US Media Remains In Thrall To Bush Regime

The lessons of Iraq WMDs - and all the lies since then - have been ignored.

Two days ago E&P's Greg Mitchell wrote Few Editorials Find Fault with the Bombing of Beirut:

Amazingly, criticism of the extent of Israel's bombing -- and its policy of collective punishment -- has actually decreased as the carnage has mounted.

The editorial response is all the more scandalous because this is not some distant conflict where America is merely a third party. The U.S. is Israel’s prime (sometimes virtually its only) major ally, and the funder or producer of much of the armaments landing on Lebanon – though you’d never know of this special link from reading most of these editorials.

Even if readers here don’t fully appreciate it, the U.S. and Israel are indivisible in the eyes of many if not most in that region. Every bomb that kills civilians in Lebanon might just as well have emerged from our war planes or artillery, in their eyes...

Many editorials carry outright misinformation; others act as if the history of this conflict can be measured in weeks, not decades. And few op-ed columnists have condemned the over-the-top Israeli behavior...

Several leading newspapers that did express disapproval of the Israeli air war late last week, when it was still fairly minimal, then published editorials a few days later with hardly any mention of the attacks on Beirut – even though those shellings had increased dramatically. One had to wonder what sort of complaints or second thoughts the first editorials produced to slacken those spines.

While news pages in many newspapers have created a more balanced record, they have generally offered the image of equivalency of destruction in Lebanon and Israel which simply does not exist.

See Mitchells' full report for specific examples of one-sided US reporting.

Today Mitchell writes that nothing is changing:

As the current explosion of violence in the Middle East continues toward its tenth day, some U.S. newspapers on their editorial pages are now calling for a new diplomatic push — but almost none of them have condemned the Israeli attack on civilian areas and the infrastructure of Lebanon, which the country’s chief of state said Wednesday is “tearing the country to shreds.” At least 300 have died in Lebanon and the attacks have created over half a million refugees, roughly one in eight residents of the country.

An E&P survey of editorials in dozens of papers around the country during the past three days found almost none of them raising objections to the extent of the Israeli bombardment so far, though some expressed fears that it might go on too long.

The US media has been in thrall to their rogue government's morally bankrupt policies for a very long time indeed.

PS: This point from Mitchell deserves more attention:

The word “rockets” makes Hezbollah's terror weapon of choice seem very space age, but they are in fact crude, unguided and with limited range – nothing like the U.S. prime grade weapons on the Israeli side. The vast majority of them land in the water or an empty field or explode in the air.

Of course, Hezbollah did hit an Israeli warship with a single tele-guided missile (much to the Israelis' shock), but there is nothing "symetrical" about their arsenal in comparison with the US-made Israeli weaponry.