Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/14/23 Ted Galen Carpenter on the News Media’s Role in the American Empire

Episode Date: April 18, 2023

Ted Galen Carpenter makes his first appearance on the show as a Senior Fellow at the Libertarian Institute. Scott and Carpenter discuss his most recent book about the news media’s long history of enabling Washington’s disastrous foreign policy. They start with the campaign to get the U.S. involved in World War I and move up to the present day—touching on Vietnam, Iraq War I, Bosnia, Iraq War II, Syria and Ukraine.    Discussed on the show: Unreliable Watchdog by Ted Galen Carpenter The Captive Press by Ted Galen Carpenter Ted Galen Carpenter is a senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. Carpenter has written 10 books including America’s Coming War with China: A Collision Course over Taiwan and most recently Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative Magazine and the National Interest. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of anti-war.com, author of the book, Fool's Aaron, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and The Brand New, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2004. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scott horton.4 you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton's show thank you guys on the line i've got ted galen carpenter new senior fellow at the libertarian institute welcome the show how you doing ted well thank you very much scott it's a pleasure to be

affiliated with the libertarian institute It's a new home, and I hope it'll be one that is very productive for both of us. I'm sure it will be. And, you know, we published books, too, and I know you like writing them. So mark your calendar. All right. And speaking of books, your latest is Unreliable Watchdog, the news media, and U.S. foreign policy. And this is really something else here.

How long have you been working on this thing? I've been working on that book about a little over two and a half years. It's really good. And it has a lot of evidence about how the news media have absolutely failed to provide its proper role with respect to the American people and alerting them to misconduct and incompetence in U.S. foreign policy. You know, I've noticed this ever since I was a kid that the newsman is always on the cop side, no matter what it is, or whatever the mayor says, or whatever, if you have a problem, even, you know, here in Austin, seven on your side. But their job really is explaining why you just need to sit there and take it, because that's the way it is. And it's always been like that, and it comes to the wars, too.

I mean, remember, they called it the rummy show when Donald Rumsfeld would get up there and go, I don't have to prove that Saddam's friends. with Osama and give some riddle about you know what you know and you don't know what you don't know yet and that's good enough for everybody they loved it um but so i don't know i was born against these guys no matter what uh how come the journalistic field is full of people and and institutions that are so biased toward the state i mean they get some scoops here and there of course but it's almost always still from the government's point of view, you know? Well, two things really struck me as I was researching this book. One was just how little daylight there was on issue after issue after issue

between government accounts of foreign conflicts and U.S. involvement in them and what purported to be news accounts. Most of the news accounts turned out to be little more than rewritten official statements, position papers, or press releases by the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department, and with regard to the nexus between domestic security and foreign affairs, the FBI. And that's making news outlets into propaganda conduits, not independent monitors of government behavior. The other thing that struck me was how often of the news media portrayed complex, foreign conflicts and foreign disputes as morality plays with all evil on one side,

whatever side the U.S. government was opposing in another country, and all innocence and nobility on the other side, the one that Washington was supporting. Those characteristics stood out time and time again on foreign policy issue after foreign policy issue. All right. So let's pick on Woodrow Wilson because I hate him, even though he was dead long before I was born. But he's the father of Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler and the Bush family fortune, for starters. So tell us about his propaganda campaign during the First World War. That was a textbook example of how public could be conditioned to support an extreme policy, one that would have had. very little support before the war broke out.

And yet the herd mentality took over. I would even argue a lemming mentality took over. And that was actively fostered by the press. The press was the Wilson administration's conduit for mobilizing the American people to hate everything German, to regard this war. as a crusade, as Wilson put it, to make the world safe for democracy, and that anyone who opposed that was guilty of sedition. Now, some of this sounds rather familiar in our own time, but it was especially intense during that period, and it has left scars on this country,

deep scars, the most noticeable one being the continuing existence of the Espionage Act of 1917, which is being used today to harass critics who dare reveal government secrets or government misconduct. So that was an episode. Wilson, indeed, was the father of so many of the problems that our country faces today. yeah well and it's no accident i mean he was a bad person who believed in horrible things and so guess what it turned out that the way he behaved also had horrible consequences i mean him and all of his people it's just amazing to think um i forgot exactly the context but we were joking the other day about uh colonel edward mandel house bragging that oh yeah well i anticipated mousselini by several

years back, you know, when Mussolini was popular and House was jealous. But, you know, that's who those people were. And then so, yeah, there's no surprise that that's how they acted. And then that that's the legacy that they left was real fascism in Europe, the kind that makes, you know, American style blush. And then the war and the whole world empire ever since then. It's, you know, the Republic of dishonesty. The empire lies as a as Ron Paul called it, and I blame him. And you know what? It's funny, right?

Because he was not the worst. If it hadn't been for him, we might have gotten to World War I even earlier, right? Well, Theodore Roosevelt and a lot of his followers were pushing hard for U.S. involvement in the war within weeks after the outbreak in Europe in 1914. So Wilson talked a good game right up until he was safely reelected as president in 1960. And then the tone changed and he pushed the U.S. pushed Congress to declare war in April of 1917. This begins a legacy, but what we've seen in the subsequent decades is truly scary because it represents, a mortal threat to domestic liberties that Americans had taken for granted and to a large extent still take for granted, even though they're in grave danger.

Yeah. Now, do you talk in the book about, you know, British intelligence and that whole opt to pressure us into World War II? I touch on that briefly, but most of the book focuses on the period. of since the end of the Cold War. The reason being I had a previous book that I published in the late 1990s called The Captive Press, which dealt with a lot of the issues from the Spanish-American War through the end of the Cold War and the start of the Persian Gulf War. This book covers some of that territory as well, using new sources.

sources that didn't exist 20, 25 years ago. But most of the book focuses on the period beginning with the wars in the Balkans and going forward to the what I termed the second cold war with Russia, which increasingly looks like it's turning hot rather than cold. Yeah, I know. I heard them on NPR talking about China the other day. They just take it for granted that, oh, all this increasing of tension could lead to a cold war. Well, it could lead to a hot one, but they can't even imagine that,

you know, they can't just say it could lead to a war. That's one of the problems that I'm amazed at the casual nature with which U.S. officials, other Western officials, and the Western news media regard reckless proposals, proposals that could easily trigger a shooting war between the United States and Russia or between the U.S. and China, and yet they act like this is just purely an academic exercise. There's no real danger of the conflict between NATO and Russia, for example, escalating into a direct conflict and one with nuclear implications. It just, their minds don't seem to grasp the seriousness of that, a danger. And they instead act like this is, I guess, some kind of war game where nobody's going to die.

All right. Now, so before we get to the Balkans, because I really want to hear all about that. And this is definitely on my list because, of course, I'm writing a book about all this Cold War stuff right now. The new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia, that is not China. Thank God I don't know nearly enough about China to try to write a book about that But on Vietnam I wonder if we can talk about that a little bit Because I was raised to believe that man you would not believe

The level of lies never mind you wouldn't believe the lies But you wouldn't believe how bad they lied all day every day And I guess kind of the iconic image as it was explained to me Was a report that's not necessarily live but on tape from earlier today, you know, where a guy is saying, yeah, we lost 400 guys today and they're stacking their bodies like cordwood in the background. And they go, yeah, I mean, they killed a lot of the other guys too, I guess, but boy, did our guys get their ass handed to him. Back to you in Washington there, Jeb, you know? And then they would say, and now live to the

Pentagon briefing. And he would go, man, we whooped their ass today. We lost three guys and four wounded but boy we killed thousands of them but meanwhile everybody could see like you know over their tv dinner they could no we just saw a pile of bodies of american gis dude you can't and then it was like that i was told it was like that every day that the kind of lies that they tell us about iraq or russia or palestine or whatever are just nothing compared to the degree of dishonesty which i guess is what provoked such a reaction also all the dead bodies right the 60,000 dead Americans, you know, coming home in body bags, too. But part of it, too, was just the contempt that was displayed for the American people, that you're just going to believe us,

because we say so, no matter how outrageous the propaganda is. And, and I guess, you know, and maybe journalism got a little better for a while after that as kind of backlash, or maybe that's a mythology or any of those points relevant to you, sir? Well, it was a case where journalism got somewhat better. Both reporters and the American people were amazingly trusting of the U.S. government going into the Vietnam War. That experience did sour, both the public and a major segment of the press. and they found for the first time, I guess, the realization that the government routinely lied. And that was disillusioning in the extreme.

The journalistic community after that, up until the Persian Gulf War, was certainly more skeptical of government accounts. And that skepticism came through, particularly with the Reagan administration's policies in the third world in Angola, in Central America, and so on. But that didn't last. And I wonder how much of that was simply partisanship that most journalists were Democrats and Reagan was a staunch, obviously, a staunch Republican. But once you got to the lead up to the Persian Gulf War, it was like Vietnam never happened. The gullibility in the press, the willingness of the press to pass on preposterous stories in some cases to the American people as fact, rebounded totally. And that has continued to the present day. It really has not dissipated the slightest.

Despite the bruising experience in Iraq, where even some key journalists had to admit they had been dupes and served the interests of George W. Bush's administration and the Iraqi National Congress. This was the exile group that was desperately trying to get the United States into a war with Saddam Hussein. But that second disillusionment didn't last at all. Within a matter of a couple of years, it was gone entirely. As we saw when the U.S. intervened in Libya, in Syria, and now that we're seeing the confrontation with Russia

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And there's free shipping, too. Well, let's go back to Rack War I there for a second, because that was such a huge one, and I was interested in that. I was in ninth grade, and I wasn't a Republican, so it wasn't that I believed in Bush, but I did like fighter jets and explosions and stuff. So I supported the war. And I can't say I really bought into like, oh, we have to go save the Kuwaiti people and stuff.

I don't remember thinking that. But, you know, I did pay very close attention to what was happening at the time. And so I have very vivid memories of the media coverage. And it was something where, you know, James Webb wrote in his book, the former Secretary of the Navy and Senator, said that, you know, a lot of people who had opposed Vietnam were looking for a war to

support. And a lot of people who had supported Vietnam were looking for a war to win. And so this is one where we could all get together. In fact, I found the quote where Brent Skowcroft says, one of the major reasons we did this was to beat the Vietnam syndrome, to get the American people back together, united behind a foreign war, and to set the present that this is who we are and this is what we do. And you people will come along with it. And it works so well. Yellow ribbons around every tree,

even way out in the countryside. You know what I mean? And well, in downtown too, everywhere. And all the brand-new country songs that were produced and put on the radio just to support the war and all this stuff. I mean, they really did it up, didn't they? Well, it was a patriotic boom. and avidly, avidly encouraged by George H.W. Bush's administration and a news media that was at least as enthusiastic about this conflict as the U.S. government was.

I bring up myself as a surprisingly easy victory. Yeah. I'm sorry. I bring up myself as a high school freshman because I equate the mentality of the entire country. at the time to my own at the time that this is it was a it was a nation of 15 year olds being told by a republican president that you can sad you can indulge your bloodlust this is something wrong that we can all do together so let's do it you know and the fact that the war did not turn out to be nearly as bloody for the american side as was predicted by almost all observers, made that seem like a, just a tremendous success. So if we can do that to Saddam Hussein and kick his forces out of Kuwait, and the main

debate over that time was whether we should have pushed on to Baghdad and overthrown Saddam. The people who were saying this is a bad idea, this is going to entangle us in difficult Middle East Affairs for generations, those voices were absolutely suppressed. They got no traction whatsoever. But that set the precedent that, hey, we, the United States can intervene anywhere, any time, and secure an easy victory. And that led in turn to the interventions in the Balkans and then, of course, from Iraq, Libya, Syria, and what we're seeing today with regard to Ukraine. All right. Well, talk a little bit about the Balkans because the breakup of Yugoslavia, it's obviously very difficult and a lot of difficult names to memorize and these kinds of things. And the CNN morality tale at the time was the Serbs or the Nazis and they're trying to genocide all of their former.

statists there in the former Yugoslavia. And so America and our allies have to help all of their poor innocent victims. Does that sound about right to you? Unfortunately, that is a very accurate description of both the official U.S. policy of the Clinton administration and the news coverage. And it's exactly right. The Serbs were demonized. They were the latest incarnation of Nazis. And the Bosnian Muslims and the Muslim Kosovars with regard to Kosovo, they were absolutely innocent victims. They were democratic freedom fighters, trying to resist brutal Serbian aggression. And it was that simplistic.

That's the way it was portrayed to the American people. Yeah. And now, you know, I want to skip ahead to, because, well, I don't know, we can talk about Iraq War II a bit more if you want, but the other one that's really interesting to me from this era is Syria, where you had these just complete and total frauds like Michael Weiss of the Daily Beast and all these supposed experts who really rallied. The press, the rest of the press, and the American public, to some degree, around back in Al-Qaeda, against a guy in a three-piece suit. And then they said that we were the bad guy.

We were crazy for criticizing their policy that led directly the rise of the Islamic State. And it wasn't even a covert op. It was right there in front of everybody, like the slowest motion, craziest train wreck you could imagine. It's unbelievable. And the press... Yeah, one would have thought that if not... not U.S. officials, at least U.S. journalists, would have been a lot more cautious about official accounts, given the experience of having been lied to with respect to Iraq, about Saddam's arsenal

weapons of mass destruction, that Iraq was supposedly connected to the 9-11 attacks. Both assertions were total nonsense. So one would have thought, going in, into Syria, that they would have been more skeptical, more cautious. Instead, they were, for the most part, willing channels of the Obama administration's propaganda that we were supporting democratic freedom fighters in Syria against the brutal Bashar al-Assad. In fact, the opposition for the most part, consisted of Sunni extremists, in some cases, really radical types, including the Nusra front, which was Al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria. Most members of the news media covered that up

entirely. Did not let the American people know that. And again, vilful, anyone who pointed out that reality. Instead, they maintain the fiction circulated by the Obama administration. That's when journalists become nothing more than cheap propagandists. And that's what happened with the Syrian war. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, as bad as Iraq War II was, it wasn't meant by the people who started the war in America to benefit Iran and al-Qaeda. That's just because they were really bad at being imperialists and starting aggressive wars and stuff, but deliberately taking the side of al-Qaeda and in broad daylight and getting away with it, dominating the narrative in such a powerful way. Is it just that the military industrial complex advertises on the major

channels, and it just comes down to simple stuff like that, Ted? I got to tell you, when I was a kid and they said, oh, no, there's no John Doe, too. You don't need to worry about that. Or even, you know, before that. Oh, the branch of idiots, they killed themselves. You don't need to know what was going on at the back of the house. And every newspaper man in America agreed. I thought, well, it must be a weird secret society type-based conspiracy of control that I can't see. Because how do you get every newspaper editor in America, every major TV news producer in America, to just pretend to believe that?

That couldn't possibly be true. And we see on things like this, too, back in the Al Nusra front, I mean, it's not like you and me are the weird ones on this. They are, but they dominate somehow. And so what's the secret? It's not the secret conspiracy. Is it just the money? The money is part of it, but I think there is something a bit deeper and more worrisome. And that is the herd mentality, the presence of group think with a vengeance.

Most of the journalists have similar backgrounds. They have similar educational experiences. They view the world in much the same way. And unfortunately, it is a really distorted way. It is one that is incredibly dangerous for both the safety and the liberties of the American people. But we've seen that on issue after issue after issue. It's not like they're holding a secret meeting every Thursday. morning at 10 o'clock and deciding what the party line is going to be for for news accounts

for the coming week it's that they view the world in fundamentally similar ways so they react to developments in the same way one can call that brainwashing that may be an accurate term in this case and add to that the economic of the military industrial complex and the career incentives. If you want to get ahead as a journalist and get a post at a major news outlet, being an iconoclast is not the way to go. You simply parrot the party line, whatever it may be at the moment, and you will see your career advance, contradict official accounts, contradict the dominant narrative, and you will find your career sliding backwards and that you will be increasingly marginalized. We have seen that

again and again and again with journalists who were once pretty prominent and now are very obscure. Yep. And meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldberg, the guy that said Saddam and Osama were working together against us. He's the editor of the Atlantic. And TV news is full of all guys who were all wrong on all of these things all along. And that's how they keep their job. And it's not in spite, they don't have their job in spite of that fact. It's because of that fact, quite obviously. All right. And I'm sorry, we're out of time, but thanks very much to you, Ted Carpenter, new senior fellow at the Libertarian Institute. The book is called Unreliable Watchdog, the News Media and U.S. policy really appreciate it thanks scott the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kpfk 90.7

fm in l a psradyo dot com antiwar dot com scott horton dot org and libertarian institute dot org