Friday, November 03, 2006

Iraq:The hidden story

posted by madtom at 12:29 AM

5 Comments:

Blogger locomotivebreath1901 said...

This reporter lost any credibility with me when he announced in the first minute of his report, "...this remains one of the least covered conflicts in the modern televison age". Huh?

Couple that with the over riding tone of shock & disbelief and one would think that this reporter just discovered that there's a war going on over there! How come he didn't get that memo?

Still, many of the images & interviews were interesting and informative, but that reporter....jeeez!

5:43 AM  
Blogger Jon said...

I think he lost credibility with you as soon as you realized what the report was about.

The point is that war reporting is sanitized before it hits US news media and it's fairly obvious that this is true.

12:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

A similar documetary could be made showing how the media in the West sanitizes the attrocities and practices of radical Islam, and the case would be much easier to substantiate. Somehow this effort managed to lay all the gore at the feet of Americans, despite the fact that every incident I saw pictured were the result of Arab on Arab violence--with a likely Persian or two behind much of it. See any beheadings on the nightly news lately? Remember, it was US major media who decided they should stop showing the planes crashing into the WTC, and they never showed the splatterred bodies of those who jumped to their deaths rather than be cooked alive.

12:27 PM  
Blogger Jon said...

No, you don't see beheadings on the nightly news... because the war is sanitized (or the reporting is simply unavailable) before it gets into your TV. I disagree that the report lays the blame for the carnage on the US. It showed that some (many? most? all?) Iraqis blame the US for the carnage, but the reporter made a point to say that news they are getting out of Iraq is not the news a western journalist would provide, because Iraqi reporters don't ask the questions that a western journalist would ask. The example is that a woman says her son is killed by people working for the US, but the Iraqi reporter failed to ask how she is so certain these are people working for the US.

Regardless of who did the killing, Iraqis, probably most, blame the US for toppling what they saw as a stable government which was then replaced by chaos.

I don't know what channels you were watching, but I saw plenty of shots of planes crashing into the towers and people leaping to their doom. I also saw plenty of bodies being pulled from ground zero. Are you so sure that there is much left to see of a body that just plummeted 100 stories? Probably not.

I guess you can't please everyone all the time. I think the last argument was that CNN aired some disturbing footage. I personally think that the least everyone here in the US could suffer is being subjected to disturbing footage. It's not like we're the ones who are actually being shot at and blown up on a daily basis. Maybe if people had a better understanding of what they were subjecting people to, they might choose violent recourse as the last resort rather than the first.

1:04 PM  
Blogger madtom said...

I know that I feel that the war is underreported. That's why I blog about it and try to bring all the important news here, in one place so that I can try to make sense of all that's going on. I find it very hard to get a grip on what is happening in Iraq from 15 sec sound bites on TV. I think this clip focused on TV news. Newspapers I think, do much better, but TV is pathetic.

This report also brings to light the effort being made to sanitize the Images from Iraq. Remember the big to do last year when that porno site started offering free porno to any deployed servicemen that posted picture of the war, "Now That's Fucked Up" or something like that, right away they came down on the owner of the site. And they have been closing Milblogs for as long as there have been Milblogs. They want control of the message, complete control. What makes this war different than any before is that the internet allows anyone to bring news. The news media is no longer the gate keeper. Normal people just like those featured in the report and post their news opinions and file reports from areas that would be inaccessible to traditional reporters. They also have the effect of humanizing the enemy, and the civilians caught between warring the factions. All of a sudden the dead are not just random numbers, but they can in fact be people you correspond with regularly, adding a new dimension to any conflict.

What I don't understand is why the media cooperates. Has the media been drafted? Do they have an obligation to sanitize the news? Or take side? You would think that their only obligation is to the consumer. Another question is if the media freely agrees to cooperate with the war effort, do they then become legal targets for the enemy? Do they then become enemy combatants?

7:54 PM  

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