The First Casualty of War

I highlighted in my last post that the Washington Post, et. al., wilfully misrepresented the election of Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani as a success for Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, and deceitfully implied that al-Bolani was al-Maliki's preferred choice; and by failing to mention that Farouk al-Araji, the other Shia Alliance nominee for this position and al-Maliki's preferred candidate, was emphatically rejected. This is as rather obvious example of Western media publications putting out disinformation. This is but the tip of the iceberg.

Many on the Left of the political spectrum will not be surprised by this; yet it is not just the Right Wing pro war news publications that engage in this sort of disinformation and misrepresentation: it is the Left wing media too. In part, this can be explained by the well reported difficulty of non-Iraqi journalists to report outside the Green Zone. Thus the Western media is not so much reporting this war as reporting the reports they receive.

Yet, with some notable exceptions, Western journalists writing or broadcasting about the Iraq war for the mainstream media (MSM), are complicit in propagating a deception on the public. Firstly, due to their uncritical reception of obviously fraudulent or suspect information; and secondly due to their frequent failure to qualify the suspect nature of both the source and the information they are putting out. Even the caveat that the outlet cannot verify the report is not enough when they have good reason for disbelieving its veracity.

This is exemplified in the Western MSM coverage of factionalism and paramilitary violence in Iraq. Read the article The Western Misrepresentation of Iraqi Factionalism