Ear­li­er this month, NBC reporter and ana­lyst William Arkin end­ed a 30-year career as a jour­nal­ist, announc­ing in a “scathing let­ter,” Democ­ra­cy Now! reports, that “he would be leav­ing the net­work. Arkin accus­es “the media of war­mon­ger­ing while ignor­ing the, quote, ‘creep­ing fas­cism of home­land secu­ri­ty.’” He does not equiv­o­cate in a fol­low-up inter­view with Amy Good­man. “The gen­er­als and the nation­al secu­ri­ty lead­er­ship” are also now, he says, “the com­men­ta­tors and the ana­lysts who pop­u­late the news media” (Arkin him­self is a for­mer Army intel­li­gence offi­cer).

The prob­lem isn’t only NBC, in his esti­ma­tion, and it isn’t only sup­posed jour­nal­ists cheer­lead­ing for war. Most of the con­flicts the coun­try is cur­rent­ly engaged in are un- or under-report­ed in major sources. His let­ter “applies to all of the main­stream net­works, applies to CNN and Fox, as well…. We’ve just become so shal­low that we’re not real­ly able even to see the truth, which is that we’re at war right now in nine coun­tries around the world where we’re bomb­ing, and we hard­ly report any of it on a day-to-day basis.”

This isn’t the case with inde­pen­dent media orga­ni­za­tions like Democ­ra­cy Now!, The Inter­cept, or Air­wars. Sec­u­lar and reli­gious refugee relief orga­ni­za­tions like the Inter­na­tion­al Res­cue Com­mit­tee, World Relief, or Mus­lim Glob­al Relief are pay­ing atten­tion. Many of these orga­ni­za­tions are non‑U.S.-based or con­nect­ed to the “civil­ian experts” Arkin says once appeared reg­u­lar­ly in the nation­al media and rep­re­sent­ed oppos­ing views, “peo­ple who might be uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sors or activists… or experts who were asso­ci­at­ed with think tanks.”

Air­wars, affil­i­at­ed with the Depart­ment of Media and Com­mu­ni­ca­tions at Gold­smiths, Uni­ver­si­ty of Lon­don, has mon­i­tored con­flicts around the world since 2014, with exten­sive cov­er­age and records of alleged civil­ian deaths, mil­i­tary reports, and the names of vic­tims. For a com­pa­ra­ble U.S.-focused deep dive, see the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Wat­son Insti­tute of Inter­na­tion­al & Pub­lic Affairs. The project’s web­site not only tracks the enor­mous eco­nom­ic costs of wars in the Mid­dle East and Africa since 9/11; it also tracks “the human toll,” as you can see in the video below.

At the top of the post, see a map (view in a larg­er for­mat here) from the Cost of War Project’s Stephanie Savell, 5W Info­graph­ics, and the Smith­son­ian of all the regions where the U.S. is “com­bat­ting ter­ror­ism.” While most of the media orgs and non-prof­its men­tioned above would prob­a­bly dis­pute the use of that term in some or all of the con­flict zones, Savell sticks with the offi­cial lan­guage to describe the situation—one in which the nation “is now oper­at­ing in 40 per­cent of the world’s nations,” as she writes at Smithsonian.com.

Maybe no one needs an edi­to­r­i­al to imag­ine the enor­mous toll this lev­el of mil­i­tary engage­ment has tak­en over the course of 17 years since the incep­tion of the “Glob­al War on Ter­ror.” The map cov­ers the past two, illus­trat­ing “80 coun­tries, engaged through 40 U.S. mil­i­tary bases,” and con­duct­ing train­ing, exer­cis­es, active com­bat, and air and drone strikes on six con­ti­nents. The selec­tions, writes Savell, are “con­ser­v­a­tive,” and sourced from both inde­pen­dent and main­stream media out­lets and inter­na­tion­al gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary sources.

“The most com­pre­hen­sive depic­tion in civil­ian cir­cles of U.S. mil­i­tary and gov­ern­ment antiter­ror­ist actions over­seas,” the Amer­i­ca at War map pro­vides infor­ma­tion we don’t often get in our daily—or hourly, or by-the-minute—diet of news. “Con­trary to what most Amer­i­cans believe, the war on ter­ror is not wind­ing down.” It is expand­ing. Giv­en the country’s his­to­ry of sus­tained mass move­ments against legal­ly sus­pect, gross­ly expen­sive wars with high civil­ian casu­al­ties, dis­ease epi­demics, star­va­tion, and refugee crises, one would think that a siz­able seg­ment of the pop­u­la­tion would want to know what their coun­try’s mil­i­tary and civil­ian defense con­trac­tors are doing around the world.

via Smithsonian.com

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the U.S. Civ­il War Visu­al­ized Month by Month and State by State, in an Info­graph­ic from 1897

An Archive of 800+ Imag­i­na­tive Pro­pa­gan­da Maps Designed to Shape Opin­ions & Beliefs: Enter Cornell’s Per­sua­sive Maps Col­lec­tion

It’s the End of the World as We Know It: The Apoc­a­lypse Gets Visu­al­ized in an Inven­tive Map from 1486

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness