"If we learn nothing else from the war on Iraq and its subsequent occupation, it is that the U.S. ruling class has learned to make ideological warfare as important to its operations as military and economic warfare," write Robert W. McChesney and John Bellamy Foster in this excerpt from their upcoming book, The Big Picture: Understanding Media through Political Economy [3]. "A crucial component of this ideological war has been the campaign against 'left-wing media bias,' with the objective of reducing or eliminating the prospect that mainstream U.S. journalism might be at all critical toward elite interests or the system set up to serve those interests."