HBO host Bill Maher is taking aim at the New York Times for portraying Donald Trump’s actions in Iran as a “bad war.”
Maher brought up the subject on his recent Club Random podcast featuring neuroscientist Sam Harris. The show was recorded a few days after Trump launched his sorties against Iran’s radical, Islamist Mullahs, and during the segment Maher and Harris began to talk about the media’s portrayal of the military actions that had only just started.
“As we’re talking now, the Iran [war], the new Iran war, and The New York Times headline was, you know, ‘U.S. troops die’ – that was like what they led with. Now, that is a big part of the story, that troops have died, I mean it’s kind of a bigger story than that,” Maher said, according to Mediaite.
“But then in a country where I’ve read 80-90% of the people are thrilled that the Ayatollah is gone. What picture did they put? Picture of people mourning the Ayatollah.,” Maher continued.
He then blasted the U.S. media for pushing the anti-Trump message while ignoring the millions of Iranians who were thrilled with the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the decapitation of his oppressive regime.
“… I can’t believe that somebody at the desk didn’t get, ‘I’ve got a great picture of people dancing in the streets’… ‘Yeah. we’re going to go with the 10% who are sorry the Ayatollah is dead because that’s going to funnel the thought of our readers toward ‘oh this is a bad war to get into,’” Maher exclaimed.
Maher concluded saying that the media is pushing an ideology, not covering the news.
“Now we can talk about whether it is or it isn’t,” he exclaimed. “But that to me is the difference in what the media does now and what they didn’t used to do. Like you’re funneling me toward an opinion, whereas I would love it if you just told me what happened.”
For his part, Harris agreed that the media has gone astray from reporting the news.
“I mean the boundary between activism and journalism has clearly broken down. I mean, you know, I think we’ll get to a place where we rebuild trust in at least some of these institutions but we’re not there yet,” Harris replied.
Maher also talked of the actions in Iran during his Real Time HBO show on Friday. During the show he said he supports Trump’s actions in Iran and ripped liberals for not supporting the “liberation” of Iran.
“I just want to reiterate what I said in the monologue, I’m cautiously optimistic, unless he puts boots on the ground, then he’s going to lose me. We’ll see, for now. I just don’t get what liberals don’t get about liberation,” he told his audience. “I see so much happiness. I see it in Venezuela. I see it here in Iran. Could we skip the part where we talk about, oh, they had so many different reasons for going to war, regime change and we’ve got to get rid of the nukes and they were supporters of terrorism? It’s all of it. How about this? This was a fascist theocracy, and nothing in the Middle East was ever going to get better while they were still there f*cking everything up.”
Watch the interview with Sam Harris here:
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