The holidays have always been a time for reflection. And so with the sun now chasing New Year’s parties around the world, here are three of the biggest loads of crap that the mainstream media dished out in 2008.

3. Russia’s attack on Georgia was as act of unprovoked aggression
During the August conflict that focused on the Georgian breakaway province of South Ossetia, syndicated columnist Gwynne Dyer did an admirable job outlining a narrative for the war that was seldom found elsewhere. While CNN consistently echoed the Bush administration’s condemnation of Russia for an unprovoked attack and warned that the “Soviet Union” would soon be marching on Europe, Dyer pointed out that it was actually Georgia that attacked South Ossetia. “Russia didn’t threaten Georgia,” Dyer wrote as the conflict continued, “it responded to a surprise Georgian attack on South Ossetia, a territory where there were Russian peace-keeping troops by international agreement.” During the conflict, the mainstream media all but erased this fact and opted to stoke the flames of a greater conflict between the U.S. and Russia that simply did not exist.

2. Hamas started the Israel-Gaza conflict in December
I’ve heard this line repeated on major news networks countless times since Israel’s most-recent assault on Gaza began on December 28: “Hamas started this conflict by firing rockets into Israel and Israel has a right to defend itself.” Israel does have a right to defend itself. But the conflict is so much more complicated than this that repeating such a line is simply ignorant. When Hamas was democratically elected as Gaza’s government in January 2006, Israel instituted a blockade, sealing Gaza’s borders and sharply restricting what went in and out of the already-oppressed territory. At the same time, many countries around the world (including Canada) cut off badly needed food and medical aid to Gaza. The result has been a territory under siege, where unemployment hovers around 50 percent, fuel is scarce, hunger is increasingly widespread, and medical supplies have dwindled to dangerously low quantities. (For a comprehensive overview of the effects of Israel’s blockade on Gaza, Sara Roy’s recent piece in the London Review of Books, If Gaza falls…, is definitive.) Hamas’s practice of targeting civilians with indiscriminate rocket attacks is unacceptable and justifies a measured response from Israel. But as the government of Gaza, what should Hamas’s response have been to a siege that is slowly killing its people? Furthermore, commentators such as Gwynne Dyer and Tariq Ali have emphasized the political implications of a war so close to an Israeli presidential election and suggested that the whole mess is nothing more than political posturing. There’s a lot more going on here than ‘who hit who first’.

1. The “Surge” brought peace to Iraq
Perhaps no falsehood of 2008 was repeated so often by so many people as three simple words: “The Surge worked”. If George W. Bush is remembered as the man who brought peace to Iraq, the media’s failure to relate the real story of the 2003 U.S. invasion will be as great as the war itself. Three things brought about a calm in Iraq; the least significant of the three was the increase in U.S. troop numbers known as the “Surge”. More important was the so-called “Sunni awakening”, which is the media-friendly term for the cessation of sectarian killings by Sunni groups in Iraq. But as the Straight previously noted, the Sunni awakening was not so much a change of heart as it was a shift in the labour market. Around the same time that the U.S. sent more troops to Iraq, it also began a strategy of simply buying off its enemies. As reported in the Washington Post in August 2007, extremist Sunni groups were given large sums of money to stop killing American soldiers and Shiite civilians. That article pointed out, “Shiite leaders fear that the United States is financing highly trained and well-armed militias that could undermine the government after American troops withdraw.” And the third and most significant reason that violence in Iraq declined through 2007 and remained calm this year is that by 2008, the Iraqi civil war was largely over. As early as December 2006, the New York Times was reporting that most mixed Sunni-Shiite neighbourhoods in Baghdad had been cleansed of minorities and that American forces were building walls throughout the city to separate feuding communities. By the end of 2007, as these maps published in the New York Times show, it was clear that the war was not resolved peacefully; it had simply been fought to completion. Bush’s surge didn’t bring peace to Iraq, it only arrived in time to observe a peace that came as the result of a very bloody civil war.

Honourable mentions
Barack Obama will bring change to America: Flip through bios of his appointments thus far and you realize that America is likely heading into four years of centrist policies that will maintain military operations in the Middle East and South Asia and continue to bailout whatever corporate failure asks for it next. (John Pilger has more to say on this.)

Offshore drilling will ease oil prices in America: Despite John McCain’s chants of “Drill, baby drill,” a few pennies off a gallon of gasoline 10 years from now is not worth the destruction of America’s coasts.

And finally, a bailout will save the auto industry: Pouring money into incompetent companies without sufficiently addressing incompetence will only delay the industry’s demise. (On this topic, Thomas Friedman might have said it best.)

Here’s to 2009 and all the stories to come.

Follow Travis Lupick on Twitter @travislupick.