Of deteriorating governmental control in Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 9/8/09) says that "a stale witticism calls Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai 'the mayor of Kabul.' Now, not even." He points to the "corrupt, inept and--with massive election fraud--now illegitimate" administration as a "notable work product" of "those who believe in making war":

After 30 years, the results are in: a devastated city....

Meanwhile, a war-stoking mindset is replicating itself at the highest reaches of official Washington--even while polls tell us that the pro-war spin has been losing ground. For the U.S. public, dwindling support for the war in Afghanistan has reached a tipping point. But, as you've probably heard, the war must go on....

Visiting Kabul in late August, I met a lot of wonderful people, doing their best in the midst of grim and lethal realities. The city seemed thick with pessimism.

In comparison, the mainline political discourse about Afghanistan in the United States is blithe. A familiar duet has the news media and the White House asking the perennial question: "Can the war be won?"

The administration insists that the answer is yes. The press is mixed. But they’re both asking the wrong question.

According to Solomon, a question "more relevant, by far," though unlikely to come from corporate media, "would be to ask: Should the U.S. government keep destroying Afghanistan in order to 'save' it?" See FAIR's Action Alert: "Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?: When Public Support Slips, TV Packs in War Boosters" (8/25/09).

Media Monitors Network has the latest column from Norman Solomon (8/26/09), in which the longtime analyst of corporate media boosterism for U.S. wars considers a recent swath of stories that "have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan."

True, "the comparisons are often valid," Solomon finds, "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.... 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....

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 of the U.S. war effort than the American public.

And today, when "top policymakers for what has become Obama’s Afghanistan war can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation’s mighty newspapers," Solomon reiterates that "opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war"--noting how an August 13–17 ABC News-Washington Post poll "found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting."

See the recent FAIR Action Alert: "Where Is the Afghanistan Debate?: When Public Support Slips, TV Packs in War Boosters" (8/25/09).

As "official Washington is buzzing about 'metrics'" of success in the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Norman Solomon (ZNet, 8/13/09) notes of media's persistent question, "Can the war in Afghanistan be successful?"--"Don't ask the dead":

On August 7, under the headline "White House Struggles to Gauge Afghan Success," a New York Times story made a splash. "As the American military comes to full strength in the Afghan buildup, the Obama administration is struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won."

Don't ask the dead. They don't count.

The Times article went on: "Those 'metrics' of success, demanded by Congress and eagerly awaited by the military, are seen as crucial if the president is to convince Capitol Hill and the country that his revamped strategy is working."

But, Solomon says, "routinely, the dominant political and media calculus renders the dead as digits and widgets, moved around on spreadsheets and news pages. The victims of war are hardly seen as people by the numbed sophisticates who can measure just about anything but the value of a human life." Thus prompting Solomon's question to all of us: "The dead can't speak up. What's our excuse?"

Noticing that "days ago, buried in a chart under the headline "How the Health Care Bills Compare," the New York Times provided some cogent yet cryptic information," Norman Solomon (Guernica, 7/23/09) has done some valuable decoding of a Senate committee bill's "public plan that would 'compete with private insurers,'" as "the Times chart explained on July 18":

The public plan "would provide 'only the essential health benefits,' as defined by the bill, 'except in states that offer additional benefits.'"

Meanwhile, the newspaper noted, "Democrats from three House committees are working on a single plan." Under that plan, "Different levels of coverage--'basic, enhanced and premium'--can be offered through the public option."

Those few grainy sentences, quickly swept beneath the waves from oceans of media, referred to a disturbing aspect of "public plan" scenarios. If the ostensible goal is healthcare for all, then--at best--some of the "all" would end up being much more equal than others.

The Republican Party is coming from such a right-wing place that any government action to improve healthcare access is ideologically unacceptable. In contrast, the broad outlines of a Democratic "public plan" at least embrace the precept that the not-so-tender-mercies of the market are insufficient to fully provide for the population's medical needs.

But as a practical matter, a "public plan" coexisting with the private health insurance system--generally touted by U.S. media as the pole of real options farthest from the Republican "free market" fixation--is inherently reconciled to major inequality in access to healthcare.

While "media accounts keep telling us that the current political debate on healthcare is unprecedented and groundbreaking," Solomon points to "an article in the latest edition of the Columbia Journalism Review, by seasoned healthcare reporter Trudy Lieberman, makes a convincing case that little has changed within the frames of media parameters."

Sign on to FAIR's petition telling corporate media to stop censoring the healthcare debate.

And if you happen to be near New York City, join our July 28 Petition delivery at ABC.

Norman Solomon has noticed (Common Dreams, 7/20/09) that "media eulogies for Walter Cronkite--including from progressive commentators--rarely talk about his coverage of the Vietnam War before 1968." An "obit omit" Solomon deems "essential to the myth of Cronkite as a courageous truth-teller":

But facts are facts, and history is history--including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm....

Also in 1965--the pivotal year of escalation--Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerrilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."

Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar--as if reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.

See Solomon's book and film War Made Easy for an extended look at Cronkite's important contribution to the U.S.'s war on Vietnam.

Noting how "the president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now," FAIR associate Norman Solomon is letting Huffington Post readers know (7/9/09) "that's how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually":

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

Solomon warns that "'escalation' isn't mere jargon. And it doesn't just refer to what's happening outside the United States":

"Escalation" is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad--nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper--nothing too abrupt or jarring....

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he's hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

While "Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set" and "sounded an open-ended note: 'There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan,'" Solomon writes that the announcement "was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place."

Solomon foresees that "war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come 'piecemeal'--'with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.'" For a look "beyond how many more troops and when to send them"--the only major questions about Afghanistan regularly given venue in corporate media--listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Ann Jones on Afghanistan" (1/23/09).

Noticing that "the New York Times used three square inches of newsprint on Tuesday to dispatch two U.S. Army soldiers under the headline 'Names of the Dead,'" Norman Solomon (Common Dreams, 7/1/09) points out how apparently "there wasn't enough room for any numbers, names or ages of Afghans who have died as a part of the Afghan war and related operations."

Having observed wartime media long enough to know that "that's the way routine death stories go," Solomon has also observed that "reporting on life is like that, and reporting on death is like that: even more so when the media lenses are ground with ideology, nationalism and economic convenience":

The conventional wisdom of press and state insists that the U.S. war effort must do more than go on--it must escalate--in the name of human decency. The political rhetoric in Washington is close to 100 percent humanitarian, while the new supplemental infusion of U.S. spending for Afghanistan is 90 percent military.

Inside a contrived news frame, destruction can nurture life. In media myth, we can be well-informed and ignorant of war's realities. Along the way, the benefits of numbed quiescence and muffled dissent are vastly overrated.

Listen to Solomon's recent appearance on the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09).

Norman Solomon uses his most recent Creators Syndicate column (6/19/09) to call for journalism that "is open scrutiny of the dynamics of power. Reporters should shine a bright light on behind-the-scenes maneuvers that block congressional oversight of administration policies":

Last Tuesday, when the House of Representatives approved a supplemental spending bill for more war in Iraq and Afghanistan, there must have been celebration at the White House. Days of intense arm-twisting paid off.

The Obama administration had brandished the weapon of retribution against the newest Democratic arrivals in the House. Most news coverage seemed oblivious, but not all. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported just hours before the war-funding measure came to the floor, "the White House has threatened to pull support from Democratic freshmen who vote no."

Even though "journalists expect strong-arm tactics to come from the White House and may actually view them as evidence of the effective use of presidential power," Solomon maintains that "huge concentrations of power are hazardous to democracy": "We may shrug and say words to the effect of 'that's the way things are'--but the fact remains that we need journalism to scrutinize 'the way things are.'"

However, Solomon has several examples--from media failure "to scrutinize the Gulf of Tonkin incident" on up to "adulatory news coverage" of "drastically loosened" financial regulation in the '90s--that demonstrate how, "unfortunately, too many journalists behave as though levers pulled by the powerful are not notable enough to be questioned."

Looking beyond "the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news" Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs "Media's Love/Hate Affair with Violence"--as exemplified by

the kind of violence--rarely occurring in the light of day--that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all kinds of violent acts are happening in the nation's prisons and jails. The violence that some guards inflict on prisoners is even less apt to make the news than what stressed-out prisoners do to one another.

Various forms of what could be called "institutionalized violence" are not identified as such in the standard reportorial lexicons. When children go to bed hungry--or when people can't see a doctor and then wind up in emergency rooms with serious medical conditions that could have been prevented with earlier healthcare--some very cruel hotwired violence is underway. But from a boilerplate media standpoint, it's part of the regular social order.

And that's all aside from journalistic adoration of "the U.S. war-fighting establishment--what outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex.'" Solomon concludes: "In short, according to tacit judgments that dominate the media establishment, reprehensible violence doesn't include the violence that goes unrebuked by prevailing authority structures in our society."

Writing that "it takes at least tacit faith in massive violence to believe that after three decades of horrendous violence in Afghanistan, upping the violence there will improve the situation," FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Huffington Post, 6/8/09) tells us that,

when last Sunday's edition of the Washington Post printed the routine headline "Iraq War Deaths," the newspaper meant American deaths--to Washington's ultra-savvy, the deaths that really count. The only numbers and names under the headline were American.

Ask for whom the bell tolls. That's the implicit message--from top journalists and politicians alike.

A few weeks ago, some prominent U.S. news stories did emerge about Pentagon air strikes that killed perhaps a hundred Afghan civilians. But much of the emphasis was that such deaths could undermine the U.S. war effort. The most powerful media lenses do not correct the myopia when Uncle Sam's vision is impaired by solipsism and narcissism.

With plenty of experience chronicling such matters, Solomon foresees "plenty more media invisibility and erasure ahead for Afghan people as the Pentagon ramps up its war effort in their country." Read the current edition of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Treating Civilian Deaths as a 'Sore Point': The PR War in Afghanistan and Pakistan" (6/09) by Peter Hart.

In a Consortium News rejoinder (4/30/09) to how "mainstream U.S. news media often laments the decline of objective journalism, pointing disapprovingly at the more subjective news that comes from the Internet or from ideological programming," Robert Parry writes that

one could argue that the U.S. mainstream press has inflicted the severest damage to the concept of objective journalism by routinely ignoring those principles, which demand that a reporter set aside personal prejudices (as best one can) and approach each story with a common standard of fairness.

The truth is that powerful mainstream news organizations have their own sacred cows and tend to hire journalists who intuitively take into account whose ox might get gored while doing a story. In other words, mainstream (or centrist) journalism has its own biases though they may be less noticeable because they often reflect the prevailing view of the national Establishment.

Parry looks to "double standards" in corporate reportage on Nicaraguan Contras in the '80s and the 2005 "assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri" to make clear that "how that translates into daily coverage is that an American news outlet often will demand a much lower threshold of evidence about serious accusations against a perceived U.S. enemy than an ally." Anyway, as a longtime FAIR associate once noted on the age-old debate over the merits of journalistic objectivity: "Passive acceptance of murderous priorities in our midst is a form of de facto advocacy."

Norman Solomon is unable to resist the irony (Huffington Post, 4/11/09) of a lead New York Times article titled "Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory," inverting the futuristic character of news that scientists possibly "could erase certain memories by tinkering with a single substance in the brain" to look back on how "American media outlets have been pulling off such feats for a long time":

The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out "specific types of memory" are lagging way behind.

Don't need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads?

Don't want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan Contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers?

Don't care to recall the Pentagon's estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period?

Forget about it! That's what selective memory is for.

The Times' ethical concern that people "tempted to erase a severely painful memory" might "in the process [lose] other, personally important memories that were somehow related" prompts Solomon to further his metaphor: "Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories--national or personal--if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental." In other words, "Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick."

FAIR associate Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 2/14/09) tells why he's concerned the potential lifting of the government ban on press photography of war casualties' coffins isn't "particularly good news":

I wrote in my book War Made Easy that ambiguity is part of the process that we bring to the media-consuming table: "Visual images may be among the most powerful messages we receive about war, but those graphic messages still leave it to us to assign them meaning. And we, in turn, assess meaning not so much because of what's in front of our eyes as because of what's behind them--our assumptions and attitudes--influenced and shaped, probably much more than we would prefer to admit, by cues from political leaders, pundits and reporters who function as role models with their reactions, including what they say and don't say."

Solomon's fear is that, minus any crucial reportorial context about the brutal reality of war, the photos might "mostly excite the nationalistic pride that exalts the fallen as the bravest of the brave and heighten the fervor of the facile notion that others must die to affirm that the earlier dead did not die in vain"--in the larger picture, "unless the mindset and context of how the public sees that photography undergo a major shift, war will go on."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "From Self-Censorship to Official Censorship: Ban on Images of Wounded GIs Raises No Media Objections" (March/April 2007) by Pat Arnow

Norman Solomon's latest column (Creators Syndicate, 1/31/09) looks over a decade in which "the false truism of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction led to the horrors of the Iraq invasion and occupation," and "in the wake of 9/11, overall, the main journalistic outlets of the United States fed us falsehoods, hysteria, self-righteousness and endless permutations on rationales for waging war in Afghanistan and Iraq." Luckily Solomon noticed that "sometimes the best journalism is something else" that might not "pass the muster for soundbites or long-form televised discourse as historic events unfold":

During the second year of the "war on terrorism"--which was increasingly being shortened to the even vaguer "war on terror"--both [Joan] Didion and [Norman] Mailer were out with books that drew on assessments they had made in essays or interviews after 9/11.

Didion wrote: "We had seen, most importantly, the insistent use of September 11 to justify the reconception of America's correct role in the world as one of initiating and waging virtually perpetual war."

There, in one sentence, an essayist and novelist had captured the essence of a historical moment that vast numbers of journalists had refused to recognize--or, at least, had refused to publicly acknowledge. Didion put to shame the array of self-important and widely lauded journalists at the likes of the New York Times, the Washington Post, PBS and National Public Radio.

Viewing the sprawling post-2001 U.S. wars as one "war to end peace," Solomon thinks "the war seemed, by rhetorical design, to be inherently endless"--and the work of spreading of that rhetorical framing largely fell to all-too-eager corporate media; see the FAIR Media Advisory: "Iraq and the Media: A Critical Timeline" (3/19/07)

A January 23 New York Times column by Bob Herbert distilled the message of Barack Obama's nascent administration as "No more crazy wars." FAIR associate Norman Solomon's reaction (AfterDowningStreet.org, 1/26/09): "I wish." Lamenting the current "narrowness of political vision--while news outlets are reporting that the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is expected to 'as much as double this year to 60,000 troops'"--Solomon recalls the Lyndon Baines Johnson inaugural speech that "foreshadowed the massive slaughtering of people in Vietnam":

Pundits and congressional leadership nodded sagely as the president cited the threat of Communism and proceeded to boost U.S. troop levels in Vietnam. Similar nodding--and nodding off--is now underway as the president cites the threat of terrorism and prepares to boost U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan....

Lyndon Johnson's capacity to deliver on hopes for a Great Society shattered on the jagged steel of a war that, year after year, few pundits were willing to acknowledge was crazy....

Several weeks ago, a Bob Herbert column made a practical moral argument: "Sending thousands of additional men and women (some to die, some to be horribly wounded) on a fool's errand in the rural, mountainous guerrilla paradise of Afghanistan would be madness."

Days after the inauguration, the news has included a fresh spate of stories about Afghan civilians killed by U.S. missiles. Hamid Karzai, in effect the president of Kabul, declared that the Pentagon’s frequent killing of civilians in Afghanistan "is strengthening the terrorists." And so it goes.

Solomon's reminder to today's journalists: "Escalation of a crazy war will make it crazier. Pretending otherwise will not make it any less insane--or any less destructive." Listen to the FAIR radio show CounterSpin: "Norman Solomon on Obama's Inauguration" (1/23/09)