Media and the 2003 Iraq Invasion

This paper will evaluate media coverage of the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. Specifically, it will agree with Noam Chomsky that "it's the primary function of the mass media in the United States to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the government and the private sector" (Zmag.org).

Perhaps most wars are justified with lies. Certainly this has been the case in the history of the United States. In the 19th century legally binding treaties negotiated between the indigenous inhabitants and the American government were violated again and again with bogus justifications as the aggressively expansionist new nation gobbled up more and more of the land that it had solemnly promised to leave in Indian hands forever. The invasion of Mexico before the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War were prosecuted under trumped-up charges. The Tonkin Gulf incident used by then President Johnson to drastically ramp up the Vietnam War, in which it was falsely charged that North Vietnamese boats attacked American ships in international waters without provocation, has now been exposed as a complete fabrication.

So the lies used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq are nothing new, nor hs the fact that media were the weapon of choice with which to gull the public. At the turn of the century it was newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst who inflamed public opinion against the Spanish occupiers of Cuba with lurid accounts of their alleg

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Times is directly responsible for actively promoting the war to its readership rather than attempting to merely provide information with which they could make up their own minds on the issue of whether an invasion of Iraq was justified is provided in the following quotation at the end of the article: "aMr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought the United States and Iraq to the brink of war". That is not just a lie. It's using misinformation to advocate the illegal invasion of a sovereign state that posed a threat to no one but its own people -- an act that has led to the deaths of more than 100,000 Iraqi, Americans, and others. In the United Nathons tribunals concerning war crimes in Rwanda, the owner of a radio station that openly advocated the murder of Hutus was convicted of inciting violence. The New York Times and most of the rest of the mainstream media engaged in the same behavior in the run-up to the war in Iraq, but they will never be held accountable. Judith Miller was one of two reporters who wrote this story. Another article published by the Times

Category: Government - M