How CNN Shills for War

Letting lobbyists for military contractors like William Cohen opine as if they are objective experts, that’s how.

I don’t watch a lot of cable news, mostly because it just makes me agitated. At night, most of the coverage isn’t really news but opinion and entertainment delivered as news. So instead of learning from people who actually know something about the events being covered, the cable programs center on anchors who are mostly skilled at emoting, building a connection with their viewers, and guests who help narrate whatever spectacle we are being offered to draw our attention. (Well, maybe Chris Hayes is an exception.)

But cable news still has a big impact on public opinion, because the people who watch think they’re well informed, and they influence their friends and colleagues are influenced. So even if the viewing audience for CNN, MSNBC and FOX is only around six million people total at the height of prime time, what those programs emphasize has outsize influence on public opinion.

A few nights ago, I looked at CNN for a few minutes and caught Jake Tapper, standing in the 4:00am dark somewhere in Ukraine, interviewing William Cohen, the former US Secretary of Defense. Cohen is certainly the kind of knowledgeable talking head you’d want to hear from in the middle of the Ukraine crisis, so I listened for a bit. Cohen was arguing that it was time for the United States and NATO to escalate their efforts to defend Ukraine and that it was time to stop letting our fear of tripping into a shooting war with Russia keep us from taking more aggressive steps. Russia isn’t abiding by any rules, while we are, he complained. It’s time for the US and NATO to stop letting Russia push us around, he intimated.

Cohen is on TV a lot these days, and he’s not the person being moved by the news of the horrible atrocities being carried out by Russian forces. No sensible person thinks it’s a good idea to led Vladimir Putin invade another sovereign country, commit war crimes, and get off scot-free. But there are also good reasons for us to be extraordinarily cautious about directly confronting Russian forces with the full power available to NATO. As I’ve written here earlier, under Putin Russia has embraced a military doctrine called “escalate to…