Ack! I’d forgotten how hard it is to keep up with the news while working for a living. My contract is over at , but I’m having a hard time finding the time to compose the insightful commentary that Picket Line readers have learned to love and expect.
Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. citizens aren’t rising to the challenge → independent press oversight lacking → jingoist bias, malarkey
An interesting article by Norman Solomon from ’s San Francisco Chronicle: “Picture-perfect killers.”
…In , when the Gulf War’s overwhelming bombardment began, a CNN correspondent remarked on the “sweet beautiful sight” of U.S. bombers leaving runways in Saudi Arabia. CBS correspondent Jim Stewart told viewers about “two days of almost picture-perfect assaults.” (Meanwhile, an enemy armament became anthropomorphically sinister. On NBC, reporter Arthur Kent termed the Iraqi Scud missile “an evil weapon,” while CNN’s Richard Blystone called it “a quarter-ton of concentrated hatred.”) After three weeks of the air war, Newsweek put the U.S. Stealth bomber on the cover. Under the headline, “The New Science of War,” was a reassuring subhead, “High-Tech Hardware: How Many Lives Can It Save?”…
Adulation for the Pentagon’s arsenal has become a permanent aspect of the war story. Several months into the occupation of Iraq, for instance, at the top of the front page of the New York Times, a color photo showed a gunner aiming his formidable weapon downward from a Black Hawk helicopter, airborne over Baghdad. Underneath the picture was a story lamenting the recent setbacks in Iraq for such U.S. military aircraft: “In two weeks,” the article said, “the Black Hawks and Chinooks and Apaches that once zoomed overhead with such grace and panache have suddenly become vulnerable.” Referring to machinery of death in a reportorial voice, the words “grace” and “panache” were attributed to no one; they hovered as objective characterizations by a newspaper widely seen as epitomizing the highest journalistic standards.…
