The mass media’s coverage of US foreign policy would often be funny — except for the fact that the future of the world is at stake.
After the Bush administration has so thoroughly discredited itself during the past six years, you might think that mainstream journalists would bring sober skepticism to coverage of its leading lights. And certainly the Bush team has taken some media lumps. But sooner than later — against all evidence — the overall coverage by news media reverts to gullible exercises of absurd trust in the demonstrably untrustworthy.
We’ve all heard about the wisdom of giving the benefit of the doubt. But this is ridiculous.
A prime example is Time’s recent cover story about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. From the big words on the cover — “Back to Reality” — to the final words of the main article, the package reeks of a saccharine deodorizer for the stench of a supremely arrogant and deadly foreign policy.
The Feb. 12 edition’s cover asserts that the magazine will provide an explanation for “Why Iraq and Iran are forcing Condoleezza Rice to rethink US foreign policy and deal with the world as it is.”
At one level, of course, Rice and the rest of the Bush team have always dealt with the world “as it is,” no matter how delusional their thinking. But from the outset the Time package implies that the administration’s thinking has shifted to a well-grounded outlook. Yet the spread offers scant evidence of any such trend.
The weirdest aspect of Time’s coverage may be its compulsive effort to portray US policy-makers as frustrated idealists who yearn to work Uncle Sam’s benign will on an often recalcitrant world.
“The ambition that underpinned the invasion of Iraq,” the magazine flatly states, was “to bring Western-style democracy to the Islamic world.” And the nation’s largest-circulation news weekly goes on to declare — again without attribution — that a “democracy agenda ... dominated US foreign policy after 9/11.”
As is so often the case, the journalistic lingo reflects an attempt to sound ultra-sophisticated, with a bloodless hardball spin. The Time piece refers to “the misadventure in Iraq” — with “misadventure” being an odd way to describe a horrendous and ongoing war. To the Washington press corps, it might be a misadventure; to the people fighting and dying in Iraq, it is a catastrophe.
The final paragraph supplies the worldview windup: “Restoring US prestige will involve the kind of trade-offs between interests and ideals that (Rice) and Bush have so far been reluctant to make — but that are the stock-in-trade of successful US diplomacy.”
This kind of reporting refuses to acknowledge the financial and geopolitical self-interest that is central to US foreign policy. The idea that the US invasion was based on zeal for the “ideals” of “democracy” does not pass the laugh test — yet it is endlessly promulgated by the likes of Time magazine and other corporate media. The factor of oil as a key motivator for attacking and occupying Iraq is apparently beyond the journalistic range of the USA’s most acclaimed reporters and pundits. Meanwhile, implicitly, the coverage equates “American interests” with corporate ones.
“The fate of Bush’s legacy, and perhaps even the future shape of the international system, may hinge on whether Rice can pull off some kind of diplomatic breakthrough in the 23 months she has left,” the Time story says.
Ten paragraphs later, the magazine quotes Rice — who uses the same “international system” buzz phrase to advance the same unexamined assumptions as though they were no more ideological, nationalistic or self-interested than just plain common sense. Moves by Iran, she says, “are dangerous for American interests and dangerous for the international system.”
In conventional US media, perhaps it would be tasteless to deeply probe the actual character of “the international system.” But the ongoing US military actions in Iraq — and, for that matter, the world’s huge military expenditures — are central to that “international system.” So, we would do well to ask: What is so sacred about protecting it?
— Norman Solomon’s latest book, “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,” is now available in paperback.
