MR. BFRY BREAKS DOWN YOUR WORLD

I wrote this piece a few months back, but I think its damn relevant now

Information War- Brian E. Frydenborg

Friday, May 6th^th, Boston-

It’s time to declare war. No, not on Syria, North Korea, or Iran. I’m talking Fox. And MSNBC. And CNN. For that matter, throw in ABC, CBS, and NBC, and everyone from Chris Matthews and Katie Couric to Sean Hannity and Wolf Blitzer. For all the glee many liberals take in ridiculing Fox—and if you don’t know that there is plenty to ridicule there, you probably will “miss” this article as it flies over your head—they and the entire country need to take a much harder look at the presentation and format of all TV news. There’s little to give any informed citizen comfort. But there’s plenty to entertain and distract. And that’s the whole problem.

Over 270 people have been killed in Iraq since the new Iraqi government was formed on April 28th; this does not include the wounded, wounded like the boy in the picture above, one of three brothers, all young boys, who were wounded in the same attack. Multiply this picture by thousands and thousands. In fact, I dare you to picture a room, filled with 10,000 or so young children in there, wounded, who may have a foot blown off, like young Mr. Haidar Qasem in the picture, or a nose, a hand, an arm blown off, or scars all over their faces. Picture it long and hard. You may find it difficult, because these are images which are rarely seen on American television sets during newscasts. For some reason, gruesome violence is OK in movies and TV entertainment, even on network TV, but, gee golly, if it’s happening in real life, and if its happening, say because of the gross (even criminal) negligence and incompetence of our government in its prosecution of a war and the subsequent occupation/rebuilding effort, don’t show that. Making Americans feel bad about their country’s actions is bad for ratings. Yet war is not G or PG, and when it’s our government and tax dollars feeding this bloodbath, we should have our eyes held open with our head shoved into the screen, a screen that does not edit out the unpleasantries, and if makes us uncomfortable, it’s supposed to.

Whether it is the Michael Jackson Trial, the “Runaway Bride,” the hostage who used her faith in Jesus to save herself and get the guy who murdered the judge in the courtroom to give himself up, the Terry Schiavo saga, or steroids in pro-sports, nobody is better than the American news media at latching onto an interesting yet isolated and insignificant story, filled with wackos and drama but playing little or no significant role in the wider world and affecting few people outside those featured in the story itself. The horror which has developed in today’s journalism isn’t so much the fact that these stories are being covered, but that they take up the majority of the newscasts at the expense of major stories that affects the lives of thousands. These glossed-over stories are downers that make our own leaders look bad, and our nation’s actions look bad. If you depended on television news for your coverage of the Iraq war, you have no idea what is going on there.

A two minute segment, with all the blood and gore of war edited out, is a convenient way for a major news organization to still be able to say they are “covering” the issue while in reality, deliberately or accidentally, the public is kept almost wholly ignorant of the actual conditions. TV news does nothing more than deceive people into thinking that they are informed.

The devil lies in the details, like an actual Captain of the Marines (they don’t mess around) complaining that they were never given the proper body armor despite many requests, and were never given enough troop support, and as a result, his men died, and died in larger numbers. This Captain—by the name of Kelly D. Royer—was later relieved from command for being too “authoritarian.” Perhaps “authoritarian” translates into “rocking the boat.” Because any reasonable, objective analysis shows how arrogance, ignorance, and incompetence has greatly increased the degree to which violence thrives and is perpetrated in Iraq at the cost of thousands of extra lives, American, Iraqi, and others: men, women; children, parents, sons, daughters.

Unfortunately, that is exactly what is missing from our TV news. Occasionally, and only occasionally, a U.S. newscast will do a quick piece on a veteran, bravely recovering from his wounds. The Iraqis’ suffering is barely covered at all, all you get is a 5-second clip with some woman screaming and smoke in the background, with an effeminate-British translator saying in English “This woman came and saw her son was lying in a pool of blood” or something like that. Then, right back to… the Jacko trial. Or how about hours and hours of Terry Schiavo?

Americans have no idea of the scope of the “collateral” damage done in Iraq because they are bombarded with these nonsense stories. The facts are simple: while our occupation of Iraq has uprooted the lives of millions and killed thousands and thousands of innocents, while our incompetent national leadership wished the Iraq problem would go away, never admitting we didn’t have enough troops to begin with and not even bothering to ensure our sons and daughters were armed with body armor or even given a simple Arabic-language primer card, while our tax dollars were paying people like Ahmed Chalabi for misinformation, the TV news media glossed over these issues as they were occurring, dealing only with a pointless left/right axis of debate on a general semantic level, with self proclaimed Middle East/Terrorism experts like Sean Hannity routinely making the absurd assertions that the “liberal” media was not reporting all the “good” things being done in Iraq. When all you get is wimpy Alan Combs responding by attempting to explain that a constitution is meaningless without law and order in 1/3 of the time Sean was jabbering his nonsense, and Sean gets to do the closing remark, the “facts” most people get in the news often depends on which talking head is more aggressive, loud, or flashy.

If ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption can have stat-boy take his anchors to task when they get their facts wrong, why the hell does TV news let its hosts and anchors make blatantly false, completely unresearched claims continually with no attempt to check the truth? It is the press’s responsibility to fact check our governments claims, but if no one fact-checks TV newscasts, (where, by far, the vast majority of Americans get their news) and if the only stories covered in any detail are nonsensical senasationals, how can any of the American public have any idea what is going on thousands of miles away? The only way to get credible information is to have someone on the ground where the story is taking place, who has a background in what they are covering and is therefore equipped to make intelligent comments and ask the right questions. Christiane Amanpour, one of the only people left in American TV news that does just that, was lamenting, on The Daily Show of all shows, how few journalists are like that, and how often she presses her superiors to make such in depth reporting less of a rare thing. It’s very sad how we can hear such criticism of the media only on Comedy Central, now the best TV news we have, because, from NBC to FOX, the rest of the news programming on TV is a joke.