U.S. Mainstream Media Fails to Challenge Trump Administration’s Push Toward War with Iran
- U.S. Mainstream Media Fails to Challenge Trump Administration’s Push Toward War with Iran
by James North, https://mondoweiss.net/
The risky U.S. moves to provoke a war with Iran continue, and the American mainstream media is still transmitting the Trump administration’s views almost without challenge:
–
* The New York Times has run lengthy accounts about the alleged Iranian attack on oil tankers, but the paper buried the skepticism about the U.S. version lower in its articles.
–
* A respected Israeli expert, writing in Haaretz, calmly explained why “Iran is the immediate, but unlikely suspect” in the attacks. Nothing like his point of view has gotten prominent play in America.
–
* The most influential foreign affairs columnist in the world, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, is still missing in action, a good 6 weeks after the Trump administration launched its latest effort to provoke Iran.
–
* None of the mainstream coverage explains that Israel is a big factor instigating the rising American hostility to Iran.
–
The lead front-page New York Times report on Saturday is one sign of the bias. Paragraph after paragraph reported the U.S. version of the June 13 attack on 2 oil tankers, citing “officials,” “President Trump,” “a senior official,” and “a grainy black-and-white American military video.” Only when readers got to paragraphs 8 and 9 did we learn:
–
–“. . . others said the (video) footage fell short of proving Iran’s culpability”
— and that the Japanese owner of one of the tankers questioned that his ship had even been attacked by mines, “saying it had been struck by a flying object.”
–
The Israeli reporter, Zvi Bar’el, used a different approach to raise doubts about the U.S. version of the attacks. Bar’el, a longstanding expert on the Mideast, argued that such a strike “goes against Iran’s policy, which seeks to neutralize any pretext for a military clash in the Gulf.”
–
read more.
end