But how much proof do we need that the United States conspired with Britain to invade Iraq on utterly false pretexts causing the virtual destruction of an entire nation? What worse crimes have Ahmadinejad and Chavez perpetrated to earn themselves membership of the “awkward squad”? What would it take before Britain and America were inducted? The answer is that it could never happen because this kind of media labelling is a function of power, not of rational thought. The technical term: ‘propaganda’.
For our neutral media, ‘we’ are always reasonable, civilised, benign – it us up to ‘them’, the crazies, to reach out to ‘us’ in peace and friendship. Peace will reign when those who are “hostile” renounce their baseless aggression towards ‘us’. The myth of media objectivity obscures the deep mendacity of the mainstream stance: the world is always viewed from ‘here’, and ‘here’ is always high and moral.