So, back when the DNC was hacked and documents were leaked showing that the DNC had been helping Clinton and kneecapping Sanders, I found it interesting that most of the media focused on “the Russians did it!” rather than on the content of the leak, which was, after all, in the public interest to know.
The same thing is going on with the Texeira documents. WSWS has a particularly good article on this:
While about 60 or so documents have been made public so far, US media outlets indicate they have access to far more. The Washington Post reported Thursday, “The Post also reviewed approximately 300 photos of classified documents, most of which have not been made public.”
And the Post and the other media outlets are responsible for maintaining this secrecy. They are not reporting information that undermines and contradicts the official line from the Pentagon, State Department and White House.
Rather, the Post is selectively releasing sections of the documents with an aim to facilitate US war propaganda. An article published Thursday by anti-China war propagandist Josh Rogin declared, “The most shocking intel leak reveals new Chinese military advances.”
None of this is particularly surprising if you were an adult who was paying attention during the Iraq War and especially the run-up to it. The media actively colluded with the state to promote the war and actively got rid of prominent journalists who had the gall to oppose it and call out the lies.
We already know that the documents reveal that US and NATO special forces are on the ground. People paying attention have been sure this was the case, but most people aren’t paying that close an attention, and the US government has never admitted it.
Information like this is the real story: NATO governments are taking actions which could be considered an act of war against a nation which, despite rhetoric, we are not at war with. No NATO country is at war with Russia and we want to keep it that way. Well, “we” do if we’re sane and don’t want to increase the odds of, y’know, an apocalypse.
Western media is mostly propaganda. When well done it’s not blatant. Some of the best is just the refusal to publish. The New York Times, during the 2004 election, knew that Bush had been spying on Americans in dragnet fashion: both illegal and likely to be unpopular. It held publication until after the election and explicitly said that it did so because it didn’t want to influence the election.
But, if the goal of the institution was to make sure that citizens know what they need to to make informed decisions, then that story should have been published during the election. “Bush has been mass-spying on Americans” is exactly what people need to know to decide if they want to vote for him.
The NY Times, of course, knew publishing the story w9uld have helped Kerry, so it wasn’t a neutral decision. It was a choice to (not) do something in order to help Bush win, even though journalism is supposed to be about revealing the truth because the public has a right to know.
In the same way, the Texeira documents being withheld almost certainly contain revelations that would hurt the current government support for continued help to Ukraine to fight Russia.
But that shouldn’t be, if the media actually believed its own propaganda about its purpose, the concern of the media. If the government is doing things it says it isn’t then the public should know, so the public can decide if it supports what the government is doing.
This isn’t complicated. Journalists have simply decided that they agree with the government about Ukraine vs. Russia and thus are almost certainly concealing information which would damage the government’s position.
That ain’t journalism. Orwell once wrote:
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want published; everything else is public relations.
We don’t have reporters. We have PR people pretending to be journalists. They might as well call themselves stenographers.
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