At the same time last week that the world was focused on the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, a story of war began emerging out of the country Georgia. Georgia is one among many former Soviet republics that broke away from the USSR when the latter collapsed in 1989.

Check out the Wikipedia page on Georgia. The population of the country is dominated by ethnic Georgians — that is, except for certain enclaves within the country. Two such enclaves are South Ossetia (dominated by ethnic Ossetians) and Abkhazia (dominated by ethnic Abkhazians).

At the same time that Georgia broke away from the USSR, South Ossetia and Abkhazia broke away from Georgia. But while Georgia has been recognized by the international community as a sovereign nation, the same courtesy has not been granted to South Ossetia or Abkhazia. So since the early 1990s, those two enclaves have been acting as “de facto” sovereign self-governing countries.

That history brings us up to the events of last week. Since Friday, the top media story across the world not involving the Olympics has concerned a war between Russia and Georgia within these two enclaves, and also in parts of Georgia proper.

Until this present moment, the American media has covered this story in a comical “fairy tale” sort of way. That is, the media — including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, and pretty much any other leading American media voice that I could find — was painting this war story as a juvenile black/white, good guy vs. bad guy story. In this fairly tale, Russia is the bad guy; Georgia the good guy.

In order to promote this myth, the American media needed to keep the following facts out of their story-telling:

• the president of Georgia is a “bad man”, who has used his legal system and police force to jail dissidents and political opponents
• on Wednesday of last week (August 6), this president signed a ceasefire agreement with South Ossetia
• the very next day, on August 7, the day before the Olympic opening ceremonies, this president of Georgia ordered his military to attack the capital city of South Ossetia with tanks, mortars, and commandos (i.e. to take back South Ossetia by extreme force)
• through this weekend, and even through to today, the Georgian army has been bombing the capital city of Ossetia
• there are a great many civilian Ossetian victims of this Georgian aggression, who have sad heart-rending stories

I repeat, up until the past couple of hours, you could not read the above facts on any major American media source. Obviously, leaving out these facts in the story of the Russian-Georgian war makes it seem like the Russians are simply invading Georgia trying to take the country over (ie. this is 1979 Afghanistan all over again).

Why did the American media hide these facts from us Americans? Why have they been telling us fairy tales for the last 3 1/2 days?

Is the American media simply a tool of the U.S. government? I mean, the government is all about misinformation. Maybe in matters of war, the American media simply takes its marching orders from the White House.

Well, I doubt that. In fact, if anybody owns anybody, I would think that it’s the corporations who dominate the government, not the other way around. And the American media is simply one set of corporations.

So if the government isn’t compelling the media to tell us American people fairy tales about war, why is the media doing it?

I got my answer this morning reading Google news. The thing is, if you wanted to read a more true account of this war in South Ossetia over the past 4 days, all you had to do was browse to foreign news sources on Google news. I mean, most every developed nation has its own media, and they put their stories out on the web too.

Those sources are where I found the above “hidden” facts. But one such source for these hidden facts that I found this morning surprised me. That source was CNN.

Huh? Didn’t I just list CNN as simply another American fairy tale-spinning media corporation? How is that CNN was telling me the full story this morning?

Well, the mystery is solved because the CNN site I visited this morning was CNN Europe, with content targeted to Europeans. It’s CNN USA that spins fairly tales to us Americans; CNN Europe tells a fuller story.

That’s when it it hit me: The American media tells us Americans fairy tales instead of the truth because we Americans are children. Paraphrasing Jack: “[We Americans] can’t handle the truth!” And profits for any corporation are found in giving the customers what they want. What we want is what we can handle.

So then what’s really interesting to me is that, as I am writing this, the American media is reversing itself on its coverage of the war in South Ossetia. That is, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, etc., are all now filling in the missing “details” of the fairy tales that they have been spinning since Friday.

What a turn-around! … but why?! I mean, just when I was starting to get comfortable that I understood why the American media spins fairy tales over war, they up and reverse themselves. What is happening here?

I have a sneaking suspicion that the American media realizes that we live the Age of the Web. As I said above, we have 24×7 web access to non-American media. We also have YouTube — i.e. we can just watch it for ourselves without having to wait for the American media to tell us about it.

The reality of this present war is that Georgia is going to lose and lose big time. Moreover, Russia doesn’t look like it will be parking its military bases in Georgia or trying to keep soldiers in Georgia or anything like that.

What it looks like is that Russia is doing exactly what the US does when we decide to attack another country. That is, Russia is dismantling the ability of Georgia to wage war — including killing its military personnel, destroying its communications infrastructure, and so on. See e.g. US vs. Serbia, US vs. Afghanistan (before the occupation), and US vs. Iraq (before the occupation).

Come this time next week, it looks like the bulk of Russian soldiers will be back home, and Georgia will be left as a country with a decimated military. At that point, the American fairy tale would have collapsed of its own falsehood.

So maybe that’s why the American media flipped this afternoon. I mean, maybe the corporate media approach to us Americans is: “Tell them fairy tales so long as the tale holds water; but as soon the facts make that fairy tale impossible to keep spinning, start slipping in some of the facts that we had been hiding, to gradually coax the dumb, childish Americans toward the painful truth.”

I’m not saying there are people in the media who sit back and say that. I’m just saying that’s how they are collectively behaving.

Are we Americans really that dumb that our media needs to behave this way? I guess. But praise be to Allah that we live in the Age of the Web, meaning that the truth will inevitably come out, no matter how shocking or painful.