Ted Koppel writes an interesting and revealing commentary for the Washington Post of how the US media reports opinions as if they were facts.
Koppel writes, “While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic.… But when our accountants, bankers and lawyers, our doctors and our politicians tell us only what we want to hear, despite hard evidence to the contrary, we are headed for disaster.”
For example, a Reuter’s piece on Yahoo had this lead paragraph in the morning, “China warning on Friday against military acts near its coastline…” as if China would retaliate if anything happened.
From comments I’ve read on the Internet, the US mob reacted as expected calling President Obama a loser for not retaliating in North Korea.
In the afternoon, the replacement lead paragraph said, “China said on Friday it was determined to prevent an escalation of this week’s violence on the Korean peninsula…” I’ve read what the Chinese minister said and this is closer to the truth.
It is obvious a hot-blooded reporter wrote the morning piece for the mob that wants war, since there are voices in South Korea and in the US screaming for blood regardless of the outcome.
Mobs seldom pay attention to history. It takes wiser heads in positions of power to prevail. In the US media and often in Washington DC, there is seldom this level of wisdom to be seen.
An example of a government reacting to what a nationalistic mob demanded led to World War I. By the time that war ended more than sixteen million had been killed, and this all took place because one man had been assassinated.
The same thing happened in Vietnam where more than three million died after the LBJ White House lied and the US media stirred the mob to action.
Over Iraq, opinions and White House lies repeated in the US media stirred the mob again and that led to a war where hundreds of thousands have already died and the violence in Iraq hasn’t ended.
This brings up another point raised from Koppel’s commentary.
Koppel aptly reveals that today’s “free” press has abandoned the truth, because there are millions of Americans that worship the opinions of people such as “Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly – individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.”
The opposite often happens in China between the state-run media and nationalistic mob.
For example, in May 1999, Chinese nationalism and anger ran high after the US bombing of the PRC’s embassy in Belgrade. Instead of fanning the flames, the state-run media calmed the mob.
Then there was the April 2001 Hainan Island incident caused by the collision of a US spy plane with a PLA fighter jet killing the Chinese pilot. The same thing happened.
Next, there was the recent Senkaku Island dispute between China and Japan.
In all three incidents, the state-run media in China calmed nationalist pride and the people’s demand for blood.
It is ironic that in America, the opinionated, biased voices from the so-called “free” media often feeds the mob’s frenzy and the mob signals what it wants to hear, which may lead to another war unless wiser heads prevail.
Discover more at Media Slugfest Using Taiwan
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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