FAIR:
"In an earlier article (FAIR.org, 12/18/19) regarding the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19), I discussed how the Post’s exposé also exposed the Post as one of the primary vehicles US officials use to spread their lies, and why it’s impossible for corporate media outlets like the Post to raise more substantive questions about the deceptive nature of US foreign policy
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But those aren’t the only significant takeaways. The Afghanistan Papers should also be considered an excellent case study of contemporary colonial propaganda, and yet another example of corporate media criticizing US wars without opposing US imperialism.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of media coverage of the Vietnam War, in Manufacturing Consent, found that questions of the invasion’s 'tactics and costs'—to the US—dominated the debate, because the media absorbed the framework of government propaganda regarding the 'necessity' of military intervention, the 'righteousness of the American cause' and the US’s 'nobility of intent.' Decades later, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of corporate media is still a useful tool in understanding the Post’s Afghanistan Papers."
-->The US empire makes tactical mistakes, but never moral ones. Or so the mainstream media is constantly preaching to the American people.
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NPR:
"More than 100 Gold Star families are suing several major defense contractors, alleging they made illegal "protection payments" to the Taliban — thereby funding the Taliban's insurgency efforts that killed or wounded thousands of Americans in Afghanistan. ...
'Defendants supported the Taliban for a simple reason: Defendants were all large Western companies with lucrative businesses in post-9/11 Afghanistan, and they all paid the Taliban to refrain from attacking their business interests," the complaint says. "Those protection payments aided and abetted terrorism by directly funding an al-Qaeda-backed Taliban insurgency that killed and injured thousands of Americans.' "
-->Why wouldn't the NYT cover this story? Perhaps it's because our "newspaper of record" doesn't want to expose the criminality of our country's neoliberal wars for profit.
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Common Dreams:
"'Cutting Social Security Is Murder': Flood of Public Outrage Greets Trump Proposal to Slash Benefits for Hundreds of Thousands. ...
Those are just a few of the more than 1,700 official comments members of the U.S. public have left on President Donald Trump's proposed Social Security rule change, which could strip lifesaving disability benefits from hundreds of thousands of people.
The proposal received hardly any media attention when it was first published in the Federal Register in November. But recent reporting on the proposed rule change, as well as outrage from progressive Social Security advocates, sparked a flood of public condemnation and calls for the Trump administration to reverse course."
-->Where is the NYT when it comes to reporting this attack on Social Security disability benefits? Why in bed with its Wall Street buddies! It didn't report this story.
