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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Jack Kelly: Media are easy marks |
| 2005-02-05 |
| ... The terrorists had to do something to revive their plummeting prestige. That they resorted to clumsy frauds is not a sign of strength. "The captured toy story could be pretty significant," said the Web logger John Hinderaker (Power Line). "The terrorists need, more than anything else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear, they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule. Their pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will [make] them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world." It's also interesting that the terrorists turned to the news media to recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be the by-product of embarrassment. But more to the point, why are major media so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported terrorist group, releases? For the terrorist, it is like being given millions of dollars in free advertising. The major media have from the beginning exaggerated the strength and popularity of those they mislabel "insurgents," to the disgust of American soldiers. "I'm tired of hearing the crap, the whole, well 'We are barely hanging on, we're losing, the insurgency is growing," Marine Sgt. Kevin Lewis told Dan Rather, in Iraq for the election. "It's just a small amount of people out there causing the problems. It's a small number, and we're killing them." The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and the failure of the major media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate. Mr. Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Mr. Jordan could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of targeting journalists. Mr. Jordan's slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to be mentioned in the "mainstream" media. Gee, I wonder why not. |
| Posted by:Mrs. Davis |