When news breaks and…

When news breaks and I’m doing training classes, I’m really late to the party. Therefore, before I even surf the news and the blogosphere, I’m sure that just about everything that can be said has been said about the Nick Berg murder video. All I’d add (if, in fact, I’m actually adding this) is a thought I heard while listening to Mark Levin radio show.

A number of callers, and Levin himself, noted that the media will show Iraqi prisoners being humiliated but they won’t show Americans hurt or killed by Islamic terrorists. They won’t show people falling to their deaths from the World Trade Center. They’ll show Iraqi prisoner videos, in the name of the right of the people to know what’s going on, but they won’t show Daniel Pearl or Nick Berg, or bodies from Ground Zero. I sorta’ understood some of the reasoning behind this, but I heard a comment on Levin’s show that changed my mind. The caller said, essentially, that the major media will show pictures and video that will inflame the “Arab street”, but it won’t show pictures and video that might inflame the “American street”.

And that seems to be, based on what the media releases, the basis on which they make their decision. I’d note that this therefore means that anything that would boost the anti-war effort will be shown, but anything that may tend to increase support for the war is left unshown or untold, supposedly solely out of respect for the families of the victims. That’s the media’s story, and they’re sticking to it, but the effect is to promote an agenda in spite of protestations of objectivity. Frankly, I don’t see any compelling reason to believe that the promotion of that agenda isn’t the #2, if not the #1, real reason these decision are made. Why did Ted Koppel only read the names of war dead from just the Iraq war? Why not any of those that died in Afghanistan? Is it because that there are more anti-Iraq-war folks than anti-Afghanistan-war folks? Their lives were just as important, they’re just as dead, and yet ABC chooses its battle, so to speak, by picking that conflict which has the anti-war folks in a bigger tizzy.

And, as the Drudge Report notes, there are plenty of images of soldiers in Iraq being welcomed as heros, and you won’t find those pictures in the New Yorker or on 60 Minutes.

Again, a liberal media shows itself in a number of way, one of which is what they don’t report on.

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