Report On the Media

Ranting Profs present an email from an Army officer : in charge of his unit's media relations. It explains a lot about the vaccuum of news about the reconstruction:

"The Fox News crew laid out what qualified as 'newsworthy: -- Women taking
an active leadership role in the new government, detainee/prisoner abuse
cases, any WMD news, and individual soldier contributions (such as one soldier
who bought school supplies and teddy bears for Iraqis out of his own pocket.)
These were the stories deemed airable and they wouldn't respond to anything
outside of that. The news crew wasn't bashful about its agenda and they made
it clear that they weren't going to respond to anything outside of those story
lines unless it was something really spectacular.
Fox stood out most as a network that knew what it was going to put out
before it even shot the footage. Other news organizations were more subtle
about what they wanted to cover but pretty much everyone had their stories
written before they showed up. To Al-Jazeera especially, the video footage was
merely a formality."

And that was Fox, the "conservative, pro-war" network!

Read it all - and remember it when you watch and read media coverage on Iraq today.

Posted by Mitch at February 10, 2004 05:00 AM