Why the media rarely questions the US government’s wars in the Middle East
The controversy over how many people went to the inauguration was worth hours of attention, the death of children hardly gets a mention.
This is a photo of Nawar al-Awlaki, an eight year old girl that was killed in a raid ordered by Trump. A Navy Seal shot her in the neck, and she suffered for two hours before she died. Other civilians, including women and other children, died in the same attack.
On the same day that Trump signed the infamous immigration ban, he also signed an order to increase military spending, reevaluate the strategy against ISIS, and “rebuild” the military. He is following up on his campaign promise to “make our military strong again.” This is a choice that will further destabilize the Middle East, radicalize more Muslims, kill more civilians like little Nawar, and create more refugees.
This is nothing unique to Trump: killing civilians is a bi-partisan activity. Not only Donald Trump and George Bush, but also Bill Clinton and even Barack Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, have committed atrocities in the Middle East.
For instance, Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical plant in 1998 on the groundless premise that it was a chemical weapons plant. In 2016 Obama’s military dropped, on average, about 72 bombs a day. According to one estimate, his drone policy alone killed more than 1000 civilians, although the exact number is hard to estimate, and the Obama administration did not give an accurate figure. He authorized drone strikes on funerals and weddings, and with no discernible regard to civilian casualties.
While many Americans are aware of these drone strikes, most are probably unaware of their highly unethical nature. For that reason, a few select quotes on the matter are appropriate:
Between January 2012 and February 2013, U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets.
Numerous reports during the Obama Administration — including at least one by a former drone pilot — describe a pattern in which a missile fired from a U.S. drone hits an area, bystanders rush to the scene to help the wounded, and the drone, still overhead, kills the rescuers.
One of the missiles hit the car. The car was totally burned. Four other cars were also struck. When we stopped, we heard the drone fire. Blood was everywhere, and the people killed and injured were scattered everywhere. The area was full of blood, dead bodies and injured people. I was injured. I saw the missile hit the vehicle behind the car my son was driving. […] It was my own car. I went there to check on my son. I found his body thrown from the car. I turned him over, and he was dead. He was already dead.
Why does Nawar’s murder not warrant an outcry?
Most would agree that directly killing innocent Muslims is far worse than a ninety day immigration ban, but there is no outcry. Why is there no controversy over the murder of an innocent girl? Why does her murder, and the murders of the hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians that have died in the Middle East since 9/11, not warrant a mass outcry? Any clear minded person should see that theses actions are deeply immoral, and yet there is little outcry against them. Why is that?
Part of the reason is that these activities are largely unknown. As of March 25, 2017, googling “Nawar al-Awlaki” returns less than 30 thousand results. For reference, a search for “alternative facts” returns more than 250 million results. But why is it that so few people know?
The media simply doesn’t do much to inform the public about the activities of the US military. According to a YouGov poll from September of 2014, only a third of Americans knew that the US military had not conducted strikes in Syria (we have since then), a mere 16% knew of the strikes in Yemen. The US is currently in state of permanent, undeclared war in seven different Middle Eastern nations (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria and Yemen) and the American public doesn’t even know. The reason they don’t know is that the media barely reports it. The controversy over how many people were at the inauguration was worth hours of attention; the deaths of children is only worth a passing mention.
Obama’s most unethical policies, such as mass surveillance, the drone strikes, keeping Guantanamo open, were largely overlooked by media elites. And for the most part, these same unethical practices are now being overlooked when they are carried out by the Trump Administration. For instance, the headline of The New York Times article on the attack that killed Nawar doesn’t even mention civilian deaths, instead only mentioning the Navy Seal that died. A reference to civilian deaths is buried about three quarters of the way down in the body of the article.
As of March 25, 2017, doing a Google search for the phrase “alternative facts NYT” brings up no less than nine results from the Times with the infamous two words as the subject of the article, just on the first page alone. A search for “Nawar al-Awlaki NYT” returns only one relevant result from a side blog on the Times website (Women in the World), every other result is from other media sources, or they are about Nawar’s father and/or her older brother, who were killed in US drone strikes. The widespread ignorance of the activity of the US military in the Middle East is stunning, and should serve as a condemnation of the news media, which has clearly failed to give this topic adequate attention. Why don’t they talk about it?
One possible reason was elaborated by the leftist intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman in their 1988 book Manufacturing consent. In the book, Chomsky and Herman put forward the theory, that large media organizations are largely subservient to power and will generally go along with corporate interests, because they are owned by large multinational corporations. This should not be regarded as surprising or controversial.
Take NBC for example: From 2004 to 2011, NBC was owned by General Electric (GE), while GE was also making billions of dollars in profit from military contracts with the US Government. Another example is the Washington Post, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (who is also CEO and founder of Amazon.com) has a $600 Million contract with the CIA, $600 million being roughly twice the value of the Post. With that knowledge in mind, of course, GE, Bezos and others like them aren’t going to employ people that have an anti-war bent. They have hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of profit at stake. These are only two examples, and while the ways that business interests affects reporting vary from one media outlet to another, there are numerous other conflicts of interests like those.
Another point put forward by Chomsky and Herman is that the news media frequently relies on official government sources for information. While unquestioningly accepting sources from Russia or China on the activities of their military would be considered laughable, the media usually has no problem accepting the official line from the US or other NATO nations.
When they do send journalists over to see the situations for themselves, these journalists get “embedded” which means that they get attached to a military unit, and they only see what the military wants them to see. This essentially leads them to be parrots of official state propaganda. At no time was this more clear than in the lead up to the Iraq War in 2003, but it’s not new, in fact it‘s been the case for decades.
Chomsky and Herman argue further that the establishment media will indeed allow a variety of perspectives, but only within a narrow spectrum that is considered “acceptable.” They argue that people that go into journalism are socialized to accept certain positions, and to understand that there are some things you just don’t say. Journalists often move in the same circles, and are socialized into the political establishment, generally forming the same types of opinions. Anyone that does have a minority, dissenting opinion, learns to keep it to her/himself for the most part.
The Navy Seal’s name is much better known than that of the girl he killed.
The way the media has reacted to the raid in Yemen that killed Nawar is good evidence that Chomsky and Herman were right. Take a look at the reactions to Donald Trump’s speech to Congress on February 28th. The most striking and memorable portion of the speech was when the widow of the Navy Seal received a lengthy standing ovation. That Seal died in the same raid that killed Nawar. There were generally two reactions, some like Van Jones, praised the speech, saying that it was “unifying” and “presidential.” On the other hand, critics like Paul Weldman, writing for the Washington Post, said it was a cynical move, that Trump used Owen’s widow as a prop.
Largely absent was any discussion of the civilians that died in Yemen. Ryan Owens is universally regarded as a fallen hero. Googling his names returns 21 million results. Again, for reference, googling “Nawar al-Awlaki” returns only about 31 thousand results. In other words, Ryan Owens is mentioned seven hundred times more frequently on the internet than the name of a girl that he and his friends murdered. The names of the nine other children that died there are even more obscure. Nawar’s name is only known because of the novelty that her father and brother were killed by Obama.
So why does this matter? It matters because the media isn’t performing the role it’s supposed to in a free society. The traditional conception of the news media is one of a powerful watchdog that keeps our leaders in check. But when it comes to this issue in particular, they aren’t living up to that expectation. While many journalists are doing an admirable job reporting on the Trump administration, on foreign wars, journalists have often parroted the propaganda of the government. In the fifteen years since the US began the War on Terror by invading Afghanistan, more than 1 million people have died, either directly or indirectly in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and 10 millions have been displaced. With a death toll this high, this is an issue that clearly deserves more attention. But what we see can hardly be called a public debate. Very rarely does anyone even stop to question whether we should be engaged in endless wars, or whether dropping bombs on children in impoverished nations is a good way to stop terrorism.
