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Now that the shooting has stopped, America may want to
conduct a war-crimes trial. The preferred defendant is not
Saddam Hussein, but Peter Arnett, who broadcast Iraqi
propaganda
from Baghdad.
Arnett is a convenient symbol of the current American hate affair with the media. Military censorship of war coverage had wide support, perhaps because coverage was tightly restricted in our victorious invasions of Grenada and Panama, but not when we lost in Vietnam.
However, there was no need for the military to censor Vietnam coverage; the media were generally quite willing to suppress any derogatory information about the American side.
Consider this account from the New York Times in March
of 1968: American troops caught a North Vietnamese force
in a pincer movement on the central coastal plain
yesterday, killing 128 enemy soldiers in day-long fighting.
. . . When the two companies of United States Marines moved
in on the enemy force from opposite sides, heavy artillery
barrages and armed helicopters were called in to pound the
North Vietnamese soldiers.
The 128 enemy soldiers
were in fact the women and
children of the village of Song My, and that is how the My
Lai Massacre was reported by the American press. The Army
began its own investigation on April 23, 1969, a full six
months before anything appeared in the press -- and that
was only a vague 100-word announcement from Fort
Benning.
Peter Arnett was a reporter for Associated Press then.
He accompanied American troops during the 1971
incursion
of Cambodia. He saw them enter a town and
loot it; he reported what he saw.
AP, that guardian of objective truth, removed all
mention of the looting before transmitting the story.
Arnett protested; AP replied that We took looting and
similar references out of Arnett copy because we don't
think it's especially news that such things take place in
war and in present context this can be
inflammatory.
In other words, the nation's leading news service had an eyewitness account of American soldiers looting a village during a controversial military campaign, and censored it.
Why bother with the complication of government censorship when the press usually does such a good job, all on its own, of keeping us ignorant?
The other common criticism against CNN is that, as an American company, CNN is obliged to act in American interests, presumably as defined by Wyoming Sen. Alan Simpson. CNN counters that it is an international organization, serving people in many countries; it cannot be the American Ministry of Propaganda.
If people are truly concerned that American companies don't always put American interests first, then the protests outside the CNN headquarters in Atlanta are just the start of a merry time. How about General Motors, which has exported 40,000 American jobs to Mexico? Or various oil companies which arranged for their royalty payments to foreign governments to be credited against their American tax bills?
Once a company gets big these days, it can't be just an American company, even if it is chartered in Delaware. American interests are just one set of interests the company must consider. Big corporations operate beyond any single government or national interest. CNN is only the most visible aspect of this, the real new world order.
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