Why Can't the Corporate Media Just Tell the Truth About Iraq & Afghanistan?

By Rory O'Connor, MediaChannel.org. Posted November 4, 2009.

When it comes to the media and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – as in many things – John Lennon put it best: I’m sick and tired of hearing things/From uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics/All I want is the truth/Just gimme some truth.”

To my surprise, I finally got some truth about the war in Iraq from the New York Times this week.

Given the abysmal cheerleading that has largely marked mainstream media coverage of that misbegotten adventure since its inception – and the Paper of Record has certainly been no exception -- it was even more surprising that the truth came from Alissa J. Rubin, a leading member of what NBC News’ chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel recently dubbed “the Baghdad class of 2003.”

The occasion should be duly noted and even lauded.

Writing in this Sunday’s Week in Review section, Rubin began by noting, “I came to Iraq three days after Saddam Hussein fled Baghdad. It was April 12, 2003. At the time, Iraqis bristled when asked if they were Sunni, Shiite or Kurd. It made no difference, they said, they were brothers. And, in the heady aftermath of the war, for a short while it almost seemed true.”

It almost seemed true -- but it wasn’t quite, not really…

It almost seemed true -- but only to those seemingly true believers, who saw only what they wanted to see… Count among them, of course, George Bush, Dick Cheney and their many minions – but count also the Times, its editors and correspondents like Rubin, along with most of the rest of the mainstream media – those who should have known better and acted differently, but who instead quickly fell into line, gullibly accepting the government’s lies and parroting its compulsory, embedded phony patriotism, to their ever-lasting shame and America’s and Iraq’s ever-lasting sorrow and pain.

Now here’s some truth: “I should have been the canary in the coal mine,” Alissa Rubin wrote this week in the New York Times. “But like so many others around me, I did not want to believe what I saw.”

Now that the Baghdad class of 2003 has suddenly and alarmingly morphed into “the Kabul class of 2009” – yes, Rubin’s covering the new/old war in Afghanistan now – here’s hoping, as I put it in my last post, “We don’t get schooled again.”

Perhaps there is a scintilla of hope. After all, Rubin is finally at least asking the right questions: “What are the lessons of Iraq that I carry with me?” And she is warning us in advance this time, “For outsiders, there is a familiar struggle to see the place as it truly is, not as we might wish it would be.”

And what do we outsiders wish to believe in Iraq and Afghanistan? To Rubin, that much at least is clear:

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Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is the author of "Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio" (AlterNet Books, 2008). O'Connor also writes the Media Is A Plural blog.

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