Stupidity Is the Plan: How a Vicious Cycle of Media Bias and Public Reaction Begets War

Americans have a perception problem. It is incredibly easy to react to ongoing hostilities with calls for in kind hostilities. The war hawks rely on this tendency to get their way. What is far more difficult is having the perspective and empathy to try to understand why the adversary attacked, whether there was anything we could have done to avoid the attack, and, critically, what is the proper response that won’t feed forward into a positive-feedback-loop.

We saw this mass cognitive failure after 9/11. It was very easy to emotionally react to the planes hitting the towers with calls for more violence. However, it took pre-existing knowledge and thoughtful reflection (something I didn’t achieve until years later and which only one member of Congress demonstrated) to stave off that reactionary tendency and to instead recognize the role our leaders’ policies played in creating the hatred that manifested on 9/11, and thus how doubling-down would only make matters worse. Twenty years post-9/11, an honest appraisal shows the attacks were not unprovoked like we were told. Instead, the attacks were unmistakably a reaction to 30+ years of U.S. meddling in the Middle East, which included support for brutal dictatorial regimes, blockades that killed hundreds of thousands of people but were infuriatingly deemed "worth it" by US officials, and military bases on Holy land in Saudi Arabia from which the aforementioned blockade was enforced. However, thanks to the poor quality and strong bias of the US mainstream media, Americans were simply unaware of these myriad factors. In our naïve minds, the attacks were unprovoked – "you saw it, the planes came out of the clear blue sky" – and so we responded by giving George W. Bush unprecedented support to renew and escalate the exact kinds of actions that provoked 9/11. George W. Bush’s war would kill or displace millions of innocent people, while predictably (see Blowback or Gen. McCrystal’s "Insurgent Math") swelling the ranks of al Qaeda from less than a hundred members to the tens of thousands estimated today.

The same cognitive failure due to incomplete facts from a bias media is happening today vis-à-vis Russia-Ukraine. It’s very easy for Americans and Westerners to simply denounce Russia and call for a strong military response from NATO, as we have seen. What’s harder is to take a step back from the brink and try to understand what would drive Putin to such an extreme and desperate measure. In 1990, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, neoconservative "thinker" Charles Krauthammer wrote in Foreign Policy about "The Unipolar Moment." No longer was the world "bipolar," with power balanced between Moscow and Washington. Instead, "world power reside[d] in one reasonably coherent, serenely dominant, entity: the Western alliance." Unfortunately, instead of dealing with Russia as our co-equal partners, US leaders opted to push Russia around both economically and geopolitically. On the economic side, the US and West spent billions on Shock-Therapy (no, they really called it that) to "privatize" the former Soviet economy, which left most Russians far worse-off financially and, according to NPR, paved the road for Putin’s return as president (oops). Geopolitically, whereas, US Sec. of State James Baker had promised in 1990 that NATO would expand "not one inch eastward" from Germany, beginning under Bill Clinton and continuing through the W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, NATO was expanded thousands of miles eastward, engulfing Poland and former Warsaw pact countries until its position today, abutting the border of Russia itself. At the same time, Bill Clinton invalidated claims of NATO’s "purely defensive" nature by aggressively attacking Yugoslavia with NATO in 1999, despite there being no immediate threat to a NATO member. Later, Bush and Obama re-upped on demonstrating NATO’s true, non-defensive nature by utilizing NATO in their aggressive wars of choice in Afghanistan in 2001 and Libya in 2011.

Knowing this history, one should be capable of understanding Russia and Putin’s fears/qualms surrounding NATO expansion and their motivations for invading Ukraine, while not endorsing them. Unfortunately, years of biased media coverage (if any) on NATO expansion and Russia have left most people completely unaware of this history. A Pew Research poll in 1997 found that only 5% and 15% of respondents followed the issue of NATO expansion either "closely" or "fairly closely," respectively. Demonstrating Americans’ lack of understanding about the possible consequences of NATO expansion, the same Pew poll found that, while 41% of respondents thought failure to expand NATO would embolden Russia to re-invade Europe, only 24% thought that such NATO expansion would anger Russia. Since then, Americans have been subjected to an onslaught of anti-Russia propaganda, from Crimea to the 2016 election. A Pew Research poll from 2018 shows how successful anti-Russia programming has been in the target audience, with support for NATO among Democrats increasing from 58% to 78% from 2016 to 2017. An additional Pew poll from March of this year found that while a plurality (42%) of Americans thought the Biden administration was not doing enough in response to Russia’s Ukraine invasion, only 7% thought the administration was doing too much. In addition, a terrifying 1 in 3 (35%) actually responded that they favored "taking military action even if it risks a nuclear conflict with Russia." How could so many attest to something so profoundly horrible? Well, consistent with the 1997 poll, a Pew poll from this year found only 23% of Americans had heard or read about the situation in Ukraine prior to the invasion, versus 69% after the media blitz began following the invasion. Given their lack of prior knowledge, it’s no wonder Americans were a blank slate onto which the media could imbue their biases and fears. What’s more, this poll shows that when the media wants to, they can inform Americans about important world conflicts. So why don’t they?

We remain ignorant of the truth "at our own peril"

The problem is this: if the warmongers know that all they need do is provoke an attack and uninformed Americans (and the entire West) will rally around the flag, then what is stopping them? For example, recent polling from before and after onset of the 2022 Ukraine war in the neutral, non-NATO countries of Ireland and Sweden showed increases in the desire to join NATO from 34% to 48% for Ireland and 42% to 51% in Sweden, the first ever in-favor majority. To the warmongers, you see, it’s a win-win scenario. So long as the public remains un- or misinformed, our leaders know they can take hardline positions against America’s chosen adversaries with only two possible outcomes: either (A) the adversary backs down and "comes to heel" (as Hillary Clinton once said), meaning America gets its way or (B) the adversary reacts with violence, which simply validates the hardline position – "we told you they couldn’t be trusted." Either way, support for the US/Western alliance and opposition to the adversary increases.

The only way that doesn’t happen is if, through the mainstream media, enough people receive sufficient facts to be able to thoughtfully understand the situation and weigh options. If, on the other hand, the media fails to educate the public by not reporting or misreporting on the events that led to the current crisis, then Americans will be at the mercy of the warmongers and will have to be forgiven for their reactionary responses.

A pop-culture analogy (sorry)

Imagine there’s a guy (let’s call him Chris), who insults a man’s wife (let’s call that other man Will). Will doesn’t like it, so he goes and physically assaults Chris. What would viewers think is the correct response for Chris? Is it (A) to try to defuse the conflict (perhaps with a joke) or (B) to escalate and hit back. It’s debatable. Will clearly escalated the situation, but an honest viewer recognizes Chris’ actions provoked Will. Chris chooses to defuse, and we, the audience, understand why.

But, what if we didn’t know about Chris’ initial insulting remark? What if the media coverage failed to report on it? What if instead the media "truncated the antecedent" and never showed us the insulting joke, editing that part out, such that all we saw was Will walk up on stage unprovoked and slap Chris? Most viewers would be calling for Chris to strike back (perhaps by enforcing a No Slap Zone).

This analogy speaks to how biased or omitted media coverage of US foreign policy propagates US aggression around the world. Rather than explaining the background of the current situation, the media truncate the antecedent, allowing the now woefully underinformed public to emotionally react and call for exactly what the hardliners wanted all along. Of course, they do this. It serves their interests.

As Representative Ron Paul said to Congress in 2011, "Once again a bad man is doing bad things thousands of miles away and once again irresponsible voices are demanding that the US ‘do something’ about it. Will we ever learn? We continue to act as the policemen of the world at our own peril…" Unfortunately, "we don’t ever learn" because the media so often refuses to tell us the truth.

Dr. Josh Everson is a toxicologist and research scientist with over a dozen peer-reviewed publications. He is an antiwar advocate and member of the Horton school of revisionist foreign policy. Visit him on Facebook.