Corporate Media: Complicity in War Crimes

Two good example of how the Corporate Media work as the propaganda machine of the power (Goebbels would be proud!) From the land of War Criminal Bush:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday.

But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words.

Read "Disappearing Antiwar Protests. Media shrug off mass movement against war" on FAIR

... and from the land of War Criminal Blair:

"There are two paradigms for interpreting the success of the Iraq project." So writes Peter Beaumont in the Observer.

We wonder if Beaumont would describe the September 11 attacks as "the New York project", or "the American project". Would he talk of Saddam Hussein's 1990 "Kuwait project"?

Beaumont continues:

"Confronted with a vigorous but limited Sunni insurgency, bolstered by al-Qaeda atrocities, it is tempting to focus on the violence; to put the question of engagement in Iraq in terms of a cost-benefit analysis."

"In one column, you put the totals of US and UK dead - going on 3,000 and 100 respectively - and then try to extract a meaning for those lost lives. In this equation, no progress on the security front equals wasted lives. Its ultimate logic is withdrawal." (Beaumont, 'Despair is still not an option,' The Observer, September 25, 2005; http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1577939,00.html)

It is remarkable that Beaumont can include US and UK military deaths in one column while excluding 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths, subsequently mentioning them only as an afterthought (see below). Should not the death of Iraqi civilians - innocents who are neither paid nor trained to place their lives in danger - be prominent in any such calculation?

Beaumont adds:

"But there is a second paradigm. This demands that the headline violence is stripped out and that Iraq's progress is counted not by the bodies of foreign soldiers or of Iraqis [the afterthought], but by how much democracy has begun to take root. The answer to the question of whether British and US troops should remain should not be calculated by the scale of their losses, but by whether they are doing any good."

Again, astonishingly, Beaumont focuses on "the scale of their [British and US] losses" - the incalculably greater suffering of the Iraqi population has once again disappeared. This is shameful.

Read "PETER BEAUMONT OF THE OBSERVER ON 'THE IRAQ PROJECT'" on Media Lens