DarrenBarefoot.com

I’ve thought a lot about media bias over the last year or so. Along the way I came to a couple of conclusions.

One of them is that the answer to “is the media biased” can be answered by looking at ones position relative to the market that the publication is targeting. If you’re Stephen Harper the Toronto Star is biased left.

Individual outlets are biased towards serving their own commercial interest. There is no other motivation that comes even close to the influence of maintaining and increasing revenue.

I agree with your observation that the media is sensationalist. The sadder observation is that thoughtful, probing, sensitive in-depth reporting cannot seem to find a market in North America. That type of reporting cannot compete.

It seem that we cannot look away from the traffic accident that is the current media.

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Of course, I see the perspective of everyone here. But let’s be honest. The war is a guerrilla war, one which “the most powerful military on earth” does not train for. They train for tank battles and gallant Naval battles. They train for dogfights and sattellite surveillance. These were the currency of the cold war and as much as one can argue that the cold war is over, 50 years of ingrained training takes time and a radical demand for other kinds of warfare to change. The U.S. Army and Marines and the Navy docs that go with them don’t train to be prison guards, they don’t train for car bombings and suicide bombers, they don’t train for house-to-house searchs and patrols down narrow alleys where dissidents with RPGs may appear above them in a window with no warning.

So I’m not defending the abhorrant behavior of some of the military numbers. I come from a military background and work for them now. It’s despicable and you’re right, the media should have called them out. However, people need to understand that 1) combat does strange things to people, 2) training for tanks does not translate into guerrilla urban warfare, which ultimately leads to strange things happening in the heads of these men and 3) no war in American history has ever been fought in front of the television camera. “War crimes” are normal and have been for thousands of years. It’s part of war. It was just hidden from the public because the public has not been trained to cope. Thus the outcry from the media and viewers.

Cheers. :)

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Darren,

No war in American history has been fought in front of the television cameras. ;) In Vietnam, there was war reporting where the average citizen was introduced to war and the expected result was an outraged public. However, no war in American history has had cameras ON-SITE during the invasion, embedded reporters doing LIVE broadcasts, reporters sending footage back as the Marines or soldiers were actually attacked, reporters accompanying the men as they stormed the mosque in Fallujah, etc. Even in Gulf War I, there was footage of the city of Baghdad under siege (do you remember where you were the day the air strikes began and the night sky of Baghdad was lit up with anti-aircraft warfare?) but again, there was no embedded reporters letting the public witness the inner workings of the air campaign and the 100 hour ground war that followed? No, I stand by my claim that no American war has been fought in front of the cameras.

This entry got me thinking about that concept and I’m developing an entry for my own blog based on it, but I only want to put up one major entry per day and today was engulfed by the Inaugural… :)

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your second source is a broken link, Darren.

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Thanks to Darren for allwoing me to post the link to We Can’t Cope.

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