The mainstream media have largely adopted a pro-war narrative: the U.S. should have stayed longer, Biden’s withdrawal is precipitous, the president has failed to secure all the good things that America brought to the people of Afghanistan/Kabul. Biden has gotten surprising support from the left, which has long opposed the Afghanistan occupation, and from some independent voices who have said that the 20-year war was catastrophic and violent and the chaotic scenes at the airport are merely the last chapter in a misbegotten policy.

Journalists get fired for sharing political opinions, except when that opinion is in support for U.S. foreign policy and endless war. This is playing out vividly now as the mainstream press effectively spins its coverage on the U.S. withdraw from Afghanistan into an argument for continued military occupation.

Nina Turner, running for Congress in Ohio, says a group is targeting progressive candidates of color with “dirty money”– in an apparent reference to Democratic Majority for Israel. Turner has called for conditioning U.S. aid to Israel, while her rival Shontel Brown recently visited the country at the behest of a rightwing Israel lobby group.

The New York Times slants its coverage of the U.S.-Iran nuclear deal talks, leaving out the Israeli role.

Religious zealots have established an “outpost” settlement in West Bank lately and Israeli forces have killed five Palestinians protesting the landgrab. The story is getting wide coverage in Palestine but not in the United States, though these lands are the supposed basis of a “Palestinian state.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar’s progressive allies, in Congress and outside, rushed to her defense. Had this exchange happened just a few years ago she would have been left to twist slowly in the wind, alone. Instead, more than 50 progressive U.S. groups said clearly that “the repeated targeting of Rep. Omar is rooted in sexism, racism and anti-Muslim bigotry.”

In the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof asks if his criticisms of Israel were fair during the recent Gaza attack and says, Yes. Spanish and Irish precedents for terrorism show that negotiation of political issues is the only way to end war crimes over territorial questions.

The New York Times does an unprecedented thing for a paper that has long supported Israel: puts the faces of dozens of Palestinian children slaughtered by Israel in Gaza on its front page. “Never thought I’d see the day when Palestinian victims were pictured, named, & their stories told,” says James Zogby.

Slate reports on top-editor media bias during Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza: “when a statement came from the Israel Defense Forces, senior editors at the paper treated it as fact. When [reporter] Omar recorded a statement from an eyewitness on the ground that contradicted the Israeli military’s account, he said the top editors called it unreliable.”

Amira Hass’s charge in Haaretz that Israeli military, as part of its air assault on Gaza, “is wiping out entire Palestinian families on purpose,” cries out for followup by American journalists. So far, no mainstream U.S. media outlet has followed up on her report. Their failure is journalistic malpractice.