Corporate media reaction to Donald Trump’s April 6 missile strike on a Syrian airfield might be summed up in an ironic tweet from FAIR analyst Adam Johnson: “Find someone who looks at you the way US media look at bombs.”
Daily papers lined up to endorse Trump’s action, as a study by Johnson found (FAIR.org, 4/11/17). As of April 11, out of the top 100 US newspapers, 47 had run editorials: 39 in favor, seven ambiguous and only one opposed to the military attack. Sample headlines: “Syria Strike Shows US Resolve,” “Striking Syria Long Overdue” and “Serious on Syria: The Attack Was a Message to Russia and China Too.”
The public at the time was much more divided; an ABC/Washington Post poll (4/7-9/17) found 51 percent supporting the airstrikes and 40 percent opposed.
Immediately after the attack, as Americans were just forming their opinions, corporate media opinion was already established. Johnson (4/7/17) looked at five top dailies—the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and New York Daily News—and found none offering any opinion space to anyone who argued the airstrikes shouldn’t have happened. The five papers ran a total of 18 op-eds, columns or “news analysis” articles that either praised the strikes or criticized them for not being harsh enough. The Times (4/7/17) ran a piece headed, “On Syria Attack, Trump’s Heart Came First.” The Washington Post (4/7/17) called it “Trump’s Chance to Step Into the Global Leadership Vacuum.”
On television, we had MSNBC‘s Brian Williams (4/7/17) opining weirdly about the “beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments.” And CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria (4/7/17) embodying what FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (4/7/17) called the “essential pundit take,” that Donald Trump “became president of the United States” by launching Tomahawk missiles at a sovereign state.
As a candidate telling Obama he should not get involved in the Syrian civil war, explained Zakaria, Trump showed he was “unconcerned with global norms.” This attack on another country, unjustifiable in terms of self-defense and unauthorized by the UN, shows his “education”: He’s
recognized that the president of the United States does have to act to enforce international norms, does have to have this broader moral and political purpose. President Trump realized, as every president has for many decades now, that presidents always believe they have inherent legal authority as commander in chief. And they don’t need to go to a pesky Congress every time they want military force.
Zakaria’s open contempt for public opinion or legislative process, and his strange idea that asserting that the US need not comply with international law reflects “international norms,” evoke earlier generations of war punditry. Naureckas recalled the New York Times‘ R.W. Apple, who declared of the elder President George Bush in 1989: He has completed “a presidential initiation rite, [joining] American leaders who since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood to protect or advance what they construe as the national interest…. Panama has shown him as a man capable of bold action.” Yes, Panama.
The Washington Post was among the many who referred to the idea that with the airstrike, Trump was “righting Obama’s wrongs” in Syria, picking up on what writer Reed Richardson (FAIR.org, 4/7/17) called the dangerous “Obama did nothing” narrative. When folks like CNN anchor Jake Tapper (Twitter, 4/4/17) ask, “What will it take for the world to intervene in Syria?” they’re standing on its head a reality in which the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Russia, among others, have been intervening in Syria for years.
The US has been arming, funding and training anti-Assad forces since at least 2012. The Post itself (6/12/15) reported in 2015 that the CIA alone was spending $1 billion a year training Syrian rebels. As Richardson concludes, if the press can’t be trusted to honestly report what a previous president did or did not do in Syria, there’s little hope for the press helping the public figure out what our current president should—or should not—do there going forward.