This is American foreign policy Version 2014: Often disrespectful, often unlawful, purposefully destructive of order, possessing no idea of limits. There is no more Saddam Hussein, and it takes some doing to bring him in for reconsideration, no more Gadhafi, no Morsi, no Yanukovych, there would be no more Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela if Washington had its way. You have to climb over a mountain of prejudice and misinformation to consider what Washington has done wrong in these cases, but it is wrong. The quality of these leaders has nothing to do with it.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” Most journalists, at least of my cohort, know this sentence from the Philip Knightley book “The First Casualty,” a history of war correspondents that begins, ironically, in mid-19th century Crimea. Maybe we should be talking about the State Department’s war, not its policy, because the reporting of it has been near to fatally awful.
This is my other point of clarity. The media entered the post-Cold War era in bad shape, having surrendered almost all ground that separates them from power (political, corporate, financial by way of the stock market). But they are now not short of craven.
There have been red-handed cases to match the WMD-in-Iraq bit Judith Miller made infamous: Washington’s role in the Egyptian coup, the gas attack last August in Syria, now the State Department’s provocative manipulations in Ukraine. But beyond these, you find a day-to-day effort to slant and mislead, a grinding, relentless use of vocabulary, juxtaposition, innuendo and other such devices that poisons the news columns.
Again, we have our saving grace. I harbor no illusions: Millions of people read and watch these Washington-generated narratives and believe them. But the forward edge of the phenomenon is how many people no longer do or never have.
Complete story at - Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com
“The first casualty of war is truth.” Most journalists, at least of my cohort, know this sentence from the Philip Knightley book “The First Casualty,” a history of war correspondents that begins, ironically, in mid-19th century Crimea. Maybe we should be talking about the State Department’s war, not its policy, because the reporting of it has been near to fatally awful.
This is my other point of clarity. The media entered the post-Cold War era in bad shape, having surrendered almost all ground that separates them from power (political, corporate, financial by way of the stock market). But they are now not short of craven.
There have been red-handed cases to match the WMD-in-Iraq bit Judith Miller made infamous: Washington’s role in the Egyptian coup, the gas attack last August in Syria, now the State Department’s provocative manipulations in Ukraine. But beyond these, you find a day-to-day effort to slant and mislead, a grinding, relentless use of vocabulary, juxtaposition, innuendo and other such devices that poisons the news columns.
Again, we have our saving grace. I harbor no illusions: Millions of people read and watch these Washington-generated narratives and believe them. But the forward edge of the phenomenon is how many people no longer do or never have.
Complete story at - Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com
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