War and the Media Again
I came across this interesting article today on MediaLens which is a "media watch" sort of thing.Below is an excerpt. You can read the full article here.

Anyway, the website looks fairly interesting. They have a "what people say about us section" with comments on the site from both the "Left" and the "Right" here.

Not sure if they are a bit too left - I'm reserving my judgement.

Some other "look at the media" sites that are good are:
Media Channel
Media Guardian

The snippet:

Army Of Mothers

On January 29 the front page of the Daily Mirror carried a full-page picture of Tony Blair with dripping red fingers and palms. The title in large letters: 'Blood On His Hands'. On pages 4 and 5, John Pilger's article, 'Bloody Cowards', was illustrated with a large picture of three Iraqi soldiers burned to death during the last Gulf War - arms were incinerated to stumps, skulls ended abruptly above teeth bared in agony, skin was brittle and blackened like carbonised rubber.

We could not help reflecting on the agony these men must have suffered as they burned. And we could not help reflecting that each of them had been someone's son, brother, father, partner. Two of the Media Lens team are parents and we know very well that long days and nights had been spent fretting over these men as children. All had been cherished, adored, painstakingly clothed, washed, taught to walk and speak. With all the nonsense that is talked about war, with all the casual depictions of violence as entertainment in our wretched media, we forget that whole lives of love and hope are centred around these human beings - only for them to be incinerated to nothing by erudite, smiling men in smart suits telling lies.

We can dismiss this as sentimental if we like, or we can accept it as a human reality that is all but impermissible in our famously tough media - a media that always has the stomach for a fight, but rarely for evidence of the consequences. We sometimes wonder that the warriors of this world are not brought to their knees by an outraged Army of Mothers demanding that sons born in such pain and difficulty should be killed so easily.

In his article, Pilger recalled some of his own experiences of war and death in Vietnam:

"I once watched three ladders of bombs curve in the sky, falling from B52s flying in formation, unseen above the clouds.

"They dropped about 70 tons of explosives that day in what was known as the 'long box' pattern, the military term for carpet bombing. Everything inside a 'box' was presumed destroyed.

"When I reached a village within the 'box', the street had been replaced by a crater.

"I slipped on the severed shank of a buffalo and fell hard into a ditch filled with pieces of limbs and the intact bodies of children thrown into the air by the blast. The children's skin had folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh that seeped blood, while the eyes, intact, stared straight ahead. A small leg had been so contorted by the blast that the foot seemed to be growing from a shoulder. I vomited." (Daily Mirror, January 29, 2003)

What on earth does it say about the culture we are living in - about the insidious effects of high-paid corporate compromise - that Pilger is virtually alone in writing like this now, with pictures like this now, in the face of a war of such utterly transparent cynicism?

By contrast - and with the unholy trinity of greed, lies and violence looming around the people of Iraq, to the horror of the entire world - Timothy Garton Ash is able to write: "In defence of the fence - Colin Powell did not convince me. But nor does the peace movement." (The Guardian, February 6, 2003). Garton Ash continues:

"But on Iraq, I would still like to defend a position of tortured liberal ambivalence."

There is nothing tortured about it - media fortunes have long been made by mastering the 'liberal' art of appearing to care while doing nothing to oppose those who clearly do not give a damn. This is what earns the nod from the powers that be. It's the same nod that lets the cruise missiles fly, and that has the skins of children "folded back, like parchment, revealing veins and burnt flesh". It is a shocking truth but there +is+ a causal link between 'tortured liberals' like Garton Ash and horror of this kind - it's why senior commentators are paid so much for doing so little.

In similar vein, on the BBC's Newsnight programme, Oxbridge journalists like Jeremy Paxman laugh and joke with an assortment of white, establishment grandees about the ironies and 'realities' of diplomacy and realpolitik. As American journalist Dennis Hans notes, when it comes to foreign policy, "It's a White, White, White, White Media World."