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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (66634)	9/3/2004 10:30:40 AM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (3) of 793879

Why? what makes axe murderers easier than reporting suicide bombings of buses and restaurants? Because there is a consensus that axe murderers are absolutely barbaric while there isn't a consensus that suicide bombings of busses and restaurants is absolutely barbaric. I understand that you are asserting the latter but I doubt that even you really believe that. If it were absolutely barbaric, then there would be no circumstance, no scenario, in which you could tolerate the practice. I can imagine scenarios in which the situation was reversed--where you believed in your soul that you and yours had a noble cause to fight off an overpowering enemy. I don't imagine you opposing or turning in to the enemy members of the resistance movement who fought the enemy in that way. Maybe you would, but that's not how you come across to me. There is always bias. There are two issues in this discussion. One is whether suicide bombing/terrorism is absolutely wrong. The other is whether we want to encourage the media to display bias. I could agree with you that it would be OK for them to display bias against the absolutely wrong but then we'd have to have a consensus on what is or isn't absolutely wrong. Finding consensus on that is about as likely as getting rid of bias in the media. But if we can't find that consensus, then I don't think it wise or reasonable to encourage the media to show bias because they will inevitably have bias in a direction that will infuriate a lot of the people a lot of the time. And because that encourages reporting that we can't trust. If we don't have media that we can trust, our way of life is at risk. If there is no concurrence on a POV, then promoting that POV through the media is called propaganda. Propaganda is a tool that can bite back. I'm sorry, Nadine, but I can't find any way for you to have it both ways--encourage media bias on one hand and complain about it on the other. I can't imagine one and you haven't given me one. Your suggestion that media bias against terrorism isn't really bias holds up only if terrorism is absolutely unacceptable. Warfare is evolving. As long as there is no absolute international authority to which we all owe allegiance, international terrorism will continue to be a viable tactic of asymetric warfare. That's part of the price we pay for national independence. I happened to catch part of an old movie recently, King Solomon's Mines. In it the dispute over the rule of the kingdom was settled by a contest between two champions. We don't do it that way any more. Nor do we have nice, neat packages of uniformed combatants and non-combatants so the Geneva Conventions have gotten long in the tooth. War crimes are jello.

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