Episode 232: US Meddling, the Limits of 'Agency' Discourse and How Media Chooses Which 'Voices' To Center
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“Tony Blair says world must listen to Iraqi exiles,” reads a 2003 New York Times subheadline. 'I Want To Get The Hell Out Of Here': Thousands Of Palestinians Are Leaving Gaza,” NPR told readers in 2019. “Will Iran’s hated regime implode?,” The Economist wondered earlier this year, in June 2025. In recent decades, when the US, or one of its client states, has sought to invade, bomb, occupy, or otherwise destabilize and destroy a country and its people, media and policymakers who support these aims––which is to say the vast majority––have employed ad hoc liberal standpoint theory to frame these efforts as in support of “the people” of said country, insisting that we listen to those people–whose platonic voice, we are told, share the US security state’s desire for regime change, sanctions, bombings and/or meddling.
Whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Bolivia, Gaza, or Iran, we’re told this “Platonic Voice of the People” not only objects to their government’s policies, but supports, either implicitly or explicitly, aggressive US intervention.
How these US reporters, pundits and think tank fellows settle on this supposed consensus of the “people” often remains a mystery. It’s usually not polling or any other assessment of organic opinion, but rather visuals of protest, cherry-picked interviews, exile groups funded by the US, or, most often the case, just vibes.
This isn’t to say that governments in the crosshairs of US aggression don’t have organic discontent and it is, of course, important that we understand the public opinions of people around the world, especially in countries and states that the US routinely antagonizes. But how that opinion is framed is often shoddy, self-serving, ad hoc and very selective. What about the people who support the regime? What percentage don’t? Why are we so quick to conflate opposition to a government with support for poverty-fueling sanctions or, or worse, bombing and invasion?
On this episode, our final show of 2025, we examine the media trope of representing, or rather misrepresenting, an alleged Voice of the People in besieged countries, discuss how this trope manipulates liberal notions of standpoint theory to generate support for US and US-allied acts of aggression, and provides supposedly enlightened and democratic cover for what is almost always the craven promotion of Western military and capital interests. Our guest is journalist Vincent Bevins.
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Guest
Vincent Bevins is a journalist and author. A former foreign correspondent for numerous newspapers, his writing has appeared in The London Review of Books, The New York Times, The New Republic, The Nation, The Baffler, The Outline and elsewhere. His first book, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World, was published in 2020 by PublicAffairs Books and has been translated into over a dozen languages. His second book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, was published in 2023, also by PublicAffairs.
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Show Notes
Vincent Bevins | October 22, 2025 | North South Notes
Adam Johnson | November 5, 2025 | The Column
At Least We Are Many: Resisting the Drums of War
Kaveh Akbar | June 18, 2025 | The Nation
Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to suspect fraud
John Curiel and Jack R. Williams | Feb 27, 2020 | The Washington Post
‘Years From Now, It’ll Be Clear to Everyone There Was a Coup in Bolivia’
Janine Jackson and Alex Main | November 21, 2019 | FAIR CounterSpin
Unpacking Media Propaganda About Bolivia’s Election
Gregory Shupak | November 18, 2019 | FAIR
Greeted Like Liberators: Media, Metaphor, and Myth in the Rhetorical Construction of Operation Iraqi Freedom
Charles Franklin Bisbee | December 2011 | University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Ta-Nehisi Coates | January 31, 2011 | The Atlantic
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
William Blum | 2004 | Common Courage Press
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Transcript
For a full transcript of this episode, go here. You can also find transcripts of past episodes, live shows, Beg-a-Thons, Interviews and News Briefs here.
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Citations Merch
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Credits
Senior Producer: Florence Barrau-Adams
Producer: Julianne Tveten
Production Assistant: Trendel Lightburn
Newsletter: Marco Cartolano
Music: Grandaddy
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