#AFGHANISTAN PAPERS HOW TO#

Pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. In 2001, a FAIR survey ( 11/2/01) of the Post’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks found thatĬolumns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly nonexistent.Įight years later, FAIR ( 3/1/09) found that the Post’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9 Post op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08) through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional troops in Afghanistan later that year.Īnother study ( Extra!, 11/1/09) of the first ten months of the Post’s opinion columns that same year found that

#AFGHANISTAN PAPERS HOW TO#

If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?įAIR has been tracking the Post’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from the very beginning, when the paper-along with the rest of corporate media-was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to cover the war. While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says about the Washington Post. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.” “Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 20, told government interviewers. The paper published direct remarks on the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made public”:

Senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable. Hailed by some as the “ Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that

The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” ( 12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. To get the secret history of the media’s role in the Afghan War, you have to compare the Washington Post‘s Afghanistan Papers ( 12/9/19) with what the Post was telling its readers in real time.

Afghanistan papers