The Narrative Versus the News

Journalism in the age of perpetual war

By Justin Raimondo

"....Listen long and hard to the talking heads on TV and you'll hear that phrase echoing down through the cable-vision canyons, bouncing off the walls and endlessly repeated by reporters, bloggers, and water-cooler savants: It's the narrative, stupid.

The meaning – and danger – of the narrative was masterfully demonstrated in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The facts were tossed aside, or else cherry-picked and arranged in such a fashion as to mimic the truth while telling a brazen lie. The tallest of tales were woven around a story line, in which the central figure was a power-mad dictator whose quest for "weapons of mass destruction" posed a danger not only to his neighbors, but to the whole world......

I've already noted the Bizarro World reportage coming out of the Western media that ignores or even denies the signal event that started this war: Georgia's invasion of South Ossetia, which had been de facto independent since the early 1990s. The vicious assault on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, is slowly coming to light, but the War Party is ready to downplay the casualty numbers. According to Human Rights Watch, less than 50 were killed in the hours-long assault, although Peter Finn, writing in the Washington Post, compared the look of the devastated city to that of Stalingrad during the worst battles of World War II.

Yes, the Georgian government bombed its own alleged citizens, and, yes, many were killed, though how many is not yet known. But whatever the numbers, they won't be reported except very belatedly by the Western news media – with a few exceptions – because the facts get in the way of the narrative, the story line being laid out for the next round of warmongering, one that will be conducted, perhaps, by the next American president......."