More Whining

In the spirit of my earlier rant, I thought I would share the following, which I passed along to my former professor who was concerned when she saw a report on CNN of action that we'd had here in the Baqubah area (specifically the town of Buhriz).

"Yes there was some happenings here yesterday (24th). I too saw the report on CNN and BBC and it is just sickening how the news lies. The actual spoken words weren't that off, after all they were working off one of our press releases, but the video footage that went along with it was just false, false, false. To begin, I'm not even sure that the video footage that they had of fighting was in Buhriz (a nearby suburb of Baqubah). They showed people out in the street with AKs and RPGs and dancing and firing rounds in the air, but that didn't happen at all. You see, we have our UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that was up during the fight and it scanned all over the city and never showed any masses of people. We also have a radar, designed to tell where mortars and artillery are coming from, that picks up AK47 rounds too.

"When we get an acquisition from it we check it out, even when we know it is small arms fire. That group of people they showed on CNN was not from the Baqubah area and I doubt it was from within the past year. One lie that was spoken was that the people were rallying around the insurgents. That couldn't be farther from the truth. The locals here have started putting up white flags at their homes to show that they are against the 'insurgents', who, as I mentioned before, aren't locals anyway. One other thing that should be mentioned is that the attackers went after the Iraqi National Guard, not us, and they were spanked. The Iraqis are not amused by the 'insurgents' attacking local boys.

"When I see things like that (apparent file footage being used to further propagandistic agendas) it makes me wonder what else CNN and BBC are fashioning and what can really be trusted. Are those really Sudanese refugees they show during the little thirty second story? Are those people crying really the parents of the children that got burned up in the school in India? I could go on and on, but obviously my point is that I do not trust these 24 hour news networks. Perhaps Jayson Blair (and/or Stephen Glass for those who prefer an older reference) could find a home with one of them and complete the charade of journalistic integrity. I am now giving these networks the same bemused condescension that to this point I had reserved to "Weekly World News" (The tabloid that usually has a headline along the lines of "Bat Bpu Hired to Remove Rodent Infestation") or US Weekly (the PEOPLE magazine ripoff), but then again, those are not trying to pass themselves off as bastions of objective reporting...


P.S. Here is a CNN.com link about the attack:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/07/25/iraq.main/index.html