You can make your own mind up, now, as to who was telling the truth. The purveyors of the frenzied coverage often hit back that they were genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of the Afghan people. Back then, critics of the frenzied coverage ( myself included) argued that it seemed to reflect a pervasive media bias in favor of US intervention overseas-a long-term trend of playing up storylines that cast it as a stabilizing force while playing down stories of its destructiveness. This time, the withdrawal coverage over the summer gives us a direct and immediate point of comparison. Defining what this might look like can be tricky. Such critics generally mean, rather, to highlight a story’s lack of prominence relative to its importance to say that something deserves to be a really big deal across the news cycle. This is rarely literally true it certainly isn’t true of this humanitarian crisis. Media critics are wont to say that an important story-especially when it’s a humanitarian crisis abroad- isn’t being covered by Western media. The same cannot be said of the attention American media is paying to them. The consequences of American occupation and withdrawal have since only intensified. ICYMI: What’s the metaverse? Whatever companies want it to be.Īll of this, of course, is in stark contrast to last summer, when the pullout from Afghanistan sparked a weeks-long media feeding frenzy and rampant condemnation of Biden among the pundit class. You won’t have seen a single reporter ask Biden a question about Afghanistan’s humanitarian crisis at his rare press conference this week, even though he took questions for a hundred and eleven minutes.
#TALIBAN HIIDE AFGHANSINTERCEPT TV#
You won’t have seen retired four-star generals and former Defense and State department staffers- many of them with undisclosed, ongoing financial ties to the military-industrial complex-touring TV studios to bemoan Biden’s poor judgment. You won’t have seen many political pundits describing Biden’s callous disregard for Afghan lives as the sort of thing Trump would have done. (Even Hayes’s segment on the matter was relatively brief.) You won’t have seen veteran foreign correspondents speechifying endlessly on air as to how Biden’s inaction has diminished the trust that overseas capitals place in America’s word on the world stage. You won’t have seen cable anchors lining up night after night to collectively excoriate Biden for helping to starve Afghan children. But here’s what you won’t have seen (or, at least, what I haven’t seen). This is far from an exhaustive summary of such coverage. On his prime-time MSNBC show last week, Chris Hayes decried the Biden administration’s current stance on sanctions as “an indefensible moral scandal.” In the US, The Intercept’s Lee Fang has filed several stories on the role crippling US sanctions have played in exacerbating the crisis, including a video in which he cornered several uninterested-looking senators. CBS, PBS, The Guardian, and the Washington Post have all also run dispatches from the ground.
“But I had never seen a crisis like this.” Reporting from Afghanistan for The New Yorker, Jane Ferguson described the situation as “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis” Saeed Shah reported for the Wall Street Journal that some parents are selling their children to survive. “I’ve covered severe droughts, I’ve covered countries on the brink of famine,” Goldbaum said. Last month, Christina Goldbaum, a Kabul-based correspondent for the New York Times, went on the paper’s Daily podcast and outlined how banks are running out of cash and severely malnourished children are overwhelming healthcare facilities. In recent weeks, a number of journalists at major outlets have voiced their alarm about the economic catastrophe that’s unfolding in Afghanistan in the wake of the US withdrawal from the country and its takeover by the Taliban.
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