- Politicians may be forgiven for distorting their past actions. Governments may also be excused for promoting whatever narrative they believe best suits them. Journalism, however, is supposed to remain apart from the power elite and its inbred mendacity. In this crisis it has failed miserably.
Any time anyone uses the term "The Media", red flags should wave, klaxons should sound, and Thor's hammer should come down and boop the person on the head. The Media is not a thing. It's like saying The Rivers, or The Mountains, or The Russians. "The Media" is a useless term because it is so over-broad as to be meaningless. Serious, interesting, and insightful articles have been written in serious old school media, in modern media darlings, and even on comedy sites. The work is out there, for those who seek it. Syria is a fucking mess, for many, many reasons. A 500, 1000, 1500, or 5000 word article can NEVER delve far enough, because there is just too much of a mess to parse out easily. A Journalist needs to figure out how to tell a story in the space they have available, that is going to be meaningful and illustrative of the wider issues being faced in a complex situation. It is, necessarily, reductionist. Calling out specific journalists for lazy writing is useful. Blaming a target as broad and ill-defined as "The Media" is useless and meaningless. (No offense intended to you rrrrr. Seriously. I feel Hubski is a place for superior quality discourse and conversation, and we can do better than running with a cheap, sensationalist title of an OpEd piece. My post is a call for intellectual integrity for all Hubskis... not a specific attack on you.)
I disagree. You act as if there isn't a media class, which forms a consensus opinion, whose articles feed on each other, which has its detractors and outliers but remains a largely homogeneous organ of information. The term "Fourth Estate" dates to 1787 and if it was all that disorganized there wouldn't be entire categories of professions related to managing and interacting with it. The Media is a thing. All rivers flow downhill. All mountains rise above the plains. The Russians largely read Cyrillic. Certainly there are outliers and certainly there is dissent, but by definition dissent is that which disagrees with the consensus opinion. Yes, "the work is out there for those who seek it." But for those who don't seek it, the narrative is oversimplified. The author in question, by the way, is worth listening to.
Eeehhhh... at a media business level, I agree with you. The media corporations are interlinked and do have an agenda, and do suck off one another. However, I have worked in, and still have many friends who are journalists both in the US and abroad, who write for reputable organizations (The Independent, The Economist, Financial Times, Le Monde, etc), and the on-the-ground world of active journalism is not homogenous enough, nor organized enough, for such sweeping generalizations to be true. I know how these guys and gals find their stories. I know how they write them. I know how they pitch the stories to their editors. And I know what their drafts look like before the editors and title-writers get ahold of them. We used to all sit in one room together and I'd listen to the gory details of how the industry works from the journalist/correspondent level. There is no "plan" or "agenda" at that level. These guys, on the ground, in war zones, are simply walking around, sticking their noses in, and writing about what they see. Any "contact" or "expert" they are given to speak to by their editor is taken with an enormous block of salt, because they do not know that person's motivations, connections, agenda, etc. As for leeching off each other, that can also be an indication of opportunity. You see refugees coming down the road. You talk to them. They say they are coming from Port Blahblah because armed gangs in military garb are breaking into houses and causing mayhem. So you try to get transport to Port Blahblah. But you are stopped at a military roadblock. So you try to get around it via different routes. But you can't get there. Finally, after a week, a fixer says he can get you in there. So you grab the opportunity and go. There are two other journalists with you. You get in to Port Blahblah, write a story about what you find there, and send it back to your editor. The story breaks in two different news outlets at once. All the other outlets grab the basic details of your story, and write their own spin on it, because Port Blahblah is the story of the day, and they can't be behind the curve. But... is any of this orchestrated? Or planned? Simply, no. Does Fox News refer to the people in Port Blahblah as "terrorists", and MSNBC refer to them as "insurgents", and others refer to them as "elements in opposition to Commander Dingleberry's regime"? Yes. Because they put their narrative spin on the story to make it fit the agenda of the people who sign their checks. But the journalists? Shit. By then they are at a bar in Lower Buttholesville, drinking like fish, bitching about the sensationalist title the editor put on their story, and waiting for their taxi driver's cousin to get back to them about whether the road to Upper Buttholesville is open or not. In short, find reliable writers. Follow them wherever they post from, no matter which media outlet is putting out their stories. The Media is not a single coherent and predictable thing. It's an ecosystem.
I think you're confusing my description of a "consensus opinion" with a "plan" or "agenda." Sure, there's orchestration and an attempt at manipulation with varying degrees of success (my favorite books on the subject are The Hunting of the President and The Mighty Wurlitzer). But the manipulation is just one factor in shaping the broad scatterplot of narrative that may be wide, may be narrow, may be right, may be wrong, but is most assuredly centered around a commonality. The Bush administration worked real hard to sell the idea of WMDs in Iraq. All sorts of talented journalists worked real hard to dispel the idea of WMDs in Iraq. There was no shortage of opinions on either side, and even with Colin Powell standing up in Congress the logic of the narrative tended to support "no WMDs." But the consensus opinion became "WMDs in Iraq" because that's the way the herd went. Were there cowboys? Sure. Were there rogue doggies? Sure. But the bulk of the information available was "WMDs in Iraq." So no. Not orchestrated. not planned. But at the end of the day, there are more people saying one thing than saying the other thing, and a lot of that is because nobody cares quite so much about what journalists think and say than other journalists. If you're wrong when everyone else is wrong you walk it off. If you're right while everyone else is wrong you die. So we're back to this: yeah, if you set an RSS feed to ping you whenever Greg Palast says stuff, you'll get a Palastful feed of news. But if you open a paper, you'll see something else entirely different. And it doesn't really matter which paper, either. THAT is a consensus opinion.In short, find reliable writers. Follow them wherever they post from, no matter which media outlet is putting out their stories.
I have suspected that Syria is supposed to be Iran's quagmire. The US will continue to trickle in resources as long as it continues to bleed Iran and focus ISIS. Grinding Assad down is an added bonus and he was really an Iranian catspaw any way. There is no desire to see a conclusion to the fighting, there is no victory, just a useful open wound with terrible consequences for the people living there and unknowable outcomes that will stretch out for decades.
Iran doesn't fight ground wars, and hasn't since the Sasanian Empire. After 200 years of border skirmishes with the Byzantines, Constantinople crushed them at Nineveh, which sparked a civil war, which left them ripe for invasion by the Arab Caliphate in 644 AD. That's how far back you have to go to find Persians fighting wars of aggression. Throughout the rule of Islam the Persians were known for being scheming, cosmopolitan fops that were great for court intellectuals and poets, awesome as economic advisors and courtiers, but utterly devoid of a warrior class. Anyone who thinks Iran is going to get sucked down in a land war forgets that the Iran-Iraq war was Iraq invading Iran. It was also about Sunnis worried that the Shia would get uppity now that they were in power. The narrative on Syria is "wrong" because it's complex and depressing, not because US journalists have an agenda. They have a weakness: Americans want to know who to root for. They want to know the good guys and the bad guys. Unfortunately, there are at least SIX players in Syria: - Assad. Historically, a bad guy. Terrorized and suppressed minorities, secret police, torture, the whole nine yards. Also an Alawite muslim, leader of a tiny tribal faction that has controlled Syria since Sykes-Picot through violence and terror. However, also aligned with the Christians, who were actually the bad guys in the Lebanese civil war (If you're aligned with Israel). Also an optometrist from London who likes Right Said Fred. - Kurds. Historically, a good guy. However, planting bombs in Turkey and guilty of torture and violence against Alawites and Sunni. If you're aligned with Turkey, Kurds are bad guys. If you're aligned with Iran, Kurds are bad guys. So if you're aligned with Turkey, you're aligned with Iran against Kurds. - ISIS. Historically, Baathists, the ruling Sunni party in Iraq. Also, ISIS. If you're aligned with the free world, you're against ISIS. If you were aligned with the Republican Party, you were 100% for the Baathists up until 1991. - Russia. Historically, we're never aligned with Russia. However, they're bombing ISIS. However, they're bombing it for Assad. - Turkey. Historically, we've always aligned with Turkey. They let us put bases there. Shit, it was our nukes in Turkey that prompted the Cuban Missile Crisis - Soviet nukes in Cuba were a counterresponse, not a provocation and the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis was actually the United States agreeing to dismantle bases in Turkey. And, in fact, they're bombing ISIS. Except they aren't, they're bombing Kurds and claiming they're bombing ISIS. Also, they're shooting down Russians. - Iran. Historically, we've always been aligned with Iran, except when we overthrew Mossadegh. Then we were always aligned with Iran, except when the Shah fell (fun fact: Reza Shah Pahlevi received even more foreign military aid from the US than Saudi Arabia). Then we were always aligned against Iran, because Iran's proxies are the only legitimate opposition to the US clandestine service (actually managing to kidnap and murder the CIA chief of South Asia, effectively blinding US intelligence in the region for a generation). Except we're friends now, unless you're Republican, or aligned with the Saudis (who hate Iran) or Israel (who hates Iran) or oil interests (who hate Iran). And here it gets even more complicated: Iran is propping up Assad because ISIS actually hates Shia more than they hate the Great Satan America. Shia are the "near enemy" while us kafirs are the "far enemy." Twelver Shia have been fighting an existential battle against genocide by Sunni since the 5th Imam. And they're aligned with Russia. Against ISIS. Whose methodology and philosophy is propped up by Wahabism, the state religion of Saudi Arabia, our greatest ally in the Middle East. So. Pick a good guy, and pick a bad guy, and explain it to the American public in a consistent 250-500-word narrative. Really, the instinct is to invade and liberate, which we didn't even do at the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. So what we're left with is that there's a destabilized region in the cradle of civilization full of ethnic groups that want to kill each other, and they were kept from doing so for 400 years by the Ottomans and then another 90 years by Western imperialism but now that we've knocked a hole in the Jenga pile by destroying Iraq as a country, that shit is going the way of the Balkans only on a much larger, much wider, much more vindictive scale. I love me some Stephen Kinzer. I've read three of his books. Two of them are on the Red Pill Reading List. But the media isn't misleading the public on Syria out of any sort of nefarious laziness. It's that the more you look at Syria, the more everyone is a bad guy and the less there is to be done about it and that's the sort of thing that makes people stop reading. Even this ghastly summary is factually wrong in several places, grossly oversimplified and subject to my biases. So at the end of the day, we're being misled because there's no real upside to being educated. Truly comprehending Syria is truly comprehending politics, religion, genocide, history and the ugly side of human nature and it just ain't gonna play next to Kanye West. Ever.