Blog #8


 Personally, I think that US antiwar news is not featured on major networks because there are not a whole lot of current breaking stories. Another reason is that there is a history of heavy government backlash when the public makes any major conflicting movement that does not follow their agenda. I’ll go over my first thought first. 


From what I have seen/can remember in my lifetime, major news networks are nationalistic and try to avoid backlash. This means that they will steer clear from government aggression and avoid taking sides on certain controversial topics. This is why you never see a news anchor or reporter say anything extremely negative about the Black Lives Matter movement. You would never hear an anchor say that the BLM movement is a waste of energy and that they should just deal with unfair treatment. That anchor would be dead within a week and the network would be blacklisted. This same idea goes for military activity. There were a ton of antiwar rallies and protests during the Vietnam war. On the contrary, people were outraged when Biden pulled troops out of Afghanistan. This shows that military activity is a very controversial topic. 


My other point was that news networks want to avoid government backlash. In the months following the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration cracked down on protestors claiming that you are either “with us or you are with the terrorists.” This meant that anyone who criticized the movement were considered terrorists. In an environment like that, I don’t blame the media for wanting to avoid attention.



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