The media expects us to believe them. The media expects that we’ll believe what they tell us is the truth, without question, as if there’s no way that “their truth” could ever be contradicted.
On Monday, POLITICO published an article claiming that President Donald Trump’s decision to pull back U.S. forces in Syria “took the Pentagon and the government’s Syria point man by surprise.” The article even used a quote by retired Adm. James Stavridis that he said during a Monday interview on MSNBC.
“Everyone was absolutely flabbergasted by this. I tell you that as a fact,” Stavridis said, with POLITICO going so far as to claim that Stavridis was “describing what he saw as the view from the Pentagon.
That’s all well and good, and while I mean no disrespect to Stavridis — because I thank him for his service, he might have either received conflicting reports, bad information or he wasn’t seeing the same things that others in the Pentagon saw.
Only one day later, the Chief Pentagon Spokesman Johnathan Hoffman released a statement on the U.S. Dept. of Defense website saying that the claim the Pentagon was essentially blindsided by Trump’s move are false.
Here’s the statement:
Despite continued misreporting to the contrary, [Acting Defense Secretary] Secretary [Mark] Esper and Chairman [to the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark] Milley were consulted over the last several days by the President regarding the situation and efforts to protect U.S. forces in northern Syria in the face of military action by Turkey.
The Department's position has been and remains that establishing a safe zone in northern Syria is the best path forward to maintaining stability.
Unfortunately, Turkey has chosen to act unilaterally. As a result we have moved the U.S. forces in northern Syria out of the path of potential Turkish incursion to ensure their safety. We have made no changes to our force presence in Syria at this time.
It could also be construed, judging by Hoffman’s statement, that POLITICO’s claim that “top officials” viewed “Turkey's threat of an incursion against the Kurds” as “a bluff” was also incorrect.
The media’s narrative that Trump’s move was done as a slight to an “ally” in the Kurds could also be viewed as nothing more than conjecture considering Hoffman’s statement pointed out that the move was done in an effort to “protect U.S. forces in northern Syria in the face of military action by Turkey.”
POLITCO isn’t the only outlet who classified Trump’s move as one that “blindsided” a multitude of different people and entities.
A simple Google search, using the words “Trump blindsided Syria,” gave results that show the media narrative in action — all published before the Pentagon’s statement contradicted most of them.
Take a look for yourselves (Screenshots):
How many times did you see some variation of the term “blindside” above? Sure, the term “blindsided” was in my search terms. But, I didn’t write the article for any of those outlets. They control the narrative, and the narrative-used term could be seen an astonishing 21 times on the first page of Google results alone. Nine of those instances were directly in the headlines displayed on the results page.
And the media typically tells us that there’s no reason to believe they have their own narrative independent of the truth — essentially that they’re biased.
H/T: Chicks on the Right