WaPo’s Afghan Papers Propagate Colonial Narrative of Noble Intentions Gone Awry
https://fair.org/home/wapos-afghan-papers-propagate-colonial-narrative-of-noble-intentions-gone-awry/In an earlier article (FAIR.org, 12/18/19) regarding the Washington Post’s Afghanistan Papers (12/9/19), I discussed how the Post’s exposé also exposed the Post as one of the primary vehicles US officials use to spread their lies, and why it’s impossible for corporate media outlets like the Post to raise more substantive questions about the deceptive nature of US foreign policy.
But those aren’t the only significant takeaways. The Afghanistan Papers should also be considered an excellent case study of contemporary colonial propaganda, and yet another example of corporate media criticizing US wars without opposing US imperialism.
Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s famous analysis of media coverage of the Vietnam War, in Manufacturing Consent, found that questions of the invasion’s “tactics and costs”—to the US—dominated the debate, because the media absorbed the framework of government propaganda regarding the “necessity” of military intervention, the “righteousness of the American cause” and the US’s “nobility of intent.” Decades later, Herman and Chomsky’s propaganda model of corporate media is still a useful tool in understanding the Post’s Afghanistan Papers.
The Post advanced the centuries-old colonial narrative of the empire’s good intentions gone awry when it argued that the US “inadvertently built a corrupt, dysfunctional Afghan government,” and that this illustrated that “even some of the most well-intentioned projects could boomerang."
More at the link --->
https://fair.org/home/wapos-afghan-papers-propagate-colonial-narrative-of-noble-intentions-gone-awry/The Washington Post article ---->
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/Last Edit by Gladstone
