Fair and Balanced Bashing

Harry Browne | May 11 2005

Last Sunday, Fox TV News re-ran a one-hour documentary called "Iran: The Nuclear Threat."

From start to finish, it assumes (without presenting any evidence) that Iran is building nuclear weapons and is a horrendous threat to the peace of the world. The only dissenting views shown are there merely to demonstrate how stupid or devious some people are (people such as a UN weapons inspector and an Iranian spokesman).

Watching it, the sense of déjà vu is overwhelming. It's almost exactly like the buildup to the attack on Iraq: call the inspectors woolly-headed, call the deniers liars, call the dissenters cowards. Assert the case but offer no evidence to support it. Iran's links to Al-Qaeda are undeniable (and Iran "might have" been involved in 9/11). You can't believe anything the Iranian leaders say. The Iranian people must be liberated. "Europe doesn't get it." George Bush says, "Iran cannot have a bomb" ("Saddam Hussein must disarm or we'll disarm him").

The show glorifies the preemptive attack made by Israel in bombing an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 (Iraq denied that the reactor was used for bomb-making, but doubting Israel's assertions is like doubting that George Bush is a good Christian), and cheers on the idea that either Israel or the U.S. will attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. One expert said there's a 50% to 70% chance the U.S. will attack Iran – pointing out that it can be done with air strikes, so no U.S. troops need to be diverted from Iraq.

How many times have we heard it said that "Democracies don’t make war"? But in the past 3½ years the "democratic" U.S. has made war against two countries and is gearing up for a third.

And Americans wonder why someone would want to attack us.

I know all about this show because I saw it last Sunday – stumbling onto it by chance, and then sitting with my jaw in a permanently dropped position. I was surprised to see that it's being aired again tomorrow evening (Sunday, May 8th) at 9pm Eastern time.

If you don't want to sit through it, you can get a sense of it by reading a Fox article.

Don't forget the Fox TV News slogan: "We report; you decide our way."