FAIR is the national progressive media watchdog group, challenging corporate media bias, spin and misinformation.
Just as they did in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, MSNBC and CNN now serve up a steady parade of war-hawks, spies and liars, presenting them as credible and almost heroic as long as they criticize the despicable man in the White House.
“What Next in Africa?” read a recent Washington Post headline. Among the possible answers not considered by the Post article: “Close US military bases,” “End US drone strikes” or “Stop US special forces raids.”
One of the most effective rhetorical tools in normalizing massive military budgets is to treat spending billions–and sometimes trillions—of dollars as something one has to do in order to be “modern.”
“The military is attempting to put as many adolescent fingers around as many triggers as possible. They understand the impact, the psychological lure, of firing a weapon.”
Max Boot’s hiring by the Washington Post goes to show, again, that the most certain way to move up in the media pundit universe is to consistently echo US national security orthodoxy—without pause or regret.
Corporate media have a long history of lamenting wars they themselves helped sell the American public, but it’s rare so many wars and so much hypocrisy are distilled into one editorial.
Where did all the concern over deficits go? After two years of the media lamenting, worrying and feigning outrage over the cost of Bernie Sanders’ two big-budget items—free college and single-payer healthcare—the same outlets are uniformly silent, days after the largest military budget increase in history.
The New York Times gave an enormous platform to a hawkish think tank that is funded by the US government and by top weapons corporations, letting it absurdly claim, without any pushback, that the gargantuan US military—by far the largest in the world—has been “underfunded.”
“There is no easy answer, except to start with ending the military part. Get the troops out. That’s not the end game, that’s step one. “
Far more egregious than a simple conflict of interest problem is that the New York Times decided to give an opinion column to someone linked to murder, money-laundering and a whole host of other legally and ethically repugnant behavior.
Like clockwork, pundits responded to the Afghanistan speech by rushing to praise Trump for his “presidential” decision. There is nothing quite as presidential as expanding an unending war that has left many thousands of Muslim civilians dead.
As President Donald Trump tries to make the case for staying indefinitely in Afghanistan, the stakes for those actually living there are rarely broached by US corporate media.
US journalists reported official claims about the Gulf of Tonkin incident as absolute truths, ignoring countervailing evidence and opening the floodgates for the bloody Vietnam War and the deaths of over 50,000 Americans and millions of Southeast Asians.
In the past few years, official body count estimates have made a notable comeback, as US military and administration officials have tried to talk up the US coalition’s war against ISIS in Syria and Iraq.
What have decades of unending war in Afghanistan actually done toward the ostensible goal of liberating Afghan women? Plus: The weaponization of space and the constraints on the healthcare conversation.
The expulsion of ISIS from Mosul by the US-led coalition received coverage, but the US role in killing civilians was uniformly ignored.
USA Today’s sources on how “US missile defense plans” will protect you from the “N. Korean Nuke Threat” mostly have a direct financial connection to the US missile defense program.
The vast majority of reports on Trump’s Saudi arms deal omitted a key piece of context—namely, whom the weapons will be used to kill.
One of the most common tropes in US media is that the US military always goes to war reluctantly—and, if there are negative consequences, like civilian deaths, it’s simply a matter of bumbling around without much plan or purpose.
The US hasn’t done “a very good job pushing Russia out of the way,” said MSNBC’s Jeremy Bash, implying it would be a good idea to target a country that only months ago was reported by Newsweek to have a bomb that could flatten Texas.
