Iraq to Venezuela and beyond: How US media giants like NYT, WaPo and others serve as the propaganda arm of the White House

In the early hours of Saturday, January 3, the US military launched a large-scale operation code-named Operation Absolute Resolve against Venezuela. US aircraft rained down ammunition on key Venezuelan military assets while a Delta Force team went to capture the Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. 

Maduro and Flores were taken into custody and flown out of Venezuela to New York, and US President Trump announced soon that they would face charges for narco-terrorism and other criminal activities. The operation took the whole world by surprise, not just because of its suddenness, but also for the sheer impunity of it, the audacious breach of sovereignty. 

Operation Absolute Resolve included elite Delta Force commandos, over 150 aircraft, airstrikes, and months of CIA surveillance. The images of Maduro being handcuffed and paraded around by US forces will be circulated for decades. The geopolitical ramifications are yet to be grasped completely.

Amid the cacophony of the Trump administration’s insufferable bravado, there is a barrage of questions. A lot of nations have condemned the incident and raised serious concern about the shocking absence of a ‘rules-based international order’ when it comes to US hegemony. Dictator as he might be, Maduro was the head of a sovereign nation. The US capture of Maduro was a blatant disregard of that sovereignty. 

Curiously, though, the US media, which behaves as the global champion of human rights, democracy and justice and holds sermons for the entire world on the above topics on a regular basis, is hailing the act. 

As per a report, some of the top names in US media were already aware of the plan to capture Maduro, but chose to stay silent for ‘national security’. An exclusive in Semafor has revealed that the NYT and Washington Post both had prior knowledge of the raid before it was underway, but they chose to remain silent and delayed publishing anything about it, ‘upon the request’ of the Trump administration.

First in @semafor: NYT, WaPo learned of the secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin but held off publishing what they had at the administration’s request to avoid endangering US troops pic.twitter.com/LyWNSpNJwK— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) January 4, 2026

The decision by NYT and WaPo was apparently in terms with their ‘journalistic traditions’. Semfor writes, “.. it offers a rare glimpse at a thread of contact and even cooperation at some of the highest stakes American national security issues”.

The obidience shown by NYT and WaPo is significant, because on principle the legacy media in the USA has been vocally anti-Trump since day-1. Also, because the same legacy media in the USA is the self appointed preacher of justice, morality and democratic values to the whole world.

The obedience, however, is nothing new. There are ample instances where the US legacy media has effectively worked as a US propaganda arm, trumpeting the US cause to serve the US interests and keeping silent when silence served the White House best, despite their usually assumed pretence of being the champions of free speech and media freedom. 

The Bay of Pigs invasion

In 1961, the NYT reportedly had advanced knowledge of a CIA-backed plan for Cuban exiles to invade Cuba. At the urging of the then White House officials, NYT toned-downed a front page story and tried its best to downplay the CIA involvement. 

NSA Wiretapping Program

The NYT knew about George W Bush’s secret approval for the NSA to start domestic eavesdropping against US citizens without any warrants, but did not publish it, because the Bush administration asked them not to. NYT obeyed. They withheld publication for about a year because the White House reportedly told them it would harm national security.

CIA’s ‘secret prisons’

The Washington Post had uncovered the CIA’s network of overseas detention facilities for terrorism suspects. However, at the request of senior administration officials, it withheld the names of specific Eastern European countries hosting the sites in its Pulitzer Prize-winning report. So much for ‘free press’ and justice.

US invasion of Iraq and the ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ lie

The legacy media in the US have not only played ‘secret keeper’ for the White House, but they have also been very active trumpeters and drumbeaters for the US government. 

Throughout the early 2000s, the legacy media in the USA pulled all their resources to convince everyone in the world about the biggest lie of that decade, that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, and it was absolutely necessary to remove Saddam Hussein from power. 

So loyal was the coverage that the big names in US media never even bothered to question the US government on the veracity of those claims.

The @washingtonpost ran at least 140 front page articles promoting Iraq invasion, and ran at least 27 editorials pushing for war in the 6 months leading up to Bush’s invasion. No one at WaPo paid for lying & accessory to murdering a million people.
Happy anniversary! pic.twitter.com/iRkRfq5bDR— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) March 19, 2023

They quoted Iraqi defectors and exiles, parroted whatever the Pentagon said and claimed. The Washington Post even ran stories presenting intercepted aluminum tubes as “evidence” of Iraq’s nuclear program. Other big names, like Fox etc went full blown patriotic shouting how important it is for the USA to invade Iraq and “save the world”.

The examples above are just a sample. The big names in US media, like NYT and WaPo, despite their claims of independence and assumed moral superiority, have been effectively the propaganda arms of the US government. Their conviction and journalistic stand have often been subject to US convenience, US interests, and even White House priorities in the short and long term. 

Tomorrow marks 19 years since Colin Powell lied to the UN to justify the US invasion of #Iraq. Maybe more reporters should have questioned “US credibility” then. pic.twitter.com/TJeTGFYwUp— Assal Rad (@AssalRad) February 4, 2022

During Operation Mockingbird, the CIA went on to hire journalists to aid their Cold War narrative shaping. During the COVID years, despite significant concerns and expert analysis, the legacy media just parroted whatever the Biden administration said. It not only dismissed the lab-leak hypothesis, it also went on a misinformation overdrive to shield certain names, dismiss any reference to the glaring involvement of Fauci and Peter Daszak in the gain-of-function research the US government had going on in Wuhan, and labelled all contrary voices as liars. 

Post Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, now known as X, a series of revelations told the whole world how the mighty social media giants were also taking direct orders from the Biden administration, even to the extent of misleading their own citizens.

Even their foreign coverages serve US interests, hailing obedient US allies as peaceful utopias and any not-so-aligned country as an undemocratic, backward hellhole. India has often been at the receiving end of elaborate smearing campaigns by these publications, because India chooses to follow its own foreign policy, instead of invariably saying yes to dictat from White House. 

Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Syria are names in a long list of meddled nations and regime change operations that the US government has undertaken over the years, with explicit support from their so-called ‘free press’.