From: Lew Rockwell
Sunday’s NYT, gearing up for Memorial Day, carries a leading front-page story direct from the Afghan front, complete with photos. Does it tell of the 1000 Americans who have perished there in America’s longest war or the unknown number of innocent Afghanis to fall or the many more on both sides to be gruesomely injured or the devastation visited on the poor and backward regions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan by the firepower of the mightiest war machine the world has yet to produce? Absolutely not.
Instead we are treated to a feel-good story about female Marines “bonding” with their Afghan sisters….
Many say that the media hides the wars now waged by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq. But it is worse than that. While hiding the death and destruction and certainly blotting out any graphic images of it, our poor excuse for journalism is awash with feel-good stories about the wars. The war in Korea was televised to a limited extent and contributed to American revulsion at Truman’s war and his welcome replacement by the pacific Republican Eisenhower not yet brought under the influence of the rabid Dulles brothers. The same happened with Viet Nam leading to the abrupt departure of another Democrat, Johnson.
But our rulers learned their lesson well. No more graphic images come to us from the battlefield. They are censored by being cut off at their source. Worse, the war is systematically prettified by the media. Such is the function of the servile journalism of the Empire.
