In a major development that must be frustrating to an establishment trying to sell their policies to an increasingly skeptical public, the rising popularity of independent media has made it impossible to create broad consensus for corporate-compliant narratives, and to casually denigrate, or even censor, those who disagree.
It’s been a long road.
In terms of foreign policymakers being able to control the message, the first Gulf War in 1991 was a high-water mark in retrospect. At that point, Americans were getting their national news almost exclusively from corporate sources and especially the evening news, with the young CNN (launched in 1980 the only cable alternative) adding to network coverage. With such a narrow band of options, narratives could be foisted upon the American public by the Washington establishment and their compatriots in the media, who largely shared the same social circles, backgrounds,and career interests.
Such fanciful and self-serving narratives (babies stolen from incubators and “liberating” Kuwait, the Iraqis, and especially the Kurds from the brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein) were accepted by the public pretty much without question. There was an anti-war movement in those days, but it was disorganized, and considered by the mainstream to be vaguely unpatriotic. There was a heavy Pentagon hand, if not outright censorship in the coverage of the war, a deliberate reaction to the independent and more impactful reporting of the Vietnam War a decade before.
In the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003, TV host Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for hosting antiwar voices and, according to an internal NBC memo at the time, giving the network “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” This from a network that was itself owned by a defense contractor, General Electric, which profited hugely from the invasion of Iraq.
The media fired and marginalized its dissenting voices, including Ashleigh Banfield, a rising star who said she was “banished’ by NBC after making comments in 2003 about how Americans weren’t getting the full picture of the Iraq War. She criticized the network embeds, which ensured only compliant reporters would be allowed into the war zone. The corporate media became handmaidens of the U.S. military and the powerbrokers in Washington, allowing the war there and in Afghanistan to continue for decades, without a serious questioning of the logic.
Then something unexpected happened: public trust in media plummeted from approximately 72% in 1976, to 28% today. Part of this public mistrust may have resulted from the fact that so many of the media narratives of our century, devised in concert with the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, have turned out to be wildly wrong (for example, that the Iraq invasion would bring democracy and freedom to the Middle East, and would end a threatening WMD program; that the NATO bombing of Libya was necessary to prevent a “rape army” fueled by Viagra and methamphetamines, and would bring, again, a democracy to Libya).
But the other obvious reason for the collapse in public trust in corporate media and, by extension, for policymakers’ ability to sell a chosen narrative, is the rise of independent media in the years during and following the wars. The general acceptance of blogs and social media as a source of information coincidentally took off around 2007 — at the very moment that Washington and the corporate media’s lies and misdirections were breaking down and destroying American faith in their institutions writ large.
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