-Assad’s guilt in the April 4 chemical attack on Khan Shaykhun, omitting qualifiers such as “alleged” or “accused.”
A consistent theme in the bulk of the editorials was that the airstrikes were necessary, but Trump needed a broader strategy as well as a constitutional or congressional “framework.” As FAIR (4/7/17) noted last week, the editorial and op-ed pages of top five newspapers in the country were uniformly in support of the airstrikes in the day after the attack, offering up 18 positive columns and zero critical.
Some spoke in emotional or visceral terms, most notably the New York Times (4/7/17), which insisted “it was hard not to feel some sense of emotional satisfaction” at the attack. “The US decision to launch cruise missiles at Syrian President Bashar Assad’s airfield felt good,“ the Denver Post (4/7/17) wrote.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (4/9/17) seemed giddy to the point of incoherence with Trump’s new tough-guy posture, publishing this string of NatSec bromides:
The message for the Russian and Chinese leaders must be to stop using their murderous little proxies, Syria and North Korea, to poke and prod us. We don’t want any more wars, but we also showed with the attack on the Syrian air base that we will not put up with being trifled with by their little friends doing awful things like killing children with chemical weapons and waving missiles around. Russia and China need to get busy and put the reins on the Syrians and the North Koreans, now. The game is lethal and dangerous, and there is no good reason for it to continue.
The overwhelming support for Trump’s Syria strikes—which open a whole new theater of potential war in the Middle East—is consistent with FAIR’s studies of media reaction to US military action. A 2003 FAIR survey (3/18/03) of television coverage in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, for example, found “just 6 percent of US sources were skeptics about the need for war. Just 3 of 393 sources were identified with anti-war activism.” As the US debated intervening in the civil war in Libya, pro-intervention op-eds outnumbered those opposed to or questioning intervention by 4-to-1 in the New York Times and Washington Post (Extra!, 5/11).
CORRECTION: The headline on this piece originally misstated the number of editorials the top 100 US newspapers ran on Trump’s Syria strikes. There were 47.
Adam Johnson is a contributing analyst for FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter at @AdamJohnsonNYC.
Dear Adam:
I hope you are not a supporter of attacking civilians with chemical weapons, or opposed to stopping the ongoing genocide in Syria using barrel bombs, phosphorous bombs, cluster bombs and Napalm bombs on civilian targets including houses, schools, markets, UN aid convoys, refugee camps and hospitals, as done by Assad, now supported by Iran and Russia .
The Syrian crisis is now the worst catastrophe in the world since WWII as declared by the UN High Commissioner for human rights .
If your family or relatives are living now in the hellish place called Syria , where Assad has been raining death from his air force for six years on a daily basis, wouldn’t you be supportive of stopping that by force after every other effort to stop it peacefully failed ?
Search your conscious and ask what is the crime of those children that have suffered all this cruelty?
or those men tortured to death in Assad regime prisons, or women raped in front of their families?
who is responsible for those 500,000 killed, 2-3 millions injured, and 14 millions displaced, 6 millions of them now refugees, and half of those are children ?
After 6 years of politics , is it possible that any one is opposed to take action to stop this genocide ?
Is it strange to support that decision which should have been taken 4 years ago or more ?
The blood of all human beings is red and all their souls are sacred , please do not let down the humanity in anyone , and if it comes from Trump , Iet it be, Obama has lost his chance and failed big big time , what a pitty , but that is the truth, and it does not matter what party we are in : children are children, blood is blood, and injustice is injustice no matter how much we cover our eyes, so we do not see it
Please do not let politics blind your humanity
Sincerely ,
Dr. Sakkal
You realize we have no idea who actually did the gas attacks right? You realize we know the rebels have Sarin gas of their own, yes?
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-22424188
But I guess facts don’t matter more than the narrative pushed by the warmongers, eh?
No, Assad is not good because I bring this up. But when you rush into blind bombing, you make things worse. Especially us. We’ve done no good for Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria… we need to stop.
Syria the worst catastrophe since 1945? Maybe in the capitals of Europe.
What colour do you think the blood of Vietnamese people is?
And don’t let Western mainstream media blind you from the truth, Ahmed. Everything you just said parrots Washington’s official narrative. If you really care about the truth, you’ll seek out independent media reports like this one:
http://www.mintpressnews.com/escalating-war-syria-need-international-law/226706/
“The game is lethal and dangerous, and there is no good reason for it to continue.”
Iron fisted irony
The fact that the US media doesn’t reflect the views of the population is a failing as important as the gaping democratic deficit (difference between citizen’s desires and policy) we have in this country.
This is the supposed “free media” that we want to impose on countries all over the world, but its free only to those with access and money.
“Murderous little proxies?” Is this Pittsburgh fella aware of Israel’s encroachment on Palestinian territories and Saudi Arabia’s utter genocide of innocent Yemenis? Maybe we should reign in our hounds too before the leash snaps?
Nice try from an obviously anti-war on terror Leftist/Liberal..
Israel represents a religion, and is a country where Arabs vote, are members of their parliament, and own businesses. It is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Israel responds to attacks by the Palestinians, but does not initiate attacks on the Palestinian terrorists, and the Arabs could move all of them to better places, but choose to leave Palestinians in place, purely as a ploy against Israel.
Their claim to the (100 by 30 miles) land of Israel goes back thousands of years, reaching far back into the Old Testament.
Susanna, you misinform and mislead your readers in just about every phrase you wrote. You claim that Israel represents a religion but fail to mention that it is only a facade for its Zionist policies. Israel cannot be Jewish and Zionist at the same time. Zionism is a secular political ideology, a modern invention, whose aim is to occupy, colonize, and expand. There’s nothing Jewish about these. You also make the claim like a good hasbara would, that the Zionist State is “the only democracy in the Middle East”, but fail to mention dozens of discriminatory laws against non-Jewish Israeli citizens, like Arab Israelis and the Bedouins, and also fail to note that Arab Israeli Members of Parliament are often shouted down and harassed when they speak, and several of them have been sent to prison merely for exercising what they believe are their rights. You also imply that Israel “only responds to attacks by the Palestinians”, and I presume you mean Palestinians in the occupied territories, but you do not mention the occupation itself, its military character, its policies all of which subject the Palestinians to an indignity you do not want personally to experience on a daily basis, including theft of their land, the construction and expansion of illegal Jewish-only settlements, the bulldozing of their crops, the uprooting of their olive trees, the demolition of their homes, and the arrest, detention, and interrogation of Palestinian minors..All of these, in my view, are contrary to democratic values and, further, a decent Jew should be appalled by these policies and realize that, like I do, that Zionism could not be compatible with democracy. In fact, Zionism is antithetical to democracy.
Did any of those 46 editorials mention that the attack was illegal under international law, in fact the most serious crime, an unauthorized act of aggression? Didn’t think so — just to take the U.S. constitution into account is to reach for the sky in mainstream media.
Syria, or Russia on its behalf, would be quite justified in raining 59 missiles at the two ships that attacked Syria. We thought Hillary wanted to risk a hot war with Russia … now it has ‘bipartisan’ popularity, as well as among the media sheep — or lemmings.
Spoken like a true Zionist apologist. A woefully misinformed one at that.
Dear Susanna: There is no democrary anywhere on the planet. America is a Plutocracy and Israel is a Theocrachy. IF I disagree with Israel that does not make me anti-Semitic, because most of the people living in Israel are European. The Semitic people are Arabs. I’ve always wondered….after the 1% of Jewish leadership was dragged off to Babylon, the remaining people are probably the long lost relatives of the Jews that did not get dragged away. Weirdly too, Cyrus the Great and what became the Persian Empire, ( now IRAN), Cyrus let the Jewish people that had been sent away, return from Babylon. It would seem that Jewish history would be grateful to the Iranians. That’s sad that they aren’t, because once having been the world’s first World Empire, Iran learned…. I wish America and Israel would learn this too. Empires are always so self deluding.
Strange how the Trump bombing Syria becomes an indictment of Israel. Not saying that I disagree with all the criticisms about Israel, but wonder about what this means.
As Jeff Cohen the founder of FAIR once told an audience “my apologies to the Who but “We Will get fooled again”.