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I am good and worked over the sanitizing that the mainstream media in this country is doing with the news of here, while focusing on the "pain and suffering" of non-combatants over in Afghanistan who the Taliban happen to be hugging up to in an effort to keep from getting a bomb dropped on themselves. This amounts to little more than propaganda, and I am just about sick and tired of it.
Thank whatever you hold holy for the Net, my friends and colleagues. Without it, and without our persistent searching for truth and news we would not know, as Paul Harvey calls it, the rest of the story.
How many times in the past few weeks since the air campaign started have you seen stories from some network talking head or another about damage to civilian areas, or non-combatant casualties in Afghanistan? Most of the time, little attention seems to be paid to the fact that the Taliban is purposely strenghtening positions in civilian areas to incur "collateral damage" that they know will be played as the lead story in American living rooms.
But how much have you heard.... really heard, on any mainstream outlet of the victims of the WTC? Or the plane in Pennsylvania. Who, besides the late Barbara Olson has been lamented in the Pentagon crash? Were any of those killed on the ground spoken of? We are treated to sanitized memorial service, after cropped picture. As the event recedes into history, so does our institutional memory. Our media is about the moment at hand, and little more.
In World War II, Frank Capra made a series of films entitled "Why We Fight". These days, it seems like our Fourth Estate is telling us the story of "Why We Shouldn't Fight... Someone Might Get Hurt". Well, no kidding all you powderpuffed talking heads. I am scornful of most, but I am especially un-inspired by Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC, reporting live from Pakistan nightly with serious intonation on the carnage and damage our air campaign has caused. Remember her? She was a blonde on 09/11 and went brunette for her trip abroad.
Its a war, media people. We didn't start it. Those who terrorize and harbor terrorists did. In war, people die. Its messy and stuff gets broken. But then, other than repetetive mentions and static shots of "ground zero", what are we really being told about what has happened on the homefront. Sure, anthrax is being sensationalized in the media so that some parts of the public are near hysteria. The risk to the average person is so low that it is in fractions of a percent, yet its a crisis and would cry out in blood red headlines if this were still the golden age of newspapers. Of course, now even some in the foreign press are wetting their pants that the US has not the stomach or the will to stick it out.
I was sent a link to this site by a co-worker. Its not so much a site as it is a collection of picture files of images of the WTC attack and its aftermath. They tell only a small part of the overwhelming human tragedy that is 9/11/2001. They tell the story of "Why We Fight".
I'm reminded of an line in an old movie about how when the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The media has so sanitized and made legend of what the attacks were, and meant to those who lived through them, and died because of them. What have you ever heard of the children who must have died in the day care centers on site? The husbands and wives, sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers and children? What of them?
In my research for this piece I came across another example of the media perpetuating the legend. On MSNBC.com I found an article about a biography that is planned of the late Father Mychal Judge, an FDNY chaplain who perished on 09/11. The news item points out that he was killed on that day by falling debris.
Thats Father Mike in photo up above, slumped in the chair. He was already dead when that photo, and a later more famous image, was taken. Remember forever the image of this peaceful man of God being carried away from the scene of his gruesome end to be laid out in honor at a nearby firehouse.
The truth of the matter is that Father Mike was struck and killed by a falling human body. A person who either fell out of the building or jumped so as not to burn to death landed on Father Mike and killed him. But our media elite choose to refer to that human being, yet another precious life sacrificed by this evil act, as "falling debris".
This spoon feeding of information to the American public absolutely infuriates me to my very core and it has to stop. What is the Fourth Estate afraid of... getting us angry? We are way beyond angry, oh media mavens. We should never lose the emotion that will fuel our righteous wrath as a nation and a people to seek justice on the people who helped perpetrate this act and still live, and failing justice then their eradication from the earth.
That is what this war is about, and we must not forget it. If the media would simply tell us the truth, instead of trying to sugar coat and spin because we "must be protected", then no one, not even the hand-wringing British press, would have any doubt as to our resolve to see this through to the end. But the press seems to feel that we can't handle the truth.
I say we can handle the truth, and that we must handle it. We owe it to the victims and their families to never forget the awful truth of the reality, the suffering and the horror that was 09/11. This is truly why we fight.
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