Go back a moment to the lesson that Trump is apt to learn from events of the past week. Would it be wrong to reduce it to the following? “You can make some highly respectable new friends by throwing missiles at an obnoxious foreign power. It works like a dream so long as you do it fast and give it a humanitarian gloss.” In the sheer quantity of the attention paid, and the narrowness of the attention, something terrible about our political culture has come to light.
David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale University. He wrote the paragraph quoted above this past Monday in an essay titled “Bomb First,” which appeared in the NYR Daily Section of the New York Review of Books. His intent at the time was to turn a skeptical eye on the near-gleeful reaction by the U.S. media to Trump’s use of Tomahawk missiles against Syrian targets in purported “response” to that country’s apparent gassing of civilians. His conclusion:
For an American president, bombing is easier than thinking. For an American lawmaker or opinion-maker, it costs nothing to celebrate the resolve of a president who bombs.
Bromwich’s main point is that nearly all reporting on military strikes is fundamentally passive, consisting mostly of media outlets being spoon-fed pre-ordained conclusions, all while minimizing context or any need for further investigation or inquiry. He is harshly critical of what he sees as the major media’s reflexive reaction to the Syrian attacks, and singles out the reaction of The New York Times, which on April 7 featured no less than 19 stories about the missile strike, all cast in headlines (listed by Bromwich) fairly lauding Trump’s “decisive” performance of an act that required virtually no effort on his part and probably even less time actually contemplating its probable outcome:
The headlines are a shade less redundant than the stories themselves; but the words that inevitably stand out are attack, strike, decision, action, Syria, Syrians, and (most of all) Trump. ...[T]he overall message is never in doubt. The newspaper of record is telling a president whose legitimacy it has challenged ever since the election—a president who craves approval almost as much as he loves attention—“Now you have made yourself important in a good way.”
Bromwich also skewers fawning pundits like Fareed Zakaria, who declared “Donald Trump became President” by bombing as well as the applauding response of Democrats too eager to show their purported military bona fides. Meanwhile, increasingly serious and alarming questions about the extent of Trump’s corrupt and possibly treasonous collaboration with the Russian government in influencing this country’s election took an immediate back seat to the wonderment generated by his willingness to blow up things in a grandiose fashion. An attention-craving spoiled child was showered with attention for dropping bombs. What lesson indeed would we expect him to draw from this?
Well, we found out in short order as we were treated in a matter of days to what shows all signs of being a new, “trending” feature of this administration, dragged out whenever less flattering news appears looming and needs to be drowned out:
The US military on Friday defended its decision to drop its most powerful non-nuclear bomb on ISIS positions in Afghanistan, describing it as a "tactical" move.
And like drooling lemmings, the cable news networks leapt to celebrate the wonderful new explosion with mind-numbing, wall-to-wall coverage of the MOAB bomb, CNN’s the most disgraceful of all:
After the U.S. military dropped the most powerful conventional weapon in its arsenal, nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” on an Islamic State complex in eastern Afghanistan, cable news networks responded with almost continuous coverage of the event, but the visuals in the networks’ coverage varied widely. Fox News spent about 21 minutes airing video footage from a 2003 test of the bomb, MSNBC barely used video footage at all, and CNN played and replayed the bomb test footage for a staggering almost 54 minutes in just six hours.
[H/T Media Matters.]
That means CNN spent/ wasted one entire hour out of six playing the same “bomb test” footage again, and again, and again. Nothing else mattered to that cable network except the power of this particular bomb. Not the defunding of Planned Parenthood, with its negative impact on the lives of millions of American women. Not the disgraceful appointments being made by administration officials equally likely to harm Americans. Not the fact that Trump has now arbitrarily decided to hide from the American people the names of “visitors” (i.e, corporate lobbyists) to his White House. Not the fact that his attorney general is intent on turning this country into a xenophobic police state.
No. Bomb First.
There is no better example why our traditional corporate media failed as an institution to prevent the election of someone as malevolent and incompetent as Trump in the first place than its pathetic, Pavlovian response to the purposeful distraction of military fireworks. After all, a media that have trained themselves to roll over and play dead whenever they hear a “bang” can’t be expected to do much in the way of protecting the American Republic from more insidious forms of violence.