Norman Solomon: The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public
[Norman Solomon is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” which has been adapted into a documentary film. For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com]
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media’s insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.
This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington -- insisting for the longest time that the war must go on.
In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were actively demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers -- including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.
A similar pattern took shape during Washington’s protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American public.
In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing that “one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18 months.” But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the war course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.
Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by the magazine’s editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: “When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?”
Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots is just as wide. Top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers -- at the same time that opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.
While a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting, the savants who determine big media’s editorial positions insist on staying the course...
... The war on Vietnam persisted for several horrific years after the polls were showing that most Americans disapproved. The momentum of a large-scale and protracted U.S. war of military occupation is massive and cataclysmic after the engine has really been gunned.
That’s one of the most chilling parallels between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The news media are part of the deadly process. So are the politicians who remain hitched to some expedient calculus. And so are we, to the extent that we go along with the conventional wisdom of the warfare state.
Read entire article at The Huffington Post
This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media’s insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.
This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington -- insisting for the longest time that the war must go on.
In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were actively demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers -- including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.
A similar pattern took shape during Washington’s protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive of the U.S. war effort than the American public.
In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing that “one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18 months.” But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the war course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.
Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by the magazine’s editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: “When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?”
Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots is just as wide. Top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers -- at the same time that opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.
While a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth fighting, the savants who determine big media’s editorial positions insist on staying the course...
... The war on Vietnam persisted for several horrific years after the polls were showing that most Americans disapproved. The momentum of a large-scale and protracted U.S. war of military occupation is massive and cataclysmic after the engine has really been gunned.
That’s one of the most chilling parallels between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The news media are part of the deadly process. So are the politicians who remain hitched to some expedient calculus. And so are we, to the extent that we go along with the conventional wisdom of the warfare state.