Greenwald } Pro-War Propagandists: How Bloodthirsty Media Push US Toward Every New War

Note From Glenn Greenwald: The following is the full show transcript, for subscribers only, of a recent episode of our System Update program, broadcast live on Rumble on Monday, February 6, 2023. Going forward, every new transcript will be sent out by email and posted to our Locals page, where you'll find the transcripts for previous shows. 

Watch System Update Episode #35 Here on Rumble.

Good evening. It's Monday, February 6. Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our new, live, nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. EST, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.

Tonight – that the U.S. media is biased and pursues a political agenda rather than truthful reporting is hardly in dispute these days. Less obvious is exactly what that agenda is. There are many ways to express it, but often, the overarching allegiance is not so much to any political party or even the left versus right wars, but rather status quo power subservience to the U.S. Security State, and, especially, a virtually reflexive craving for more U.S. war. With the U.S. already involved in a dangerous and still escalating proxy war with a nuclear power, that one based in Moscow, and talk increasingly of the potential possibility of war with another, that one based in Beijing, understanding the role the media plays in America's posture of Endless War is more vital than ever and we’ll delve deeply into that topic tonight. 

Then, a new study by the Pentagon's official think tank, the RAND Corporation, shows some serious changes in how Washington is now thinking about the war in Ukraine and whether it is in Americans’ interest to continue to pursue that war. The problem, though:  war propaganda was so effective in working Americans into a neocon frenzy – where they really believe full victory over Moscow is possible and that the real U.S. goal there is fighting for Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy – that it is now a real challenge for Washington how to rein in that war fervor. We’ll look at this new RAND report and all of its broader implications. 

As we announced last week, our live aftershow on Rumble will now air twice a week – Tuesday and Thursday. So, look for that tomorrow night, right after our live show on Rumble. 

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now. 

That the American media is heavily biased barely requires debate at this point. There are few political beliefs these days which command widespread consensus among Americans, but contempt for the corporate media and a recognition that they are more guided by a political agenda than a desire for truthful reporting are beliefs most Americans share. As a Gallup 2022 survey found under the headline, “Americans’ Trust in Media Remains Near Record Low”

At 34%, Americans’ trust in the mass media to report the news “fully, accurately and fairly” is essentially unchanged from last year and just two points higher than the lowest that Gallup has recorded in 2016, during the presidential campaign. Just 7% of Americans have “a great deal” of trust and confidence in the media, and 27% have a “fair amount”. Meanwhile, 28% of U.S. adults said they do not have very much confidence and 38% have none at all in newspapers, TV and radio. Notably, this is the first time that the percentage of Americans with no trust at all in the media is higher than the percentage with a great deal or a fair amount combined (Gallup. October 18, 2022). 

But the question of which political agenda they serve is a bit more elusive. Many conservatives insist the answer is easy. The media is devoted to political liberalism. Rush Limbaugh spent decades ranting against what he called The Liberal Media. And throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the conservative perception of the corporate media was rather straightforward and clear. The narrative went, Journalists are Democrats, they believe in liberalism, and they are devoted to the advancement of the political left. 

Whether that was really as true then is more a question for history. I would submit that – like most things these days – a simple, traditional left v. right framework is really not the best metric for understanding the media's allegiances. It is definitely true – observably so – that employees of major American media corporations support the left-liberal views on culture war issues. ["WOKE or identity politics"—Ed.] That's not hard to understand why. Employees of NBC, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the like live in big blue cities on the East Coast. They attend the same schools as each other and circulate in the same social enclaves. 

So, on standard culture war questions – LGBT rights, abortion, gender, ideology and gender roles, dogma about race and racism – there is almost certainly an overwhelming consensus in favor of left-liberal politics. That is almost certainly why the small amounts of lingering trust the U.S. media has managed to preserve come overwhelmingly from American Democrats and liberals as the 2022 Gallup report found:

America's trust in the media remains sharply polarized among partisan lines, with 70% of Democrats, 14% of Republicans, and 27% of independents saying they have a great deal or fair amount of confidence. There has been a consistent double-digit gap in trust between Democrats and Republicans since 2001, and that gap has ranged from 54 to 63 percentage points since 2017 (Gallup. October 18, 2022). 

The accompanying chart from Gallup is remarkably illustrative, and it reveals the following: basically, the approval of corporate media is now almost entirely dependent on Democratic Party voters. Starting essentially in 2016, there was a radical jump in trust that Democrats have for the corporate media, largely because they perceived, correctly, that the corporate media was almost entirely on their side in trying to sabotage Donald Trump and advance the interests of the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the trend line about Independents and Republicans when it comes to trust in the media has steadily declined since 1974 and is now basically in full-scale collapse. It is hard to overstate how dependent the corporate media now is on Democrats when it comes to retaining any degree of trust. If not for Democrats, these numbers would be way, way worse, drastically lower.