March 31, 2003
Media

William Powers: "If war is hell, wading through all this wartime journalism is fast becoming a kind of purgatory."

Editor and Publisher: "The war is only a week old and already the media has gotten at least 15 stories wrong or misreported a sliver of fact into a major event."

George Monbiot: "Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world , but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that 'it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them'."

Body and Soul: "American reporters also aren't asking the kind of skeptical question European reporters are. The Post article notes that both American and Arab media are playing to local biases, but its emphasis is on Arab bias, and our failure to get our point of view across to the Arab world (apparently that Americans are also getting a distorted and sanitized view of the war is less important to the Post.)"

(That last post is a great summary of media analysis.)

posted by dru in war
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