The Afghanistan Gap: Press vs. Public

This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson's war in Vietnam and President Obama's war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are largely valid. But a key parallel rarely gets mentioned — the media's support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it.

This omission relies on the mythology that the U.S. news media functioned as tough critics of the Vietnam War in real time, a fairy tale so widespread that it routinely masquerades as truth. In fact, overall, the default position of the corporate media is to bond with war policymakers in Washington — insisting for the longest time that the war must go on.

In early 1968, after several years of massive escalation of the Vietnam War, the Boston Globe conducted a survey of 39 major U.S. daily newspapers and found that not a single one had editorialized in favor of U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. While millions of Americans were demanding an immediate pullout, such a concept was still viewed as extremely unrealistic by the editorial boards of big daily papers — including the liberal New York Times and Washington Post.

A similar pattern continued during Washington's next protracted war based on lies. After more than a year of the U.S. war effort in Iraq, the editorial positions of major dailies were much more conformist than the American public.

In mid-spring 2004, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll was showing that "one in four Americans say troops should leave Iraq as soon as possible and another 30 percent say they should come home within 18 months." But as usual, when it came to rejection of staying the war course, the media establishment lagged way behind the populace.

Despite sometimes-withering media criticism of the Bush administration's foreign policy, all of the sizable newspapers steered clear of calling for withdrawal. Many favored sending in even more troops. On May 7, 2004, Editor & Publisher headlined a column by the magazine's editor, Greg Mitchell, this way: "When Will the First Major Newspaper Call for a Pullout in Iraq?"

Today, the gap between mainline big media and the grassroots is just as wide.

Top policymakers for what's becoming Obama's Afghanistan War can find their assumptions mirrored in the editorials of the nation's mighty newspapers — at the same time that opinion polls are showing a dramatic trend against the war.

While a recent ABC News-Washington Post poll found that 51 percent of the public says the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting, the savants who determine big media's editorial positions insist on staying the course.

Recycled from the repetition-compulsion department, a spate of new hand-wringing editorials has bemoaned the shortcomings of Washington's allies in the occupied country. Of course the edifying pitch includes the assertion that the supported government and its armed forces must get their act together.

"President Obama has rightfully defined success in Afghanistan as essential to America's struggle against Al Qaeda," The New York Times editorialized on Aug. 21. But Al Qaeda, according to expert assessments, is scarcely present in Afghanistan any more. There are dozens of countries where that terrorist group or its allies could be said to have a much larger presence. Does that mean the U.S. government should consider waging wars in all of those countries?

But in yet another let's-you-and-them-fight editorial, paragraph after paragraph explained what must be done to win the war. It was all boilerplate stuff of the sort that has littered the editorial pages of countless newspapers for many years during one protracted war after another — in Vietnam, in Iraq and in Afghanistan.

When the congressional leadership and top administration officials read such editorials, they can take comfort in finding reaffirmed support for their insistence on funding more and more war. If only public opinion would cooperate, there'd be no political problem.

But, increasingly, public opinion is not cooperating. While the media establishment and the political establishment appear to belong to the same pro-war affinity group, the public is shifting to the other side of a widening credibility gap. In a word, the problem and the threat for the press and the state can be summed up as democracy.

Norman Solomon is the author of the book "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death," which has been made into a documentary film. For information, go to: www.normansolomon.com.

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