Sick.Sick.Sick.Sick.
This in a nutshell was what I felt when watching the coverage of the Iraqi war.
Down in Iraq, people were being killed for making no mistake apart from being at the wrong place at the wrong time and what did you and I see???
How one missile was different from another, how the great might of the coalition was being shown in this display of their arsenal.
Panelists were called to describe how these equipment worked, how much they cost and ah! what fun it all was.Life was being ended down on ground but we have to spend more time marvelling at these weapons.
All I want to ask is this:
Why are there double standards?.
CNN international killed us with hour after hour of coverage of the Sniper attacks in Washington and yet paid no attention apart from a passing reference of 24 hindu Priests being shot dead in Kashmir, I shudder thinking about the international coverage an American priest being shot dead would get(you can double it if it happened somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia).
Being a journalist is definetly one of the hardest professions because the cynical attitude a journalist acquires after a point of time, being at scenes where there is plenty of bloodshed and sometimes the frustration that accompanies the fact that truth has been tampered with is something journalists have to put up with.
The most important thing that any journalist must possess is a total un-biased look towards any situation.
That is something that Cable News Network(CNN) hasnt been able to do over the past month.
Some of the coverage of the Iraqi crisis has been downright laughable.
True they are an American company and they will show the American point of view but they should not forget that their news channel is beamed to every nook and corner of this planet and I mean every nook and corner of this planet.
There are two sides to every war and the second side to this war was of the Iraqi People and not Saddam Hussein.
Why this review?
Iraqi people;to put it simply;have been screwed repeatedly over the past 25 years, first by Saddam Hussein and then by the Americans in the 1991 Gulf war who promised them much and then left them to Saddam’s mercies.
To fight for one country is something that any person would do and yet when Iraqis tried to offer resistance however brief it may have been were termed as cowards by the western media. A defence which the Bush/Blair Pair and the media had immediately denounced as deceitful and cowardly.
Keep up the double standards fellas.
Any report of people dying was met with much skepticism by the journalists like Jim Clancy in Kuweeeeait .Does the western media seriously believe that there can be absolutely no casualties in war?.
I couldnt help but laugh when so much was made about the arrival of Sir Galahad at Um-Qasr, a ship whose arrival made the headlines throughout the day with the 200 tonnes of food it carried being the sole answer to all of iraqi problems.
Its like having one damn Coke or Pepsi Vending machine at the Superbowl.
When Arab media tried to show people who had been injured or been killed during these strikes it was denounced as Arab Propoganda and they were the first channels from where these media took clippings of Baghdad being bombed.
When these channels showed American POW’s, the west took a strong stand against and quoting the geneva convention rules and all, but these were conveniently forgotten when clippings of line after line of hapless Iraqi soldiers taken into custody with their hands behind their heads.
The same media fights for showing exclusive coverage from the cells of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but thats our not people is it?, those are some screwed up Afghani’s brainwashed by Al-Qaeda into thinking that the more people you kill the better are your chances of going to heaven.
Not much light was made of the total lack of Weapons of Mass Destruction anywhere, I am absolutely amazed that they havent come to surface somewhere beneath the desert, if Iraq had been attacking USA the whole world would have seen every damn explosive and bomb ever created by man and then more as well.
Palestinians get killed every day with repeated incursions by the Israeli army and yet no mention is made of the palestinian point of view;oh no no...the whole gaza strip is made of people who are having so much fun in life that they want to end it with one massive crescendo of committing suicide and killing hundreds of Israelis along with him or her.
All you and I get to hear is some Israeli spokesman who says ’’There were some terrorists there in that building’’.Not much light is made of the fact that those bloody tanks go on a killing spree.
Changes have to be made and drastically, the power of the media lies in the fact that its a weapon, a tool which has the power to make or brake governments, change peoples opinions in a matter of minutes.
Its biggest strength lies in the fact that its independent.
Till changes are shown CNN for me has lost its credibility and changes of showing no bias and actually showing the most important news first.
Till then the only thing I will watch on CNN is World Sport with Pedro Pinto and thats because the Trailblazers are in the playoffs but they seem close to being eliminated.
authors note:You may wonder why BBC has been spared.The channel according to me had made a serious attempt to cover the war from a humanitarian point of view midway through the crisis.
The chief of BBC infact went as far as pointing out the mistakes committed by his counterparts in America.