Throughout history, news media have been used by their owners to promote political agendas, in other words, for propaganda. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, Hearst’s New York Journal and Pulitzer’s New York World immediately assigned blame to Spain. The slogan “Remember the Maine!” was coined and amplified by these papers, and it became the rallying cry for the Spanish-American War of 1898. In 1976, an investigation by Admiral Hyman Rickover concluded the explosion had been caused by an internal coal-bunker fire igniting an explosives-storage magazine.

More recently, during the lead-up to the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 Iraq War, legacy media uncritically disseminated government narratives. The Oct. 10, 1990 testimony of Nayirah al-Ṣabaḥ, daughter of Kuwait’s then ambassador to the United States Saud Al-Sabah, before the U.S. Congressional Human Rights Caucus, claiming that Iraqi soldiers threw babies out of incubators, was widely broadcast despite being a hoax fabricated by the public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. Similarly, media outlets heavily promoted the narrative of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, later found to be non-existent, with the complicit media neglecting to scrutinize the “intelligence” used to justify the subsequent invasion. This scenario has been repeated since 1992 with regular claims by Benjamin Netanyahu—currently Israeli Prime Minister, then a Member of the Knesset in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamirʼs government—that Iran is on the verge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, either in “weeks,” “months,” or “three to five years.”