The Media as watchdogs of American hegemony

A former United States diplomat, the  Senate staffer and a specialist in international relations, government affairs, and legislative politics James George Jatras gives his analysis of  American Media as a mean of government policy's propaganda and explain the agressive tone of the modern mainstream journalism in covering military conflicts

My recently released study, “How American Media Serves as a Transmission Belt for Wars of Choice,” examines three related phenomena:

1) The behavior of the mainstream media in the US as a propaganda board for government policy when it comes to unleashing wars unconnected to American national defense;

2) How media relate to what is called the Deep State or the Oligarchy - the permanent government here in the United States - which is very different from the formal visible government that most people understand;

3) In terms of prospects for the future, whether this system is in danger of breaking down - which would be a positive development for the US and for the whole world - or whether the Deep State and its related media arm will risk unleashing what might be the final war in human history in an attempt to preserve its power, privileges, and wealth.

Let us start with the first part, the behavior of the media. Anybody who has been paying attention during the last 25 years, perhaps longer, is familiar with some of the methodologies of how the American major media carry water, so to speak, for government policy in the area of war and peace. Think, for example, of the recent strike on the Syrian aid convoy, or so-called “Aleppo Boy” few weeks ago. When an event occurs somewhere in the world, American and other western officials immediately, within minutes, are making accusations as what happened and who is to blame, based on little or no facts, just assertion. That story then goes around the world, over all the major prestigious media instantly, all reporting the same story in the same way to pin the blame on the somebody being targeted. Only after that happens, people may start to ask questions - what really happened there? Is this story true? What are the facts?

However, by that time the story moves on, the media are not interested anymore. Any factual challenges end on the back pages somewhere if reported at all. We saw this in Bosnia, in Kosovo, during the Gulf War, and so on. This is just one of the many methodologies that are detailed in the study about how the media serves as a transmission belt to simply sell the pro-war story to a public, especially here in the United States.

Tactics of this sort are facilitated by the fact that most Americans know little about the outside world, a kind of blank canvas on which information can be painted. For example, in 2014 there was a study done about how many Americans could locate Ukraine on a map without the names marked on it. Only one out of six people polled could even locate in the general neighborhood of Ukraine where Ukraine actually was. Some thought it was in a middle of the Atlantic Ocean, some thought it was in the middle of the United States. Interestingly, the less people knew about Ukraine or where it was, the more convinced they were through the media narrative that the United States needed to do something forcefully in Ukraine.

There are many aspects of how media transmission belt works. This study tries to lay out the various methodologies and then links them to the underlying government entity in the service of which these methodologies are employed.