Sunday, December 09, 2012

Editorial: The superflous American media

Today Press TV reported the following:


Over 3,000 US troops have secretly returned to Iraq via Kuwait for missions pertaining to the recent developments in Syria and northern Iraq, Press TV reports. 
According to our correspondent, the US troops have secretly entered Iraq in multiple stages and are mostly stationed at Balad military garrison in Salahuddin province and al-Asad air base in al-Anbar province. 


As usual, nothing from the US press.  

Is Press TV correct?  

Maybe it's wrong.

But a new defense agreement was signed Thursday between Iraq and the US and the US press ignored that.  

A press that fails to cover what matters is a press that stops being trustworthy.  And, more than anything else, that sentence described the press of the last ten years and as it has really always been.


We starve, look at one another, short of breath 

Walking proudly in our winter coats 
Wearing smells from laboratories 
Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy 
Listening for the new told lies 
With supreme visions of lonely tunes 
 --  "The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine In)," written by Gerome Rangi, Jim Rado and Galt MacDermot 






More troops back into Iraq.  This after Tim Arango (New York Times) reported in September that a Special-Ops team had just been sent back in.  All the other outlets -- in fact that paper's own editorial board -- managed to look the other way and pretend that never made it into print.




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With 4488 US military personnel having died in the Iraq War, you'd think the President of the United States sending troops back into Iraq would qualify as news.


But that's only true if the goal of a news outlet is to inform.  When it's to distract and cover for the government?  Audiences decline, trust vanishes and people aren't willing to pay for so-called 'news' content anymore.  In other words: Today.



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