randomWalks

I found this New York Times piece on the Arab media's coverage of the war to be simply stunning. It is dripping in moral outrage over the fact that the Arab media dare to "portray" the war as a killing field, as if carnage and war are concepts alien to each other. The article is also incredible in the way it implies what words like "neutral" and "moderate" mean.

For example:

Sensationalism has not gripped all media. Some mainline government-owned newspapers like the staid Al Ahram in Egypt and two of the privately owned international Arabic papers based in London, Al Hayat and Asharq Al Awsat, have reported the war in neutral language. They show bandaged victims in Iraqi hospitals but not the gory pictures of ripped bodies that fill the pages of their competitors.

and

The Arab media's reporting of the war may also drown out the more moderate voices that avoid brutal imagery and metaphors of endless victimization.

So showing that people die in a war in the most savage ways imaginable is "sensational," but a more "neutral" tone is to stop at showing "bandaged victims," as if dropping 2,000 bombs on cities is no more harmful than an injury sustained in a rough game of football. To be "moderate" means to simply ignore that hundreds upon hundreds of civilians have died in some of the most sick ways possible or else been maimed for life.

And yet the American media, supposedly neutral, churns out charming prose such as this:

On the ground, however, the work of the 2,000-pound Mark-84 JDAM bomb -- Joint Direct Attack Munition -- the new workhorse of the U.S. military, is just beginning. In nanoseconds it releases a crushing shock wave and showers jagged, white-hot metal fragments at supersonic speed, shattering concrete, shredding flesh, crushing cells, rupturing lungs, bursting sinus cavities and ripping away limbs in a maelstrom of destruction.

So it's ok to masturbate over JDAMs--"The brutal shock wave, a force that far exceeds the pressure the atmosphere normally applies to the human body, smashes into and explodes body cavities of lesser pressure -- lungs, colon, bowels, even through the sinuses into the skull."--but showing what they do is "sensational."

Ok. I'm glad the Times straightened me out on that one.

originally posted by zagg