Protests Planned Against Media War Coverage
by Danny Schechter
Announcement: United for Peace and Justice is Partnering with MediaChannel.org to Focus Attention on Media Complicity in the Iraq War.
Last week, new photographs of detainees abused by US soldiers in the infamous Abu Ghraib gulag in Iraq surfaced. They were discovered by the American Civil Liberties Union. The story was covered on TVS in Australia.
The most elaborate statistics on the abuse scandal appeared in the press.
• 1,325 images of suspected detainee abuse
• 93 video files of suspected detainee abuse
• 660 images of adult pornography
• 546 images of suspected dead Iraqi detainees
• 29 images of soldiers in simulated sexual acts
This information made headlines in the Guardian newspapers in England. Meanwhile, in the United States, all of the networks covered a speech by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who once famously said, "As we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
Now, the Pentagon's Rumsfeld is declaring a new war - on the press. The Washington Post reports:
"Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Friday called for the U.S. military and other government agencies to mount a far more aggressive, faster and nontraditional information campaign to counter messages of extremist and terrorist groups in the world media. Rumsfeld Š lashed out at the U.S. media, whose coverage he blamed for effectively halting recent military information initiatives, such as paying to place articles in Iraqi newspapers."
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0224-21.htm