I used to be an assiduous MSNBC prime time viewer, especially before, during, and after the presidential election. Now, when I turn it on, I can't help thinking that Olbermann and Maddow are simply doing the bidding of the Obama administration. This became blatantly clear to me once they both flipped from opposing the health care legislation to supporting it, as if everything that was said and done before did not matter, and as if viewers are some idiots which have no memory whatsoever.
Yesterday, upon the release of the video of the Iraq slaughter by US forces, I decided to watch Olbermann and Maddow to see what they had to say on the issue.
As if to confirm my suspicions that led me to stop watching the channel altogether, Keith Olbermann did not utter one single word on the event. That's right. Nothing, nada, zip, nil. The silence was deafening. This is the biggest story since the Abu Ghraib scandal and what does Keith Olbermann do? He says nothing.
Onto Rachael Maddow.
At least, she had the grace of dedicating a short segment to the issue. She even showed part of the video. But she did not have any guests, and it was clear that she was uncomfortable. She kept referring to the event as the "incident," thus framing it as something rare and unusual. By doing so, Rachel Maddow apparently went from criticizing the "few bad apples" theory promoted by the Bush administration during the Abu Ghraib scandal to espousing the same flawed theory now that Obama and the democrats are in power.
MSNBC's prime time near silence on the issue may be prompted by the need to tread carefully vis a vis the channel's owner General Electric, a major military contractor. For this reason, I still hope that tonight we may see something a little more substantial on either Countdown or TRMS, or hopefully both. Nevertheless, both shows at this point are way behind the curve, and they reveal a need not to uspet their bosses (and amongst these I also put the Obama administration).
On the other hand, Democracy Now had an excellent show yesterday on the issue with both Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Salon's top investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald as guests. Greenwald has been one of the very few courageous journalists who have dared to say it like it is, and his analysis elucidates the point I was making about Rachael Maddow's decision to frame this event as an incident:
[T]here's a serious danger when incidents like this Iraq slaughter are exposed in a piecemeal and unusual fashion: namely, the tendency to talk about it as though it is an aberration. It isn't. It's the opposite: it's par for the course, standard operating procedure, what we do in wars, invasions, and occupation. The only thing that's rare about the Apache helicopter killings is that we know about it and are seeing what happened on video. And we're seeing it on video not because it's rare, but because it just so happened (a) to result in the deaths of two Reuters employees, and thus received more attention than the thousands of other similar incidents where nameless Iraqi civilians are killed, and (b) to end up in the hands of WikiLeaks, which then published it. But what is shown is completely common. That includes not only the initial killing of a group of men, the vast majority of whom are clearly unarmed, but also the plainly unjustified killing of a group of unarmed men (with their children) carrying away an unarmed, seriously wounded man to safety -- as though there's something nefarious about human beings in an urban area trying to take an unarmed, wounded photographer to a hospital.
Unfortunately, although predictably, Greenwald has been assailed from most sides for attacking the troops (even though he actually does not). But such attacks, especially the ones from the so called "left," simply illustrate the moral corruption of a society whose fabric has been entrenched by the culture of empire. An empire that very few people dare to question openly, because the defenders of empire will marginalize them with the simplistic and disingenuous our troops are the good guys argument. And when anyone such as Greenwald dares to question this emotionally charged us vs. them argument by saying that our troops are just some poor souls turned into blind killing machines for the US corporate empire, they are called traitors and America haters.
In my opinion, the real America haters are those who are either too weak to call it like it is, or have a vested interest in the status quo. They are those who while pretending to support the troops are sending them to die in some foreign desert conquering countries that have done us no harm. Regardless, both types of people are active participants in the slaughter that is taking place in front of our eyes. This is not George Bush's war anymore. It is Obama's and, by extension, our war. The blood of the innocent children wounded in this video is on our hands. And for this reason, anyone who votes and pays taxes in this country has a responsibility to say and do something to stop it right here, right now. Anything less than that is simply complicity.