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Jewish World Review Feb. 4, 2005 / 25 Shevat, 5765 The Toy Story: How the media is creating — or, rather, re-creating — history By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
History repeats itself, Karl Marx said, "first as tragedy, second as farce."
In the days immediately following Iraq's historic election, two videotapes
from "insurgent" groups were distributed to the news media. One purported
to show an American soldier being held hostage. The second purported to
show that a British C-130 transport aircraft, which crashed on election day,
had been shot down by a surface to air missile.
The "American soldier" was Cody, a G.I. Joe action figure. This is obvious
from the picture, but the Associated Press and CNN bit hard.
The cause of the C-130 crash is still being investigated. But experts at
Janes Defence Weekly have doubts about the "insurgent's" claims.
"The missile footage has just been grafted onto the front," said editor
Peter Felstead. "And it looks like a surface to surface missile to me."
Other experts note the wreckage footage was shot in daylight, while the
C-130 crashed just before nightfall. It is highly improbable "insurgents"
could have been on the scene before the sun set, and there were British
soldiers all around the next morning.
Media outlets that were quick to report the insurgents' claims had
little to say about the hoaxes. Nor did they speculate on what the hoaxes
might mean.
Last Sunday's elections demonstrated the massive support of the Iraqi people
for democracy, and the relative impotence of the "insurgents." The "river
of blood" they promised was barely a trickle.
Eight suicide bombers killed 36 Iraqis besides themselves. Of these, seven
were foreigners (six Saudis and a Sudanese). The only Iraqi was a child
suffering from Down's Syndrome (he had the intellect of a four-year-old).
That is, as the Iraqi writer Nibras Kazimi put it, "eight against eight
million." And on what basis, one might ask, do the media call seven foreign
terrorists "insurgents?"
The terrorists had to do something to revive their plummeting prestige.
That they resorted to clumsy frauds is not a sign of strength.
"The captured toy story could be pretty significant," said the web logger
John Hinderaker (Power Line). "The terrorists need, more than anything
else, to be seen as awesome, terrible figures. If they stop inspiring fear,
they are finished. So the one thing they cannot stand is ridicule...Their
pathetic effort to pass a doll off as a captured American soldier will
(make) them laughingstocks throughout the Arab world."
It's also interesting that the terrorists returned to the news media to
recover lost momentum. Journalists who fell for these hoaxes may merely be
idiots, and their silence about the implications of the hoaxes may simply be
the by product of embarrassment. But web logger Shannon Love (Chicago Boyz)
wonders:
"Why were the major media so quick to disseminate pictures of an action
figure as a genuine hostage photo?" More to the point, why are major media
so quick to disseminate anything that a terrorist group, or purported
terrorist group, releases? For the terrorist, it is like being given
millions of dollars in free advertising."
The major media have from the beginning exaggerated the strength and
popularity of those they mislabel "insurgents," to the disgust of American
soldiers.
"I'm tired of hearing the crap, the whole, well 'We are barely hanging on,
we're losing, the insurgency is growing,'" Marine Sgt. Kevin Lewis told Dan
Rather, in Iraq for the election. "It's just a small amount of people out
there causing the problems. It's a small number, and we're killing them."
The scandalous remarks of Eason Jordan, CNN's top news executive, last week
at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland (where Europe's elite goes
once a year to sneer at the United States), and the failure of the major
media to report them suggest the distortions are deliberate.
Jordan told a panel that the U.S. military had killed a dozen journalists in
Iraq, and that they had been deliberately targeted. When challenged, Jordan
could provide no evidence to support the charge, and subsequently lied about
having made it, though the record shows he had made a similar charge a few
months before, and also earlier had falsely accused the Israeli military of
targeting journalists.
Jordan's slander has created a firestorm in the blogosphere, but has yet to
be mentioned in the "mainstream" media. Gee, I wonder why not.
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© 2005, Jack Kelly | ||||||||||
