esmaspäev, mai 17, 2004
Good Howie
Howard Kurtz sets a Goldberg-ite conservative idiot straight in his online chat:
New York City, N.Y.: Mr Kurtz,
Thanks for taking our questions.
Are you going to continue to ignore the amazing double standard highlighted by the media's prominent placement of the most horrific pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, while refusing to show the horrific pictures of Nicholas Berg's beheading? (And please don't tell me that the media "showed" the beheading by showing a picture of him sitting in front of the killers -- the media obviously didn't just show an Iraqi prisoner sitting in front of a US MP.)
Your ombudsman, Michael Getler, who said it was SO important to show the torture pictures, made a pathetic attempt to reconcile the two treatments yesterday.
The disparity in the treatment of the two apisodes just confirms for me how bad the anti-war bias in the media really is: it is the worst I've ever seen.
Howard Kurtz: This is a totally false comparison. News organizations, which have to worry about such things as children seeing their product, are simply not going to show someone's head being cut off. That's very different from running a picture of a guy in a dog collar. If some crazed U.S. soldier had cut off the head of an Iraqi prisoner, you would not be seeing that either.
I agree that the Berg execution should be covered as fully as the prisoner scandal (though in both cases I object when the networks turn the pictures into video wallpaper and run them every 12 minutes). But questions of taste are also involved, and that has nothing to do with any political agenda. (The Post, for example, supported the Iraq war editorially and yet has been very tough on the administration for what it sees as fostering a climate in which the prisoner abuse could flourish.)
That's what I'm talking about.
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Howard Kurtz sets a Goldberg-ite conservative idiot straight in his online chat:
New York City, N.Y.: Mr Kurtz,
Thanks for taking our questions.
Are you going to continue to ignore the amazing double standard highlighted by the media's prominent placement of the most horrific pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib, while refusing to show the horrific pictures of Nicholas Berg's beheading? (And please don't tell me that the media "showed" the beheading by showing a picture of him sitting in front of the killers -- the media obviously didn't just show an Iraqi prisoner sitting in front of a US MP.)
Your ombudsman, Michael Getler, who said it was SO important to show the torture pictures, made a pathetic attempt to reconcile the two treatments yesterday.
The disparity in the treatment of the two apisodes just confirms for me how bad the anti-war bias in the media really is: it is the worst I've ever seen.
Howard Kurtz: This is a totally false comparison. News organizations, which have to worry about such things as children seeing their product, are simply not going to show someone's head being cut off. That's very different from running a picture of a guy in a dog collar. If some crazed U.S. soldier had cut off the head of an Iraqi prisoner, you would not be seeing that either.
I agree that the Berg execution should be covered as fully as the prisoner scandal (though in both cases I object when the networks turn the pictures into video wallpaper and run them every 12 minutes). But questions of taste are also involved, and that has nothing to do with any political agenda. (The Post, for example, supported the Iraq war editorially and yet has been very tough on the administration for what it sees as fostering a climate in which the prisoner abuse could flourish.)
That's what I'm talking about.
