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Iraq Invasion Media Bias and Deception
The Western Media Deceives the World About the Iraq Invasion.
The Media have pretended to cover Operation Iraqi Freedom, better known as the War on Iraq. They have never acknowledged that this has been far more an invasion than a war. The American TV media have distorted facts, reported numerous unsubstantiated stories, taken the White House at its word without investigating the facts, omitted pertinent facts or portions of stories and have accepted the role of being an informercial for the Bush administration and for their own corporate sponsors. This bias has become more and more apparent as the Iraq invasion and occupation progressed. In its coverage of the events leading to and including the war in Iraq, the US media have misled the public as never before.
Cartoon by K. Bendib, all rights reserved.
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What is war? - (A must see. Turn speakers on first if you have them.)
Control Room (DVD)
A documentary about the Arab television network Al-Jazeera's coverage of the U.S.-led Iraqi war.
Click here for more information.
- “There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.” - Ron Martz
The story of Jessica Lynch is the tale of how a modern war icon is made, and perhaps how easily officials and journalists with different agendas accepted contradictory, self-serving versions of what happened to her.
We have not been given in the American media (we would need to read the foreign press) a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing. - We got precise figures for the American dead, but not for the Iraqis. Recall Colin Powell after the first Gulf War, when he reported the "small" number of U.S. dead, and when asked about the Iraqi dead, replied: "That is really not a matter I am terribly interested in." - Howard Zinn
 Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage - "Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage. Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq. Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us. Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations. Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered. - Mercier admitted that it was "absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post."
 TvNewsLies.org Tracks Iraq war crimes- TvNewsLies.org Tracks the New Iraq
- And the Media Covers the Iraq Invasion
- BBC Chief Slams US Media War Coverage
- Turner Calls Murdoch (FOX News) a War Monger
- Buying Political Favors with Pro-War Fanaticism
- Something Corrupt is Consuming Journalism
- War Coverage Rewrites History
- Positive Press on Iraq Is Aim of U.S. Contract - U.S. military leaders in Baghdad have put out for bid a two-year, $20 million public relations contract that calls for extensive monitoring of U.S. and Middle Eastern media in an effort to promote more positive coverage of news from Iraq. - The contract calls for assembling a database of selected news stories and assessing their tone as part of a program to provide "public relations products" that would improve coverage of the military command's performance, according to a statement of work attached to the proposal.
- MSNBC's Banfield: Media filtered realities of war
- More From Banfield: NBC is not happy.
- Ashleigh Banfield's Career No Longer Seems to Shine as Bright
- Iraq and the Media
- Which War are You Watching?
- The Baghdad Celebration - Example of media manipulation.
- Homogeneous Coverage
- Collection of Articles
- Balanced Coverage Needed
- Journalists Criticize Media Coverage of Iraq
- An Opinion
- A Memo to the Media
- Controlling the News With Embedded Journalists - Part 1
- They Did Not Have Time to Tell Us About War Profiteers
- Americans Look Overseas for the Truth
- Critics Accuse Media of Aiding Us War Propaganda
- This is Real Journalism - Finally someone is asking the real questions!
- Media Bosses Admit Pro-War Bias
- San Francisco Newspaper Fires Antiwar Reporter
- The Link Between The Media, The War, And Our Right To Know
- MSNBC Finally Asks a Question Instead of Reading a Pentagon Script
- U.S. TV Lost Focus on War, Says Editor
- Free press during wartime
- The New Newsspeak
- Press Not Ready to Cover Our Own Gaza
- “I Was a Mouthpiece for the American Military” - An embedded TV producer's frank assessment - When it came to other stories that were clearly sympathetic to the U.S. side, such as funerals for American soldiers killed in combat, the U.S. military was extremely helpful—indeed, encouraging. In such cases, she was granted full access and allowed to film speeches by officials honoring the dead, the posthumous awarding of medals, and other aspects of the ceremony. - But when this producer wanted to pursue a story that might have cast the war effort in an unfavorable light, the situation was entirely different.
- ‘Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.’- Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'
US POW rescue was 'stage-managed' - ‘There was only one problem: the story simply wasn't true. The dramatic rescue was a well-prepared 'infowar' operation staged for the cameras. The purpose being to shift media focus away from the killing of civilians by the US bombardment of Iraq and on to the 'heroism' of US forces.’ BBC documentary exposes Pentagon lies: The staged rescue of Private Jessica Lynch - A BBC Correspondent documentary, “War Spin” broadcast in Britain on Sunday 18 May, presented a devastating account of how US and British government and military forces set out to mislead and misinform the public during their war against Iraq - aided by hundreds of compliant “embedded” journalists. Lights, camera, rescue - The press raved: "This story is 'Mission: Impossible,' but it's real" ... (an NBC official commenting on the Lynch rescue in reference to a possible made-for-TV movie on the affair). "After Saddam's tumble, Americans could finally gaze enthusiastically at their TV screens," (Post-Intelligencer columnist Joe Copeland). Fabrications as magic potion - ‘It's a terrifically funny bit of war fiction that looked impossible to top -- until that front-page account in The Washington Post of April 3 about Pfc. Jessica Lynch: How she "fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers" after Iraqis ambushed her company, "firing her weapon until she ran out of ammunition," how she "continued firing at the Iraqis even after she sustained multiple gunshot wounds and watched several other soldiers in her unit die around her," how she was "fighting to the death," how "she did not want to be taken alive."’ A Long, and Incomplete, Correction - This is the third column in as many months devoted in whole or in part to the case of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch. If you're tired of it, I can't blame you. But judging from the response to The Post's recent effort to reconstruct how Lynch was captured and rescued, many readers are not yet tired of it, and neither am I. Pfc. Lynch withdraws cooperation for movie - Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch has reportedly pulled out of a proposed deal with NBC for a television movie about her ordeal during the war in Iraq.- TVNL comment: Maybe she does not want to go down in history as a person that made a movie based on lies. Using Private Lynch - The Army's official After-Action Report said she was in a vehicle that crashed while hauling butt trying to escape an enemy ambush. She was knocked unconscious and woke up at a nearby Iraqi hospital receiving special attention from some super-caring Iraqi doctors and nurses. - This was probably the first incident in U.S. military history in which an American soldier was awarded our country’s fourth-highest ground-fighting award for being conked out and off the air throughout a fight. - MORE JESSICA LYNCH INFO HERE
- The Military's Media
- No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? - US media scoundrel shrugs his shoulders
- California Newspaper Editors Critique Iraq War Coverage
Panorama: The War Party - A BBC Broadcast - “Panorama investigates the "neo-conservatives", the small and unelected group of right-wingers, who critics claim have hijacked the White House.” - Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni favors peace over war in the Middle East, but the large media outlets ignore his message.
Embed Catches Heat - TV Sanitized the Iraq Conflict, But a Paper Gets the Hate Mail - ”There must have been two wars in Iraq. There was the war I saw and wrote about as a print journalist embedded with a tank company of the Army's 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized). Then there was the war that many Americans saw, or wanted to see, on TV.” Rose: Where are the weapons of mass destruction? - “Excuse me for shouting, but why aren't the networks and cable news shows raising all Billy Hell over this?” Bell berates media giants for warmongering words - Martin Bell, the former BBC war correspondent and independent MP, yesterday condemned the hypocrisy of the media owners Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch, whose news organisations had led the calls for war in Iraq. Waggy Dog Stories - An administration hypes the threat posed by a foreign power. It talks of links to Islamic fundamentalist terrorism; it warns about a nuclear weapons program. The news media play along, and the country is swept up in war fever. The war drives everything else — including scandals involving administration officials — from the public's consciousness. The Lies We Bought - THE UNCHALLENGED "EVIDENCE" FOR WAR - ‘For public relations purposes, it hardly mattered that no such IAEA report existed, because almost no one in the media bothered to check out the story.’ Victims of the peace decide Americans are worse than Saddam - “None of the American promises has happened. It is unbelievable what has happened,” - TVNL comments: Folks, you may want to e-mail or hand a printout of this article to all the war supporters that you know; including the people in the media! - NOTE: It appears that this article was moved to a paid subscription archive. We will leave the link here for those of you why may want to access it. Dying for the Government - It Seems to Me - Howard Zinn - Our government has declared a military victory in Iraq. As a patriot, I will not celebrate. - We have not been given in the American media (we would need to read the foreign press) a full picture of the human suffering caused by our bombing How the media might have to cop the blame for Bush's blushes - The growing scandal over the Bush Administration's manipulation of intelligence data on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction focuses on the role of the White House. But it doesn't devote proper attention to the role of the US media in the propaganda effort that misled the world. Hawks turned media into parrots - ANTONIA ZERBISIAS - Turns out that CNN was the Pentagon's Bitch after all. - But, in fairness to America's "most trusted'' news source, my indelicate term can also be applied to ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume and, yes, even unto PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Handout Photos Don't Tell the Whole Story - The wire services -- behaving like adjuncts of the White House -- distributed the staged hospital scenes, and noted in their captions that the photos were handouts. Fibbing It Up at Fox - Since the Iraq conflict began on March 20, Fox News has been on a mission to legitimize it. Embedded reporters' viewpoint misses the main point of war - The U.S. media did a good job of describing the lives of the military personnel and narrating the advance of U.S. troops, and a lousy job of covering the politics of the war. Readers and listeners all over the world were exposed to a vigorous discussion of the motivations behind the war, but Americans -- especially those who got their news from television -- were largely deprived of that reporting and analysis. The war, brought to you by the White House - To see what media consolidation will do to British television, look no further than the US - where Glutton Bowl is typical fare - John Willis is the BBC director of factual and learning, and former vice president in charge of national programmes at WGBH in Boston. This is an edited extract from a speech given at the Royal Television Society this week US war reporter under fire - A reporter for The New York Times, Judith Miller, is the target of claims that she and her newspaper have been the vehicle for White House and Pentagon "propaganda" over Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction. US soldiers were main danger to journalists - BBC world affairs editor John Simpson has called on the US government to investigate why more journalists were killed by American soldiers than by any other means during the Iraq war. US TV networks 'kissed ass' - Michael Wolff, the media commentator and New York Magazine columnist, has accused American television networks of "kissing ass" in their coverage of the Iraq war in return for a relaxation of media ownership rules in the US. - Wolff put forward what he described as the "semi-conspiracy theory" that major media companies in the US meekly followed the flag-waving agenda of the Bush administration in order to persuade the federal communications commission to change its regulations. Iraq WMDs a 'lie': former inspector - UN former weapons inspector Scott Ritter on Monday said US statements about Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction before launching war on Saddam Hussein's regime were a "lie". - "The entire case the Bush administration made against Iraq is a lie," Mr Ritter told reporters, also criticising the media for being too willing to accept the weapons of mass destruction allegations as justification for war. "What was the basis of the affirmation by [US Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld? He said there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - nobody asked him to prove it. The press just printed it. U.S. ignored WMD message, analyst says - A conference of top-level military analysts was told that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction months before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — a message that later fell on deaf ears in the U.S. capital, analysts say. - Former Canadian military officer-turned-analyst Sunil Ram remembers the January, 2001, conference Understanding the Lessons of Nuclear Inspections and Monitoring in Iraq: A Ten-Year Review. What he heard at the meeting he has repeated for months, he says, getting little attention from the mainstream media: that U.S. President George W. Bush had no grounds to base the invasion of Iraq on the disarmament issue. New Merle Haggard Tune Blasts US Media Coverage of Iraq War - "I don't even know the Dixie Chicks, but I find it an insult for all men and women who fought and died in past wars when almost the majority of America jumped down their throats for voicing an opinion. It was like a verbal witch-hunt and lynching." Al Jazeera says U.S. forces arrest two employees - The Arabic television network Al Jazeera said on Sunday U.S. forces had arrested their correspondent and driver in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul while they filmed an attack on American troops. - TVNL comment: The American press knows what it is permitted to present as truth. For example the fake Jessica Lynch recue or the scripted celebration iwhen they knocked down the statue are permitted to be filmed; but you can not film it if it is not in the script. No improvising! The unreported cost of war: at least 827 American wounded - US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media. Crunching the numbers - There have been a number of reports suggesting that certain Western media sources are misleading the public as to the extent of the coalition casualties in Iraq. The creative accounting methods employed by major US news networks range from underreporting non-combat deaths among the US troops to simply neglecting even the officially-acknowledged casualties. - This failure to report non-combat deaths coupled with the US military’s practice of passing certain combat casualties as non-combat lead to a seriously distorted picture of the war in Iraq being presented to the US public. Military, media meet off battlefield to debate war coverage - "The embedded process proved to be more beneficial to the government than to the media," said George Wilson, defense correspondent for the National Journal and longtime military reporter for The Washington Post, who traveled with an artillery unit in Iraq. "The rah-rah coverage of the units we were embedded with eclipsed a lot of larger questions." - "The news media has covered wars for centuries without being a companion force to the military," said a Pentagon correspondent for a cable news network. "I think the embeds were there for one reason -- Don Rumsfeld wanted them there. And he put them there for one reason -- because it would further administration goals and objectives. As a reporter, I don't mind being used, but I want to know I'm being used." Judy Miller's War - Lay all Judith Miller's New York Times stories end to end, from late 2001 to June 2003 and you get a desolate picture of a reporter with an agenda, both manipulating and being manipulated by US government officials, Iraqi exiles and defectors, an entire Noah's Ark of scam-artists. Clark Alleges White House Pushed CNN to Fire Him - "The White House actually back in February apparently tried to get me knocked off CNN and they wanted to do this because they were afraid that I would raise issues with their conduct of the war," Clark told Newsradio 620 KTAR. - Previously, Wesley Clark claimed publicly that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, he was pressured by the Bush administration to link the attacks directly to Iraq. - Insisting on the accuracy of his military analysis of the Iraq War, Clark said, "No one ever complained about my analysis being partisan except for [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay and he's hardly an unbiased source," - UN Headquarters Bombing in Iraq Exposes US News Media Bias
Number of Wounded in Action on Rise - Iraq Toll Reflects Medical Advances, Resistance Troops Face - The number of those wounded in action, which totals 1,124 since the war began in March, has grown so large, and attacks have become so commonplace, that U.S. Central Command usually issues news releases listing injuries only when the attacks kill one or more troops. The result is that many injuries go unreported. Media Must Explain Lack of 9/11-Saddam Link - Now, how much can we blame the media for this woeful misinformation? It's not a minor question, since surveys also show that avenging the 9/11 attacks proved to be the single most important reason Americans backed President Bush in his war on Iraq earlier this year -- and continue to support our presence in that country. Amanpour: CNN practiced self-censorship - CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship." - As criticism of the war and its aftermath intensifies, Amanpour joins a chorus of journalists and pundits who charge that the media largely toed the Bush administrationline in covering the war and, by doing so, failed to aggressively question the motives behind the invasion. - "It's not a question of couldn't do it, it's a question of tone," Amanpour said. "It's a question of being rigorous. It's really a question of really asking the questions. All of the entire body politic in my view, whether it's the administration, the intelligence, the journalists, whoever, did not ask enough questions, for instance, about weapons of mass destruction. I mean, it looks like this was disinformation at the highest levels." CNN's Downward Spin, Axis of Logic commentary - Everywhere but in the US news media, Operation Enduring Freedom is leaving a sea of blood in its wake. However, if we are to believe CNN, war is not hell; it is merely "heck." There is no blood worth mentioning, no depleted-uranium danger to US troops and no dissent or voices crying in the national wilderness. 'THE SHAME OF AMERICAN JOURNALISM' - The debacle in Iraq certainly isn't all its fault, but our national media deserves to stand up and take a bow. - My problem is with the national-media guppies, who swallowed yesterday's Al-Halabi gambit hook, line and sinker. This is nothing new, of course. The national news media has been following the administration's lead at every step of the way with its Iraq war coverage. Study: Wrong impressions helped support Iraq war - A majority of Americans have held at least one of three mistaken impressions about the U.S.-led war in Iraq, according to a new study released Thursday, and those misperceptions contributed to much of the popular support for the war. - TVNL Comment: Finally a study that proves what TVNL has been saying all along; it’s the media’s fault that Americans are missinformed. Bush’s News War - Fed up with the gloom-and-doom coverage of the conflict, the White House is taking aim at the press - IN BAGHDAD, OFFICIAL control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis. Curtains Ordered for Media Coverage of Returning Coffins - In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains. Press Underreports Wounded in Iraq - Since the war began in March, 1,927 soldiers have been wounded in Iraq, many quite severely. (The tally is current as of Oct. 20.) Of this number, 1,590 were wounded in hostile action, and 337 from other causes. About 20% of the injured in Iraq have suffered severe brain injuries, and as many as 70% "had the potential for resulting in brain injury," according to an Oct. 16 article in The Boston Globe. - According to an Oct. 3 report by UPI, nearly 4,000 soldiers had been medically evacuated from Iraq for non-combat reasons. Mr. President, we're not your court stenographers - When Bush says news is being "filtered," his complaint really is that reporters refuse to be good court stenographers. Bush's "filter" is merely a matter of contextual reporting, and holding the government accountable. US 'targets' journalists in Iraq - Cameraman Samer Hamza was freed on Wednesday after two days in custody. - Al-Jazeera's editor told BBC News Online that this and other incidents suggest his organisation is being deliberately targeted by US troops. The New York Times’ Friedman libels the Iraqi resistance - The New York Times’chief foreign policy commentator, Thomas Friedman, who has assumed the role of leading “liberal” defender of the American occupation of Iraq, published a particularly venomous column on October 30 under the headline “It’s No Vietnam.” - Friedman’s piece appeared on the same day as columns by two other liberal commentators arguing that the recent upsurge of anti-US violence in Iraq and the exposure of Bush administration lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi-Al Qaeda connections in no way discredited the war or provided legitimate grounds to oppose the US occupation of the country. Richard Cohen of the Washington Post penned a piece entitled “Vietnam It Isn’t,” and Benjamin Schwarz, the former executive editor of the liberal World Policy Journal, published a column in the Los Angeles Times headlined “Bush Fibbed, and That Might Be OK.” Embedded reporters 'sanitised' Iraq war - Television reports produced by "embedded" correspondents in the Iraq conflict gave a sanitised picture of war, according to an academic study published by the BBC today. - Researchers found that although reporters who accompanied the British and US military were able to be objective, they avoided images that would be too graphic or violent for British television. Some of the coverage resembled a "war film". - Although British broadcasters were not guilty of the overt pro-war bias of their US counterparts, they tended to assume the truth of what they had been told. In nine out of 10 references to weapons of mass destruction during the war, there was an assumption that Iraq possessed them. - Broadcasters were twice as likely to show Iraqi enthusiasm for the coalition forces as suspicion or hostility. Huge weapons cache found - Task Force Ironhorse soldiers raided what they thought was a safe house for terrorists Tuesday and found 33 blocks of dangerous explosives, 98 feet of detonation cord, 20 blasting caps and abundant volatile munitions used in improvised explosive devices. - Soldiers also discovered two rifles, eight fragmentation grenades, a machine gun, one rocket propelled grenade launcher, 300 rounds of 7.62mm ammunition, and three rounds of 14.5mm anti-aircraft ammunition. - TVNL ALERT!!! Does the headline match the article? Is this really a HUGE cache of weapons? Speakers say media bear some blame for Iraq war - Misleading and incomplete reporting by major news outlets helped President Bush steer America into war with Iraq, speakers said Friday during the opening session of a three-day National Conference on Media Reform at UW-Madison. - "This war could never have taken place without the complicity of the news media," said John Stauber, author and founder of the Center for Media and Democracy, a group that seeks to expose corporate and government propaganda campaigns. "The media that sold this war doesn't want to examine how they did it." U.S. Troops More Hostile With Reporters - Jumpy U.S. Soldiers in Iraq Becoming More Aggressive in Treatment of Journalists - In October, the Belgium-based International Federation of Journalists, which includes unions representing 500,000 journalists in more than 100 countries, complained of increased harassment of reporters, including beatings of some, since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime. - A number of journalists, particularly Iraqis and other Arabs working for foreign media organizations, say they are now routinely threatened at gunpoint if they try to film the aftermath of guerrilla attacks. Some have been arrested and held for short periods. - US troops 'beat' Iran journalists - Two Iranian journalists claim they were beaten, blindfolded and tortured while held by American forces in Iraq. - "We could not speak to each other and only with our coughing could we understand where each of us were located," Soheil Karimi told a news conference in Tehran. - "They did not let us speak a word. Whenever we wanted to speak the soldiers used to put their guns inside our mouths." - The two men were filming near an American checkpoint at the time of their arrest on 1 July.
- Pentagon Limits Funeral Coverage - Arlington to Keep Reporters Away - The Army tightened rules yesterday on press coverage of funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, directing that reporters be kept far enough away from the graveside that they would likely be unable to hear a chaplain's eulogy.
Media caught in Iraq's war of perceptions - Newly enforced restrictions on media coverage reflect Washington's sensitivity to public attitudes. At home, reporters are kept at a distance from Iraq servicemens' funerals at Arlington National Cemetery; they are not allowed to photograph caskets returning to Delaware's Dover Air Base. In Iraq, the military has mistakenly fired on journalists, detained them, or confiscated their equipment, leading media organizations to raise protests with the Pentagon. Iraqi Gov't Bans Arab TV Network - One of the biggest Arab television news networks agreed Monday to halt reports from Iraq after the U.S.-appointed government raided its offices, banned its broadcasts and threatened to imprison journalists. - Media groups said the action called into question the future of a free press in Iraq Iraqi ousting of Arab TV channel sparks freedom fears - Groups campaigning for a free media have called on the US-backed Iraqi Governing Council to reverse its decision to throw Arab news channel al-Arabiya out of the country. - "The handling of news is the sole responsibility of news editors. Iraq's new authorities should not try to get a news organisation to change its editorial line by using force - such methods belong to the past and are contrary to the promises of democracy made to the Iraqi people," BBC chief slates US media on Iraq - He cited research showing that US news organisations relied mostly on pundits who supported the war, and appeared to toe the government line. - "For any news organisation to act as a cheerleader for government is to undermine your credibility," he added. Pentagon Funds Pro-U.S. Network in Iraq - The station's ties to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority have hamstrung its credibility, said Don North, an adviser and trainer at Al-Iraqiya who later left the network. CBC News interviewed more the 50 journalists for DEADLINE IRAQ: Uncensored Stories of the War. - Here are the full stories from 12 of them. They tell us more about what is was like when the bombing started over Bahgdad, what is was really like to live in a fox hole with the American troops and what happened when the Palestine Hotel - where the media was based - was bombed. Only dictators ban television news - By HELEN THOMAS - The raid by the U.S.-appointed Iraqi officials on an Arab television network bureau in Baghdad and the ban on its broadcasts hardly fits my idea of how to spread democracy in the Middle East.
- Isn't that the first thing dictators do -- shut down broadcast outlets and newspapers? Spin clouds truth in polls of Iraqis - Secretary Paul Wolfowitz has said, "The polls do show that most Iraqis want us to stay as long as necessary." - The Washington Post story pointed out that the same poll found that 47 percent of residents thought they were worse off at the moment, compared to only 33 percent of residents who thought they were better off. Nearly everyone (94 percent) said Baghdad was more dangerous now than before the invasion. The United States cleaned up one mess, but has replaced it with chaos of its own. When Will Press Stop Circulating Dubious Iraq Claims? - This sort of "evidence," which surfaces periodically, is significant, as polls have always shown that one of the major reasons the public supported the invasion of Iraq was belief that Saddam helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Even after more than two years have passed -- and no hard evidence of that uncovered -- a poll earlier this week showed that slightly more than half of all Americans still believe that to be true, suggesting that perhaps the press has not really done its job in debunking this belief. CBC Newspeak - The first sentence of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) online news article reads: “Anti-U.S. fighters shot down a helicopter near Fallujah, Iraq, on Friday, killing one American soldier and wounding another.” - “Anti-U.S. fighters.” What kind of biased nonsense is this? What kind of deranged thought processes could have skewered the language of the news in such a biased fashion? - The logical assumption is that if country A invades country B and if country B fights back then it is anti-country A. Resistance now means anti-attacking country. It brings new meaning to the sci-fi refrain: “Resistance is futile.” Media Spin Can Separate War From Death - A dozen years after the Gulf War, public perceptions of it are now very helpful to the White House. That's part of a timeworn pattern. Illusions about previous wars make the next one seem acceptable. As George Orwell observed: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." For Many Iraqis, U.S.-Backed TV Echoes the Voice Of Its Sponsor - Station Staffers Acknowledge Their Reluctance to Criticize - Nine months after U.S. forces closed Iraq's state-run television stations and subsequently launched the new channel with promises of a democratic dawn for the country's news media, the Pentagon-sponsored station has not won the trust of many Iraqis. - TVNL Comment: Sounds like every US news network!! Media AWOL - With nary a WMD to show for its work, the 400-member team searching for military equipment in Iraq has packed up and gone home. Although more than 1,000 member of the Iraq Survey Group remain on the hunt, it now appears the Bush administration's weapons of mass destruction mantra was propaganda for mass deception. How much attention will the mainstream media now devote to investigating the unfolding of the WMD affair and who in the administration should be held accountable for perpetuating this monumental fabrication U.S. Firm to Run Iraqi TV - Harris Corp. Also to Operate National Newspaper - The Pentagon has awarded a $96 million contract to a U.S. communications equipment maker to run Saddam Hussein's old television and radio network, now called al-Iraqiya, for the next 12 months, the chairman of the company said last week - TVNL Comment: An occupying power controlling the press. Sounds fair. What do you think? U.S. Journalist Quits Pentagon Iraqi Media Project Calling it U.S. Propaganda - But we immediately started clashing with coalition provisional authorities, who wanted control -- they just couldn't resist controlling the message. Unfortunately, they turned what should have been an independent voice for Iraqis -- this was our aim, to sort of make a PBS, a public broadcast radio and TV for the Iraqis. But instead, it just became a mouthpiece for the coalition, and the Iraqis didn't find it credible. If News From Iraq Is Bad, It's Coming From U.S. Officials - Despite criticism of the media by the Bush administration and its allies, U.S. TV news coverage of the Iraq situation continues to be dominated by government and military officials, according to a new study by FAIR. The few critics of military operations that find themselves on the nightly news broadcasts rarely question the war as a whole. Nightly network news reports largely focus on tactics and individual battles, with more substantial and often troubling issues surrounding the war, such as civilian casualties, rarely being reported. Report: media fed faulty Iraqi intelligence - A newspaper investigative report published Tuesday charges that a US-funded Iraqi exile group fed global media outlets many of the still unsubstantiated claims about Iraq, in the months leading up to the Bush administration's pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein. - A list of the news organizationsthat based reports on the faulty information reads like a who's who of the American, Canadian, British and Australian media elite - including the New York Times, BBC, Daily Telegraph, NPR, Melbourne's The Sunday Age, and CNN. Media panels: Fear of seeming unpatriotic prevented critical Iraq reporting - Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference on media coverage of the war. - ''There is no doubt that there is an atmosphere of fear in the media of being out of sync with the punitive government,'' Sheer said. - Massing said nuclear experts or weapons inspectors would have refuted the evidence had the Times consulted them. Experts later verified the tubes were not used for nuclear weapons, but The New York Times and other papers buried that news in their inside pages, he said. - ''The reason we embedded so many journalists is that we wanted to dominate the information environment,'' Long said. ''We wanted to beat any kind of disinformation or propaganda by beating them at their own game.'' Obstacles Hamper Iraq's Fledgling Fourth Estate - Attempts to jump-start a free news media have failed. The U.S.-led coalition, the Governing Council and lack of experience are blamed. - Although reporters theoretically are free to express their views, the U.S. military has raided the offices of newspapers it deemed to be aiding insurgents. The Iraqi Governing Council has banned some news outlets for being "disrespectful"; and the office of one U.S.-backed newspaper was recently attacked with a rocket-propelled grenade. Journalists like to be spoon-fed, critic says - "The most important decision any country can make is to go to war," said McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois. "Look at the press coverage leading up to the war. How good a job did it do to give the people the information they needed to make an informed decision? - "All the evidence shows the coverage was inadequate and woeful. Our news media was vastly too uncritical toward claims, dubious at best, by the Bush administration." - But don't just blame right wingers. Fox News and the Iraq War: Fact vs. Fox-tion - One of the leading media corporations that advocated for a U.S. invasion of Iraq was News Corp and its subsidiary Fox Television. Rupert Murdoch's Fox News acted as a megaphone for the Bush Administration's march to war. Over and over Fox News' hosts and contributors made misleading comments -- many of which have been proven to be 100% false. The question now is whether or not Fox hosts and contributors will admit they were wrong and apologize to their viewers for giving them unfair and unbalanced information. CNN to Al Jazeera: Why Report Civilian Deaths? - As the casualties mount in the besieged Iraqi city of Fallujah, Qatar-based Al Jazeera has been one of the only news networks broadcasting from the inside, relaying images of destruction and civilian victims-- including women and children. But when CNN anchor Daryn Kagan interviewed the network's editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik, on Monday (4/12/04)-- a rare opportunity to get independent information about events in Fallujah-- she used the occasion to badger Al-Sheik about whether the civilian deaths were really "the story" in Fallujah. - ACTION: Please tell CNN that there is no bigger story in Fallujah than the deaths of civilians. Ask the network to report the reality of the siege-- including eyewitness accounts and video footage shot by non-embedded journalists-- before dismissing civilian victims as the responsibility of the resistance. Why didn't America's top journalists grill Bush on Iraq War? - Allowing President George W. Bush to duck hard questions and not demanding the difficult answers, American reporters failed to support our troops in Iraq whose causality numbers increase, day by day. They similarly failed our nation, waiting for answers about a war that could have been avoided. - TVNL Comment: The obvious answer...they are NOT America’s TOP journalists. They are America’s CORPORATE journalists. 7 ABC affiliates ordered not to air 'Nightline' - Sinclair Broadcast Group has ordered its seven ABC stations not to broadcast Friday's "Nightline" that will air the names and photographs of the more than 500 U.S. troops killed in the Iraq war. - According to campaign finance records, four of Sinclair's top executives each have given the maximum campaign contribution of $2,000 to the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. - The executives have not given any donations to the campaign of Sen. John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, the records showed. - TVNL Comment: Say all you want about the liberal bias in the media but when you talk about right wing bias you talk about censorship. Regardless of the the opinion content in the media the right has embarked an a mission of censorship which can be best described as cold war Soviet style media control US media grapples with Iraq horrors - It has led to journalists outside the US to question whether the White House was pressuring the media not to cover stories critical of the American war in Iraq. Editor-in-chief of U.S.-funded Iraqi newspaper quits, complaining of American control - On a front-page editorial of the Al-Sabah newspaper, editor-in-chief Ismail Zayer said he and his staff were ''celebrating the end of a nightmare we have suffered from for months ... We want independence. They (the Americans) refuse.'' - TVNL Comment: This is democracy? Reminder: Bill of Rights, Amendment I: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. US Climate Of Complete News Disinformation And Turmoil - The US/UK government and their subordinate media machines have flooded the world with so much malarkey, doubletalk, and misrepresentation regarding the wars on terror that it"s become impossible to navigate through the mayhem of it, let alone believe any of it, including the recent video of N. Berg"s execution. Just consider a few inconsistencies and contradictions in this news bedlam: Where Was Press When First Iraq Prison Allegations Arose? - Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again? The media is now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they last fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge -- when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? - "That's something you'd have to ask editors at major newspapers," he said. "But there does seem to be a very strong prejudice toward investing U.S. official statements with credibility while disregarding statements from almost any other source -- and in this current situation, Iraqi sources." The War's Dark Side: Filling in the Blanks - Two striking documentaries about journalists in Iraq suggest how rarely the harshest images — and sometimes the unwelcome news — have penetrated American newscasts until now. U.S. Talk Show Rhetoric Sounds a Rwandan Echo - For several weeks now, right wing radio talk show hosts, like Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage -- who dominate the airwaves and much of the political debate across the American heartland -- have been hammering home the idea that our enemies are far more inhumane than anyone on the U.S. side. - War propaganda -- as a rule -- involves a dehumanization of the enemy to the point where killing and torture seems not only justified but down-right patriotic. Television news accused of Iraq bias - Like other independent journalists and media professionals, Mahajan says many of the big western broadcasters and newspapers are failing to tell the world what is really happening in Iraq. - They allege that major media players, such as CNN and the BBC, rely too heavily on official occupation authority sources at the expense of Iraqi opinion. - So much so that the line between objective journalism and partiality is being blurred. - "I think there is a lot of pressure from the military to stifle independent reporting and the media are just going along with it." - Miller believes that the major western media players, including the BBC and CNN, are ideologically in bed with the establishment. - A study by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a US media monitoring group, noted that 76% of the guests on network talk shows in late January and early February 2003 were current or former US officials, and that anti-war sources accounted for less than one per cent of the guests. US media kills story that Iraqi PM executed 6 prisoners - The US media has surprisingly failed to pick up the shocking disclosure by Sydney Morning Herald, Australia’s leading newspaper, that the Irqai Prime Minister Iyad Allawi personally executed six suspected insurgents in a Baghdad police station. - The story by award-winning Australian journalist Paul McGeough said that the prisoners were handcuffed and blindfolded, lined up against a courtyard wall and shot by the Iraqi PM. Dr Allawi is alleged to have told those around him that he wanted to send a clear message to the police on how to deal with insurgents. Two people allege they witnessed the killings and there are also claims the Iraqi interior minister and four American men were present. The Times Refuses Reprint in Moore Book - The publisher of a coming book by the filmmaker Michael Moore said yesterday that The New York Times had denied permission for Mr. Moore to include in his book a May article in which The Times reviewed shortcomings in its own reporting about the events leading up to the war in Iraq. What if Iraq Media Coverage was Scrutinized Like CBS Documents? - What if the model being used to dissect Dan Rather and CBS News was applied to all of the corporate media for their coverage in the build up to the invasion of Iraq? We speak with Harper's publisher Rick MacArthur who says "there would have been no war." BBC governor under fire for Iraq contracts - The BBC chief who played a pivotal role in how the corporation covered the Iraq war and the David Kelly affair, stands to profit out of a firm with lucrative military contracts in Iraq. - Former defence minister Peter Kilfoyle said: 'The fact that she has such a financial interest in the armaments industry and firms involved in Iraq appears to be a real conflict of interest. She should have stepped aside when it came to discussing military issues.' On Television, Torture Takes a Holiday - The minimizing - and in some cases outright elimination - of Abu Ghraib and its aftermath from network news coverage is in part (but only in part) political. Fox News, needless to say, has trivialized the story from the get-go, as hallmarked by Bill O'Reilly's proud refusal to run the photos of Graner & Company after they first surfaced at CBS. (This is in keeping with the agenda of the entire Murdoch empire, whose flagship American paper, The New York Post, twice ran Prince Harry's Nazi costume as a Page 1 banner while relegating Specialist Graner's conviction a day later to the bottom of Page 9.) During the presidential campaign, John Kerry barely mentioned Abu Ghraib, giving TV another reason to let snarling dogs lie. Senator John Warner's initially vigilant Congressional hearings - which threatened to elevate the craggy Virginia Republican to a TV stardom akin to Sam Ervin's during Watergate - mysteriously petered out. Media Disinformation and the Nature of the Iraqi Resistance - The distortions of reality and lack of oppositional media leave people in the West, Americans in particular, ill informed. - The Western media diligently diverts public attention from the illegal Occupation of Iraq and the responsibility of the U.S./Western governments for the horrendous crimes committed against the people of Iraq. - Western journalists and pundits are the main agents of this distorted propaganda. - In other word, portraying the Iraqi national Resistance movement as a collection of "religious fanatics" and "foreign" fighters "with nothing to lose" is the Occupation's way of discrediting the Iraqi Resistance and denying the Iraqi people their legitimate right to fight for freedom and national sovereignty. Amply documented, the pretexts for the war and the Occupation were based on fake intelligence. Hence, the U.S. and its "allies" are in the process, through media disinformation, of not only legitimizing the Occupation, but also of creating new pretexts for the maintenance of continued US military presence. Unseen Pictures, Untold Stories - U.S. newspapers and magazines print few photos of American dead and wounded, a Times review finds. The reasons are many -- access, logistics, ethics -- but the result is an obscured view of the cost of war. Knight Ridder's Baghdad Chief Replies to Criticism From Back Home - I invite Mr. Yost to spend a week in our Baghdad bureau, where he can see our Iraqi staff members' toothbrushes lined up in the bathroom because they have no running water at home. I frequently find them camping out in the office overnight because electricity is still only sporadic in their sweltering neighborhoods, despite what I'm sure are the best-intentioned efforts of people like his Marine buddy working on the electrical grid. - Mr. Yost can listen to our bureau's morning planning meetings, where we orchestrate a trip to buy bottled water (the tap water is contaminated, when it works) as if we're plotting a military operation. I wonder whether he prefers riding in the first car -- the most exposed to shrapnel and bullets -- or the chase car, which is designed to act as a buffer between us and potential kidnappers. Why Few Graphic Images from Iraq Make it to U.S. Papers - The Times' survey of six months of coverage found almost no pictures of Americans killed in action at a time when 559 Americans and Western allies died; the same publications ran just 44 photos from Iraq to represent the thousands of Westerners wounded during the same period. But according to photo services, pictures are sometimes transmitted and left unused.
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