Quote of the day

Someone on a mailing list I'm on wrote this nice little summary of how a lot of people are feeling at the moment:

Now we see a pyrotechnic display on TV that is the war as we are allowed to witness it. But THAT is not the war. The real war we never get to see. We don't get to see magled bodies, we don't get to smell rotting, burned flesh, we don't see the pain of the families of killed Iraqi soldiers. No, the in our war the people that get killed all somehow deserve it, as we are good and therfore they must be evil.

The whole thing makes me fucking sick.

More US media stories

Scot has a little more information about the US media and its handling of the upcoming (current?) war in Iraq. He points to a poll whose results claim that 44 percent of Americans believe that most or some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi. He also notes that Salon appear to be setting themselves up to report the other side of the stories, that the mainstream doesn't want to cover. We can only hope... Meg has more information and lots of links from a couple of days ago on the media issue.

Americans look elsewhere for news

I've been telling Keith about how I've noticed that a lot of American bloggers (James Duncan Davidson in particular) are looking at blogs to get their news fixes. I've considered that this stems from US news networks/sites/etc. not objectively reporting the current Iraq "crisis". Of note, Andrew pointed me at an article outlining the way the current US administration is using the media to push its agenda (I'd also heard of recent press conferences where the Bush camp handed out pre-baked questions, and only called for question from reporters who were willing to ask the questions). Looks like wired have picked up on the thread, and have posted an article on the subject. What is interesting to me (apart from the obvious) is that the ABC news site is getting a lot of hits from US-ians looking for objective coverage. buzz.weblogs.com has more articles on the matter. In fact this site looks rather scathing... an interesting read!