Friday, May 4, 2012

Oh, Gee; I Missed It

The debut of Julian Assange’s television show on Kremlin-created RT a couple weeks ago produced some debate over state-controlled propaganda. This is why I found all the hand-wringing in the American media over his show to be so disingenuous. If an American media figure wants to rail about state-subservient media propaganda, they don’t need to look to all the way to Moscow to find it.

[...]

[L]ast night’s one-hour melodramatic extravaganza hosted by NBC News anchor Brian Williams [the bin Laden show ] — “Inside the Situation Room” — was hagiography in its purest, most propagandistic, and most subservient form.

[...]

In essence, the entire show was devoted to uncritical veneration of our national political and military leaders. It was as vapid as it was propagandistic; as Josh Gerstein wrote: “Much of the program was devoted to the thoughts and feelings of the senior officials involved and to such details as Biden clutching his Rosary ring as the raid unfolded and the sourcing of the food consumed by officials on that fateful day.” We got to hear about how the President’s daughters reacted upon hearing of bin Laden’s death, and how very difficult it was for him to attend the White House Correspondents’ dinner that evening.

[...]

There was no dissent, no critical scrutiny of claims, no raising of difficult questions, no facts revealed.

[...]

Whatever one’s position is on the killing of Osama bin Laden — and I’ve always argued that there is a range of reasonable views — there are many journalistically important questions and significant disparities that still need serious examination (with all due respect (i.e., none) to John Kerry’s dictate that we all “shut up and move on”).

[...]

[D]ue to multiple conflicting White House claims [there are] numerous unanswered questions about what really happened on the raid.

There’s also the question of why Obama aides like John Brennan spouted outright falsehoods to the world on key questions (such as whether bin Laden was armed or used his wife as a “human shield” and whether there was a “shootout” in the house). There are conflicting claims about whether a full video recording of the raid exists. There’s the contradictory administration behavior of resisting lawsuits seeking any disclosure about the raid on secrecy grounds while simultaneously boasting publicly about the details of the raid for political gain. And there’s the question of whether previous American statements — and the principles of Nuremberg — would have made it better (or even legally necessary) to apprehend bin Laden for trial; whether doing so was reasonably possible; and whether that was permitted by the mission plan.

  Glenn Greenwald
Yo, Glen. Who cares? We killed that sonofabitch bin Laden. He-Man Obama is a great warrior chief. Now shut up and move on.

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