By Robyn Newcomb
In the first week of this new decade, it was impossible to walk past an American television without feeling nauseous. Not just because the U.S. assassinated Qassem Soleimani (a prominent military leader of Iran), not just because of the thought of how many Iranian and Iraqi civilian lives had been jeopardized as a result but because no matter what side of the political spectrum you were looking at, no one on cable news or in major headlines was telling the full truth; no one could cough up a genuine opposition; no one would call it what it was: murder. Several features of that news cycle’s coverage highlighted the ongoing crisis of American corporate media’s role in pushing pro-war political discourse.
First, we saw a frantic skewing of who Soleimani actually was. Media networks, which had previously never even mentioned his name, were now joyously reporting on the death of “world’s #1 bad guy,” universally deciding he was a “renowned terrorist,” justified only by the phrase “he was responsible for American lives.” The reality behind this sentence is that Soleimani trained forces who fought (and yes, killed) U.S. troops involved in the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq. This is not a welcome sentence in a country as nationalistic as ours, but the U.S. troops can be more easily deemed “terrorists” than the soldiers Soleimani trained. (Nathan J. Robinson published an exceptional piece in Current Affairs titled “How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda” which works through propaganda semantics such as these that I highly recommend reading.)
Second, we saw the wholesale erasure of the U.S.’s extensive history of terrorizing Iran, from overthrowing the democratically-elected Mosaddegh in 1953, to supporting Saddam Hussain in the Iran-Iraq war, to killing 290 civilians in shooting down Iran Airliner Flight 655 in 1988, to imposing crippling economic sanctions, to surrounding Iran with dozens of U.S. military bases. Iranians are far more justified in fear or resentment of us than vice versa, yet most reporting handled Iran as if it were a senselessly hostile, wild-card foreign power that only suddenly appeared on the international scene in 2019. Upholding the American empire depends on this: a racialized fear or hatred of most other peoples on Earth who, in reality, will always be more threatened by the United States than we will ever be of them. And it depends on our ignorance to buy into it.
Third, we saw widespread acceptance of the idea that simply because the U.S. government states something, it’s true. (If the phrases “Weapons of Mass Destruction” or “Gulf of Tonkin” mean anything to you, you know this is not the case.) Specifically, the foundationless claim that Iran was posing an “imminent threat” to the safety of the U.S. — which was admitted to be false only two weeks later — was widely parroted by major sources with only a meager “says Pence” tacked on at the end. While this technically makes a true statement, as Pence did say that, the constant framing implies it to be true — and a journalist’s job is to investigate and contextualize a story, not to serve as a complacent mouthpiece for government officials.
Fourth, we saw anti-Trumpism fuel a whitewashing of U.S. history abroad. While it’s certainly likely that Trump was exploiting fearmongering to distract from impeachment and buy support for re-election, focusing only on this element would be both shortsighted and dishonest. The relentless pushing of The New York Times’ reporting that Trump, shocking everyone involved, chose assassination despite being offered more moderate options, as well as the widespread “if only we’d supported Hillary” opining served to disguise the reality that the recent actions are completely in line with decades of U.S. policy in the Middle East and elsewhere (not to mention the fact that Hillary personally stated she would be willing to “obliterate” Iran just a few years ago). How could this possibly be a “Trump problem” if we’ve been committing it for a century? Publicly admitting to assassinating a country’s leader is more overt than simply overthrowing them in a coup — as the U.S. is so fond of doing — but its consequences are no more violent.
Fifth, we saw a blackout on the role of the “revolving door” between the Pentagon and defense industry contractors, perhaps exemplified by the fact that the last job of our national Defense Secretary was as a top lobbyist for Raytheon. Lockheed Martin board members were given national platforms as “national security experts” without disclosing their role to viewers. Instances like these aren’t aberrations, they’re commonplace, and it would be more than generous to attribute them to mere oversight.
Perhaps most importantly, we saw these factors combine to create the illusion of a pro-war consensus where there wasn’t one, a process that Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman term “manufacturing consent.” We saw, for instance, a host on NPR immediately state that, in the U.S., Soleimani’s assassination was “universally viewed as a good thing.” Once this false consensus is created, the existing opposition is invisibilized, dissidents can be framed as deranged, and the only acceptable pushback is a specific brand of pseudo-opposition limited to qualms like “recklessness,” “timing,” “procedure,” etc., which ultimately only reinforce the pro-war narrative.
Until we begin to see news corporations like Fox and CNN alike for what they are — entertainment companies owned by massive corporations with considerably more right-wing political bias than most Americans are aware — and start seeking out and placing our faith in more independent, internationalist sources, American anti-imperialism will always be stopped short by the myth of American exceptionalism. Freeing ourselves from this ideology is the first step in allying ourselves with the rest of the world.