If CNN is to retain any credibility....ROTFLMAO
he should be fired.....immediately if not sooner..."
The Bush's administration brainwashing machine ?
Did you read this ?
Well if not then do so and get a brain:
by Robert Jensen
It was the picture of the day -- the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in Baghdad -- and may end up being the picture of the war, the single image that comes to define the conflict. The message will be clear: The U.S. liberated the Iraqi people; the U.S. invasion of Iraq was just.
On Wednesday morning television networks kept cameras trained on the statue near the Palestine Hotel. Iraqis threw ropes over the head and tried to pull it down before attacking the base with a sledgehammer. Finally a U.S. armored vehicle pulled it down, to the cheers of the crowd.
It was an inspiring moment of celebration at the apparent end of a brutal dictator's reign. But as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has pointed out at other times, no one image tells the whole story. Questions arise about what is, and isn't, shown.
One obvious question: During live coverage, viewers saw a U.S. soldier drape over the face of Hussein a U.S. flag, which was quickly removed and replaced with an Iraqi flag. Commanders know that the displaying the U.S. flag suggests occupation and domination, not liberation. NBC's Tom Brokaw reported that the Arab network Al Jazeera was "making a big deal" out of the incident with the American flag, implying that U.S. television would -- and should -- downplay that part of the scene. Which choice tells the more complete truth?
Another difference between television in the U.S. and elsewhere has been coverage of Iraqi casualties. Despite constant discussion of "precision bombing," the U.S. invasion has produced so many dead and wounded that Iraqi hospitals stopped trying to count. Red Cross officials have labeled the level of casualties "incredible," describing "dozens of totally dismembered dead bodies of women and children" delivered by truck to hospitals. Cluster bombs, one of the most indiscriminate weapons in the modern arsenal, have been used by U.S. and U.K. forces, with the British defense minister explaining that mothers of Iraqi children killed would one day thank Britain for their use.
U.S. viewers see little of these consequences of war, which are common on television around the world and widely available to anyone with Internet access. Why does U.S. television have a different standard? CNN's Aaron Brown said the decisions are not based on politics. He acknowledged that such images accurately show the violence of war, but defended decisions to not air them; it's a matter of "taste," he said. Again, which choice tells the more complete truth?
Finally, just as important as decisions about what images to use are questions about what facts and analysis -- for which there may be no dramatic pictures available -- to broadcast to help people understand the pictures. The presence of U.S. troops in the streets of Baghdad means the end of the shooting war is near, for which virtually everyone in Iraq will be grateful. It also means the end of a dozen years of harsh U.S.-led economic sanctions that have impoverished the majority of Iraqis and killed as many as a half million children, according to U.N. studies, another reason for Iraqi celebration. And no doubt the vast majority of Iraqis are glad to be rid of Hussein, even if they remember that it was U.S. support for Hussein throughout the 1980s that allowed his regime to consolidate power despite a disastrous invasion of Iran.
But that does not mean all Iraqis will be happy about the ongoing presence of U.S. troops. Perhaps they are aware of how little the U.S. government has cared about democracy or the welfare of Iraqis in the past. Perhaps they watch Afghanistan and see how quickly U.S. policymakers abandoned the commitment to "not walk away" from the suffering of the Afghan people. Perhaps we should be cautious about what we infer from the pictures of celebration that we are seeing; joy over the removal of Hussein does not mean joy over an American occupation.
There is no simple way to get dramatic video of these complex political realities. But they remain realities, whether or not U.S. viewers find a full discussion of them on television.
Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas and author of "Writing Dissent: Taking Radical Analysis from the Margins to the Mainstream" / His pamphlet "Citizens of the Empire: Thoughts on Patriotism, Dissent, and Hope" can be downloaded for free at nowarcollective.com
Source:
by courtesy & © 2003 Robert Jensen
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If that doesn't satisfy you then read these:
The biased reporting that makes killing acceptable
By Robert Fisk
Independent 14 November 2000
When CNN's Cairo bureau chief, Ben Wedeman, was shot in a gun battle in Gaza last month, I waited to hear how his employers would handle the story. Having visited the spot where Wedeman was hit in the back, I realised that the bullet must have been fired by Israeli soldiers at a location on the other side of the nearest crossroads. So, what happened? CNN reported that "most of the bullets" fired came from the Israelis, but - according to a pathetic response from a company spokesman in London - CNN was not going to suggest who was to blame "at this time". Indeed not. The American Associated Press news agency later reported - a real killer, this one - that Wedeman had been "caught up in crossfire".
So much, I thought, for the 150 or so Palestinians shot dead by Israeli troops over the past six weeks. If CNN didn't have the courage to tell the truth about the shooting of its own reporter, what chance did the Palestinians have? The latest shocking piece of American journalism promises to be an "exclusive" on the American CBS network, whose 60 Minutes team has been given access to an Israeli army "re-enactment" of the killing - by Israeli troops - of 12-year-old Mohamed al-Dura. The picture of him cowering in the arms of his father and then collapsing dead beside him has become an iconic image of the current conflict in the Middle East.
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, whose reporting of the battles outshines anything appearing in the supine American press, has already quoted an Israeli member of the Knesset, Ophir Pines-Paz, who complains that the reconstruction sounds "fictitious" and like an attempt to "cover up the incident by means of an inquiry with foregone conclusions... the sole purpose of which is to clear the IDF of responsibility for Al-Dura's death". Lobby groups in the United States, including a few brave American Jews, are demanding to know why the CBS network is filming a partial inquiry that is intended to prove that those who killed a little boy didn't kill him - without, apparently, even asking the Palestinians for their version of events.
It is all part of a familiar, weary pattern of biased reporting, which, over the past few weeks, has started to become dangerous as well as deeply misleading. The Israeli line - that Palestinians are essentially responsible for "violence", responsible for the killing of their own children by Israeli soldiers, responsible for refusing to make concessions for peace - has been accepted almost totally by the media. Only yesterday, a BBC World Service anchorman allowed an Israeli diplomat in Washington, Tara Herzl, to excuse the shooting of stone-throwers - almost 200 of them - by Israeli soldiers on the grounds that "they are there with people who are shooting". If that was the case - which it usually is not - then why were the Israelis shooting the stone-throwers rather than the gunmen?
The murder of Israelis rightly receives much coverage. The killing of two Israeli soldiers in Ramallah police station was filmed only through the courage of one camera crew. The Palestinians did their best to seize all picture coverage of the atrocity. Yet when an Israeli helicopter pilot fired an air-to-ground missile at a low-ranking Palestinian militiaman on Friday, it also killed two totally innocent middle-aged Palestinian women. In its initial reports, BBC World Service Television reported that. Yet by yesterday morning, the BBC was able to refer to the "assassination" of the Palestinian without mentioning the two innocent women - 58-year-old Azizi Gubran and 55-year-old Arachme Shaheen - blown to pieces by the same Israeli missile. They had been airbrushed from the story.
Then we have that old bugbear the "clash". Palestinians die "in clashes" - as if they are accidentally shot rather than targets for Israeli snipers. The use of that word - and the opportunity it affords journalists of not stating that Israelis killed them - is little short of a scandal. Take Reuters' report from Jerusalem on 30 October by Howard Goller, which referred to five Palestinians "wounded in stone-throwing clashes" and the funerals of Palestinians "killed in earlier clashes". Yet, in a report on the same day, Goller wrote of an Israeli shot dead by a "suspected Palestinian gunman", while his colleague on Reuters, Sergei Shargorodsky, referred to "Palestinian shooting attacks on Jewish settlements" and an Israeli man stabbed to death, "presumably by Palestinians". Funny, isn't it, how the responsibility for the killing of Israelis tends to be so explicitly - and rightly - apportioned, while blame for the killing of Palestinians is not?
But on we go, reporting the Middle East tragedy with all our own little uncontroversial clichs and amnesia and avoidance of "controversial" subjects. Such journalism is already leading - despite the extraordinary casualty figures - to a public view that the Palestinians are solely responsible for the bloodbath, that they are generically violent, untrustworthy murderers. I think this kind of reporting helps to condone the taking of human life.
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