American Media - Silence of the Lambs

"It seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan," Isaacson wrote in October. "We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people."
With all of Washington competing to be more patriotic than the next, no media outlet wants to be too critical--and the Bush gang knows it. As top White House adviser Karl Rove told a meeting of the Republican National Committee, the war is good for the GOP's election hopes in November--not to mention Bush's approval ratings.


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Yet the media still acted shocked when Bush, in his State of the Union address, ignored the Enron scandal and the recession--and instead hyped the administration's plans for extending the war on terrorism.
But then again, that had to be good news for the media bosses, too. After September 11, cable news outfits like CNN got a triple-digit boost in their ratings, and newsstand sales of Time and Newsweek jumped by almost 100 percent. The bottom line is that war is also good for the media business.


Americans are being brainwashed to ask only the questions the Bushites allow and they are programmed to see everything the Bush junta does as unquestionably correct. The brainwashing has gone so far that Americans no longer see what has happened to our country.


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ROTHSCHILD: The mainstream media's role has been disgraceful. They're enlisting as the front men for the Pentagon. They're acting as cheerleaders. They're flag wavers and flag wearers, and they're limiting the information that the American people are getting.
They intentionally didn't record the full extent of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. Walter Isaacson, the head of CNN, admitted as much in a memo to his staff.
And I saw it go up on CNN one day--in a report from one of their reporters in Afghanistan, who talked about some of the civilian casualties. And at the bottom was an editor's note, saying essentially that these casualties should be kept in the context of the many more casualties that happened on September 11.


Goodman: How many Americans know,

September 11 is also a significant day in Chilean history. It's the day President Salvador Allende died in the midst of the rise of the Pinochet regime, fully supported by the United States. At the time, it was President Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, responsible for thousands of Chilean dead.
Look at Vietnam: 2 million. Look at Indonesia: up to 1 million. And then you look at East Timor, where one-third of the population was killed in the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. Who gave the go-ahead? That was Henry Kissinger and President Ford.
These are acts of state terror, and people have to be held responsible for them. Just as Milosevic is being tried right now in The Hague, there should be an international court for the likes of Henry Kissinger.
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Media_control_propaganda/Media_Lapdogs.html

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BARSAMIAN: What the media do nationally is to imperceptibly create an amnesiac-like feeling. There's no context for actions, there's no background, there's no history. Things just happen.
The whole sordid history of U.S. support for the mujahideen, for Osama bin Laden, for the Taliban--these are all bundled together, as George Orwell would say, as inconvenient facts, and they're dropped down the memory hole at the Ministry of Truth, to be forever lost.
EVEN BY the standards of the media in past wars, though, they seem to be especially spineless right now.