Today, we have yet another bombing in Iraq, this time in Eastern Baghdad. As
Yahoo reports on it:
A car bomb exploded near a busy local market and cinema in eastern Baghdad on Thursday, killing at least 17 people and wounding 65, police said.
That's a pretty ugly picture, no? And unfortunatly, this is commonplace activity in our favorite occupied territory. Every day, it seems, we hear of yet another bombing. And not only that, the frequency is picking back up again and the body count seems to be rising with each bombing as well. This time, 17 people were killed and at least 65 injured, according to Yahoo.
There's more...
Here's April 29th Yahoo.com
People look for survivors after a suicide bomb attack at the Athamiya district of Baghdad April 29, 2005. REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani
And GlobeandMail.com from Oct. 28, 2003.
Wow! He sure looks happy carring what is most likely a direct family relative - maybe a son or daughter.
Folks, this is the truth of the matter. And the pictures alone are reason enugh why this needs to be published on a day-to-day basis - so that everyone sees what's really going on over there, instead of Bush's sugar-coated statements of how "Things are really looking good over there" and how "It's a lot of hard work, ya know?" news clips.
And as my brother, FrenchyLamour just pointed out to me, John Tierney of the NYTimes has this to say about the NYTimes reporting the carnage going on over there (Link, for registered NYTimes users):
The standard advice to newly arrived journalists at that time was: "Relax. It's not nearly as bad here as it looks on TV."
That's not all...
Correspondents complained that they'd essentially become cop reporters, and that the suicide bombings took so much of their time that they couldn't report on the rest of the country. They were more interested in other stories, but as long as the rest of the press corps kept covering the bombing du jour, that was where their editors and producers expected them to be, too.
You could argue that their bosses were simply responding to their audiences' visceral urges. Everyone rubbernecks at car accidents; cable news ratings soar when there's a natural disaster or a heinous murder. But how much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings?
How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer's fate are never in doubt?
But the great money quote righhhhht here:
I'm not advocating official censorship, but there's no reason the news media can't reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings. A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers.
John - "Reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings"??? Fondness? You really think journalists are fond of covering this type of news? If I were a reporter - anywhere in the world, I wouldn't want to cover this type of news. It's terrifying, sad, upsetting but...most importantly, it's REAL!!!
John - "A little restraint would give the public a more realistic view of the world's dangers??" Really? A little restraint...how do you sugest we restrain the news anymore than it is? In my opinion, the news is already restrained enugh as it is, don't you think? This is the truth of the matter, John. Everyday, in Iraq, BOMBS ARE GOING OFF AND PEOPLE ARE DYING!
And it's not just Iraq the news is already restrained on. The news is restrained on telling people the truth of the matter on all sorts of topics ranging from the discrepancies over both elections, social reform numbers, the GOP-Religious agenda, Social Security, ethics investigations and most recently, the Downing Street Memo, which is finally starting to break into the US media machine.
If anything, the US media needs to grow a pair and actually start doing what reporters should be doing. And that's report the news, no matter what it looks like, what it sounds like, or what it is.
What ever happened to "Just the facts, ma'am...just the facts"?