Thursday, April 26, 2007
Glenn Greenwald - The media and the Tillman / Jessica Lynch frauds
Myself and the left bloggers saw that the Jessica Lynch story, particularly as it was first reported on TV and the Washington Post, was a crock of lies and propaganda. Hers was a great story, but not the 1984 fiction someone connected to the military was dreaming up.
The vast majority of right bloggers never saw that and in fact Jessica later was attacked by them when she corrected the myths that had been spread of her capture and rescue.
This was a small part of the sad vast decline of the media reporting in this country covered by Bill Moyers last night. You can watch it online here. And this was also yet another example of the continuing lying insanity of the right blogosphere.
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3 comments:
It was a fiction, of the Washington Post, not the Bush admin, Rove, the military or anybody but the Post.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/media_lynch_mob.html
Damn, Gary, can't you post announcements before they occur? :)
I happened to have followed the Jessica Lynch story fairly closely, and I ended up reading the book she had ghost written.
Yes, for the first few days, Washington Post went forward with a barely accurate story, but within a few weeks, major media had most of the facts right. The problem was that the military didn't try to correct the inaccurate information from the initial account.
The ghostwritten book was actually a compelling read and a first person account. (There was a frontline documentary too, I can't remember). One reason is that the episode itself was a noteworthy story, with or without the inaccurate reporting. It was less about military heroism than cultural misunderstandings and how female soldiers are changing how we deal with combat situations.
The Tillman story is a different matter.
Anon doesn't know that Ray Robinson in his link is lying and doesn't know how a newspaper works.
This story was fed by background sources, more than one. This is mentioned in the Greenwald post. I suspect it was the PR contingent that organized the pull down of Saddam's statue - another staged event for the American TV market. The Pentagon supplied a five-minute night-vision video of highlights of the rescue raid for the PR effort. When doubts about the story surfaced Pentagon spokesmen and the typical right wing "news" organizations denounced the critics. The Pentagon refused to provide unedited footage from the rescue. The Washington Post went back and expanded and made corrections to the story and even editoralized against the American sources that refused to go on the record .
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