by Robert Bridge, Strategic Culture:

As historians know, events of great significance are sometimes put into motion by some seemingly irrelevant occurrence.  This week’s shot across the bow of the mainstream media by one of its erstwhile members probably won’t trigger a stampede for the exits, but it did provide for a timely wake-up call.

Although probably no more harmless than the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings deep inside the Amazon rainforest, news that veteran journalist William M. Arkin severed relations with NBC over its relentless pro-war, anti-Trump narrative was exactly the message the omnipotent media kings needed to hear as attacks on alternative (i.e. conservative) voices have reached totalitarian proportions.

In a farewell letter to his colleagues, Arkin said he was “alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war.”

“We shouldn’t get out Syria,” he asked rhetorically, suggesting Trump’s particular brand of foreign policy has not been a total flop. “We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia … do we really yearn for the Cold War?”

For many, news of Arkin flipping his bosses the proverbial bird on the way out the door was the sort of salute many have dreamed of delivering to the Legacy Media ever since the conspiracy theory of Russia intervention in the 2016 election turned into a nice excuse for the hulking Orwell Brothers – Google, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube – to start culling alternative media voices like hunters on the opening day of deer season.

Although Arkin’s letter betrays some naiveté – at one point he says he believed, despite his experience with the Iraq War, that he was invited back to NBC in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign to “break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness” – it is his frank admittance that the media has assumed the role as “cheerleader” for evermore military misadventures that strikes a nerve.

“I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable,” he wrote. “No wars won but the ball is kept in play.”

Reading Arkin’s letter forces one to question at what point the mainstream media stopped serving as the voice of reason and restraint and started shaking the pompoms on behalf of military conquest. It seems that something fundamentally changed in the American mindset following the 20-year Vietnam War, which was arguably the last time the Liberals displayed genuine disgust with war.

Despite a plethora of global butchery today that warrants some serious criticism and debate, ‘progressive’ Liberals – from college campuses to Hollywood to the media establishment, institutions they essentially own lock, stock and barrel – would rather devote their time to insanely personal issues instead (specifically, matters related to sexuality, political correctness, feminism and race).

Although it may be argued that many millions of people did take to the streets around the world to protest the 2003 Iraq War, for example, those efforts are known today for what they failed to accomplish: halting the mad rush to war without UN approval against a country that played no role whatsoever in the attacks of 9/11. The fact that the media was overwhelmingly on the side of the hawks certainly did not help the campaign.

In the New York Review of Books, writer Michael Massing ventured to ask members of the mainstream media tribe “where were you all before the war?”

“Why didn’t we learn more about these deceptions and concealments [of the Bush administration with regards to what some had dubbed ‘faith-based intelligence’] in the months when the administration was pressing its case for regime change—when, in short, it might have made a difference?”

Across the pond, meanwhile, the glaring disconnect that existed between the war-wary public and the pro-war press was summed up by Roy Greenslade of the Guardian: “There is a genuine scepticism about the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, a readiness to question America’s warmongering leadership and an obvious unease at Tony Blair’s zealous push for war,” Greenslade wrote. “People…do not seem to accept the views of President Bush and Blair that Saddam Hussein is a threat to world peace. Yet, and here is the rub, the vast majority of the British press certainly does.”

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