Yellow Journalism

Today, the NY Times published a story with the following headline, “U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers”. It was written by Jeff Gerth and Garth Shane. It’s the story of how the Pentagon was connected to an article called, The Sands Are Blowing Toward A Democratic Iraq. It was prepared by the United States military and translated into Arabic before being published in an Iraqi newspaper.

The article itself was written in the style of the region, calling on the will of Muhammad and offering readers a critique of the critics of the Iraq war. It suggested that the critics were wrong and that Iraq was on its way to a democracy.

The story was on ABC’s Nightline program where one interviewee played it safe and said, “You show the world you're not living by the principles you profess to believe in, and you lose all credibility,". No shit! It’s not about being credible, it’s about winning: pure, plain and simple.

The history of American Imperialism is full of examples of misleading information, like the sinking of two American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964, and the killing of babies in incubators during the first Gulf War. The former is commonly known as a false flag operations. The latter is propaganda, because it was proven by CBS on 60 Minutes, that a public relations firm, working for the Pentagon, made it all up.

So what does this mean?

Modern warfare requires a variety of weapons: real and imagined. It also requires rumour and myth. As Hiram Johnson put it many years ago: the first casualty when war comes is truth.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/01/politics/01propaganda.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=3af8aaf9fa1cb0bc&hp&ex=1133499600&partner=homepage