U.S. MEDIA BEATS THE DRUMS OF WAR

I'm really ambivalent about attacking Syria.  It's true the U.S. ignored Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran during the Reagan presidency and used the chemical weapon Agent Orange during the Viet-Nam war.  So the leaders of the U.S. are being somewhat hypocritical in denouncing Assad's use of chemicals.  But his use of them is just so horrible and immoral a missile strike, particularly if it is backed by many other nations, may be in order.  On the other hand, it may be totally counterproductive as limited attacks on other Middle Eastern countries have been (see front page article in today's Los Angeles Times).  I'd like to see reader's comment on this one.

FROM MINT PRESS NEWS

US Media ‘Beats The Drums Of War’

The whispers and public statements might be coming from the White House and Pentagon, but it seems U.S. media outlets are the real amplifiers of the call to strike Syria.

By Jon Queally | August 27, 2013

Does the “drum beat” for war come from the White House or from a media that just loves war? (Screenshot: Fox News)What the US media still doesn’t know about the use of chemical weapons in Syria last week has done little to keep it from accepting statements from the US government with barely a whiff of the skepticism one would expect after the colossal—and well-documented—media failure that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

And if there were voices cautioning against a volly of U.S./NATO airstrikes (note: there are), most media consumers scanning the front pages of top news websites wouldn’t know it.

Instead what they’d see if they looked at CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the Huffington Post on Tuesday morning was not so much a US government on tapping the “drums of war” but a corporate media system banging on them.

CNN:

Fox News:

MSNBC:

Huffington Post:

Similarly, as FireDogLake’s Kevin Gosztola cataloged, the editorial boards from some of the largest US newspapers penned editorials that somewhat unanimously supported direct military action by the US. Despite the continued lack of concrete evidence about the details of the chemical attack, Gosztola continued his critique of mainstream outlets by noting how the troubling trend was

further proven by the round of reports in US media [Sunday], which granted an Obama administration official anonymity to say there was “very little doubt” that chemical weapons had been used by the Syrian regime against civilians. Such a statement could easily help increase public and political support for military action yet the media did not force the person to go on the record and give his or her name if the administration wanted such a statement to be published.

And it’s not just the neo-conservatives pushing for their latest war of choice. As Greg Mitchell, who literally wrote the book on the media failure surrounding the Iraq War, observed in his blog at The Nation late Monday:

As hours pass and rhetoric by Obama administration officials, named and unnamed, grows more bellicose against Assad and Syria, liberal hawks in the media, and newspaper editorial pages, have largely fallen in line, calling for a swift US missile attack or more. This was the same pattern we saw in regard to Iraq in 2003, when a Republican was in the White House.

Of course, the two situations are different, and The New York Times has a lengthy and chilling new report tonight trying to recreate the night of the attack. But there is this much that’s the same: liberals are calling for fast action even though proof of a chemical attack, and who did it, remains less than definitive—and with United Nations inspectors on the scene but their work discounted by America. Yet the rush to judgment—and bomb—escalates.

This article originally appeared on Common Dreams.