4 Ways to Find Out What’s Really Happening in Iraq

[quaoar]

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/05/the-ireland.php

4 Ways to Find Out What’s Really Happening in Iraq
by Doug Ireland

Coverage of Iraq made this an annus horribilis for America’s major media. If you want to know why public opinion in Western Europe has been so overwhelmingly against the U.S. war in and occupation of Iraq, there’s one obvious answer: the difference in television news between theirs and ours. You can easily determine this for yourself: Spend a week watching the news broadcasts and TV magazines of the BBC, France2 and Deutsche Welle, all available on many U.S. cable systems. The footage of dead Iraqi babies and children — victims of U.S. attacks on "terrorists" — that you will regularly see on European public television is rarely aired on U.S. networks. The regular interviews in Iraqi hospitals with doctors recounting the slaughter of the innocents that show up on European news broadcasts aren’t often seen on the all-news cable networks here, let alone on the Big Three broadcast nets’ newscasts. Iraqis, of course, know this daily reality all too well — which explains their overwhelming hostility to the U.S. occupation.

An on-the-ground study of Iraqi casualties between April and September by Nancy Youssef of Knight Ridder newspapers demonstrated that "Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis — most of them civilians — as attacks by insurgents." But you’re not told this by U.S. TV’s "embedded" reporters, who’ve traded their reportorial independence for access to the boom-boom footage that drives what Time magazine has labeled the "militainment" proffered by American television. In fact, embedded reporters are enrolled in what the Pentagon calls "information operations" — a counterpart to military operations designed to exact the rosiest possible picture of the U.S. occupation from accredited reporters. Those who don’t toe the Pentagon line, and who report negatively on the occupation of Iraq and the indiscriminate effects of U.S. forces’ combat there, are simply blacklisted.

The demagogic nationalism of Fox News, the ratings king, has dragged the other networks down to its level as they seek to win back lost viewers. In a must-read article on "Iraq, the Press and the Election" in the December 16 issue of The New York Review of Books (available online at www.nybooks.com), the Columbia Journalism Review’s Michael Massing dissects U.S. media coverage of Iraq with devastating effect. CNN, for example, he portrays as "careening wildly between an adherence to traditional news values on the one hand and a surrender to the titillating, overheated, nationalistic fare of contemporary cable on the other. In the end, CNN . . . offered the superficiality of Fox without any of its conviction."

[malatesta1137]

1. why should I worry my pretty head with

pictures of dead soldiers or dead Iraqi babies? I have ENOUGH to worry about, like the legacy of my family name, now that the truth about our dealings with the Nazis is coming out. Not to mention all the war profiteering in the 80s, 90s and since my brain-dead child hijacked the presidency in 2000!! How about some sympathy for ME!!

Barbara Bush

[brindis_desala]

2. reporters aren't just being blacklisted

they risk being arrested or even killed.
Al-Arabiya did have an unembedded reporter, Abdel Kader Al-Saadi, in Falluja, but on November 11 US forces arrested him and held him for the length of the siege. Al-Saadi's detention has been condemned by Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists. "We cannot ignore the possibility that he is being intimidated for just trying to do his job," the IFJ stated.

It's not the first time journalists in Iraq have faced this kind of intimidation. When US forces invaded Baghdad in April 2003, US Central Command urged all unembedded journalists to leave the city. Some insisted on staying and at least three paid with their lives. On April 8, a US aircraft bombed al-Jazeera's Baghdad offices, killing reporter Tareq Ayyoub. Al-Jazeera has documentation proving it gave the coordinates of its location to US forces.

On the same day, a US tank fired on the Palestine hotel, killing José Couso, of the Spanish network Telecinco, and Taras Protsiuk, of Reuters.

http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/003440.html

"We don't do body counts," said General Tommy Franks of US Central Command.

[Tinoire]

3. Very true... Here's a good unembedded reporter

http://dahrjamailiraq.com/index.php

if you want to know his background, read this
Unembedded: An Interview With Dahr Jamail
by Charles Shaw
http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=4095

[TrustingDog]

5. yah, but that sounds like a 'terrorist' name. n/t /big sarc

[Erika]

4. Freedom of Speech has been replaced

by Bushspeech. I can't believe the Western media won't stand up for the free speech. It's pretty pathetic when we have to rely on foreign press for some semblance of truth.

[dbt]

6. Kick!

Laughing my ass off to keep from crying at this little gem:

"In the end, CNN . . . offered the superficiality of Fox without any of its conviction." Murkin Corporate Mediathink in a nutshell!

:argh:
dbt