The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned -- the media's insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington -- insisting for the longest time that the war must go on.

In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were actively demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers -- including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.

A similar pattern took shape during Washington's protracted war in Iraq. Year after year, the editorial positions of major dailies have been much more supportive than the American public of the U.S. war effort.

In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing that "one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18 months." But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.

Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush Administration's foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by the magazine's editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: "When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?"

Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots is just as wide. Top policymakers for what has become Obama's Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation's mighty newspapers -- at the same time that opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.

While a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting, the savants who determine big media's editorial positions insist on staying the course.

Recycled from the repetition-compulsion department, a spate of new hand-wringing editorials has bemoaned the shortcomings of Washington's allied leader in the occupied country. Of course, the edifying pitch includes the assertion that the Afghan government and its armed forces must get their act together. (Good help is hard to find.)

"President Obama has rightfully defined success in Afghanistan as essential to America's struggle against Al Qaeda," the New York Times editorialized on Aug. 21. Yet Al Qaeda, according to expert assessments, is scarcely present in Afghanistan any more. There are dozens of countries where that terrorist group or other ones could be said to have a much larger presence. Does that mean the U.S. government should be prepared to wage war in all of those countries?

Paragraph after paragraph of the editorial proclaimed what must be done to win the war. It was all boilerplate stuff of the sort that has littered the editorial pages of countless newspapers for many years during one protracted war after another -- in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

When congressional leaders and top administration officials read such editorials, they can take comfort in finding reaffirmed support for their insistence on funding more and more war. If only public opinion would cooperate, there'd be no political problem.

But, increasingly, public opinion is not cooperating. While the media establishment and the political establishment appear to belong to the same pro-war affinity group, the public is shifting to the other side of a widening credibility gap.

In a word, the problem -- and the threat for the press and the state -- can be summed up as democracy.

Now, one of the pivotal questions is what "liberal" and "progressive" online organizations will do in the coming months. Many are led by people who privately understand that Obama's war escalation is on track for cascading catastrophes. But they do not want to antagonize the leading Democrats in Washington, who contend that more war in Afghanistan is the only viable political course. Will that undue deference to the Obama Administration continue, despite the growing evidence of disaster and the sinking poll numbers for the war?

A cautionary note for those who assume that the impacts of public opinion will put a brake on the accelerating U.S. war in Afghanistan: That assumption is based on a misunderstanding of how the USA's warfare state really functions.

Under the headline "Someone Tell the President the War Is Over," the New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote: "A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his own allies) won't stay with him." That was way back in August 2005.

(The next day, I wrote a piece headlined "Someone Tell Frank Rich the War Is Not Over.")

The war on Vietnam persisted for several horrific years after the polls were showing that most Americans disapproved. The momentum of a large-scale and protracted U.S. war of military occupation is massive and cataclysmic after the engine has really been gunned.

That's one of the most chilling parallels between the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan. The news media are part of the deadly process. So are the politicians who remain hitched to some expedient calculus. And so are we, to the extent that we go along with the conventional wisdom of the warfare state.

Comments

[morgan1]

You are a smart man, even brilliant at times and I have read your books and follow your columns; however, you miss the big picture here. The media has been bought by the Far Right, the corporations, the Pentagon--The entire MIC since the debacle with Nixon and student protests. There is a direct disconnect between what the public wants and expects versus what the WH/Federal Govt/Politicians are willing to give back. We elect our officials believing their b.s. to do what is right, what we want and why we elect them. Once they are in, and that applies to the President, they no longer care what we want, nor do they listen until it is time for elections once more. That is the real problem. They did away with the draft to stop the public from bitching and to be certain another uprising could not occur. They got smarter and we were dumbed down. It's that simple.

[WorkingClass]

Exactly. The problem is corporate rule. The corporate media are part of the problem.

[indymaggie]

I hev given up on the media totally. They don't report anymore and forget investigative reporting. That is gone completely. They are all partisan. Thank god for the bloggers.

[A Richards]

Who are we fighting again? Whom if Afghanistan is threatening the U.S. with actual harm?

[jcephrie]

I think the media might be farther behind in this war due to the climate of Afghanistan. From what I've heard, much, if not all, of the actual fighting stops in the harsh winter months. This reprieve from incoming dead may skew the editorialists view of the situation. Further more, like Iraq, the largest presence of Americans in Afghanistan is not soldiers, but contractors. When we talk about our military presence we talk about the ~60,000 troops, but not the contractors who are their to support them. Last I heard it was something like 1:3 or 1:4 troops to contractors. This likely further obscures the conflict from the editorialists perspective.

This may lead to the political establish deciding we need to pull out of Afghanistan before the media does. Which makes me wonder, could the media's slowness actually push them to continue a war they know they can't win?