The plight of the Afghan people was crucial for pundits and journalists — as long as they had a war to defend. Now that US troops are gone, Joe Biden’s sanctions are causing starvation and suffering — and the media has been astonishingly silent.
The US withdrawal from Afghanistan last summer provoked a wave of sudden concern across the American media about the plight of the Afghan people. That concern, as it turned out, was both fierce and fleeting, with some network pundits in particular going rather quiet once debate about the Biden administration’s disengagement had worn out its news cycle.
As writer and media critic Adam Johnson observed in an analysispublished last month, several high-profile media figures dedicated substantial time and numerous segments to the coming suffering of Afghans in the act of scolding critics of the American occupation and those advocating withdrawal alike. And as FAIR’s Julie Hollar noted, the plight of Afghan women in particular briefly became a theme in US media attention again — having been mostly dormant since the months following the initial US invasion in 2001.
Remarkably, or perhaps unremarkably, the same networks and pundits have had much less to say about the cataclysmic conditions that now exist for millions throughout the country. And, when the subject does come up, the direct role of American policy is effectively erased from the picture. As Johnson put it in December: “An urgent, profound humanitarian crisis is unfolding as we speak, but the ramp of media concern is virtually nonexistent. A report here and there over the past weeks, but nothing remotely close to the nonstop moralizing and calls to ‘do something’ we saw during the last few weeks of August upon the U.S. withdrawal.”
READ FULL ARTICLE: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2022/01/sanctions-financial-assets-afghanistan-biden-administration-economic-collapse
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