http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=03/05/20/7015451
From an article by an embedded journalist:
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.
I saw and wrote about a war that was confusing and chaotic, as are all wars. It was a war in which plans and missions changed almost daily - and on one occasion changed three times in an hour. It was a war in which civilians died and were horribly wounded. It was a war in which soldiers questioned the intelligence they received, the logistics lines that had trouble supplying them with water and spare parts, and the reasons they were fighting the war.

Apparently that is not the war the TV-viewing and occasional newspaper-reading public wanted to see or thought it saw. But, according to a recent study by the Readership Institute, a large percentage of Americans preferred to get their war news from TV and not from newspapers. The war they saw, or thought they saw, on TV was meticulously planned, flawlessly executed - and not a single member of the armed forces had a complaint or problem. Few civilians died in that war.



TV news in the US is so uninformative, and so sensationalistic, that there tends to be little to differentiate it from those "reality tv" shows. It seems that this is only getting worse and worse. This article illustrates the frightening fact that people take this TV news so seriously that they will attack people who report directly on something as being wrong based on their "knowledge" of the events from TV.

And why shouldn't they? TV news is presented as direct reporting from the source , often in shockingly misleading ways. Frequently you'll see an anchor report on "exclusive to their network" stories which you've already seen discussed on other networks, or an anchor report as breaking news something which they have been repeating all day. Other times they'll have reports from correspondents in other countries reading off information that they're piping in to him from the US. All of this serves to foster the illusion that these people are out doing real journalism and discovering new leads when in fact they essentially read off the newswire information thats already been reported by the associated press.
Even this is dumbed down and edited so as to be easily understandable by anyone watching without any real though and made to fit into the general viewpoint that the network has been pushing. They do this by selectively quoting people, focusing on small aspects of events while ignoring more significant ones, or in some cases justg plain exaggeration.

People who rely on TV news as their primary source of information about the world cannot help but be woefully misinformed.

anybody w at least the slightest hint at intelligence moves on to bbc and internet at some early point in their high school education.

BBC is okay but even she has been tame and even pro-Axi.. sorry Coalition as of late. I can't wait until Al Jez comes out in English! I think the best western news cast is the CBC, or DW T.V

I use everything for entertainment. I post on this message board for guess what reason?

And well JPS I don't think the internet is a whole lot better. I mean look at the banner where you got that article. "anarchist, activist, and alternative news"

The guy says stuff like

I saw and wrote about a war that was confusing and chaotic, as are all wars. It was a war in which plans and missions changed almost daily - and on one occasion changed three times in an hour. It was a war in which civilians died and were horribly wounded. It was a war in which soldiers questioned the intelligence they received, the logistics lines that had trouble supplying them with water and spare parts, and the reasons they were fighting the war.

Now what does he mean about missons change daily? Does he mean what the commander he is closet to objectives changing? A squad leader isint told everything for a reason.

As far as questioning intelligence what does he mean? The soldier could have said something as simple as "Say again" or "could you repeat that?"

Untill somebody invents reporter robots or we find some outside alien life form that has no connections to earth to report for us we will have biased news so expect it.

the Western media, whose
"coverage" at best minimises the culpability of imperial powers. Richard
Falk, professor of international relations at Princeton, put it this way:
"Western foreign policy is presented almost exclusively through a self-righteous, one-way
legal/moral screen (with) positive images of Western
values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted political violence."


Taken from:
The Herald, 13/09/01
Inevitable ring to the unimaginable
JOHN PILGER.

I live in England, and while the BBC news is pretty good, I look out for supplemetary documentaries which I find are a little more incisive.
Newsnight (BBC)
Panorama (BBC)
Dispatches (Channel 4)

Originally posted by Salty

And well JPS I don't think the internet is a whole lot better. I mean look at the banner where you got that article. "anarchist, activist, and alternative news"
There's a substantial difference between reporting from a statedly anarchist perspective, and presenting heavily biased incomplete news as objective reporting.



Originally posted by Salty
Now what does he mean about missons change daily? Does he mean what the commander he is closet to objectives changing? A squad leader isint told everything for a reason.

As far as questioning intelligence what does he mean? The soldier could have said something as simple as "Say again" or "could you repeat that?"
As an ex-marine, I'd imagine this guy would know the difference.

Originally posted by Salty
Untill somebody invents reporter robots or we find some outside alien life form that has no connections to earth to report for us we will have biased news so expect it. They could at least make an effort at it though, rather than intentionally presenting things in the manner that I described.