On the same day, Bush’s former speechwriter (now Post columnist) Michael Gerson added, “There is no question – none – that Israel’s attack on Hamas in Gaza is justified.”
So, as much of the world recoiled in horror at the ferocity of the Israeli attacks, the Post’s neocon-dominated opinion section only heaped blame on Hamas for its firing of small rockets into southern Israeli territory.
It took 12 days into Israel’s punishing assault on Gaza for the Washington Post to permit the first op-ed suggesting that there might be two sides to the dispute, an article by former President Jimmy Carter who presented both Israeli and Palestinian concerns.
In a column entitled “An Unnecessary War,” Carter noted that Israel had failed to live up to the goals of last year’s truce agreement. He also described the near-starvation of many of Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants, cut off from the outside world by an Israeli blockade.
While Carter’s column fit well within the mainstream of international opinion, it represented an anomaly in the opinion circles of Washington, appearing almost like a fringe viewpoint after a steady diet of neocon propaganda, especially in the Post’s editorial section.
Looking back over the Post’s recent history, I’m also reminded of my experience at the Post-owned Newsweek magazine in the late 1980s. I had been hired because of my early work exposing what became known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Newsweek – like the Post – had bought into the earlier false denials of the Reagan administration.
I thought maybe Newsweek sincerely wanted to catch up on possibly the most important scandal story of the decade. But I soon encountered what I considered troubling neocon trends at the magazine, particularly an elitist view about the need to steer the public in a direction favored by the Establishment, rather than to trust in the people’s well-informed democratic judgment.
When I spoke once with Washington bureau chief Evan Thomas about what I considered the importance of giving unvarnished information to the American people so they could make up their own minds, he upbraided me with an admonition that at Newsweek our purpose was less to inform the readers than to guide them to the proper conclusions.
Over the ensuing two decades, that elitist attitude, a core feature of neoconservative ideology, appears to have spread throughout the Washington Post company. It influences the tone of the news pages [see, for instance, “WPost Admits Bungling Obama Quote” or “Obama’s War with the Right (& Media)”], but it pervades the editorial section.
Rather than encouraging as free and open debate as possible, the Post now sees its role as herding the American people to certain preordained conclusions – and casting out from acceptable society anyone who dares threaten the Washington consensus.
Original post and copyrighted at ConsortiumNews.com
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