{"id":35361,"date":"2018-06-22T06:07:28","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T11:07:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35361"},"modified":"2018-06-22T06:07:28","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T11:07:28","slug":"pro-war-media-deserve-slamming-not-sainthood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=35361","title":{"rendered":"Pro-War Media Deserve Slamming, Not Sainthood"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pro-War Media Deserve Slamming, Not Sainthood<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Still from \u201cThe Post.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The media nowadays are busy congratulating themselves for their vigorous criticism of Donald Trump. To exploit that surge of sanctimony, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out The Post,\u00a0<\/em>a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. Critics raved over the film, which the New York Post\u00a0<\/em>enthusiastically labeled \u201cjournalism porn of the highest order.\u201d Boston Public Radio station WBUR called it the \u201cmost fun you\u2019ll ever have at a civics lesson.\u201d<\/p>\n

Spielberg, touting his movie, claimed that \u201cthe free press is a crusader for truth,\u201d But the media hoopla around The Post\u00a0<\/em>is akin to geezers boasting of having shown moments of courage when they were almost 50 years younger.<\/p>\n

The Post\u00a0<\/em>is built around the Pentagon Papers, a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam War had gone awry. The 7000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been profoundly deceiving the American people ever since the Truman administration and that the same mistakes were being endlessly repeated. Like many policy autopsies, the report was classified as secret and completely ignored by the White House and federal agencies, which most needed to heed its lessons. New York Times\u00a0<\/em>editor Tom Wicker commented in 1971 that \u201cthe people who read these documents in the Times\u00a0<\/em>were the first to study them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon official, heroically risked life in prison to smuggle the report to the media after members of Congress were too cowardly to touch it. The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>shattered the political sound barrier when it began courageously publishing the report despite a profusion of threats from the Nixon administration Justice Department. After a federal court slapped the Times\u00a0<\/em>with an injunction, the Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>and other newspapers published additional classified excerpts from the report.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pro-War Media Deserve Slamming, Not Sainthood Still from \u201cThe Post.\u201d The media nowadays are busy congratulating themselves for their vigorous criticism of Donald Trump. To exploit that surge of sanctimony, Hollywood producer Steven Spielberg rushed out The Post,\u00a0a movie depicting an epic press battle with the Nixon administration. Critics raved over the film, which the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[5493,7844,16594,512,1426,3322,655,17608,827],"class_list":["post-35361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geopolitics","category-liberty","tag-counterpunch","tag-donald-trump","tag-james-bovard","tag-media","tag-misinformation","tag-pro-war","tag-propaganda","tag-the-post","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35362,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35361\/revisions\/35362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}