The US media purports to be “objective” – meaning it should treat all parties to a dispute equally – but isn’t and implements blatant double standards when it comes to Israel’s nuclear weapons, a leading US journalist has said.
Writing in an article in Consortium News, investigative reporter Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, said that it was “a typical day in the life of the mainstream U.S. news media” when Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu went on American TV and threatened war on Iran for its alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon, while being spared any inconvenient questions about Israel’s very real – and rogue – nuclear arsenal.”
Mr Parry’s article, titled “Israel’s Nukes Off-Limits,” referred to a recent CBS’ “Face the Nation” show, Mr Parry pointed out that “host Bob Schieffer devoted more than six minutes of a ten-minute interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the topic of Iran’s alleged pursuit of a nuclear weapon, with Netanyahu explicitly threatening to attack Iran if it crossed his personally drawn ‘red line’ on the level of permitted refinement of nuclear fuel.
“Nowhere during that interview – or in the major news articles that I read about it – was there any reference to Israel’s own rogue nuclear arsenal or how destabilizing it is for one religious state possessing nukes to threaten to attack another religious state lacking a single nuke,” Mr Parry said.
“The imbalance in this nuclear equation is so breathtaking that you might have thought it would be at the center of a testy Q-and-A. Instead it was nowhere.
“Netanyahu also was allowed to denounce Iran as ‘apocalyptic’ without any question about Netanyahu’s own frequent references to Israel facing ‘existential’ threats.
“Indeed, Israel’s attitude toward using nuclear weapons is sometimes called the ‘Samson Option,’ recalling the Biblical hero who destroyed himself along with his enemies. So, again, you might have thought Schieffer would pounce on Netanyahu’s self-serving remark. But, nah!
“In other words, it was a typical day in the life of mainstream U.S. journalism, a profession which purports to be “objective” – meaning it should treat all parties to a dispute equally – but, of course, isn’t.
“An ‘objective’ interview or article would have included at least some reference to Israel’s nuclear arsenal and the question of whether Israel has the unilateral right to wage war (or even threaten war) against another country, with the particular irony that Israel is accusing Iran of pursuing a course that Israel has already taken.
“But it is expected now that ‘objective’ U.S. journalists will avert their eyes from a reality that Israel would prefer not to mention. In the real world of U.S. journalism, ‘objectivity’ means following the bias of the powers-that-be and framing issues within the conventional wisdom.
“That the U.S. press corps routinely fails to provide that sort of context is clear evidence that the principle of ‘objectivity’ is one that is selectively applied, which would seem to negate the very notion of ‘objectivity,’” he concluded.
Of course, what Mr Parry dare not mention—although he must be aware of it, given his extensive understanding of how the US mass media is biased in favor of Israel—is that this very same media to which he refers is almost completely under the direction of the same tribal elite who run Israel.
Once this simple fact is understood, the “symptom” which Mr Parry describes becomes explicable.
