I think we’re witnessing the beginning of the end of the mainstream media.
My reasoning? Compare the media’s reaction to the Nick Berg slaying with that of the people. So far the media has been trying to flog the dead horse of the Abu Ghraib prison scandals while minimizing Berg’s death as much as they can. Now that Berg’s father is speaking out against Bush (and making himself look like an ass in the process), expect the media to start slavishly covering his every word.
If that weren’t enough, InstaPundit links to a story that shows the absolute depravity of some members of the media:
The other day, while taking a break by the Al-Hamra Hotel pool, fringed with the usual cast of tattooed defence contractors, I was accosted by an American magazine journalist of serious accomplishment and impeccable liberal credentials.
She had been disturbed by my argument that Iraqis were better off than they had been under Saddam and I was now — there was no choice about this — going to have to justify my bizarre and dangerous views. I’ll spare you most of the details because you know the script — no WMD, no ‘imminent threat’ (though the point was to deal with Saddam before such a threat could emerge), a diversion from the hunt for bin Laden, enraging the Arab world. Etcetera.
But then she came to the point. Not only had she ‘known’ the Iraq war would fail but she considered it essential that it did so because this would ensure that the ‘evil’ George W. Bush would no longer be running her country. Her editors back on the East Coast were giggling, she said, over what a disaster Iraq had turned out to be. ‘Lots of us talk about how awful it would be if this worked out.’ Startled by her candour, I asked whether thousands more dead Iraqis would be a good thing.
She nodded and mumbled something about Bush needing to go. By this logic, I ventured, another September 11 on, say, September 11 would be perfect for pushing up John Kerry’s poll numbers. ‘Well, that’s different — that would be Americans,’ she said, haltingly. ‘I guess I’m a bit of an isolationist.’ That’s one way of putting it.
What can be said of something like that. The media wants the US to fail. They put John Kerry becoming President over the lives of thousands of Iraqis. They’re doing whatever they can to make Iraq into a failure – another Vietnam in which victories on the battlefield are spun into defeats by the traitorous press.
It is sick, treasonous, reprehensible, and wrong to root against your own country for pissant political gain. Anyone who would willingly aid al-Qaeda’s propaganda war by spinning the facts against the United States out of hatred for Bush is a traitor. There’s simply no way around it. The media is deliberately using propaganda to distort the situation on the ground and offer aid and comfort to the enemy while our soldiers are dying. Thankfully not all members of the media engage in these activities, but far too many of them do.
We didn’t lose Vietnam by force of arms, we lost Vietnam because members of our own country lost their will to fight. We allowed people like John Kerry to convince us that if we let the North Vietnamese take over that nothing bad would happen. In 1971 Kerry appeared on the Dick Cavett show to tell the country that there would be no bloodshed if we left Vietnam.
Soon after, we did.
Over two million were slaughtered.
How many Iraqi lives would be lost if we repeated that mistake?
The American people are starting to wake up to this, which is why the ratings for network news has gone down while readership of blogs has gone up. If I want to know what’s going on in Iraq, I can get around a dozen opinions from the Iraqis themselves. I can see what individual soldiers are seeing. I can gather information from any number of sources almost instantaneously, allowing me to do the kind of fact-checking the media seems entirely disinterested in covering.
With all that, who the hell needs Dan Rather telling us what to think?
“The media wants the US to fail.”
Quite possibly your dumbest statement yet. If the Lord had blessed you with a long term memory, you would have remembered the media’s co-operation in the selling of this war.
“Anyone who would willingly aid al-Qaeda’s propaganda war by spinning the facts against the United States out of hatred for Bush is a traitor”
the problem is that nobody is spinning the facts:
-no WMDs
-no link to Al-Qaida
-put an end to Saddam /(tortures in Abou Graid)
So there you go, the purpose of the media is to sell paper/content, and the best way to do it is to make it bloody and explosiv (everyone in hollywood knows that!!).
And once again, G.W.Bush is not the US by himself! Him failing differs from the US failing. Actually, if he is re-elected, the whole middle-east will be a religious war where random arabics will turn into terrorists after each revenge raid from the US army for the head of Mr Berg, or the foot of Mr Simpson…not a good plan….
Of course, we could just be like Europe, where al-Jazeera sur Seine… err… Le Monde spouts the same old propaganda day after day, regardless of what’s actually going on. The European media has become little more than a propaganda organ for the state. Read Jean-Fraçois Revel or Orianna Fallaci, they’re one of the few who have figured out what’s going on.
As for no WMDs in Iraq – then where did the chemical weapons seized in Jordan come from? The media won’t tell you, because that goes against their preconceived notions.
Either Iraq did have a WMD program, and took it elsewhere to be hidden, or every single intelligence agency in the world (including France’s) was utterly wrong and Saddam Hussein pulled the biggest scam in modern history. Occam’s Razor says that the most likely answer is often the most correct one, and given the preponderance of evidence it’s clear that the arguments that Iraq didn’t have WMD are completely unprovable.
Where’s the documentation of weapons being destroyed? Where are the residues this would produce? Why would Saddam then lie to the world and violate UNSCR 1441? Why did no intelligence agency in the world know about this?
Just don’t expect the European propaganda machine or America’s liberal elitist media to ask those questions – they’ve decided, and the facts be damned.
No link to al-Qaeda? Then why did Mohammad Atta fly to Paris just when an Iraqi intelligence agent had a scheduled meeting with a “Hamburg student”? Why does Czech Intelligence stand by their claim that Atta did meet with al-Ani?
Then what was another Iraqi intelligence agent doing in a Kuala Lumpur hotel in 1999 at the same time as a meeting where the bombing of the USS Cole was planned?
And if you’re honestly believe that what happened recently in Abu Ghraib is no difference than forced amputations and murders, well, then obviously you’re not living in the real world. As horrible as the Abu Ghraib scandal is it doesn’t even compare to what Saddam did.
The media used to do this little thing called reporting in which members of the media actually tried to find out what was going on and report back to the people. Now the media comes to a consensus, and reports only those “facts” that meet that consensus and discard the rest.
We need a Hutton Inquiry in this country.
The problem wit saying statements like “The media wants the US to fail.” is that you are taking the individual actions of people who share the same profession and attributing them the whole community as if the community was one person. This is something I’ve seen lot when the terms liberals and conservatives are tossed about like a hackysack. The fact is that there exists media people who are trying to get the real story out. I don’t see that point reflected in your post.
However, from my point of view, National News networks don’t do it for me anymore. I can get more and better news from the blogging sites (where anybody can rebut a unsatisfactory point) and radio (NPR and talk radio). So I can spend my home time talking over the issues with my wife.
In the information age, the truth fights to be free.