In the aftermath of the United States’ latest war crime — the assassination-by-drone strike in Baghdad of Qassem Soleimani, head of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — Fox News decided to educate its audience on the proper takeaway from the episode.
The upshot was not, of course, that the illegal killing was kind of a big deal or that the person who authorized it — Donald Trump — had potentially set the stage for calamity and bloodshed of untold proportions. Rather, the crucial point to focus on was the “polarized reaction by American news outlets.”
Trotted out to confirm the severity of the situation was one William A. Jacobson of Cornell Law School, who bemoaned the sad state of the “liberal media”: “Take any topic and they portray Trump as irresponsible and ignorant. This time those portrayals are on steroids, with Trump being portrayed as a warmonger surrounded by sycophants isolated from reality.”
Well, yeah.
In reality, the oft-invoked allegation of “polarization” in the media and the broader political establishment hardly holds water; it’s like arguing that 21 degrees Fahrenheit and 22 degrees Fahrenheit are polar opposites. Just recall, for example, that time Trump fired cruise missiles at Syria and the liberal media thought it was pretty much the most exciting thing to have ever happened.
A glance at media coverage of the Soleimani assassination also fails to produce much evidence of a fanatical anti-Trump campaign. The lead paragraph of a New York Times article about the “Master of Iran’s Intrigue” is devoted to establishing how Soleimani was “behind hundreds of American deaths in Iraq and waves of militia attacks against Israel.” The second paragraph reiterates that he was a “powerful and shadowy . . . spymaster at the head of Iran’s security machinery.”
In other words: he deserved it. And never mind that the United States has been behind countless thousands of Iraqi deaths in Iraq or that — as the article later reveals — the “waves of militia attacks” took place during the brutal twenty-two-year military occupation of south Lebanon by Israel, which also boasts the distinction of having slaughtered tens of thousands of people in that country.
When you’re not actually in the business of speaking truth to power, some things are better left unsaid. READ MORE AT JACOBIN.