This morning I was listening to NPR and heard the news that yesterday 65 bodies were found in Baghdad, Iraq, and the reporter referred to the deaths as "sectarian violence."
Sectarian violence my ass, that's civil war, why not call it what it is? How many bodies do they have to find before it qualifies as civil war? 100 per day? 1,000?
The Bush administration refuses to define the current situation as 'civil war' because it doesn't sound good, and they can't afford their poll numbers to dip further or they'll end up in the negative, but, last time I checked, the media is still free to say what they want. There's still freedom of the press in America, although maybe not for long thanks to the Republicans.
Why won't the media call it what it is? Who cares if the administration calls it something else, if the media were to tell the truth, the administration would be hard pressed to keep hiding the truth from us. This way, the media is doing us a total disservice: instead of keeping us abreast of what's going on in the world, they just become appendices and mouthpieces of the administration.
But obviously, silly me, there are politics at work here. NPR belongs to the government, really, so they have control over its content. And even the media that is privately owned has to respond to its shareholders and owners, who cannot afford to piss Bush off or they'll lose contracts somewhere else along the way, maybe for other companies that belong to the same big conglomerate.
The media has been losing ground in the way the public sees and trusts it for a while now, and it will only get worse.
They're just a bunch of patsies.
No comments:
Post a Comment