War Media
The dominant corporate mass media’s coverage of U.S. foreign policy is no magical exception to the rule that the more things change the more they stay the same. Under the standard media rules, deeply internalized by reporters and commentators who want to keep their paychecks coming, Uncle Sam is always at bottom a noble, benevolent, democratic, selfless, altruistic and well-intentioned actor on the global stage. The U.S. is never a vicious, selfish, murderous, and criminal oppressor or an imperialist. The U.S. occasionally makes tragic “mistakes” and tactical errors in the design and execution of its inherently virtuous foreign policies, but those policies are never fundamentally immoral, illegal, or imperial in nature.
There is some space for criticism of U.S. militarism in dominant media but only for pragmatic criticism, never for principled moral criticism. There is room only for critical evaluation of whether or not the policy in question is working – working for “us,” with “us” taken to be synonymous with an empire that accounts for nearly half of the world’s military spending and maintains more than 800 bases spread across more than 130 countries – all in the name of something they call “defense
Dominant media routinely repeats and disseminates Uncle Sam’s charges against governments and groups that Washington’s foreign policy elite doesn’t like. The U.S. is good because Uncle Sam says so and its enemies are bad, for the same basic reason.
People who die or are otherwise harmed by the U.S. military and by Washington’s clients and allies – people like the Palestinians, the Iraqis, the Afghans and the East Timorese – are “Unworthy Victims.” They do not merit attention, personalization, empathy, or concern.
By contrast, the tribulations of those who suffer at the hands of officially designated enemy regimes and forces are a source of great media focus and concern. They are “Worthy Victims.”
Along the way, those who criticize and (more than that) those who experience U.S. foreign policy as immoral, illegal, and/or imperial are seen as beyond the pale of acceptable debate. When they are not simply made invisible they are treated as fanatical extremists, crackpot “ideologues” and fringe “fanatics” who do not deserve to be taken seriously.
(By the way I never call it “mainstream media.” Back in the Cold War era, we didn’t call Soviet state television and the official state Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia “mainstream Russian media.” I will not extend the term “mainstream” to “official state corporate war and entertainment media firms like NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, and NBC, all part of a communications empire wherein six giant multinational corporations own more than half of all U.S. media print and electronic.)
Killing Afghan Civilians v. Scaring New Yorkers
None of this has ended simply because the president happens now to be an eloquent black Democrat from Chicago instead of a boorish white Republican moron from West Texas. Dominant U.S. media plays along today with his false claim that Iran poses a significant nuclear threat to the so-called international community (in defiance of the findings of the IAEC and the United States’ own intelligence community), just like it played along with Bush’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. That media continues to ignore U.S. ally Israel’s nuclear arsenal and Israel’s provocative policies of apartheid and occupation. Dominant mass media continues to denounce Cuba’s authoritarianism and Iran’s authoritarianism and Hugo Chavez’s authoritarianism while ignoring our own “dictatorship or money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson) and the arch-repressive practices of many of “our” allies likes Saudi Arabia, Israel, Egypt, and Columbia.
Dominant mass media persists in deceptively portraying Washington’s aggressive and imperial and murderous five-front war of terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as just and “defensive.” It continues to ignore the Obama administration’s deepening militarization of Latin America and Africa. It continues under Obama as under Bush to refuse to blow any kind of serious audible moral whistle on the epic and ongoing crimes of “our” military.
Sometimes the callousness of it all just numbs your soul. Here’s one horrific example among many under Obama. In the first of May last year, U.S. air-strikes killed 140 civilians in Bola Boluk, a village in western Afghanistan’s Farah Province. Ninety-three of the dead villagers torn apart by U.S. explosives were children. Just 22 were males 18 years or older. Villagers brought tractor trailers full of the pieces of human bodies to the provincial governor’s office to prove that the casualties had occurred. “Everyone at the governor’s office was crying, watching that shocking scene.”[3]
The initial response of the Obama Pentagon to this appalling incident – one of many mass civilian-butchering U.S. aerial killings in Afghanistan since Obama became president – was to absurdly blame the civilian deaths on “Taliban grenades.” This was a preposterous lie that dominant U.S. media reported without question, without derision. Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “regret” about the loss of innocent life, but the administration refused to issue an apology or acknowledge U.S. responsibility for the blasting apart of civilian bodies in Farah Province.[4] Dominant war media reported this without disgust.
The matter was quickly dropped and forgotten, sent down George Orwell’s memory hole, with deep media complicity, as the Pentagon wrote checks to the Afghan government to give families a couple thousand dollars per child corpse to compensate them for the blasting apart of their little ones. The U.S. subsequently conducted a dubious “investigation” that reduced the civilian body count drastically and blamed the Taliban for putting civilians in the way of U.S. bombs. The “liberal” media offered no critical commentary.
By contrast around the same time last year, there was a brief media frenzy over a very different occurrence, enough to elicit a full apology and to fire a White House official. The problem was that the White House had scared New Yorkers with an ill-advised Air Force One photo-shoot flyover of Manhattan that reminded people of 9/11.[5]
The sickening irony was quite remarkable. Scaring some New Yorkers was a big deal that led to a full presidential apology and the discharge of a White House staffer. Killing more than 100 Afghan civilians was a minor matter that did not require any apology. Nobody had to be fired. Nobody in the dominant media sought to comment on the perversity of it all.
