As the media begins to pump out their annual stories looking back on the previous year, it is disquieting that a recent Pew Research Center reported that the U.S. media devoted only four percent of its media coverage in 2010 to the never-ending military quagmire in Afghanistan. This shamefully low rate was a drop from the already dismal five percent by the media in 2009.
While Vice President Joe Biden recently said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the US military would withdrawal Afghanistan in 2014, it appears that the mainstream corporate owned media has already left Afghanistan due to viewer fatigue. Too bad political leaders like Biden are not fatigued by the never-ending war, instead of being financed and cheered on by the military industrial congressional complex and other vested interests who want the never-ending military quagmire to continue.
Similar to the lack of reporting on the Afghanistan quagmire, the weak and timid press coverage of leaked State Department cables by the American media is another glaring example of how the public lies and false information of political leaders is allowed to continue unabated with little public pressure. Haven’t the American public or the American press learned anything from the Iraq war and the failure of the press to challenge and refute the now discredited claims presented by the Bush administration during their run up to the Iraq War in 2003?
While it is impossible to definitively explain why the American media is not fully reporting on the US State Department cables, some of the information revealed in the US State Department cables reveal that American officials may be more interested in protecting themselves from answering embarrassing questions, than it is about protecting American national security as they publicly proclaim. One of the most notable US State Department documents that have been virtually ignored in the American mainstream media is a cable by the American government in October 2008 discussing a BP oil well gas leak in Armenia, 19 months earlier than a very similar gas leak that caused the Deep Water Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico. The cables reveal that some of BP's partners in the gas field were upset that the company was so secretive about the incident that it even allegedly withheld information from them.
In one cable from the embassy in Baku in October 2008, a U.S. diplomat says "BP has closed off a 'few suspect wells' from which they think a bad cement job caused the leaking gas." That, the diplomat says, "is actually good news, since had it been a reservoir leak the damage would have been potentially non-reparable, whereas now all BP has to do is fix the cement job." The repair work is "hard and expensive ... but preferable to losing the platform." By April 2010, that assessment would read like a gross understatement.
Although first reported on 17 December by The Guardian, highlighting the abysmal American press coverage of the leaked US State Department, Time magazine only reported on the issue on Monday December 20. Underscoring the atrocious and pathetic American press coverage of the leaked US State Department cables is the fact that the Time Magazine story referenced the British newspaper The Guardian and not The New York Times. It is an ominous indication of the freedom of the press in America when the American public has to learn of information about its government through foreign news sources.
While The New York Times may be hesitant to publish the leaked State Department cables for a multitude of reasons, not reporting on information contained in the cables does not mean the information in the cables will disappear or does not exist. Although some Americans may be angry at the actions of Julian Assange for releasing the US State Department cables, the people who lost loved ones in the Deep Water Horizon explosion or in Iraq and Afghanistan as a result of government and corporate secrecy may not be as critical of Mr. Assange.
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