George Stephanopoulos’ 20 December 2015 Interview of Donald Trump — Illustrated American Media’s Propagandizing Function — Glaring Bias and Intellectual Dishonesty Concealed as Inquiry

© 2015 Peter Free

 

21 December 2015

 

 

Germany’s Reich Minister of Propaganda (1933-1945) — Joseph Goebbels — would have envied American government’s ability to harness the US press without lifting a finger

 

Most American media now act as an arm of the Federal Government’s de facto Establishment Propaganda Machine.

 

The following example subtly demonstrates this point and illustrates the camouflage of bias that so often conceals it.  

 

 

George Stephanopoulos as Minister of Propaganda

 

During an interview aired on 20 December 2015 — ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos attempted to take presidential candidate Donald Trump to task for overtly accepting praise from Russian Federation president, Vladimir Putin.

 

Stephanopoulos asked at various points during this interview:

 

 

How can you say you feel fine about Vladimir Putin when he backs our adversaries like Bashar Assad, when he backs Iran, when he invades Ukraine?

 

Is it wise to be praising our adversaries and alienating our allies?

 

One final question about Vladimir Putin. When you were pressed about his killing of journalists, you said, “I think our country does plenty of killing too. . . . What killing sanctioned by the US government is like killing journalists?

 

[Trump responded by pointing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s alleged mishandling of Libya, where thousands of people died. He also indicated that there is “no proof” that Putin kills journalists.]

 

Here is what Mitt Romney tweeted about that. He said there is an “Important distinction: thug Putin kills journalists and opponents; our president kills terrorists and enemy combatants.”

 

[Trump responds by asking whether Romney knows that Putin kills reporters.]

 

You said that “I think that our country does plenty of killing too.” What killing are you talking about there?

 

[Trump replied, “Well, take a look at what we’re doing in the Middle East. We went into Iraq. We shouldn’t have.” He went on to point out that American interventions have destabilized the Middle East.]

 

Your comment seems to suggest a moral equivalence between the United States and Russia. Is that what you believe?

 

[Trump replied, “I’m not saying anything. I’m saying when you say a man has killed reporters, I’d like you to prove it. I’m saying it would be a terrible thing if it were true, but I have never seen any information or any proof that he killed reporters, George. You’re just saying, he killed reporters. . . . If he did, I think its’s despicable. I think it would be horrible. But you’re making these accusations, and I don’t see any proof.”]

 

I’m still waiting for the evidence that we have been directly involved in killing people as well. . . .

 

[Trump: Well, take a look at the rampage all over the place. And you know what we’ve gotten for Iraq, we’ve spent 2 trillion dollars, okay? Thousands, hundreds of thousands of people killed. We’ve lost thousands and thousands of our great young people, soldiers. So — 2 trillion, deaths, wounded warriors. We have nothing.

Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. And I said, don’t go in. But I said, when you go out, take the oil. And I’ve been saying that for 4 years . . . . And we were so incompetent, we didn’t even get the oil.

You know who got a lot of the oil? ISIS got a lot of the oil. . . . And now Iran is taking the rest of it. They’re gonna get the lion’s share. Because we don’t know what we’re doing. We’re run by people who don’t have a clue.”]

 

© 2015 This Week with George Stephanopoulos, COMPLETE INTERVIEW: George Stephanopoulos Interviewes Donald Trump On "This Week " (12/20/2015), via Political Humor and YouTube (20 December 2015) (quoted exchange begins at 03:30 minutes into the clip and ends at 10:30)

 

 

A couple of points about this exchange

 

Notice that George Stephanopoulos does not have to acuity (or the human decency) to recognize that by invading Iraq unnecessarily — as most thoughtful geopolitical analysts now acknowledge — hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Either directly or indirectly as a result of the American military invasion and occupation.

 

Consider also that Stephanopoulos completely ignores Trump’s legitimate passing reference to the American instigated deadly anarchy in Libya.

 

Observe, too, Stephanopoulos’ almost unbelievably foolish acceptance of Mitt Romney’s vacuous distinction between Putin killing reporters and President Obama’s convenient definition of everyone that the United States has killed as either a “terrorist” or “enemy combatant”.

 

Convenient, no? We do no harm because we manipulate language so as to classify everyone we exterminate as having been an evil person.

 

This is not good interviewing. It is not good reporting. It is neither fair nor analytically objective.

 

Clearly what Mr. Stephanopoulos was trying to do was paint Donald Trump in an unpatriotic light. And he manipulatively did so, without crediting any of the candidate’s arguably legitimate (though admittedly wandering and disconnected) counterpoints.

 

 

What struck me most was — Stephanopoulos’ asinine rejection of the deadly mistakes of the last 14 years of American history

 

Stephanopoulos has become a puppet for the two American “regimes” that have acted just as foolishly as the alleged bloviator Donald Trump concluded they did.

 

 

The moral? — Mainstream media act as a propaganda arm for American government

 

George Stephanopoulos concealed his bias during the interview by selecting reflexive patriotism as a concealing camouflage.

 

Instead of asking his audience to think critically about truth, Stephanopoulos encouraged them to reject Mr. Trump’s controversial statement on an unthinking and purely emotional basis.

 

Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, would have been proud of his apparent pupil.

 

Anti-establishment and seminary-trained journalist Chris Hedges says of this cultural twistedness:

 

 

The threefold rise in hate crimes against Muslims since the Paris and San Bernardino attacks and the acceptance of hate speech as a legitimate form of political discourse signal the morbidity of our civil society. The body politic is coughing up blood.

 

The daily amplification of this hate speech by a commercial media whose sole concern is ratings and advertising dollars rather than serving as a bulwark to protect society presages a descent into the protofascist nightmare of racism, indiscriminate violence against the marginalized, and a blind celebration of American chauvinism, militarism and bigotry.

 

© 2015 Chris Hedges, The Creeping Villainy of American Politics, TruthDig (20 December 2015) (paragraph split)