HAPPY ANNIVERSARY
War-Loving Pundits

From CounterPunch courtesy of J. Orlin Grabbe, an essay by media critic Norman Soloman looking back on the absolute certainty of the pundit class about the rightness of the US invasion of Iraq:

The third anniversary of the Iraq invasion is bound to attract a lot of media coverage, but scant recognition will go to the pundits who helped to make it all possible.

Continuing with long service to the Bush administration's agenda-setting for war, prominent media commentators were very busy in the weeks before the invasion. At the Washington Post, the op-ed page's fervor hit a new peak on Feb. 6, 2003, the day after Colin Powell's mendacious speech to the U.N. Security Council.

Post columnist Richard Cohen explained that Powell was utterly convincing. "The evidence he presented to the United Nations -- some of it circumstantial, some of it absolutely bone-chilling in its detail -- had to prove to anyone that Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them," Cohen wrote. "Only a fool -- or possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise."

And

One of the most gleeful commentators on network television was MSNBC's "Hardball" host Chris Matthews. "We're all neo-cons now," he crowed on April 9, 2003, hours after a Saddam Hussein statue tumbled in Baghdad.

Weeks later, Matthews was still at it, making categorical declarations: "We're proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who's physical, who's not a complicated guy like Clinton or even like Dukakis or Mondale, all those guys, McGovern. They want a guy who's president. Women like a guy who's president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It's simple."

Click here for the rest.

My first thought when looking back on the specifics of how virtually all mainstream pundits did as much as anybody to get the US public to support the invasion is something like "what were they thinking?" As though this was all some sort of aberration from some sort of normal state of media sanity. Of course, the steady drum beat in favor of the invasion was the normal state of media "sanity." It happened with Yugoslavia before Iraq, and Iraq before Yugoslavia, and Panama before Iraq, and Grenada before Panama, and Vietnam before Grenada--the US effort in Vietnam, I must admit, did lose the press' support, but only after it was utterly clear that the war was total folly, when public support was already waning; for the first few years, however, the media loved it.

The conventional wisdom, if anybody really even believes it anymore, is that the press is the "fourth branch" of government, serving the public by keeping them informed about what the other three branches are up to, and whether or not what they're doing is good for the country. The reality, however, is that the mainstream news media are owned and operated by enormous corporations, pillars of the US power establishment, and tend to reflect the views of that establishment. That is, the news is not at all a "fourth branch" governmental watchdog; it's real function is to perpetuate the political and economic elite's narrative about the way the world works--unsurprisingly, such a narrative always supports whatever the elite decides the country needs to do. The parade of pundits who "knew" that invading Iraq was a good idea is a perfect example, if only because the US military failure there is on such a monumental scale that only a fool, or possibly a Republican, would still believe these guys were right.

This is no conspiracy theory: Noam Chomsky and Edward Hermann studied the inner workings of the news industry in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent and found that business structure and practices, rather than a conscious desire to lie to the public, results in what amounts to pro-government and pro-corporate propaganda. The journalistic travesties that Solomon describes in his essay will happen again. We've all figured out that they were wrong about Iraq, but the career incentives and business practices that resulted in such a colossal mistake in punditry are still in place, and no change is on the horizon. Give it a few years for the public's distaste over Iraq to fade. The lemming-like idiocy of the pundit class will be in full force, and the US public will again take at face value their pro-war assertions.

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