who should bomb iran first?
You would not know it from this media performance, but in fact there is a second conceivable question: Is the corporate media biased in favour of the state-corporate establishment of which it is a part? But this is one of the great mainstream taboos and is essentially never discussed. Remarkably, then, it turns out that the perennial media focus on the claim that the media is “left-leaning” is itself symptomatic of the reality that the media is anything but!
(...) Last year, John Pilger presented a more sobering picture to an audience at Columbia University: “If we journalists are ever to reclaim the honour of our craft, we need to understand, at least, the historic task that great power assigns us. This is to ‘soften-up‘ the public for rapacious attack on countries that are no threat to us.”
(...) At the top of the emailed version of the June 21 edition of the New York Times, this “advertisement” appeared in large red letters: “Should We Bomb Iran? “Vote in This Urgent Poll”
(...) In the 1,000-word article that followed, the term “al Qaeda” was used eight times. This was a transparent attempt to equate Iraqi insurgents with the terrorists responsible for the September 11 attacks, much as Bush attempted to associate Saddam Hussein with al Qaeda in the minds of the American public.