War And Media

18 Pages 4520 Words

Blood flows freely from the fresh wounds on the child’s chest, as ill equipped doctors rush to save the fleeting life of an innocent. Dabbing the wounds and suturing them as best as possible, the medics pray that time is on their side. The child convulses with the intolerable pain and as the seconds tick away slowly, he closes his eyes and gasps one final breath; despite the best efforts of the doctors, another life is forever lost. This is the scene observed on Al-Jazeera, a Middle East news channel. FAIR, a worldwide news organization formed for objective and accurate journalism and discussing false or incomplete news stories, reported that a HARM or Paveway missile slammed into a crowded market, on March 28, in the Shuala section of Baghdad, killing over 60 people (“Stray missile kills many in crowded market,” 2003). Evidence was compiled by a British journalist, Robert Fisk in the London Independent, showing that the missile belonged to the coalition forces. The same incident was reported in New York Times “A massive explosion occurred in a crowded market in Baghdad and it was impossible to determine the cause” (“Explosion kills scores in Baghdad market,” 2003). U.S. media have so far made little effort to investigate the Shuala incident, and continued to report it in fragmented stories, such as CBS, that picked up the military PR angle, and reported the incident to be a propaganda war to decrease support for the war.
The preceding is a mere example of countless incidents of media bias and a lack of objective journalism present in our daily news coverage. Through the analysis of two significant stories; Israel and Palestine, and the current war with Iraq, as reported by the American media conglomerates of news such as those owned by Time Warner, General Electric, and Viacom Inc. and compared with the reports of European media, such as BBC and Middle East media and related newspapers and independent news orga...