Chris Matthews provided fodder for right-wing propaganda in his MSNBC commentary last night on the downing of the Malaysian airliner over the Ukraine. Matthews recalled another shooting of a civilian airliner: the downing of Korean Airlines 007 by a Soviet warplane in 1983. He played tapes of Ronald Reagan denouncing the Soviets for mass murder in the air, and generally portrayed the affair as one of the shining moments of the Reagan presidency.
I was incredulous. How could a leading TV news commentator—a more or less liberal--be so clueless?
There was no reason to believe—and there is still no reason to believe—that the KAL 007 tragedy was anything but a horrendous mistake. Why on earth would the Soviets knowingly shoot down a civilian airliner? But that natural question apparently didn’t occur to the Reagan administration, which milked the tragedy for all the Cold War propaganda value it was worth, denouncing the evil Russians for an act of deliberate mass murder in the air. The US media and Congress dutifully fell in line with the administration’s propaganda campaign. US intelligence in fact had reason to believe that the Soviets had blundered. The Korean jet had wandered 200 miles off course into Soviet airspace into an area housing sensitive military the neighborhood of a Soviet missile installations, around the time of a scheduled missile test and just after an American spy plane had entered the same area. While denouncing Soviet barbarity, the administration deliberately suppressed exculpatory information it had available.
Matthews might have done better if he had recalled another airline shooting—the 1988 downing by the US Navy of an Iran Air passenger plane. Reagan called the shooting a tragic mistake, a characterization that the US media took for granted to be true. News stories about the incident focused on human fallibility and the difficulties of forming quick and accurate assessments I military sensitive situations—considerations that were generally absent from the media’s treatment of KAL 007. You would think that Matthews, having been a cheerleader for the Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq, might have learned by now to regard Washington propaganda more skeptically. His obvious failure to do any homework on KAL 007 was a gross act of journalistic irresponsibility.
Matthews’ naivete quickly became fodder for right-wing commentator Brent BakNer, who gloated at how the liberal Matthews was forced to acknowledge this example of Reagan’s greatness. Baker’s main point: “Matthews – probably inadvertently – illustrated how Reagan, unlike the current occupant of the White House, understood his role as leader of the free world under threat from evil forces.” (Actually, the incident illustrated Reagan’s great skills as storyteller, one who was never terribly bothered about whether the facts supported his story.) We will probably be hearing more such nonsense from the right, and we should recognize it for what it is.
Note: A different version of this diary was posted today at www.tony-greco.com.