“We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention–as they so often do–debate is nearly nonexistent.”
(Photo: United for Justice With Peace)
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen’s latest piece (Huffington Post, 4/12/13) decries the nonexistent debate over war and its the human costs–including how unchecked militarism blights so many other aspects of American life.
Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem–a problem that Martin Luther King, Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War). That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.
Cohen adds:
In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”–and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues — but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not atMSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.
We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention–as they so often do–debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say “Phil Donahue.”
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Steve Rendall
Senior Media Analyst and Co-producer of CounterSpin Steve Rendall is FAIR’s senior analyst. He is co-host of CounterSpin, FAIR’s national radio show. His work has received awards from Project Censored, and has won the praise of noted journalists such as Les Payne, Molly Ivins and Garry Wills. He is co-author of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error (The New Press, 1995, New York City). Rendall has appeared on dozens of national television and radio shows, including appearances on CNN, C-SPAN, CNBC, MTV and Fox Morning News. He was the subject of a profile in the New York Times(5/19/96), and has been quoted on issues of media and politics in publications such as the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and New York Times. Rendall contributed stories to the International Herald Tribunefrom France, Spain and North Africa; worked as a freelance writer in San Francisco; and worked as an archivist collecting historical material on the Spanish Civil War and the volunteers who fought in it. Rendall studied philosophy and chemistry at San Francisco State University, the College of Notre Dame and UC Berkeley.
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