Friday, March 25, 2005

In honor of my first Comment....

...I shall add my thoughts to John's ; who concluded his remarks by essentially asking why we don't see any 9/11 footage anymore...
If I recall, shortly after 9/11 all major news outlets agreed, virtually simultaneously, to cutback on showing footage of the attacks, claiming the images were simply to horriffic to continue spooling over and over. Now cutting back for a brief period is one thing, and maybe not unjustified, but that is not the same as the the virtual moritoreum on 9/11 images that has taken hold since.
The effect of this is create a state where context is non-existent. If the only images ones sees is American Soldiers marching off to war, dead Arab bodies, and anti-war protests, well, it is easy for certain conclusions to be drawn. If even occasionally American television coverage was interspersed with references to 9/11 or images (why is it OK to show pictures of alleged torture victims ad nauseum, but none of say, people screaming in the streets of NYC as they tried to outrace the collapse of Tower Two?) perhaps people might remember the flavor of that terrible day, and recall what we are fighing against.
Is it possible, however, that the media is standing by its initial assertion that there is no direct correlation between Iraq and 9/11, and thus will not juxtapose them? While I always felt that W was always after more the just WMD's (and the Arab Spring is bearing him out), the media seems to be unable to fit these new "facts on the ground" into their old hypothesis. So try to rework your original hypothesis? Nah, if you are the Media, just ignore the facts! It allows for columns of Bush-Bashing with no danger of introspection whatsoever!
9/11 ?
"Nothing to see here, folks....look! More pictures of alleged detainee abuse!"
I will revist the context issue again and again......

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