Katie Couric, on the CBS evening news on April 26, was breathless as she launched her lead story. “Now, in a CBS exclusive,” she announced, “there are new reports suggesting that Iran is only three years away from having a nuclear bomb.”
Thus it begins, the drumbeat for war with Iran, this time not with speeches from the White House or from Paul Wolfowitz, but with hype from the major news agencies, trying to convince us that they are on to Something Big. Have we forgotten that, in early 2003, the same TV networks had the same doomsday message about Iraq? President Bush and the neocons are now generally pilloried for leading us into war under false pretenses, and that’s a valid charge, but they couldn’t have done it without the press – the same press that now leads the posse to lynch Cheney and the other hawks.
In the run-up to the Iraq invasion, I don’t remember the networks warning us that maybe, just maybe, the WMD evidence was rigged by people hell-bent on regime change in Iraq. Instead, we heard the same dire warnings about chemical weapons (“he used them on his own people!”) and aluminum tubes and yellow-cake uranium. It made good copy, and it kept the viewers from changing the channel. You don’t bump your ratings by telling your audience that on a list of threats to the U.S., Iraq ranks just above Uzbekistan.
But what if Iran is really three years away from a nuclear weapon? The fear in some quarters is that this threat could prompt Israel to launch a preemptive attack on Iran - with planes and missiles supplied by the U.S. It could happen. There is so much hatred in the Middle East that an explosion is always possible. In fact, it’s more likely now than ever, and we are smack in the middle of it, because of the horrific carnage we’ve triggered in Iraq and because of our unquestioning support of Israel. There is, in short, more than enough real danger in the world without our news media piling on. It is a time for restraint on the part of the TV anchors and the headline writers. Alas, restraint is not in their toolkit. Ratings and circulation depend on excitement, not restraint, and the most exciting stories are stories of wars waged and wars threatened.
In 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine blew up in Havana Harbor (either because of a mine or spontaneous combustion; no one knows for sure), triggering a wave of outrage on the pages of the New York tabloids. Artist Frederick Remington was dispatched to Cuba to supply drawings of the scene in a well orchestrated campaign to prepare the public for war against Spain.
“There is no war,” cabled Remington to his boss, William Randolph Hearst. “Request to be recalled.”
“Please remain,” answered Hearst. “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war.”
And he did.
