All the News That's Fit to Fit The most salient difference between the Global War on Terror and the great conflicts of the 20th century,...
All the News That's Fit to Fit
The most salient difference between the Global War on Terror and the great
conflicts of the 20th century, such as World War 2, is that there is literally
no more front line. It therefore came as no surprise that the media -- that is
to say the newsrooms, editorial desks and reportorial -- proved but one more
foxhole in the conflict. The Jerusalem
Post (hat tip: The
Counterterrorism Blog) describes how some representatives of major wire
services and news agencies were in the paid service of terrorist organizations.
A small sampler of dubious connections is given below:
Meanwhile, the Associated Press and Reuters, which have their own TV
production services, rely almost entirely on footage provided to them by
Palestinian crews covering events in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The
material, distributed to thousands of subscribers worldwide, mostly focuses on
Palestinians as victims of IDF operations; the cameramen decide from which
angle to film and which material to send at the end of the day to their
employers in Jerusalem. The Associated Press also has a journalist -- Muhammad
Daraghmeh -- who works for the PA's Al-Ayyam. "It's like employing
someone from the [Israeli] Government Press Office or one of the Israeli
political parties to work as a journalist," comments a veteran foreign
journalist based in Israel.
The Counterterrorism Blog asks: "Well, excuse me, but how about
the 'journalists' in the Arab world who were either on Saddam's or Arafat's
payroll? Why hasn't the media seen fit to pursue those secret arrangements and
admit that perhaps those payments twisted the coverage of those two thugs by
Western media?" This can only be a rhetorical question. It is entirely
probable that there is no, and possibly was never any collectively responsible,
self-policing, ethically consistent 'media' able to act as single organism.
Saddam and Arafat discovered this long ago and its audience is only belatedly
realizing it now.
This process of corruption has pulled a curtain of suspicion over all
information products. No longer is it possible to rely on the assurance of a
brand name. Each item of news must now be sniffed, examined, poked and weighed
to determine its authenticity. Collateral confirmation, once the staple of
skeptical intelligence analysts, is now the task of every sophisticated
newsreader -- at least those who want to avoid being taken for a ride. Once the
media itself became an informational battleground the most natural greeting in
the dark became 'who goes there?' That skepticism has in part, empowered the
blogosphere, which provides some filtering for readers too busy to do it
themselves. Yet the blogosphere is not in principle immune from any of the
corroding influences of fear, money or influence, as the readers of Armstrong
Williams and the Daily Kos discovered to their disillusionment. We
are, in James Jesus Angleton's famous phrase, in a 'Wilderness of Mirrors',
though he himself had the idea from T.
S. Eliot.
I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:
How should I use it for your closer contact?
These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors.
Fortunately for most there is the salvation of the common senses: the ability
to observe the real through the packaging, and to learn from the airplane
crashing into the tower facts we could not read in the newspapers. One of the
strangest consequences of the development of Internet was the reimposition of
the need for each individual to learn things for themselves. It is a task most
would gladly do without, but it is the burden of sentience and the price of
freedom.
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