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Iraq: The War We Are Not Being Shown
By Arianna Huffington
07/21/05 "Huffington
Post" - - My vacation has been remarkably
eye-opening. Now, when travelers say things like that, they
usually are talking about being introduced to new cultures,
different foods, singular settings… but in my case, I’m
talking about war. Specifically, how shockingly different the
coverage of the war in Iraq is here in Europe compared to what we
get back home.
It’s like a pair of blinders has been removed and I’m suddenly
seeing for myself what I’ve long known to be the case: just how
sanitized a version of the war the American mainstream media are
delivering, and how little of even this cleaned-up coverage we
get.
Take Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s lovefest
visit to Tehran on Sunday, where he laid a wreath on the tomb
of Ayatollah Khomeini and hailed what he called “a new chapter
in brotherly ties” between Iran and Iraq. Now, by all rights,
this should have been a major story in the U.S. Here you have the
leader of the new government we’re spending hundreds of billions
of dollars creating in Iraq making very nice with the
terror-funding and nuke-building mullahs in Iran. So this is what
our soldiers are putting their lives on the line for -- 1,770
killed so far -- a budding alliance between fundamentalist
theocracies? (And yesterday’s
news about the Iraqi constitution being based on
fundamentalist Islamic principles, including curtailing women’s
rights only confirms these fears) Surely that’s front page news,
right? Not in America.
In fact, the historic visit was barely covered in the mainstream
American press. The only major U.S. newspaper to report it was the
Washington Post -- and its
story was on page A-21. A-21?! The consequences of this lack
of coverage are enormous. As the blogger Billmon at Whiskey Bar nailed
it:
“How would the folks back home feel if they knew their sons
and daughters were getting limbs blown off so that Iraqi
politicians could jaunt off to Tehran and say warm and fuzzy
things about the crazy old man who gave us the Iranian hostage
crisis? And what kind of surrealist cover story would the GOP
propaganda machine come up with to convince the Fox News
audience that fighting and dying to keep Khomeini lovers in
power is really a good thing?”
Another example of this lack of proper coverage -- and of the
media’s bizarre priorities -- came when the Iraq
Body Count dossier on civilian casualties in Iraq that
HuffPost’s Jane
Wells blogged about was released. Despite the vitally
important information it contained, the Washington Post story
on it ran on page A-18, the LA
Times’ on page A-12, and the New
York Times’ on A-8 . Thirty-seven percent of all
non-combatant deaths were caused by US led coalition forces --
compared to 9% caused by insurgents -- and in the nation’s
capital it runs on A-18.
Earlier this year, the LA
Times did a study of how often American newspapers and
magazines showed images of dead or wounded soldiers. The answer,
not surprisingly, was hardly ever.
European papers run such images far more frequently. Editor
and Publisher points to the contrast in how the memorable
photos taken at a Tal Afar checkpoint, where U.S. soldiers fired
on an approaching car carrying a family, were received. Few U.S.
papers carried them while the pictures, in the words of the
embedded photographer who took them, “seemingly dominated the
discourse in Europe, where they were run in full over multiple
pages by many important papers.” Perhaps they would have
dominated the discourse here too… if only we’d seen them.
But even this sanitized version of the war isn't good enough
for some. As HuffPost’s Michelle
Pilecki has been posting, a group of conservative talk radio
hosts went to Iraq recently for
a "truth tour," because, they say, they're tired of
all the bad news coming out of Iraq. Said one "truth
teller," Melanie Morgan, "This is not Vietnam...War is
war, and it's dangerous, and the killing is taking place all of
the time. At the same time, where there is danger, there is
success and there is a mainstream media that is determined to shut
out that success."
Boy, she must be subscribing to some better newspapers than the
ones I get.
Thankfully the blogosphere is stepping in to fill the Iraq
coverage void. Among the sites leading the way in reporting
what’s really going on in Iraq are: Operation
Truth, headed by Iraq vet and HuffPoster Paul
Reickhoff, Informed Comment
by Middle East Expert Juan Cole, Baghdad
Bulletin by 24-year-old journalist David
Enders, and Back to
Iraq 3.0, by former AP reporter Chris Allbritton.
There are also a number of blogs by Iraqis themselves,
including the family blogs, A
Family in Baghdad and A
Family from Mosul; Baghdad
Burning by Riverbend (one of the first bloggers in Iraq --
she's just come out with a book);
and, at Shlonkom
Bakazay, thoughts on the war, 7/7, U.S. politics and related
topics.
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