News Censorship
by : Forest Carman
posted : 05/24/2006
Have you ever seen the true destructive potential of an CBU-87 cluster bomb?
A car bomb detonates in downtown Fallujah; two dozen people die instantly. There is massive damage and many bodies strewn throughout the street, but the only thing we see is a burning car and a crying child.
Network news stations have the duty to show the public what is really happening, rather then skewing the truth to keep good ratings.
Some supporters of censoring graphic war images believe that the graphic images aren’t the news, that they don’t tell the details of what happened; they believe that people get caught up in the shock value of the images and don’t pay attention to the facts.
Jim Lewis, author and screenwriter, published an article on Slate.com.
In “Front Page Horror,” Lewis said that, “On a literal level, they (the pictures) show almost nothing of any value whatsoever, except perhaps that something gruesome happened…”
I believe that his point of view on the subject is very wrong. As a democratic country, a country who votes for its leader, it’s regretable that the actions of our leader can be skewed by a biased assembly of newsgroups. If we don’t see what our leaders are doing in wartime, how can we believe that they’re telling the truth in peacetime?
Picture an Iraqi father and young son walking down the street, each carrying half of another young boy, a boy blown in half by an American bomb. The father and brother were photographed carrying the two separate halves of the boy down the street.
You won’t see that on CNN, or FOX, that’s just too tasteless and taboo.
I've got some news for you! War isn’t tasteful, ever, CNN, FOX and another rightwing biased newsgroup romanticizes war by picking and choosing the right pictures to sway opinion! Propaganda! LIES!
Every time a realistic (normally higher then US sources) body count comes from Aljazeera, the press labels it terrorist propaganda, and the Pentagon pushes it away, falsifying the claim. WHAT ARE WE THINKING? 1000 lbs of high explosives falls within 100 meters of a hospital, and the Pentagon claims the hospital is un-scathed? LIES! That bomb would level it.
People, innocent people, die every day, from weapons bought with our tax dollars. Our tax dollars go to some weapons factory in Kansas, the one that makes cluster bombs. Our tax dollars got towards the fuel, men and equipment it takes to get bombs to the target area. In one swift, bureaucratic motion, ENTIRE FAMILES get wiped out, just because they are too close to “legitimate enemy targets.”
We need to pull a Vietnam, press for true news, and see the truth. Truth sways public opinion, and public opinion makes or breaks wars.
Open your eyes, then open your mouths, make a change, one protest at a time.
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