It is hard to know what is actually taught at journalism school. Perhaps the emphasis is on good personal grooming, dental hygiene, and sentence syntax.
Without doubt, there is no emphasis on truth seeking through journalism, or even common sense. This is particularly true with regards to the Bush Administration’s warmongering in Iraq and even in Afghanistan.
One would think that eventually the media would discover (somehow) that the key to understanding the Iraq occupation is to (1) discount EVERY Bush Administration explanation as bald-face lies, which they are, and (2) take the Bush Administration claims as to what the occupation is NOT (war for oil) as patently true.
In other words, the Bush Administration lies coming and going and the press focuses on stenography and not common sense.
Look at the recent hearings on how General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker discuss the occupation with the Federal legislators. If an intelligent person who had been in a coma for a decade woke up to hear those discussions, he/she would figure out within a few seconds that the U.S. is doing everything in its power to control what used to be a sovereign nation. Why?
All one has to do is discount every stated reason and ask: "What did the U.S. Government say this was NOT about?" The answer becomes instantly obvious: "Strategic control of Mid-East, Persian Gulf, and Iraqi Oil". Pure and simple!
The General and the Ambassador and the Legislators, including McCain, Clinton and Obama, all dance around the fundamental issue that the U.S. CANNOT leave Iraq and leave all that oil up for grabs to the Chinese, the Indians, the Iranians, the Iraqis, or anyone else.
That oil is what the U.S. wants, needs, and is willing to kill for and die for.
The U.S. government, whether it is President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, or Senators McCain or Clinton or Obama, or virtually anyone else except Dennis Kucinich and one or two others, does not give a damn about Iraqi freedom, democracy, well-being, or anything else except as it relates to American access and control of Iraqi and Middle East and Persian Gulf oil!
The U.S. is not leaving Iraq with all that oil at stake! MAYBE if the Iraqis were to capitulate en masse and allow a structured control by the U.S. and its proxies of all that oil, the U.S. might withdraw some combat forces, but make no mistake about it — that oil will require substantive U.S. military presence in the region and even in Iraq for years and years, until the oil wells are no longer able to support the U.S. economy and lifestyle.
When the oil is no longer of interest, then the U.S. forces will leave, and not before.
The U.S. media still has not figured out that if it takes a nuclear attack by the U.S. on anyone in the region or anywhere else, the U.S. will take or control that oil — period. All the rest is inconsequential, and if the Iraqis decide after we take their oil that they do not want democracy, they will be allowed to have whatever they want and we will leave when the oil is gone.
Instead of facing what should be an obvious reality, the media allows its focus to be determined by known, serial liars and deceivers. The media is bought and paid for and is integrated with the government/military complex and is imbedded therein.
So, the American public cannot get the truth and does not have the truth and gets strung along by a war that is so expensive that the value of the oil at stake becomes that much more expensive due to the military investments already put into the project for American control of Middle East and Persian Gulf Oil.
Wouldn’t it be nice to be from Sweden or Switzerland or virtually any other nation of the world where you can just buy and trade for oil in a civilized manner?
Instead, Americans must kill and die and invade and occupy and lie and deceive to get our oil. We must pass along the enormous, almost unfathomable expenses of these wars to our unborn young and the children of our grandchildren because we cannot pay for these wars ourselves. We borrow from the unborn to steal for ourselves and will bequeath a horrendous world, ruined by human-caused climate change, poisoned by pollution, liquidated of natural resources, bereft of bio-diversity and all duly reported by media in the form of government-engineered lies.
It must take a lot of training in journalism school to become that sort of journalist.
