40 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
40 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
War is the Continuation of Journalism
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<p>StrategyPage reports that Baathist dead-enders in Iraq are now <a href='http://strategypage.com/fyeo/qndguide/default.asp?target=IRAQ.HTM'>using<br />
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press credentials as cover</a>. Some Iraqis working for Reuters were arrested<br />
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after an attack on U.S. troops guarding a downed helicopter. Reuters is now<br />
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protesting that this was an error.</p>
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<p>Considering the virulently anti-American slant of Reuters coverage, this<br />
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is bleakly funny. Those Iraqi employees thought, perhaps, that they could<br />
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earn a nice bonus by doing with lead what Reuters does with ledes. Why not?<br />
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After all, the terror network and Reuters share an important objective<br />
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— the breaking and humbling of U.S. power.</p>
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<p>Watch the aftermath closely. If (as seems not unlikely) there were<br />
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Reuters stringers involved in the attack, you will probably see<br />
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Reuters condemn the actions of its employees only on the general<br />
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grounds that actually <em>shooting</em> Americans jeopardizes the<br />
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customary privileges and immunities of the press, not because attacks<br />
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on American troops are in any way intrinsically a bad thing. The<br />
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anti-American slant of Reuters coverage will doubtless continue —<br />
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in fact, any suggestion that it might have contributed to or enabled<br />
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the violence of yesterday will be met with shock and indignation.</p>
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<p>In the warped moral universe that Reuters and the BBC and much of<br />
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America’s own elite media inhabit, American power is so frightening and<br />
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loathsome that Islamist barbarians are actually preferable to George<br />
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W. Bush. They’ll print with a straight face quotes by al-Qaeda apologists<br />
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condemning the U.S. as a ‘rogue state’ and U.S. policies as<br />
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terrorism, while refusing to use the word ‘terrorist’ for<br />
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Al-Hamas attacks that target Israeli children for mass murder.</p>
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<p>Reuters stringers firing bullets at American troops makes concrete<br />
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a drama that has previously been abstract. Today’s war on terror is<br />
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not just a war between the West and fundamentalist Islam, it is a<br />
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confrontation of the healthy versus the diseased portions of the West<br />
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itself. The disease is Julien Benda’s <a href='http://www.ibiblio.org/esrblog/index.php?m=200211#82'>trahison<br />
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des clercs</a> and all its sequelae. And Reuters, marching in step<br />
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with Old Europe and the American left, is objectively on the side of<br />
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the West’s enemies.</p>
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<p>UPDATE: Three Reuters employees who were alleged to have been involved in the attack have been<br />
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released. This does not change my evaluation that anti-U.S., pro-terrorist bias is<br />
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pervasive and deep in Reuters international coverage, sufficiently so to put them on the enemy side.<br />
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As an index of this bias, consider that by editorial policy Reuters will not use the word “terrorist”<br />
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to describe groups like Hamas or al-Aqsa.</p>
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