In 2003, the media watchdog group FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, published a report titled “In Iraq Crisis, Networks Are Megaphones for Official Views.” The report found, in the weeks leading up to the invasion, the nation’s four top nightly news programs interviewed 267 current or former government or military officials; just one of them expressed skepticism or opposition to the war.
In a moment, we’ll be joined by the longtime media critic Norman Solomon. But first let’s turn to an excerpt of the documentary War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, produced by the Media Education Foundation, based on Norm Solomon’s book of the same name.
In the mass media, being pro-war is portrayed as objective; being antiwar is portrayed as being biased. And very much so, the same media outlets, and often the same people, who lied, teamed up with the U.S. government to convey complete distortions to stampede the United States into war on Iraq two decades ago, these are the same media outlets that are, in the last few days, telling us what it all means.
And it reminds us, I think, of something that George Orwell said. He said those who control the past control the future; those who control the present control the past. He was alluding to the
— source democracynow.org | Mar 21, 2023