The news coverage of the war in Afghanistan by the US major media is so superficial and erroneous, IAC, that a bit of a pro US tilt would actually improve their reporting.

I wouldn't expect Brokejaw to know what the American Flag is all about. The liberal media is as bad as the enemy, acting as their propaganda machine, spreading bio-terrorism fears into the American populating and giving our enemy information about our plans, troop positions and movements, ship locations, etc. They show us "staged" civilian enemy deaths as if gospel truth. They repeat the propaganda from our enemies news agency as if it is the truth.

Ah, if the press would only exercise the same "neutrality" towards our enemies that it shows to our own country. Scepticism is reasonable and plausible only if universally exercised. They are jerks, and somehow, I think the people are getting it.

regards

{hil.

If you don't read the whole article, here's a powerful and accurate quote from Ernie Pyle == a fne reporter and a soldier's reporter -- from deep in the article. It also bears on the subject we'll be discussing on-air tomorrow morning:

"We are producing at home," Ernie Pyle wrote from Tunisia, in 1943, "and we are hardening overseas. Apparently it takes a country like America about two years to become wholly at war. We had to go through that transition period of letting loose of life as it was. . . . I can't see yet when we shall win, or over what route geographically or by which of the many means of warfare. But no longer do I have any doubts at all that we shall win."

Billybob

. . . he directed CNN reporters to balance their war coverage, to supply the context for the American bombing raids and to beware being used by Taliban propagandists. The need for such directives was clear to him, Walter Isaacson says--that Oct. 28 service would probably be the last televised memorial. Furthermore, he noted in a conversation last week, there would now be less and less coverage of the terrorist attacks, and their victims, just as the networks were about to be flooded with video coming out of Afghanistan showing bombings and civilian casualties. He concluded that something had to be done to ensure that the atrocities that had caused the U.S. to go to war not be obscured.

What this clearly illustrates is the bias perspective which journalism's deadlines impose on its content. The fact of the deadline and the undifferentiated emphasis on today's story combine to stuff yesterday's story down the memory hole.

In the present instance a massive crime was committed, taking the lives of several thousand people who were among the tens of thousands at whose lives the crime was aimed. And destrying property valued in the range of tens of billions of dallars. It was a huge story, running over many days.

But like all news stories--just like the damning evidence of Travelgate, Whitewater, Craig Livingstone and the hundreds of counts of invasion of privacy, etc, etc-- eventually it became "old news." Journalism lusts for novelty; the competition among its various organs is not over the truth per se, it is over the first report of a story you can't ignore. And now the dramatic incidents are happening in Afghanistan. By the lights, such as they are, of the Talliban, everything the U.S. government is doing to pursue the perpetrators of the brutality of 9/11 is just as wrong as what we consider 9/11 to be--and 9/11 is in journalistic terms history and what American attack is NEWS

The upshot is that without perspective only the latest event is important. That, my friends, is superficiality--built right in to the formula for entertainment by which journalism lives or (financially) dies. It's not the practitioners, it's the art form. Journalism is anticonservative in its warp and woof.

If you know that journalism is anticonservative, that does not affect the First Amendment rights of newspaper publishers to perpetrate it. You don't, after all, need a license from the FCC to print. You do however need a license from the FCC ot broadcast, and if you have one already you still must apply for renewal on the grounds that you have been a good boy.

In renewing a broadcaster's license the FCC puts its (i.e., the federal government's) imprimatur on that broadcaster's transmissions. This is something the First Amendment tells the government not to do. But even within the framework of the FCC legislation, claiming to be objective and then broadcasting a predictable political slant is, in principle, illegal. Broadcast journalism is illegitimate unless someone can prove it's objective--and I have shown that that simply is not--and cannot be--the case.

If anyone saw Rumsfield's new conference this morning, they indeed saw one pathetic sight. The reporters so much wanted to catch our government in a lie and by doing so catch the Taliban telling the truth.

The NWO news services have such an overwhelming number of bureaus and manpower.

Mr. Westin's response was the logical result of decades of religiously held belief in the special vocation of journalists--an order of fact-seekers sworn to neutrality, divested of all allegiances that cumber the minds of ordinary citizens. The kind of people who know, for instance, whether they think a terrorist attack on the Pentagon was a legitimate act. Unlike Mr. Westin, who--having absorbed the above noted religious tenets of journalism today--found himself telling Columbia students that it would not be "doing a service to the American people" if he, a journalist, said it was wrong that the Pentagon got hit.

Note, and note well--Mr. Westin and his ilk are neutral about America as such. That means that they do not care about you and me, and they do not care about the Constitution emphatically including the First Amendment. Something like campaign finance "reform" which violates the First Amendment sounds just peachy to a journalist.

The entire conceit--aptly styled "religious" by the writer--of journalistic objectivity is at loggerheads with First Amendment principle. The journalistic conceit would have it that the citizen has "a right to know." The actual First Amendment, on the other hand, merely asserts that the government is not the final judge of truth--that we-the-people are entitled to our opinions and to spend our own money to propagate our own opinions. And the individual citizen, attending at his own whim to this or that purveyor of opinion, judges truth for himself and acts and votes accordingly.

The journalistic conceit would have it that the citizen has "a right to know." The actual First Amendment, on the other hand, merely asserts that the government is not the final judge of truth--that we-the-people are entitled to our opinions and to spend our own money to propagate our own opinions. And the individual citizen, attending at his own whim to this or that purveyor of opinion, judges truth for himself and acts and votes accordingly.

I am reminded of the story in the Oddesy (sp?) in which Ulysses has his sailors stop their ears with wax but has himself lashed to the mast to hear the song of the Sirens. The Sirens' temptation is "to know all"--and it persuades Ulysses to lead the ship to its doom, except that he had made himself helpless to act on that urge. And that same temptation is more-or-less explicit in advertisements for journalism. "You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world" comes to mind . . .

The media have trouble grasping that we're at war.

Is it actually possible for the media to grasp that we are at war without having censorship imposed on it?

The fact that WWII is styled "the good war" is not, IMHO, unrelated to the fact that it is the last time censorship was imposed/accepted on/by journalism.

Certainly there is need for the government to read the riot act to journalists who aren't sure that attacking the pentagon is illegitimate. Mr. Bush should publicly explain to these people that if you get caught doing it you will, on Mr. Bush's authority, be arrested or killed.