Within the serious multi-billion dollar corporate entertainment/news industry, CNN, with its prestige rising as the prime news outlet, and as Time-Warner has moved it away from its previous center left position, CNN has become a trusted disseminator of Bush administration propaganda and disinformation when public opinion manipulation it is needed, while pretending great openness of opinion.
For us, its subservient audience, CNN poses as an semi-populist alternative to Fox, the mouthpiece of the extreme right, and the ABC, NBC, CBS trio, which support war from a more center right position, with the sole brief exception of MNBC having had an uncensored Phil Donahue talking sense for a few months in 2005. CNN never informs us of the huge overlap between ownership of arms industry and of ownership of media. Those of us who know about this are not naive enough to assume that no chairman of a board would allow interest in weapons and armament production profits to influence the slant, spin or creative selection in the presentation of the news on the network it happens to have a controlling interest in.
Both Simon Harak of the War Resisters League and David Korten, author of "When Corporations Rule the World" and "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community" do slide presentations factually illustrating the revolving door between the arms industry, government and media. In "Manufacturing Consent", Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman explained the many categories of media methods for misrepresentation of news events and their import, and have since written extensively on the subject.
Now that the nation no longer wants the war which CNN "The Most Trusted Name in News" sold us more than four years ago, you can trust CNN to present more and more of the tragic side of this war. When the biz community wanted out of Vietnam, as Japan was buying up Rockefeller Center and other parts of the U.S., our corporate media showed us previously shelved photos of My Lai and began emphasizing the sorry amount of U.S. casualties.
In Iraq, our boys most sincerely, bravely, and more importantly, ACTUALLY, died for their country. CNN only programmed it. We can say with advertising certainty, 'WE SAW IT ON CNN!" If CNN and company had not been able to convince enough of us to buy the war on Iraq? No war. No war? No killed children and no killed soldiers. And no worry of Iraqi WMD pushed in our heads. And Iraqis take care of their Saddam problem, without us helping Saddam, nor punishing Iraqis. And CNN might stop pretending that it loves democracy, and let us count, on our hands and feet, the violence the CIA has been ordered to do whenever democracy has been able to raise its head anywhere in our business client nations of the formerly colonialized third world where most of humanity resides.
Addendum: Do CNN anchors and commentators remember their arithmetic multiplication table? Multiply our thousands of American broken hearts by ten and hundred to get the number of how many Iraqi broken hearts CNN shows little interest in. Is it possible to conceive of the brave and heroic hearts of the parents of thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi children - their mothers, fathers, grandfathers, grandmothers, little and big brothers and sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, and dear friends? No, it is not possible, even if CNN showed some compassion and mentioned them. "The loss of one life is a tragedy, the loss of thousands is a statistic." On TV, statistics lack human-interest projection.
Funny! So many killed and maimed. For what? We all die soon enough. Why so much apathy for, and disinterest in, stopping our government from hastening so many toward the exit? Isn't life miraculous and wondrous? All for a few bucks?
We just don't enjoy our having freedom of speech and assembly - nor the responsibility of free men for the actions of their government and military - nor being attentive to behaving democratically toward the rest of humanity. We don't have time for a quick call to our congressmen and media - but we have time to watch CNN - often enough to be fooled.
Open question: Who is guilty of these 'mistaken' war deaths? Bush, Congress, Saddam, huge mindless corporations driven by the profit motive, gullible you and I, or conglomerate media led in duplicity by CNN?
We can leave aside any accusation of criminal complicity for now, but posterity will surely have its say when all the present personalities in powerful and controlling positions are deceased, and radically so, if there is ever meaningful political-economic reform of the corporate dominated governance that has kept increasing its grip during the modern history of our republic and that of most industrialized nations.
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