Sometimes a post just makes an unabashedly excellent point. The US press is
guilty of distorting the issues of war and looting. That is more often true,
than not.

One, the U.S. press, as a whole, did not dwell much on the point that the
war on Iraq was illegal from the point-of-view of international law.
Hitler's cronies used the "preemptive war" defense at Nurnberg, and it was
found to be lacking.

Two, the press has also largely ignored the question of US legal obligation
of protecting the civilian population, the hospitals and cultural
institutions.

I am however, puzzled how these significant distortions are "liberal." I did
not know that liberals believe in wholesale violations of law. I also don't
quite understand how the sniper case relates to a war and shows the press'
"dislike" of Bush et al.

Perhaps my problem is that I am in the 99% of those who are not as well
educated as other folk on the list. Perhaps that is why I don't know words
such as "irregardless".

The joy I receive from the list is through furtherance of my benighted
education.
NB

-----Original Message-----
From: Museum discussion list [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf
Of Deb Fuller
Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 9:43 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Iraqis, looting and the press

You know, I don't think I've seen one message in the whole looting
discussion
about how the press has really distorted this whole issue. Yet people on
this
list - who are probably better educated than 99% of the world's population -
are quick to belive what they read and slam the US and the troops for first
not
protecting the museum adequately and then for trying to gloss over the whole
incident.

Could it be that the press - to use a quaint Southern expression - is
"letting
its mockingbird mouth get ahead of its jaybird behind"? (Sanitized for
propriety's sake. ;)

I live in the Washington, DC area and during the sniper attacks of last
year,
got a very eye-opening view of how quickly the press is to jump on a little
fact, irregardless of its significance or validity, and make a full-blown
story
out of it. I had just been laid off so needless to say I wasn't sleeping
well
and spent many nights flipping channels. After one attack, the vehicle
description of the "sniper van" literally changed every hour. The main
suspect
vehicles for the whole incident were a white box truck or a white cargo van.
For this shooting, it started out that way, then turned to a cream colored
van,
then a cream colored van with right tail light out, then a cream colored van
with the left tail light out, then it was a cream colored van with just a
tail
light out but also keep looking for that box truck and that ubiquitious
white
cargo van. When the sniper was finally caught, he was in a blue Chevy
hatchback. Yet the press had everyone in the area practically in a panic
every
time they saw a white cargo van, one of the most common vehicles on the
road.

During the war, the press was criticized for reporting just the war and
doing
very little commentating on it. Wow, for once they were just doing their
jobs.
It's kind of hard to spin information if you are on the battlefield and
getting
shot at and have strict controls on what you are allowed to say. But now it
seems like the press is more than making up for it by latching on to any
little
story and running with it. The US press is very liberal as a whole and
doesn't
like Bush, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld or getting into this war but rallied around
the
troops like everyone else. Now the main fighting is over and they are back
to
picking on the troops, and the whole Bush administration. I'm sure some of
it
is warrented like the lack of planning for looting. But I'm really skeptical
about how blown off UNESCO experts were or how little the troops did to stop
the looting. Given that in the sniper case, a blue Chevy hatchback was
turned
into a white box truck, cargo van and cream colored van with a tail light
out,
I'm not surprised to hear that the Iraqi museum went from completely
stripped
to "Oh, sorry, we forgot we put all these artifacts down here. We really
only
lost about 30 or 40." Loosing artifacts is tragic, don't get me wrong, but
it's
a far cry from a bunch of troops sitting on their duffs while people
blithely
walked in and carted off 4000 years of history.

So people, please. Don't jump to conclusions about what is in the press.
Like
most major happenings, the whole truth rarely comes out until many years
afterwards when it can be looked at objectively from all angles. Right now,
we're too close to the entire war to really understand what happened, what
went
wrong and the major impacts of it and probably won't be in a position to
understand it for years to come.

Deb

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