18 February 12
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a journalist, there's a buzz you can detect once the normal restraints
in your business have been loosened, a smell of fresh chum in the
waters, urging us down the road to war. Many years removed from the Iraq
disaster, that smell is back, this time with Iran.
You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and
TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back
to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms. CNN's house
blockhead, the Goldman-trained ex-finance professional Erin Burnett,
came out with a doozie of a broadcast yesterday, a Rumsfeldian jeremiad
against the Iranian threat would have fit beautifully in the
Saddam's-sending-drones-at-New-York halcyon days of late 2002. Here's
how the excellent Glenn Greenwald described Burnett's rant:
It's the sort of thing you would produce if you set out to create a mean-spirited parody of mindless, war-hungry, fear-mongering media stars, but you wouldn't dare go this far because you'd want the parody to have a feel of realism to it, and this would be way too extreme to be believable. She really hauled it all out: WMDs! Terrorist sleeper cells in the U.S. controlled by Tehran! Iran's long-range nuclear missiles reaching our homeland!!!! She almost made the anti-Muslim war-mongering fanatic she brought on to interview, Rep. Peter King, appear sober and reasonable by comparison.
Like Greenwald, I was particularly struck by Burnett's
freak-out about Iran's nuclear program, about which she said, "No one
buys Iran's claim that [it is] for peaceful purposes." She then cited
remarks by Director of Intelligence James Clapper, which, she said,
"drove that message home." But then she ran a clip with Clapper's quote,
which read as follows: READ MORE
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