The corporate-media is still freaking-out over fake news. Their concern would have a lot more credibility and sympathy if these so-called respectable news outlets hadn’t been responsible for so much propaganda. Does anyone remember mushroom clouds, aluminum tubes, and weapons of mass destruction, or are they down the memory hole?

In my opinion, the corporate-media is the largest disseminator of fake news, in the interest of promoting endless war.

The election of Donald Trump, who admittedly has a tenuous relationship with the truth, seems to have set the corporate-media off. They’ve spent the entire time since his election in attack mode, hammering him as some sort of Manchurian candidate, controlled personally by Russian leader–Vladimir Putin.

However, when Trump launched a volley of cruise missiles at Syria in response to the supposed chemical attack that Trump saw on CNN, the corporate-media turned on a dime from from attack to praise. The formerly adversarial press couldn’t find enough nice things to say about our kayfabe president.

I always thought the story was bullshit. That the Syrian military would employ chemical weapons when they were winning on the battlefield was always suspect, especially when the opposition, led by Al-Qaeda, has been known to use chemical weapons and has a powerful motive to perpetrate a false-flag attack.

And now we have confirming evidence that the chemical attack was fake news, seized upon by the corporate-media to smear Syria and Russia, all in a dangerous gambit to bring about the conflict that they lust for.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, with sources with first hand knowledge about what the U.S. military and intelligence community actually know, has just published another muckraking article–Trump’s Red Line—in the German newspaper Die Welt.  Hersh reports US intelligence actually warned president Trump it had no evidence that the Syrian military had used sarin gas. Hersh writes that Russia had warned the U.S. about a Syrian military strike before Khan Shaykhun was bombed, and he says that bombing set off secondary explosions that released poisonous gases on the ground.

“The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack,  including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.

Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious.”

So far the corporate-media has completely ignored Hersh’s story, arguably his most explosive, because it shows a President Trump risking triggering a World War III with Russia based upon his own rash decision, over the objections and to the dismay of his own military and intelligence advisers.

Hersh wasn’t able to find a mainstream publisher in the US or the UK. Instead, he had to run it in a German newspaper. Hersh, a longtime reporter for the New York Times, used to be able to publish his signature investigative articles in the New Yorker. However, this time, as Hersh relates, ”I had a hell of a time getting it published.” 

In an interview, Hersh has some perceptive musings on how and why the corporate-media employs fake news in the service of endless war.

“The next few days were Trump’s most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war… One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word ‘beautiful’ to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: ‘I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.

…If you remember, the cry immediately was that Bashar had gassed his own people again with sarin as he allegedly did four years earlier. Then the Russians chimed in by denying it. Here you had Syria which is obviously very much hated by most Americans I guess. The polls probably show that. We don’t like Bashar Assad, and so for the president it was the easy win. He’d bomb somebody nobody likes. From the press reaction today, it’s clear that not liking Syria and not liking Russia for the mainstream press is much more important than what the president did which always surprises me but maybe it shouldn’t.”

As you can see, the corporate-media fake news conforms to the official Washington consensus of US empire, which is why the deep state, the military-industrial complex, the neo-cons or whatever one wants to call the permanent war-party will never allow Trump to pursue a detente with Putin.

Fifteen years ago, the Bush administration used fake news about weapons of mass destruction to start a war in Iraq that led to the deaths of millions. Now the Trump administration, with the full support of the corporate-media and the entire political establishment, is using fake news to escalate a war that could result in a nuclear exchange between the United States and Russia.

War, as they say, truly is the health of the state.