{"id":1385516,"date":"2022-03-17T07:51:46","date_gmt":"2022-03-17T11:51:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1385516"},"modified":"2022-03-17T07:51:56","modified_gmt":"2022-03-17T11:51:56","slug":"the-press-has-lied-to-drag-the-united-states-into-war-before-dont-think-they-wont-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/the-press-has-lied-to-drag-the-united-states-into-war-before-dont-think-they-wont-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Press Has Lied To Drag The United States Into War Before. Don\u2019t Think They Won\u2019t Again"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">34<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fthe-press-has-lied-to-drag-the-united-states-into-war-before-dont-think-they-wont-again%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1385516&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/8754703531_3431d2a455_k.jpg\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<p>The night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship <em>Maine<\/em> sat at anchor in Havana, Cuba. A few minutes after 9 p.m., the nightly ritual of \u201cTaps\u201d from Fifer C. H. Newton\u2019s bugle descended over the ship. Some half an hour later, the forward end of the ship rose suddenly above the water. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cAlong the pier, passersby could hear a rumbling explosion,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/remember-the-maine-56071873\/\">detailed<\/a> author Tom Miller. \u201cWithin seconds, another eruption \u2014 this one deafening and massive \u2014 splintered the bow, sending anything that wasn\u2019t battened down, and most that was, flying more than 200 feet into the air.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The explosion, which killed more than 250 men on board, was quickly memorialized with cries of \u201cRemember the <em>Maine<\/em>!\u201d Without directly accusing Spain, which controlled Cuba at the time, a U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry decided a month later that the explosion was from a mine. (A U.S. Navy investigation decades later <a href=\"https:\/\/www.smithsonianmag.com\/history\/remember-the-maine-56071873\/\">found<\/a> it was likely an accidental coal bunker fire.) <\/p>\n<p>Shortly afterward, the United States declared war on Spain, starting the Spanish-American War. One of the biggest warmongering forces in America, capitalizing on the <em>Maine<\/em>\u2018s explosion, was the press \u2014 a position American media pundits continue to hold as they work overtime to drag Americans into a war with Russia over Ukraine.<\/p>\n<p>When you see talking heads uncritically parroting propagandist stories about Ukraine that turn out to be false, from the \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/OccupyDemocrats\/status\/1497021825187942407?s=20&#038;t=j2e9CsxQZLbenZUU_iEBfQ\">Ghost of Kyiv<\/a>\u201d to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2022\/03\/13\/europe\/snake-island-satellite-photos-intl-hnk\/index.html\">that Snake Island story<\/a> to old photos taken years ago, you should be <a href=\"https:\/\/www.eviemagazine.com\/post\/were-being-bombarded-by-old-photos-and-fake-videos-of-the-ukraine-invasion\">asking why<\/a> the corporate media is so willing to spread such fake news (while it <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/02\/28\/ukraine-proves-our-ruling-class-only-cares-about-misinformation-when-its-politically-convenient\/\">censors<\/a> conservatives for factual critiques of disproven Covid narratives, no less). It wouldn\u2019t be the first time the press lied to pull Americans into war.<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"how-newspapermen-helped-start-a-war-in-cuba\">How Newspapermen Helped Start a War in Cuba<\/h2>\n<p>It was the so-called golden age of newspapers, after the influence of the Industrial Revolution gave rise to the \u201cpenny press\u201d \u2014 newspapers you could buy at the street corner without a subscription. Competing magnates like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought for readers, and they did so by trying to produce the most sensational news possible.<\/p>\n<p>As the story goes, in the year before the <em>Maine<\/em> exploded, Hearst had commissioned reporter Frederic Remington to go to Cuba, where Cuban revolutionaries were skirmishing with their Spanish colonizers. When Remington sent Hearst a wire to explain he was leaving Cuba because there was no war to cover, Hearst reportedly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.navyhistory.org\/2018\/03\/remember-the-maine\/\">replied<\/a>, \u201cYou furnish the pictures and I\u2019ll furnish the war.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>After the sinking of the <em>Maine<\/em>, headlines <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/crucible\/tl10.html\">like<\/a> \u201cSpanish Treachery!\u201d and \u201cDestruction of the War Ship Maine Was the Work of an Enemy!\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.history.com\/news\/spanish-american-war-yellow-journalism-hearst-pulitzer\">and<\/a> \u201cInvasion!\u201d and \u201cWho Destroyed the <em>Maine<\/em>? $50,000 Reward\u201d splashed across front pages. The United States went to war in April, two months after the <em>Maine<\/em> perished.<\/p>\n<p>The media\u2019s eagerness to gin up a war mirrored the push for involvement from other voices in politics and culture. Some Americans had sympathy for Spanish-owned Cuba as fellow colonial revolutionaries, while others wanted to see U.S. influence and territory expand internationally. <\/p>\n<p>Half a century prior, when the phrase \u201cmanifest destiny\u201d was being coined, the United States had gone to war with Mexico over Texas but also ended the war with <a href=\"https:\/\/www.history.com\/topics\/mexican-american-war\/treaty-of-guadalupe-hidalgo#:~:text=Treaty%20of%20Guadalupe%20Hidalgo%3A%20February%202%2C%201848,-Following%20the%20defeat&#038;text=of%20Guadalupe%20Hidalgo.-,The%20treaty%20added%20an%20additional%20525%2C000%20square%20miles%20to%20United,New%20Mexico%2C%20Utah%20and%20Wyoming.\">acquisitions<\/a> of what is now California, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. By 1898, the United States had purchased Alaska from Russia and claimed several Pacific islands. <\/p>\n<p>Many Americans saw a similar opportunity for territorial expansion in a fight with Spain over Cuba. Sure enough, the United States <a href=\"https:\/\/history.state.gov\/milestones\/1866-1898\/spanish-american-war\">exited<\/a> the Spanish-American War with new acquisitions from Guam to the Philippines to Puerto Rico.<\/p>\n<p>While the warmongers weren\u2019t limited to the press, they were certainly concentrated there. The State Department Office of the Historian <a href=\"https:\/\/history.state.gov\/milestones\/1866-1898\/yellow-journalism\">writes<\/a>: \u201cHearst and Pulitzer devoted more and more attention to the Cuban struggle for independence, at times accentuating the harshness of Spanish rule or the nobility of the revolutionaries, and occasionally printing rousing stories that proved to be false.\u201d Sound familiar?<\/p>\n<h2 id=\"a-century-of-dishonesty\">A Century of Dishonesty<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cRemember the <em>Maine<\/em>!\u201d may have been at the height of the yellow journalism era, but it was certainly not the last instance of dishonest reporting in favor of sensational warmongering. During the Spanish Civil War, which saw Nationalist revolutionaries clash with Republicans in the years directly preceding World War II, some Western outlets were criticized for covering the conflict sensationally. The New York Times devoted far more manpower to the war than papers at the time traditionally did, with \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/alba-valb.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Julie_Prieto.pdf\">highly partisan<\/a>\u201d perspectives.<\/p>\n<p>George Orwell, who fought alongside Republican forces, wrote in his memoir \u201cHomage to Catalonia\u201d that \u201cfor the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>\u201cI saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened,\u201d he recalled. \u201cI saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various \u2018party lines.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Newspaper propagandists\u2019 willingness to cover wars in self-interested ways didn\u2019t always run in the same direction, either. Orwell\u2019s contemporary and fellow writer Ernest Hemingway had similar criticism for propagandist writers who downplayed the carnage of World War I, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.flavorwire.com\/468440\/ernest-hemingway-and-other-novelists-on-their-world-war-i-experiences\">insisting<\/a> it was \u201cthe most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Later in the 20th century, The New York Times\u2019 Berlin bureau chief Guido Enderis was providing friendly coverage of Hitler\u2019s Germany, <a href=\"https:\/\/nypost.com\/2021\/05\/08\/how-the-new-york-times-publishes-lies-to-serve-a-biased-narrative\/\">according<\/a> to writer Ashley Rindsberg\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.thegrayladywinked.com\/\">book<\/a> \u201cThe Gray Lady Winked.\u201d Meanwhile, the paper\u2019s Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty, Rindsberg noted, was downplaying Joseph Stalin\u2019s role in the 1932-33 famine in Ukraine because \u201cat the time, The New York Times was actively pushing for American recognition of the Soviet Union.\u201d President Franklin Roosevelt obliged, recognizing the USSR in 1933.<\/p>\n<p>A more recent example is that of The New York Times and other corporate media outlets reporting baseless stories about the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq to gin up support for President George W. Bush\u2019s invasion of Iraq in 2003. A year afterward, the Times editors <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2004\/05\/26\/world\/from-the-editors-the-times-and-iraq.html\">admitted<\/a> their lopsided reporting on the matter in a lengthy editorial piece. <\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe have found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been,\u201d they wrote. \u201cIn some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAdministration officials now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation from these [Iraqi] exile sources. So did many news organizations \u2014 in particular, this one,\u201d the editors continued. With the rapid dissemination of sensational photos, videos, and information via social media today, there\u2019s no indication the corporate press is any less immune to disinformation when it fits their <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/02\/28\/ukraine-proves-our-ruling-class-only-cares-about-misinformation-when-its-politically-convenient\/\">narrative<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>When you see corporate outlets rushing us into war in Europe with sensational stories and flat-out <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2022\/03\/07\/corrupt-media-pollsters-are-using-dishonest-tactics-to-drag-america-into-war\/\">dishonest polling<\/a>, think twice. The corrupt media has lied to drag Americans into war before, and none of their <a href=\"https:\/\/thefederalist.com\/2021\/11\/24\/your-default-assumption-should-be-that-everything-corporate-media-says-is-a-lie\/\">recent lies<\/a> on other issues should incline you to think they won\u2019t do it again.<\/p>\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator\" \/>\n<p>\n  Elle Reynolds is an assistant editor at The Federalist, and received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The night of Feb. 15, 1898, the U.S. battleship Maine sat at anchor in Havana, Cuba. A few minutes after 9 p.m., the nightly ritual of \u201cTaps\u201d from Fifer C.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1385516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1385516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1385516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1385516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1385516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1385516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}