USA Today Ducking the Question of Militarism

The top story for USA Today on July 8, 2016: Some Western countries aren’t spending enough money on weapons of war.

“NATO Nations Ducking the Check” was the headline across the top of the front page. “Despite Pledges, Some NATO Members Still Falling Behind on Defense Spending” was the online version (7/7/16).

The story, by USA Today White House correspondent Gregory Korte, emphasized the “big separation between those paying for the common defense and those who aren’t.” After noting that “only five member countries—the United States, Greece, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Poland—meet the required threshold of 2 percent or more of economic output devoted to defense,” the story continued:

Still, there has been overall progress. Twenty-two NATO members are spending a greater share of their economy on defense compared to last year, with an alliance-wide increase of 2.65 percent.

The story displayed not a hint of skepticism that increasing military spending is anything other than an unalloyed good. Nor did it mention the actual total military spending by NATO countries. It’s $906 billion a year—58 percent of the entire world’s military spending, though NATO countries represent less than 12 percent of Earth’s population. By comparison, Russia—which is sometimes portrayed as a looming threat to the West—has annual military budget of $43 billion, or  less than 5 percent of NATO’s.

The article gave no space for questioning whether in a world in which 3.1 million children die from malnutrition each year, there might be more pressing spending priorities. It offered no evidence that increased NATO military spending would make the world safer, either—just quotes from officials, like NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, who treat more Western war spending as a good in itself:

“This is real progress. After many years of going in the wrong direction, we are starting to go into the right direction,” he told defense ministers in Brussels last month. “But we are still far from where we need to be. And we clearly need to do more.”

USA Today‘s choice of terminology reinforces the militaristic slant: The word “defense” appears 11 times in the article, whereas the words “military,” “war” and “weapons” don’t appear at all.

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter at @JNaureckas.

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