Western media as cheerleaders for war

Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving it its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned.

Le Monde Diplomatiqe by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert, Translated by George Miller March 2023

After speeches by British prime minister Rishi Sunak and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at a joint press conference on 8 February at a military base in southwest England, it was time for questions. BBC Ukraine correspondent Natalia Goncharova greeted Zelensky with, ‘I would really like to hug you, but I’m not allowed.’ Ignoring his security service, Zelensky got down from the podium and embraced her to general applause. Then Goncharova asked Sunak, ‘You know that Ukrainian soldiers are dying every day. Don’t you think that that decision about warplanes is taking too long?’ In 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, the embedding of journalists with the US military had caused some in the profession to wince; 20 years on, in the Ukraine war, it’s become a journalism of the all-out embrace.

In France, too, the code of conduct set out by Hubert Beuve-Méry, founder of the daily Le Monde (and this publication), counselling ‘contact and distance’, has been set aside. At least when it comes to Volodymyr Zelensky: ‘In real life, he’s nice, quite cool, often funny and not at all grudging with his time,’ said Isabelle Lasserre, Le Figaro’s diplomatic correspondent and darling of the media, France Inter and news channel LCI in particular, since she adopted an uncompromising stance on Ukraine. ‘He has an incredible leadership style, a very intense charisma. He gets straight to the point, he always speaks with conviction,’ she told C politique on France 5 (12 February 2023).

Eulogies, hugs, gushing questions: the Western press’s veneration of this president in khaki fatigues suggests media in thrall to political leaders. But that impression is misleading. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and particularly since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, ‘journalism’ in the United States and also in Europe has increasingly behaved like an autonomous political force with its own ideological agenda.

Unlike traditional political parties, the media are simultaneously bringing to life and feeding rival tendencies that form two branches of the market for news: one on the hard right (Fox News, The Sun, CNews etc), the other liberal (the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, the Guardian, Le Monde etc). With these two audiences, both of which demand their own partisan reading of events, ‘journalism’ is careful not to alienate the faithful by ever making them doubt the bewitching story it serves up.

Media in combat mode have polarised the US around fictitious issues (‘Trump is the Kremlin’s puppet’, ‘Joe Biden’s election victory was rigged’). Since the invasion of Ukraine, they have involved the West in a war against Russia by suppressing any public debate on the risks of military escalation.

This undertaking has been aided by instincts inherited from the cold war: (much-replayed) archive footage of American schoolchildren learning how to protect themselves from a Soviet nuclear attack; a long-standing obsession with communist subversion in the US; and recurrent paranoia about the ‘enemy within’.

It was conceivable, though, that the demise of the Soviet Union and the election of a president who enjoyed strong support in the West, and was almost servile towards it — Boris Yeltsin — would call for more cordial relations between the two former protagonists in a confrontation that had become futile. The Russian people longed for this just as much as their leaders: in the early 1990s, when former Soviet citizens were asked about their favourite international partner, 74% of them picked the US (1).

To ensure US hegemony

This enthusiasm was not mutual. US politicians and media treated Russia as a defeated country, whose role was to not only bend to the rules of then-triumphant neoliberal capitalism, but also to remain strategically weak so that no hostile power could ever again threaten US hegemony. In 1992, only a few weeks after the end of the Soviet Union, the leaked draft Defense Planning Guidance (DPG), better known as the Wolfowitz Doctrine, a Pentagon document that the press published immediately, already had Russia in its sights. It stated that Washington would henceforth need to ‘refocus on precluding the emergence of any future global competitor’. The power of American ‘conviction’ would be all the more compelling because the Pentagon promised to back it up with a military capable of ‘preclud[ing] hostile competitors from challenging our critical interests’ (2). However, ‘the master of the Kremlin’ was then Boris Yeltsin, not Vladimir Putin.

But that barely mattered, because with rare exceptions — notably Saudi Arabia and Israel — the US and its media were almost equally inflexible towards and dismissive of their puppets (Yeltsin), their ‘allies’ (European states) and their enemies (China, Russia, Iran). The idea in the Wolfowitz Doctrine that the international order is ultimately guaranteed by the United States and that the US must be in a position to ‘act independently, as necessary’ when international support is ‘sluggish or inadequate’ was the consensus in the State Department, Washington think tanks and newsrooms. This imperial prism explains the unquestioning acceptance with which all American wars, including the most illegal ones, have been greeted by Fox News and the New York Times.

Journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count?

So Russians gradually became disenchanted with the West…………and NATO’s ongoing expansion, together with the experience of privatisation, finally convinced the Russian public that the US intended, if not to ‘humiliate’ Russia, then at least to subordinate it. ……….

In the US, the construction of the Russian enemy had proceeded in parallel as disagreements and tensions between the two former superpowers grew. ………………………………………….

‘Trump, Putin’s lackey’

Much inanity flowed from this belief. And the European media picked up most of it…………………………………………………….

The US mainstream media’s war on Trump illustrated the transformation of the news business into a political force………………………………………………….

……..journalist Jeff Gerth, who spent three decades on the New York Times, recently published a rolling investigation of the media’s Russiagate coverage in the respected Columbia Journalism Review (5). This mountain of fake news, whose main purveyors were the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, asserted that, without collusion between Trump and Putin, Clinton would have been sitting in the Oval Office. Unfortunately for them, after two years of investigation, special prosecutor Robert Mueller, a darling of the Democrats, burst this bubble and disproved any collusion (6). The Washington Post even had to correct several of its scoops and take down the most grotesque fabrications from its website.

The Columbia Journalism Review’s investigation can be read like a textbook of journalistic errors: elision of information that doesn’t corroborate a reporter’s thesis, a competitive race for scoops at the expense of rigour, passing off as ‘Russian disinformation’ stories that are true but embarrassing to the Democrats, the misleading presentation of statistics, misuse of anonymous sources (a thousandfold during the Trump era) vaguely described as ‘administration officials’ or ‘intelligence officials’.

Misleading use of statistics

Even when the agencies corrected or denied the information they had published, the press, acting as an autonomous political force, went on to make doctored ‘revelations’ to keep up the pressure on the White House. ……………………………………………….

As if to confirm this damning indictment of the press, the media outlets involved greeted Gerth’s investigation with stony silence, no doubt confident that their readers would rather have their convictions reaffirmed than be disabused. The result, Gerth explained, is that a profession that is highly influential in public life faces no penalty when it goes wrong……………………………….

Russiagate had turned questions about a ‘Russian threat’ into a domestic political weapon; the media emerged from it discredited. But the war in Ukraine saved them in a sense. It enabled them to recycle their obsession, this time based on real aggression and in a more favourable political context, since both US parties agree that their country should be arming Ukraine against Russia for as long as it takes.

The cult of ‘Western values’

A similar consensus exists in Europe. The 1999 Kosovo war had already seen Germany’s Greens commit themselves wholeheartedly to NATO; even today, the most fervent support for Kyiv is found among the liberal left and environmentalist groups that were once tempted by pacifism. . For these educated sections of society, defending Ukraine is a secular religion: journalists, high priests of the cult of ‘Western values’, preach the salvation of progressive souls at last mobilised against Moscow’s imperialism. Putin’s nationalist diatribes and reactionary traditionalism encourage this militancy, as does the presence of a Democrat in the White House.

The almost total absence of dissenting voices within the ‘progressive’ universe is also partly explained by the price exacted for straying from the bellicose line that is asserted with almost imperceptible shades of difference by LCI and France 2, Médiapart and Paris Match, L’Opinion and Politis, RTL and France Inter. Any reservation expressed about the general mobilisation for Ukraine sparks controversy or scandal,………………………………………………………………

This question gives rise to others. Why do the hosts of this morning show have guests who are almost unanimously in favour of increasing military aid to Kyiv: François Hollande, Bernard Guetta, Isabelle Lasserre, Pierre Servent etc? Why is it that from 8pm on LCI, under the leadership of Darius Rochebin (an admirer of Bernard-Henri Lévy), ‘debates’ on Ukraine assemble panels of Atlanticist journalists (a rotating cast of Pierre Servent, Isabelle Lasserre and Nicolas Tenzer), former NATO researchers (Samantha de Bendern), an exiled ‘former KGB agent’ and Ukrainian activists? Why do magazine covers look like leaflets distributed in Kyiv (‘Ukraine must win’, ran the headline in L’Express on 16 February 2023)? Why do reporters make do so often with simply illustrating a story devised in newsrooms in Paris and why, finally, do editorials only add a patina of respectability to this crusading tone?

It is as if everyone had agreed there is only one possible foreign policy, the policy being pursued by Ursula von der Leyen and the US State Department, and summed up by the German foreign minister on 25 January: ‘We’re waging a war against Russia’. The absence of pluralism is all the more noticeable because any leftwing opponents stay silent or invisible (8). …………….. journalists have gone back to basics. In the Ukraine war, Chinese, Indian, Latin American, Arab or African viewpoints don’t count

Carried away by the logic of one-upmanship that they impose on the world of politics, the media are co-producing Western countries’ progressive entry into the war against Russia. Everything about the way they treat the conflict suggests that such a confrontation is inevitable. This battle of opinion, which began a year ago, is now being waged on three fronts at once. First, the beatification of Zelensky, who has become the most famous influencer on the planet, to the extent that no book fair, film festival or American football match can claim success without his blessing via video link.

……………………………………………………………..The fear of offending Kyiv sometimes borders on self-censorship: when the New York Times ran a story online initially headlined ‘Ukraine corruption scandal stokes longstanding aid concerns in US’ (27 January 2023), it was immediately amended to read: ‘US officials overseeing aid say Ukrainian leaders are tackling corruption.’

The West’s sanctions campaign

The second front is the campaign to destroy Russia economically and militarily through sanctions and stepping up arms deliveries to Ukraine in the form of artillery, missiles, tanks and fighter planes. Not content with brushing aside the debate on the dangers of such a military escalation, the media equate any idea of negotiation with giving Moscow a full pardon (shades of Munich, 1938). As for economic retaliation, they are reluctant to admit their relative failure;…………………………………………………………..

The third front, which is probably most effective because least visible, is the avoidance of any historical perspective on the conflict and unfolding events. When France Inter’s geopolitics commentator Pierre Haski, who is also the president of Reporters Without Borders, rightly accused the Russians of ‘hitting cities and infrastructure’ (14 February 2023), he failed to point out that this is precisely what NATO did during the war in Kosovo. ………………………………………

The idea that other people might compare Russian imperialism to that of the US — wars without a UN mandate in Kosovo and Iraq, Washington’s denunciation of several disarmament agreements with Moscow, embargoes and boycotts against Cuba and Iran, extra-judicial executions by drone, the persecution of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning — is unwelcome in most newsrooms. As a result, these Western decisions are erased from memory or treated as exceptions, not part of a pattern.

………………………………………………. But the biased presentation of history does not just impoverish Westerners’ ability to judge the ongoing war. It also renders less comprehensible the reaction of other peoples who are aware of facts that their media are willing to tell them. For Arabs, Africans or Latin Americans, the assertion that Ukraine is ‘fighting for our values’ (11) can only reawaken memories of the Iraq war. At the time when the US was preparing to invade that country on a false prospectus, it received the support of eight European leaders — from the Czech Republic, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the UK, Hungary, Poland and Denmark — in the form of a joint letter published in the Wall Street Journal on 30 January 2003. It began, ‘The real bond between the United States and Europe is the values we share: democracy, individual freedom, human rights and the Rule of Law.’ The result: a country destroyed and hundreds of thousands of lives lost.

Does this mean that beyond Ukraine, other acts of aggression, massive destruction, violations of people’s right to self-determination have not aroused the same indignation, the same batteries of sanctions, the same abundance of military assistance to the besieged country? Silence in the ranks! https://mondediplo.com/2023/03/08media