Corporate media doesn’t represent humanity’s interests. It promotes the interests of billionaires and their hangers-on, who make huge profits from a war machine in constant need of excuses to kill.
Offices of The Guardian in London, 2011. (Stephen Curry, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
International law is absolutely clear. If the U.S. attacks Iran, it would be a war of aggression and the “supreme international crime”.
The job of even supposedly liberal media like The Guardian is to persuade you this is not what is at stake. To disbelieve your lying eyes.
Look at this astonishingly dishonest headline and subhead from Thursday’s paper:
“Threat of U.S.-Iran war escalates” intentionally obscures the truth: it is the U.S. doing the “escalating” – and that its escalating is entirely illegal.
“Trump warns time running out for deal” makes it sound as though Trump has some kind of authority to make this “warning”. Hey, Guardian, maybe he’s doing it on behalf of his Board of Peace.
The truth is he has no such authority. That resides with the United Nations. What Trump is doing is not a warning; it’s a threat – an utterly illegal threat of aggression.
In any case, Iran has been trying to drag the U.S. back to the negotiating table ever since Trump unilaterally tore up their original deal eight years ago. Time is only “running out” because the U.S. has decided it now needs a pretext to launch an illegal war of aggression. Why is The Guardian not making that clear in its headlines?
Instead, it has turned reality on its head. Trump, according to The Guardian, is the one supposedly trying to secure a deal – that’s the very same Trump who tore up the original deal, has refused to return to negotiations and instead bombed Iran last summer – in another illegal act of aggression.
“U.S. president says armada heading towards Iran is ‘prepared to fulfil its missions with violence if necessary’”. That is just The Guardian’s way of obscuring the fact that Trump is preparing to break international law by waging a war of aggression, the “supreme crime”.
The Guardian’s headline and subhead both present an act by the U.S. of supreme illegality as though it is some kind law enforcement measure. This isn’t journalism. It is cheerleading for an illegal war in which Iranian civilians will inevitably pay the heaviest price.
We have to stop thinking that any corporate media represents the interests of humanity. They promote the interests of the billionaire class and their hangers-on, who make huge profits from a war machine that needs constant excuses to kill.
Corporate media doesn’t hold these billionaires to account. Its sole function is to serve as their public relations arm.
Meanwhile, here is another example of utterly irresponsible journalism from the BBC on tonight’s News at Ten.
Diplomatic correspondent Caroline Hawley starts by credulously amplifying a fantastical death toll of “tens of thousands of dead” from recent protests in Iran – figures provided by regime opponents. Contrast that with the BBC’s constant, two years of caution and downplaying of the numbers killed in Gaza by Israel.
The idea that in a few days Iranian security forces managed to kill as many Iranians as Israel has managed to kill Palestinians in Gaza from the prolonged carpet-bombing and levelling of the tiny enclave, as well as the starvation of its population, beggars belief. The figures sound patently ridiculous because they are patently ridiculous.
Either the Iran death toll is massively inflated, or the Gaza death toll is a massive underestimate. Or far more likely, both are intentionally being used to mislead.
Watch the BBC’s 4:45 report:
This isn’t journalism. It’s stenography for western governments that choose enemies and allies not on the basis of whether they adhere to any ethical or legal standards of behaviour but purely on the basis of whether they assist the West in its battle to dominate oil resources in the Middle East.
Notice something else. This news segment – focusing the attention of western publics once again on the presumed wanton slaughter of protesters in Iran earlier this month – is being used by the BBC to advance the case for a war on Iran out of strictly humanitarian concerns that Trump himself doesn’t appear to share.
Trump has sent his armada of war ships to the Gulf not because he says he wants to protect protesters – in fact, missile strikes will undoubtedly kill many more Iranian civilians – but because he says he wishes to force Iran to the negotiating table over its nuclear programme.
There are already deep layers of deceit from western politicians regarding Iran – not least, the years-long premise that Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, for which there is still no evidence, and that Tehran is responsible for the breakdown of a deal to monitor its civilian nuclear power programme. In fact, it was Trump in his first term as president who tore up that agreement.
Iran responded by enriching uranium above the levels needed for civilian use in a move that was endlessly flagged to Washington by Tehran and was clearly intended to encourage the previous Biden administration to renew the deal Trump had wrecked.
Instead, on his return to power, Trump used that enrichment not as grounds to return to diplomacy but as a pretext, first, to intensify U.S. sanctions that have further crippled Iran’s economy, deepening poverty among ordinary Iranians, and then to launch a strike on Iran last summer that appears to have made little difference to its nuclear programme but served to weaken its air defences, to assassinate some of its leaders and to spread terror among the wider population.
Notice too – though the BBC won’t point it out – that the U.S. sanctions are a form of collective punishment on the Iranian population that is in breach of international law and that last year’s strikes on Iran were a clear war of aggression, which is defined as “the supreme international crime”.
The U.S. president is now posturing as though he is the one who wants to bring Iran to the negotiating table, by sending an armada of war ships, when it was he who overturned that very negotiating table in May 2018 and ripped up what was known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
The BBC, of course, makes no mention whatsoever of this critically important context for judging the credibility of Trump’s claims about his intentions towards Iran. Instead its North America editor, Sarah Smith, vacuously regurgitates (in the video above) as fact the White House’s evidence-free claim that Iran has a “nuclear weapons programme” that Trump wants it to “get rid of.”
But on top of all that, media like the BBC are adding their own layers of deceit to sell the case for a U.S. war on Iran.
First, they are doing so by trying to find new angles on old news about the violent repression of protests inside Iran. They are doing so by citing extraordinary, utterly unevidenced death toll figures and then tying them to the reasons for Trump going on the war path. Its reporting is centring once again – after the catastrophes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere – bogus humanitarian justifications for war when Trump himself is making no such connection.
And second, the BBC’s reporting by Sarah Smith coolly lays out the U.S. mechanics of attacking Iran – the build-up to war – without ever mentioning that such an attack would be in complete violation of international law. It would again be “the supreme international crime.”
Instead she observes: “Donald Trump senses an opportunity to strike at a weakened leadership in Tehran. But how is he actually going to do that? I mean he talked in his message about the successful military actions that have definitely emboldened him after the actions he took in Venezuela and earlier last year in Iran.”
Imagine if you can – and you can’t – the BBC dispassionately outlining Russian President Vladimir Putin’s plans to move on from his invasion of Ukraine into launching military strikes on Poland.
Its correspondents note calmly the number of missiles Putin has massed closer to Poland’s borders, the demands made by the Russian leader of Poland if it wishes to avoid attack, and the practical obstacles standing in the way of the attack. One correspondent ends by citing Putin’s earlier, self-proclaimed “successes”, such as the invasion of Ukraine, as a precedent for his new military actions.
It is unthinkable. And yet not a day passes without the BBC broadcasting this kind of blatant warmongering slop dressed up as journalism. The British public have to pay for this endless stream of disinformation pouring into their living rooms – lies that not only leave them clueless about important international events but drive us ever closer to the brink of global conflagration.
This article is from the author’s blog, Jonathan Cook.net.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Trump has painted himself into a corner. He can’t attack because neither Israel nor the US can defend against Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles. He can’t walk away without looking weak. Trump needs to be able to claim the US extracted concessions from Iran that only he, the greatest president in history, could have achieved. Iran should grant Trump some token concession so that he can declare victory and send the fleet home.
Back in 2015 the Guardian opened up its New Eastern Network, a collection of writers intended to “expand coverage” on Russia and Eastern Europe .
Many of the writers at the NEN came from UK Right wing think tanks aligned to the US and NATO that were actively promoting Syrian, Russian and Iranian regime change. It included Douglas Murray and Michael Gove from the Henry Jackson Society, and Jeffrey Gedman, Anne Applebaum and Peter Pomerantz from the CIA backed Legatum Institute.
The Atlantacist ties ran very deep (Jeffrey Gedmin, for example, served for four years as President and CEO of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). These groups promoted propaganda themes that infested our MSM: starvation of civilian populations by Assad, ‘weaponized propaganda’ from Russia, the Russian military ‘invasion’ of Ukraine, Islam as the enemy of democracy.
Legatum, for example, had a high level of UK political backing:
“A few months later [mid 2014] [Editor-in-chief of The Interpreter Michael] Weiss, with Legatum fellow Peter Pomerantsev, published a think-tank report on Russian media. To publicize it, they appeared at a Legatum event in London alongside Applebaum, US ambassador to Kiev Geoff Pyatt and John Herbst of the Atlantic Council. Their own website admitted that the evening was ‘hosted in cooperation with the US Department of State and the US Embassy in London’. Later Weiss spoke alongside Janis Karklins, Director of the Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence of NATO, on a Legatum podcast.”
It seems that when the Guardian talks about “expanding coverage”, what they mean is broadcasting the views of billionaire oligarchs, ex-CIA analysts, the European Union or some delightful mix of all three.
Readers of the Guardian since before they broke the “Snowden files” will no doubt notice a volte-face with regards to government interference with journalism. One wonders if the NEN being set up so soon after the Guardian came under such pressure from GCHQ that they voluntarily destroyed their own computers could really be a coincidence. In the space of two years the Guardian went from broadcasting the illegal actions of the US/UK governments, to re-printing CIA and State Department press releases. There’s a name for that, and it’s not “expanding coverage”.
This from Kit Klarenberg:
hxxps://off-guardian.org/2015/12/20/new-east-network-who-is-the-guardian-speaking-for-part-1
Brilliant takedown of our supposed ‘independent’ media. I have not bought or read the Guardian, a paper I used to read regularly, for some years now, after it turned on Julian Assange (for example).
It is a variety of smell blindness to the art of the rotten deal. The world of the military protection racket over the ages of human civilization of male dominance behavior putting civilization at risk in this era.
Like many U.S. “parallel left” and/or liberal media “non-profit” NGOs, the Guardian seems to be funded by the U.S. power elite’s liberal foundations. Between 2020 and 2024, for example, an Ithaca-based foundation, The Park Foundation, gave 6 “charitable” grants, totaling $1 million, to The Guardian, according to The Park Foundation website’s grant data base. So wouldn’t it also be accurate to characterize The Guardian as a liberal “elite foundation-funded media”, as well as a “corporate media”? hxxps://www.parkfoundation.org/grantees/theguardian-org/
Thank you, Jonathan. The Guardian is putrid in the extreme.
Great work to monitor the war propaganda from Mr. Cook
And to think the Guardian was once regarded as a left-leaning pro working class outlet. I recall Craig Murray some years ago saying the Guardian had become an outlet for MI6. The “compatible left” is busy thinly disguising the warmongering, bias and gross hypocrisy.
The western mass media cartel has become a laughing stock among insiders and intellectually honest observers. Sadly, many still follow the war propaganda.
Also, here in the US, Democracy Now is widely regarded as a left-leaning, “progressive” news outlet. However, they take every opportunity to demonize Russia , China and Iran. I hear the Iranian government referred to as “regime” while the US “administration” and Israeli “government”. The coverage is one-sided and their sources are from State Dept. funded NGOs and so-called human rights organizations. They interview wealthy expat Iranians who want Reza Pahlavi to become the Shah.
They do cover Palestine issues relatively well to build some credibility, but then the irrational bait-and-switch for audiences to attack one of the only countries who have substantively supported Palestine, and against Israeli genocide. I call the show Hypocrisy Now! and I’m not the only one. With “leftists” like these, we don’t need no warmongering right wing authoritarians.
Between 2020 and 2024, The Park Foundation also gave 5 “charitable” grants, totaling $410,000, to fund the “Democracy Now!” show you mention, according to this elite foundation’s website’s grants data base. hxxps://www.parkfoundation.org/grantees/democracy-now-productions-inc/
The evil empire supported by it’s evil minions junior partners doing whatever it wants because normal people are too naive, too numb to think…
MSM = Main Stream Manipulation.
I am glad that Trump is suing BBC!
Thankyou Fred for those revelations. I have commented on numerous occasions that the Guardian is only good now for a few opinion pieces and recipes.
Valerie, these widely read so-called mainstream outlets are necessary to read to see what the millions are seeing as ‘reported truth’. CN gets 5, 15, as many as 40 comments on articles while The Guardian gets 200. 500 or a 1000 before comments are closed. We need to read them to see what they are saying about events and what events are reported on, not to learn what to think and believe.
It doesn’t take too long to see what events The Guardian is reporting on and what they have to say about them. And we certainly don’t need to read their 1000 reader comments marked by passionate certainty about proven falsehoods. Just look at the blocked comments for failing to meet “editorial standards” from people who actually know what they are talking about and can cite credible evidence. Western media is awash in rank and dangerous war propaganda, uncritically repeated by glossy media talking heads. So it’s natural (and tragic) for the public to accept these lies. There are a number of credible websites available where informed political discussion can be found. So there is no need for us to be bothered with the muck at The Guardian other than a five minute scan.
Yes James. You are right. And i do read the comments on the Guardian’s articles. And i must say for the most part it appears the hoi polloi are clued up. So why are we still stuck with these charlatan governments and politicians i wonder.