"The Fake News hates me saying that they are the Enemy of the People only because they know it\u2019s TRUE. I am providing a great service by explaining this to the American People. They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause War! They are very dangerous & sick!"<\/p>\n
Oh my goodness, how the Fake News crowd hated that one! From left to right, from Chuck Todd to Chris Wallace, how they howled and screamed in pain! Because the truth hurts. Where was Chuck Todd during the run up to the Kosovo war \u2013 in a Trappist monastery? He can\u2019t be unaware of the catalytic role played by CNN in ginning up that conflict.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yet that\u2019s nothing compared to the chutzpah of Chris Wallace, who demanded to know "What wars have we started?" The truth is that it\u2019s hard to list any recent wars Fox News hasn\u2019t had a huge hand in starting, beginning with Kosovo and going on down the line \u2013 from Gulf War I to the invasion of Iraq to Libya, Syria, and all the way to the present day, where fresh calls for new conflicts are too commonplace to even be noted.<\/p>\n
My favorite response to Trump\u2019s tweet, however, came from Bill Kristol, who tweeted<\/a> a quote from Thomas Jefferson lauding the freedom of the press \u2013 and is anyone surprised that the leading advocate of militarism in the US is hailing the First Amendment because it protects the media\u2019s "right" to lie us into war.<\/p>\n Whatever else, Trump is right or wrong about, he is<\/i> correct about the dangers posed by our media \u2013 not any and all media, per se \u2013 which has nearly always been in the War Party\u2019s pocket. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out<\/a>, war serves their purposes both ideologically and in terms of the bottom line.<\/p>\n The same media that lied us into Iraq \u2013 the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, NBC, etc. ad nauseam \u2013 is now telling us that the President of the United States is a Russian asset. Should we believe them? Their record tells us we should turn our backs and cover our ears. In response to the laughable assertion that Trump is "demonizing" the media, some anonymous wag on Twitter \u2013 who calls himself\/herself "Russian Bot" \u2013 laid out the sickening record<\/a> of our "free" media in the run-up to the Iraq war, arguably the worst disaster in the history of American foreign policy.<\/p>\n Instead of providing a check on power, our "journalists" see themselves in a partnership with the powers-that-be, protecting and validating the privileges and "expertise" of the political class, and generally integrating themselves into the structure of domination that is the American empire.<\/p>\n None of this should be at all surprising. After all, our "journalists" and the politicians and bureaucrats they pander to all live in the same neighborhoods, send their children to the same elite schools, and belong to the same political party (guess which one!). The uniformity of opinion in these circles is hardly shocking, and this has quite naturally led to the inversion of the old-fashioned idea of the media as an adversary of power: instead, these people are the enablers of the War Party and the forces behind it.<\/p>\n In the past, the puffed up mandarins of the Fourth Estate had the field all to themselves. I\u2019m old enough to remember a time when there were only three television networks: CBS, ABC, and NBC \u2013 and one viewpoint, the liberal-internationalist perspective, when it came to foreign policy. But that monopoly is now broken \u2013 and the Dan Rathers of this world will never reconcile themselves to their loss.<\/p>\n Our whining journalists are right about one thing: a free society requires a vigilant media, one that will hold the politicians and their sycophants accountable. The problem is they haven\u2019t lived up to that task: indeed, they are the last people on earth we expect to perform that vital function.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why we started Antiwar.com: the complete lack of honest reporting on the foreign policy front was so obvious that this web site cried out to be started! And thanks to Eric Garris, our founder, it was started: one day, over twenty years ago, he called me up and said: "We should probably start a web site."<\/p>\n I replied "A web site? Oh, you mean the Internet! Heck, I don\u2019t care about cyberspace \u2013 I want to be published on nice shiny paper! Besides, this Internet thing will never take off."<\/p>\n Eric sighed, as he so often does in conversation with yours truly, and said: "Well, just in case it does take off, Justin, what would be a good domain name?"<\/p>\n I thought for a minute or two and said: "Antiwar.com!"<\/p>\n![](\"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/aapledge\/antiwar_donate_160a.gif\")
<\/a><\/i>And so it was.<\/p>\n