Finally, American society begins to mature, which isn’t simply shown in just the rejection of the stream of lies Western journalists are broadcasting, but also in the ongoing fight against corporate media bias.
This has been noted in a SurveyUSA poll, which asked 1,207 registered voters back in February about their opinion on certain press outlets. It’s curious that just 17% of voters had a very favorable opinion of CNN, while no more than 14% of voters had a favorable opinion of The New York Times. The Washington Post and MSNBC similarly were only very favorably viewed by less than 15% of voters. Another finding that, to a certain degree, allowed Trump to secure his victory was that Fox News was the outlet with the highest favorability in the poll, but only at 21%.
In turn, the Emerson College poll that conducted about the same time showed that 91% of Republicans believed the news media was untruthful. It’s curious that for the fist time in a long while opinions of the general public appears in tune with the position the current US president, who has repeatedly criticized New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN for their lies, thus starting an undeclared war against the corporate media.
The National Interest believes that the myth of the United States as an almost angelic enforcer of justice, if sometimes an inept one, gives rise to much mischief, in the press as well as in the policy realm, since journalists pressure one another, and together pressure officeholders, to substitute dudgeon for careful calculation.
The National Interest article also claims that “moral mythologizing also creates a misleading impression of what states really are and what they are capable of doing. Even the most liberal, democratic and benign of states are not designed for the promotion of values; rather, what states excel at, when they excel at anything, is establishing security for themselves.”
The article continues by arguing that “it cannot be really argued that the selective outrage with which Western media sources often indulge is not really moral. There is also a cynical selectivity engaged in by outright ideologues and partisans, who favor (or disfavor) some repressive regimes over others.”
The article also states that, “in each of the past two administrations, the president’s moral reach far exceeded his practical grasp—leading to debacles in places like Iraq and Libya. President Trump seems to have learned from his predecessors’ mistakes, but it’s not clear that his critics have. At the same time, Russia remains a particular target for multifarious reasons, not least the residual Cold War enmity that persists in neoconservative and liberal hawk circles.”
The National Interest is convinced that the outrage of Western media sources over Trump and Russia is self-defeating. The US narrative that Putin alone is responsible for the new Cold War hangs largely on his alleged unprovoked “aggression” against Ukraine in 2014 and ever since. At the same time, the narrative is sustained in part by the near-total absence of any American mainstream reporting of what is actually happening in Kiev-controlled or rebel-controlled territories. In fact, Putin’s actions both in Donbass, where an indigenous rebellion broke out against the overthrow of the legally elected president in Kiev three years ago, and in Crimea, which had been part of Russia longer than the existence of the United States, was a direct reaction to the longstanding campaign by Washington and Brussels to bring Ukraine into NATO’s “sphere of influence,” itself a form of political aggression.
If Trump is to win the information war on the home front, there’s a real chance that we can see the unprecedented level of mistrust or paranoia begin to drop. There’s no chance that such media sources as the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN will regain the trust they’ve lost before they set the record straight.
Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
