Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Propaganda and Iran’s Election

By Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, Consortiumnews.com, June 22, 2010

Editor’s Note: The remarkably biased U.S. reporting on Iran’s election a year ago – portraying President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory as “fraudulent” despite strong evidence to the contrary – has laid the groundwork for a new Middle East conflict, much as bogus reporting on Iraq’s WMD did in 2002-03.

Washington’s conventional wisdom has now wrapped itself into the logical pretzel of backing a “democracy movement” whose goal is to overturn the democratic judgment of a foreign people, as Edward S. Herman and David Peterson report in this guest essay:

It is almost a commonplace that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy.

If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and if it is supportive of the state of Israel, no matter what crimes Israel may commit, and if it doesn’t like the populist president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, and supports his overthrow and a follow-up “demonstration election” by the local elite, the media and many intellectuals will follow the state agenda, even if they must indulge in mental somersaults.

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