This morning, I woke up to CNN"s coverage of the bombing in Qana. There was a riot in Beirut at U.N. Headquarters. The CNN Beirut reporter, Brent Sadler, started his report like this:
In the beginning, there was a spontaneous reaction as Lebanese watched the Qana attack unfold on their television screens. Now, unlike CNN, we take a view that not all the most graphic and horrific pictures from such an attack are shown on our screens, but in Lebanese homes and across the Arab world, uncensored pictures of the aftermath of the Israeli airstrike had been broadcast, and that has hit home deeply in the psyche of the Lebanese.Does the edited and sanitized coverage of news by American media give us a warped view of war? Would Americans react differently if we saw "graphic and horrific pictures," not only in Lebanon, but in Iraq? The U.S. government won't even show pictures of the caskets of the soldiers who died for their country.
Imagine if we had to face a daily barrage of death and destruction. Would Americans become immune or would they begin to realize the horrors of war?
We hear stories about the number of dead and some video of the aftermath of incidents. Most Americans have already turned against the war in Iraq. What would Bush do if the media actually covered the war in an unedited manner, like in most of the rest of the world?
The American media conglomerates are complicit in the censorship. But what are they supposed to be protecting us from?
