I've had a long week, there's a fucking hurricane coming, and half the country has gone nuts. I don't feel creative enough to post anything interesting of my own, so check out Ryan Cooper. The corporate news media that paid no attention to Afghanistan whatever for the past 10 years is suddenly shoulder to shoulder trashing Joe Biden for getting out. Why is this?
He offers several reasons. One is that covering the previous administration with even a sliver of honesty required telling people every day that the president was an insane idiot. They weren't actually willing to do that but they were forced to say something at least mildly critical pretty often. So they need a chance to trash the new president to prove that they're "balanced." There's also a kind of instinctive troop worship in their DNA and the implication that the past 20 years were a failure of American arms is just too hard to swallow. But there is also outright corruption:
Finally, there is the fact that wars are extremely profitable for a small group of elites with deep connections to the press. Much of the tens of billions of dollars in occupation money was gobbled up by corrupt defense contractors who turned in shoddy work or straight-up fleeced the taxpayer. These contractors have hired dozens of former military officers who then go on television without disclosing that they have a direct financial interest in the conflicts they invariably advocate prolonging. In 2008, David Barstow at The New York Times found dozens of instances of this; Laura Bassett at HuffPost found the same thing in 2010; the Public Accountability Initiative found the same thing again in 2013; Lee Fang at The Nation found the same thing again in 2014; Paul Farhi at The Washington Post found the same thing again in 2020; and The Intercept found the same thing yet again over the last few days. Troop worship means that corrupt former generals get to ignore fundamental journalistic ethics.
Yep. But I predict that once this blows over, it won't cost Biden 1 point in the polls. In fact it should help him.
1 comment:
None of this gets to it. Not at all.
We have a foreign policy/war machine convinced that we should occupy everywhere, forever. That was open to public question until Trump openly stated we should not do so (actions aside) at which point the primary press trashed him for even suggesting such an outrageous thing. Now they are committed to universal occupation and are forced to denounce and reject a democrat for admitting, as did Trump, that this is all a waste.
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