The other night I accidentally and unfortunately caught a few minutes of mainstream news. At least it was on PBS though, and they were trying to put up a front of seriousness. I didn’t buy it, but that’s a whole other issue. The thing they were talking about was this whole controversy that has erupted over one of the CNN executives, Eason Jordan, and his recent resignation. The story goes that he made some off-the-record remarks which effectively said that US armed forces in Iraq intentionally target journalists. No transcript or videotape of the event has been released yet, to my knowledge, though I haven’t been following it that closely. The word on the street though is that Jordan “asserted that he knew of 12 journalists who had not only been killed by US troops in Iraq, but they had in fact been targeted.” Supposedly, after some pressure from Americans in the audience, Eason backpedaled on these statements. An article on the UK’s Guardian also shows that Eason has been singing this song for quite some time, and in November 2004 made statements that he knew reports of journalists being arrested and tortured by the US armed forces.
The PBS news segment on it focused on the now-popular topic of bloggers vs. mainstream media. Apparently, mainstream news outlets basically completely ignored Jordan’s statements altogether, whereas a dedicated core of bloggers split their britches over the whole thing. In addition to one of the regular staff newscasters of the show, they also interviewed two popular bloggers, and the moderator who ran the forum where Jordan originally made his comments.
Never at all was there any mention of whether or not the US armed forces really do target, arrest and kill journalists. Nobody even fucking brought that up. Instead, everybody twiddled on and on about the mainstream media as the old-guard and the bloggers as the democratic blah blah blah. And they talked about how bloggers called for a release of the transcript and video of the event. And then it went around a few circles where everyone got a chance to deliver their pre-packaged lines, and the whole thing fizzled out. They even made a statement about how “some bloggers are angry at CNN because they think it’s a liberal news source.” A liberal news source? Are you fucking joking? It’s a fucking propaganda outlet!
Nobody asked the questions about whether this shit’s really going on, and who has proof of it, and why hasn’t anybody been looking into this - especially considering all the fucked up shit we ALREADY KNOW the military has been doing at Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere. I mean, fuck, did everybody already forget that there were videos shown before closed committees of Congress where prisoners were being raped and murdered? I mean, all that shit just got magically swept under the rug like it was nothing. And now this. Rather than confront any real issue that may be going on, they have set up this meta-event of bloggers forcing a CNN exec to resign.
It’s all an elaborate and intentional ploy to get you all aflutter and distract you from the real questions that are raised by this. Those in power don’t want you to know they are murdering journalists who don’t tow the line, and so a sacrificial offering is made to quell the masses. Fucking brilliant. It’s exactly what they did with that shit with CBS, Dan Rather and the supposedly forged documents about Bush in the National Guard. By creating this mesmerizing meta-news event around “reliability and accountability of the media” everyone totally overlooked the fact that Bush is known to have gone AWOL. I’m firmly in the camp of people who believe that whole “Memo-gate” snafu was masterfully engineered by Bush’s team as a pre-emptive strike to occlude people to the real issue. And I’d bet dollars to donuts that’s pretty damned close to what’s going on here.
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